Is the reformation over? An Evangelical Assessment of Roman Catholicism.

Rausch, Thomas P.

IS THE REFORMATION OVER? AN EVANGELICAL ASSESSMENT OF ROMAN CATHOLICISM. Mark A. Noll and Carolyn Nystrom. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Baker Academic 2005. Pp. 272. $24.99.

Historian Mark Noll, of Wheaton College, and Carolyn Nystrom, a freelance writer, are eminently fair in assessing Roman Catholicism from an Evangelical perspective, although they note that fairness on either side has not always been the case. Among several examples of a troubled history, they cite a delegate to the 1873 meeting of the Evangelical Alliance who declared: "The most formidable foe of living Christianity among us is not Deism or Atheism, or any form of infidelity, but the nominally Christian Church of Rome" (11). Catholic and Evangelical relations have come a long way since those days, and the change is not just rhetorical.

To show that "things are not the way they used to be," the authors give numerous examples of new cooperative efforts: the Reverend Billy Graham's crusades moving beyond interconfessional antagonisms to include Catholics, encouraged by Boston's Cardinal Richard Cushing who welcomed him to New England in 1964; Catholics and Evangelicals finding common ground on (some) social issues, particularly on pro-life and family questions; leading Evangelicals being welcomed at the Vatican by Pope John Paul II; Catholic and Evangelical editors cooperating on the new InterVarsity Press Ancient Christian Commentary series; representatives from both traditions working together in university campus ministries and pastoral programs such as the Alpha course (see http://alpha.org); using each other's music; entering into dialogues both international and local. They also note that, unfortunately, relations in Latin America and southern Europe remain more distant, still burdened by historical antagonisms. The authors also offer a useful survey of past Evangelical-Catholic polemics, mostly from the Evangelical side, from the mixed attitude of John Wesley in the 17th century, Lyman Beecher in the early 19th, Loraine Boettner and Paul Blanchard in the 20th, to the mysterious, atavistic Jack Chick, whose four hundred million anti-Catholic comics appear today in 70 languages. To show why Evangelicals in the U.S. so often saw Catholics as a threat to their civil liberties, they quote Popes Gregory XVI and Pius IX arguing against liberty of conscience and the separation of church and state and for the establishment of Catholicism.

Vatican II gets primary credit for changing Evangelical attitudes toward Roman Catholics, but other factors include the election of John Kennedy as president, the charismatic renewal, and cultural changes in the United States that have brought Evangelicals together with Catholics on a number of social issues and made them more open to Catholic support for parochial education as an alternative to an increasingly secular public school system.

One chapter offers a summation of more than 35 years of ecumenical dialogue, teasing out the basic differences, with Catholics viewing all theology from the perspective of ecclesiology and Protestants putting more emphasis on the individual Christian. Highlighting the 1999 Lutheran-Roman Catholic Joint Declaration on the Doctrine of Justification, they see the remaining disagreements in the eight dialogues reviewed as rooted in ecclesiology. Another excellent chapter deals with the new Catechism of the Catholic Church. If progressive Catholics tend to ignore the Catechism, Evangelical and confessional Protestants esteem it highly, seeing it as a rich source of Catholic teaching, rooted in Scripture and the fathers, pastoral in tone, and extremely useful for moving beyond popular misunderstandings of Catholic teaching. Later the authors ask, "Why do we not possess such a thorough, clear, and God-centered account of our faith as the Catechism offers to Roman Catholics?" (150).

This is a hopeful book and makes excellent reading. The authors are fair to both sides, discussing questions such as infant versus believer's baptism, salvation as event or process, and comparing their different understandings of worship, noting that Catholics hear more public reading of Scripture than those in most Protestant denominations. At times their interpretation of Catholic teaching falls short, for example, in asserting that Catholics make recognition of the pope a condition of eucharistic hospitality or that matrimonial sacramentality requires that both spouses be baptized Catholics. They devote considerable attention to the Colson/Neuhaus initiative, Evangelicals and Catholics Together (ECT), but little to the considerably older international Pentecostal-Roman Catholic Dialogue (1972) and Evangelical-Roman Catholic Dialogue (1977). They conclude that Evangelicals are no longer monolithic in their attitudes toward Catholicism; some are antagonists or at least critics, but others are partners or converts. In the end, they leave open the question posed by the book's title, noting again the progress made and expressing the hope that God might do even more. But the Reformation apparently is not over at Wheaton, Noll's own school, which still will not hire Roman Catholics as faculty members, and about the time the book appeared terminated the contract of a popular professor who had converted to Catholicism.

THOMAS P. RAUSCH, S.J.

Loyola Marymount University, Los Angeles