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[Copyright 2004 by Mark A. Noll. All rights reserved. Used by permission of the author.]
Is the Reformation Over?
An Evangelical Protestant Assessment of Roman Catholicism in the Era of Vatican II and Pope
John Paul II
Mark A. Noll
History Department (Wheaton College)
In a pleasure to be with you today. As a historian I feel especially privileged to be taking
part in this gathering, for only historians, I think, are able to gauge how truly extraordinary such
meetings like the one you have convened today really are. Christian historians are also in the
very best place to offer the sincerest thanks to God for the mercy he displays in making a meeting
like this possible. Fifty years ago such a gathering between Roman Catholics and evangelical
Protestants was all but unthinkable. Four hundred and fifty years ago gatherings like this were
indeed thinkable, but they would have been called, not to reason, pray, and worship together in
light of Scripture, Christian tradition, and the practical needs of the hour, but for the purpose of
conducting a trial for heresy or even for witnessing the burning to death of a convicted heretic.
What I'd like to attempt with you today is a foolish thing, which is to present a digest of a
book, and its conclusion. I am writing this book with Carolyn Nystrom--my friend, fellow
Evangelical Presbyterian, and long-time co-laborer with me at our local church. The book has the
same title as the title of this talk.
It begins with a pretty long chapter that records a few of the many, many instances
where in the United States and around the world today it is possible for evangelicals to observe
Roman Catholics acting pretty much like, well, evangelicals--for example, showing the "Jesus
Film," conducing Alpha classes, protesting against public immorality of one kind or another,
promoting study of the Bible, seeking the gifts of the Holy Spirit, and so on. In the next chapter
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we step back and summarize the way things used to be from the time when Martin Luther faced
off against the Catholic emperor Charles V in 1521 right up until the early 1960s and the opening
of the Second Vatican Council. To be sure, it is possible in such a historical overview of persistent
antagonism to find a few instances where evangelicals and Catholics actually treated each other
with some charity--John Wesley, for example, in 1749 wrote a public Letter to a Roman Catholic
in Ireland, in which he expressed the hope that, even if Protestants and Catholics maintained
their sharpest disagreements, they might in the future avoid the abominable polemics of the past.
To Wesley, it was of first importance, not that Catholics leave their church, but that that they
"follow after that fear and love of God without which all religion is vain. I say not a word to you
about your opinions or outward manner of worship."1 In similar spirit, John Henry Cardinal
Newman, when he was an old man, after decades of sometimes sharpest polemic with
Protestants, wrote these moving words to an old evangelical antagonist, Edward Bickersteth,
who had sent him a kind note: "I can but bow before the great mystery that those are divided
here and look for the means of grace and glory in such different directions, who have so much in
common in faith and hope."2 But since most of this historical chapter tries to summarize things
before 1960, it features what seemed at the time to be permanent disagreements between
Catholics and evangelicals. In fact, most evangelicals and most Catholics held that those
disagreements were so serious that one could not be a true Christian and continue to adhere to
the other faith.
We then go on to offer our speculations as to why relations between Catholics and
evangelicals have changed so dramatically, at least in many places around the world, in the last
forty-five years. And here I would like simply to summarize the changes in five areas that we
take a little more time to unpack in the book.
1 Wesley, A Letter to a Roman Catholic (1749), in The Works of John Wesley, ed. Thomas Jackson,
14 vols. (London: Wesleyan Conference Office, 1872), 10:80, 83.
2 Quoted in Sheridan Gilley, Newman and his Age (Westminster, MD: Christian Classics, 1990),
372.
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First are changes within Catholicism. Most importantly, these changes began with the
momentous Second Vatican Council of 1962-1965, which in a sharp reversal from previous
practice went out of its way to address non-Catholic Christians as "brothers," to acknowledge
that blame lay on both sides for ecclesiastical ruptures of the Reformation, to stress the unique
role of Christ as mediator between God and humanity, and to urge ordinary lay Catholics to lives
of practical Christian holiness.
But a new interest in ecumenicity was only one mark of even deeper changes in the
Catholic church since the 1960s. The Council's focus on the importance of the laity as "the people
of God" has made at least some parts of the church's structure, and some aspects of its day-to-
day life, less clerical and ecclesiastical. Emphasis on the privileges of all Christians in living out
the gospel have encouraged ordinary Catholics to be more active in public worship, private
devotion, evangelization, and service to the world. And so the last decades have witnessed a
bewildering array of local Catholic initiatives--Bible studies, workshops for peace, coalitions for
the right to life, base communities (especially in Latin America) practicing a theology of
liberation, masses with guitars and contemporary music, traditional masses in Latin, and on and
on. To outsiders, these developments look like a Catholic acceptance of some aspects of
Protestant emphases on "the priesthood of all believers," though Catholic insiders can explain
how the newer tendencies grew from long-standing, though obscure elements of Catholic
tradition.
Since 1978 the papal leadership of John Paul II has also reflected significant changes in
the Catholic church. In his own mind, John Paul II has followed the guidelines for church
renewal outlined by the Second Vatican Council. Later historians and theologians will certainly
express their own judgments on the relationship between the Council and John Paul II's
pontificate. For our purposes, however, it is enough to see that the jolt administered to the
church by the Second Vatican Council has led on to dramatic innovations, dramatic initiatives,
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dramatic contests within Roman Catholicism over the future of the church, and dramatically
altered relations with Protestant evangelicals.
A second reason why this gathering is taking place today concerns changes in world
Christianity. In particular, the shift to the south in the center of gravity for world Christianity has
relativized the antagonism inherited from European church history. The rapid recent expansion
of Christianity in Africa, Asia, and the Pacific--combined with the ferment of renewal in the
Americas and the rapid decline of historic Christendom in Europe--have pushed Catholic-
evangelical relationships into unknown territory. Where the weight of traditional European
divisions, with attendant civil and political tensions, remains strong (mostly Latin America and
southern Europe), Catholic-evangelical relations remain quite cool. Where traditional European
forms are now thoroughly intermixed with post-Christendom realities (North America, parts of
Africa and Asia), Catholic-evangelical relations are cordial, if still cautious. Where traditional
European Christendom is only a vague reference to an un-experienced past (most of Africa, Asia,
and the Pacific), Catholic-evangelical relations are much more relaxed.
A second world-wide Christian development that has eased the way for Catholic-
evangelical connection is the charismatic movement. In particular, charismatic emphasis on the
direct work of the Holy Spirit has made historical sources of ecclesiastical strife--doctrine,
traditional church practices, and inherited authority structures--less important for Catholic and
evangelical charismatics, but also for the much broader circles that have been touched in some
way by charismatic influences.
Evangelical youth movements, which are organized to reach specific Christian, but not
ecclesiastical, goals, have also promoted positive interactions between Catholics and evangelicals.
Yet another feature of modern world Christianity that has altered the historic situation is
the increasing prominence of women in almost all activities of all of the churches. Since very
close to 100% of the polemical literature in the centuries of Catholic-Protestant polemic was
authored by men, it is not surprising that as women broaden their participation in public
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religious activity that the focus shifts away from contentious definitions of doctrine and church
practices. Documentation is hard to come by for the impact that neighborhood Bible studies have
exerted in recent decades, but the considerable success of these very local institutions is due
almost exclusively to the leadership of Christian women. At least since the 1960s, the
participation of Catholic women with evangelicals in such studies, and vice versa, has played a
large part in lowering the temperature of Catholic-evangelical relationship in many places
throughout North America, Europe, and the rest of the world.
A third arena of change concerns changes in American politics and society. The most
visible public signal of a shift in the United States was the election of a Catholic as president in
1960. John F. Kennedy's victory was itself a milestone for overcoming Protestant bias and
fulfilling earlier trajectories of Catholic public service.
Much more important in the political and social sphere, however, has been what Timothy
George once called an "ecumenism of the trenches." On many moral issues--"support for
parental choice in education, advocacy of the traditional values of chastity, family, and
community, opposition to abortion on demand, and repudiation of pornography"--more and
more evangelicals have found themselves joining more and more frequently with more and more
Catholics. The result has been a conviction growing in many places that behind this common
public testimony lay, again in George's phrases, a "coalescence of believing Roman Catholics and
faithful evangelicals who both affirm the substance of historic Christian orthodoxy against the
ideology of theological pluralism that marks much mainline Protestant thought as well as avant-
garde Catholic theology."3
In the international arena, even more damage was done to Protestant notions of Catholic
tyranny by the contribution of the Catholic church to the Solidarity movement in Poland, the
public leadership of Pope John Paul II in combating communism in Europe, and the pope's
3 Timothy George, "Catholics and Evangelicals in the Trenches," Christianity Today, May 16,
1994, p. 16; George, "Evangelicals and Catholics Together: A New Initiative. `The Gift of
Salvation': An Evangelical Assessment," Christianity Today, Dec. 8, 1997, p. 34.
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temperate statements on various explosive political situations in Latin America, Africa, and Asia.
These political actions did not address doctrinal issues directly, but they did strip away much of
the civil anxiety with which American Protestants had always looked upon Roman Catholics.
Fourth are changes arising from the work of individuals. The roster of effective change
agents is now a long one: for example, the Vatican officials who set up to treat with pentecostals,
evangelicals, and Baptists; the church and seminary leaders who in 1987 founded the Los Angeles
Catholic/Evangelical Committee as the nation's first dialogue of its kind; Billy Graham who
arranged for increasing cooperation with Catholics in his evangelistic efforts; Richard John
Neuhaus and Charles Colson who have stage-managed the Evangelicals and Catholics Together
initiative that has had such interesting effects in the United States; Father Theodore Hesburgh
and Father Edward Malloy who as presidents of the University of Notre Dame hired some of
evangelicalism's brightest scholars to deepen the Christian intellectual witness of that university;
and many, many more who in their local situations have taken the steps required for information,
dialogue, mutual learning, and mutual edification.
Fifth are changes within evangelicalism, particularly the actions of evangelicals who
claim that evangelicalism is not all it should be. A tradition of vigorous self-criticism is actually
its own kind of testimony to evangelical vitality. But where evangelicals have been moved to
admonish themselves and other evangelicals for weaknesses in ecclesiology, tradition, the
intellectual life, sacraments, theology of culture, aesthetics, philosophical theology, or historical
consciousness, the result has almost always been selective appreciation for elements of the
Catholic tradition.
A recent essay by the evangelical Bible scholar Scott McKnight, which reflects on a
number of McKnight's once-evangelical students who have become Catholics, suggests the type
of issues that find some evangelicals looking to Rome for what they have not found in their own
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churches.4 These converts seek more thoughtful liturgy, deeper grounding in Christian history, a
fuller use of the sacraments, authoritative interpretations of Scripture, and (sometimes) the
Catholic sex ethic with respect to contraception. But above all, McKnight describes a search for
what they did not experience as evangelicals--that is, a search "to transcend the human limits of
knowledge to find certainty . . . to transcend the human limits of temporality to find connection
to the entire history of the Church . . . to transcend the human limits of interpretive diversity to
find an interpretive authority."5
Most evangelicals who think about these questions, even those who strenuously criticize
evangelical practices and traditions, do not become Roman Catholics. But consideration of such
matters by those who do join the Catholic church illuminates a situation where evangelicals are
more attentive to instruction from Catholics because they have perceived weaknesses in their
own forms of faith.
After explaining why we think things have changed so significantly in the last half
century, we then present several chapters that provide documentation for our overall claim that
evangelical-Catholic engagement has now entered a new era. The careful documentation in this
part of the book is mostly the work of my collaborator, Carolyn Nystrom, and I wish it were
possible for her to expound at this point on the wide range of reading she has done. But I will
race ahead. We begin with an assessment of many of the ecumenical dialogues that have taken
place between the Vatican and various Protestant churches since the Second Vatican Council,
including the much-publicized dialogues between the Lutheran World Federation and the
Vatican which led in late 1999 to a this remarkable joint declaration on justification by faith:
"Together we confess: by grace alone, in faith in Christ's saving work and not because of any
merit on our part, we are accepted by God and receive the Holy Spirit, who renews our hearts
4 Scott McKnight, "From Wheaton to Rome: Why Evangelicals Become Roman Catholic," Journal
of the Evangelical Theological Society 45 (Sept. 2002): 451-72.
5 McKnight, "From Wheaton to Rome," 460.
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while equipping and calling us to good works. . . . Faith is itself God's gift through the Holy
Spirit who works through word and sacrament in the community of believers and who, at the
same time, leads believers into that renewal of life which God will bring to completion in eternal
life . . . Our new life is solely due to the forgiving and renewing mercy that God imparts as a gift
and we receive in faith, and never can merit it in any way."6
In the book's next chapter, we examine the documents that have been produced by the
Evangelical and Catholics Initiative spearheaded by Richard John Neuhaus on the Catholic side
and Charles Colson on the evangelical side. And we conclude this effort at documentation with a
lengthy examination of the new Catechism of the Catholic Church that the Vatican published as
an official digest of authorized Catholic teaching in 1994.
Our conclusions about the Catechism pretty much sum up our conclusions about the
other significant Catholic-evangelical discussions. Carolyn's readings highlight what a
tremendous proportion of the Catechism, and of contemporary Roman Catholic doctrine in
general, we as evangelicals should be delighted to embrace--on the Trinity, on the person of
Christ, on the power of the Holy Spirit, and especially on the saving work of Christ. In fact,
especially in the Catechism we found so much solid Christian doctrine expressed in such solid
form that it took our breath away. For example, these words on "Christ's death [as] the unique
and definite sacrifice":
(613) Christ's death is both the Paschal sacrifice that accomplishes the definitive
redemption of men, through "the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the
world," and the sacrifice of the New Covenant, which restores man to communion
with God by reconciling him to God through the "blood of the covenant, which was
poured out for many for the forgiveness of sins."
(614) This sacrifice of Christ is unique; it completes and surpasses all other
sacrifices. First, it is a gift from God the Father himself, for the Father handed his Son
6 Ibid., pp. 568-569, # 15-17.
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over to sinners in order to reconcile us with himself. At the same time it is the
offering of the Son of God made man, who in freedom and love offered his life to his
Father through the Holy Spirit in reparation for our disobedience.7
Or, for another example, these words on "Grace":
(1996) Our justification comes from the grace of God. Grace is favor, the free
and undeserved help that God gives us to respond to his call to become children of
God, adoptive sons, partakers of the divine nature and of eternal life.8
While the phraseology of such statements might just be different enough from common
evangelical ways of speaking to be noticeable, the substance is as thoroughly evangelical as it
could possibly be.
But in studying the Catechism and other official statements, Carolyn also draws attention
to elements in contemporary Catholicism that still sound either strange, or simply wrong, to
evangelicals. These elements include statements especially about the pope, the sacraments, and
Mary, although in each of these cases there is more with which evangelicals can agree than we
had anticipated. The key difference, however, transcends any particular doctrine. That
difference lies in how the church is understood as an agent of divine salvation and how it is seen
as functioning as a home for those who are being saved. This understanding of the church, we
have concluded, is the central affirmation of modern Roman Catholicism that remains furthest
from evangelical beliefs.
Then we move on in the book to a chapter chronicling how different evangelicals have
responded to the modern opening of doors and building of bridges between evangelicals and
Catholics. As many of you have probably experienced, those reactions fall into a predictable
range: First, a few evangelicals and fundamentalists continue ancient polemics that treat
Catholicism as a satanic delusion. Second, more evangelicals remain critical of Catholicism and
nervous about cooperating with Catholics, but also express their views in much more moderate
7 p. 159
8 p. 483
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terms than was customary not so long ago. Third, a considerable number of evangelicals now
express gratitude for increased openings, shared fellowship, and mutual encouragement between
evangelicals and Catholics. Such ones look eagerly for ways of expanding fruitful cooperation,
even if they recognize the seriousness of remaining evangelical-Catholic differences. Fourth, a
few evangelicals have become so convinced of the virtues of Catholicism that they have actually
become Catholics.
Finally, the book closes with two chapters of assessment. In the first of these, where we
try to treat the American dimension of evangelical-Catholic relations, our stress is on the political
transformation of the last decades. Although that transformation is quite complicated, it can be
easily summarized: once upon a time, and not too long ago, evangelical Protestants looked upon
Roman Catholics as the most dangerous possible opponents of the highest ideals of American
freedom. Now many evangelicals have joined forces self-consciously with some Roman
Catholics in together defending a vision of American freedom that they see as threatened by the
forces of modern secularism. This momentous shift on American public life has provided for
many people the first plank over the chasm of historical antagonism. The broader significance of
such political and social co-belligerency, however, is that this single plank has steadily broadened
out into a much more substantial bridge.
The last chapter in the book tries to take the measure, both historically and theologically,
of where we stand today as Catholics and evangelicals. Here is a digest of that chapter, which
treats areas of agreement and disagreement, probes how we might interpret the contemporary
situation, and then returns to the question of our title to ask if the Reformation is over.
Evangelical Protestants of a certain kind and Roman Catholics of a certain kind now
enjoy the kind of fellowship with each other that, short decades ago, was unimaginable. Of
course, not all evangelicals and not all Catholics have either desired to experience or actually
experienced such a breakthrough to more positive relationships. Evangelicals who are open to
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closer cooperation with Catholics tend to be those who define their religion primarily by
faithfulness to Scripture and the experience of God's grace, and only secondarily by the particular
beliefs and practices of their inherited denominations. Catholics who are open to closer
cooperation with evangelicals tend to be those in the moderate or moderate-conservative wings
of the church who are encouraged by statements of Vatican II about the presence of the Holy
Spirit in other Christian movements; such Catholics often worry as much about the advances of
theological modernism in their church as evangelicals do about the advances of modernism
among Protestants, and they regard the small wing of Catholic conservatism that rejects Vatican
II as unrepresentative of true Catholicism. What Carolyn and I would like to assert about
evangelicalism and Catholicism by way of a summary analysis pertains to the evangelicals and
the Catholics who have already shown a willingness to cooperate in some particulars of faith and
witness.
There is now present among such evangelicals and Catholics a broad and deep
foundation of agreement on the central teachings of Christianity. Such evangelicals and such
Catholics affirm together the Trinity, the sinfulness of humanity, the love of God extended to
sinners in the person and work of Jesus Christ, and the power of the Holy Spirit to change men
and women into servants of God. Whatever differences might still exist between such Catholics
and such evangelicals when they examine the foundations of Christianity are infinitesimal by
comparison with differences between traditional Christianity of all sorts and modernist
Christianity of all sorts. Differences on such basic issues between Catholics and evangelicals fade
away as if to nothing when they are compared with secular affirmations about the nature of
humanity and of the world. The awareness of how deep such common doctrinal affirmations can
be is, in the eye of history, astounding. It is one of the strongest proofs to my historian's mind
that we still live in the age of miracles.
More specifically, such Catholics and such evangelicals trust equally in the full
inspiration and final authority of the Bible. On Scripture, they stand together against modernistic
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proposals from within the churches that would treat Scripture as only a product of human
consciousness; together they stand against the non-Christian world in affirming that the Bible
communicates normative revelation from God.
Within a common affirmation of the inspiration and authority of Scripture, however,
differences do continue to separate Catholics and evangelicals on how to interpret the Bible.
Catholics rely in principle more on the voice of tradition and on the formal teaching magisterium
of the Church; evangelicals rely in principle more on the personal appropriation of Scripture and
on local traditions of interpretation. Because of these hermeneutical differences, evangelicals
continue to regard some Catholic practices and dogmas as un-Scriptural (however much they
look to Catholics like dogmas and practices legitimately rooted in Scripture). Conversely,
evangelical rejection of some Catholic dogmas and practices as un-Scriptural looks to Catholics,
not as a trust in the Bible, but as a caving in to the skepticism, the individualism, and the
functional anti-supernaturalism of the secular Enlightenment.
For many Catholics and many evangelicals, however, it has become important to insist
that such continuing differences flow--not from significant differences about the character of
divine revelation in the Bible as such--but from different customs, habits, or principles in
interpreting a divinely authoritative Bible .
Likewise many Catholics and many evangelicals now believe approximately the same
thing concerning justification by faith. To put this expanding area of agreement in more precise
terms, it is better to say that more and more Catholics and evangelicals now affirm that a God-
honoring, Scripture-based, and orthodox theology of justification by faith is found where the
following two propositions are believed separately and together: (1) Salvation is an absolutely
free gift from God. (2) There is no Christian salvation that is not manifest in good works.
Precisely how those two proposition are to be understood as individual Christian
doctrines and then held together as defining essential Christian practice does produce
disagreement. But it is disagreement found as much, or more, within evangelicalism and within
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Catholicism as between Catholics and evangelicals. Official Catholic teaching, especially as
articulated in the Catechism and the Joint Declaration on Justification, now seems to fall
somewhere in between John Wesley's Arminianism and the Augustinian positions maintained by
Martin Luther and John Calvin.9 All of these depictions of salvation by grace through faith are
closer to each other than any are to extreme forms of evangelical Arminianism, some forms of
Anabaptist soteriology, and other sectarian Protestant doctrines where the agency of the
unredeemed sinner is in every case much greater in the picture of salvation than found in official
Catholic teaching, Lutheran and Calvinist Augustinianism, or Wesley's Arminianism.
A difference more likely to show up systematically between Catholics and evangelicals as
a whole concerns the merciful means that God has given to provide his grace for the justification
of sinners. But, again, more and more Catholics and evangelicals recognize that differences over
questions about the means of grace can be held up for debate while they also make common
affirmations concerning the basic character of God's justifying grace. Of those continuing
differences, most concern the issue of how justification is imparted and received, and on that
issue questions of the church come front and center.
It is, in fact, over questions of the church that the most serious disagreements continue to
exist between Catholics and evangelicals. Questions about the papacy, about the Blessed Virgin
Mary, about the sacraments, about the mandatory celibacy of priests and religious--these issues
all grow out of a different conception of how God fashions the Body of Christ in the world, what
he has called that Body to do, and how he has empowered it to do the work of building his
Kingdom.
For Catholics the visible, properly constituted and hierarchically governed church is the
God-given agent for the work of apostolic ministry. For evangelicals the church is the spiritual
Body of Christ made up of all those who have responded to the apostolic proclamation of the
God-given offer of the forgiveness of sins in Jesus Christ. For Catholics, the church constitutes
9 On the conservative, Augustinian character of Wesley's Arminianism, see the article by Packer.
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believers; for evangelicals, believers constitute the church. For Catholics, individual believers are
a function of the church; for evangelicals, the church is a function of individual believers.
This is a deep divide, because even more than being a question of different doctrine it is a
question of different (and deeply ingrained) assumptions about practice. Thus, evangelicals
cannot understand how in good conscience a genuinely Christian church could have engaged
(and in limited areas of the world still engage) in coerced constraint of large populations as part
of efforts at exerting hegemonic control over entire local societies.
Evangelicals, further, cannot understand how the Catholic church can be genuinely
Christian if it seems to tolerate the substitution of church adherence for church practice--this is
the problem of nominal belief and nominal practice that evangelicals see whenever they look at
Catholicism as a whole. To be sure, Catholic leaders do address this problem, but to evangelicals
it looks like they don't mean it. How can the church tolerate a definition of Christianity that
looks more to one-time baptism and an ethnic-type of identification as a definition of what
constitutes a Christian and tolerate what sometimes looks like a nearly complete indifference to
the vast numbers of Catholics that do not seem to be concerned about practicing anything but the
most formal and rudimentary kind of Christian faith.
I have to use my imagination a little to frame a Catholic response, but I can imagine
Catholics looking at the bloomin', buzzin' confusion that is evangelical Christianity and asking,
with the same bewilderment I have just expressed the other way, questions like this: As
Catholics we cannot imagine that genuine Christianity could be so torn apart as we see
evangelical Protestantism torn apart, and for such a never-ending list of sinfully schismatic
reasons: personality disputes, ego trips, preferences in music, preferences in sermon length,
preferences in politics, economic classes, races, denominational pride, eccentric interpretations of
a limited part of the Bible, very eccentric interpretations of a limited part of the Bible, and so on.
Or, again, as Catholics we cannot understand how you evangelicals can claim to be
Christian and limit your faith to what goes on in your heads--to words, preaching, testimonies,
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books, more words--but no real sacraments, no real sense that Christ died for bodies as well as
for heads, no real appreciation for what comes to us through the physical senses. So why is all
the good Christian literature and about 95% of the good Christian painting, and most of the really
serious Christian scholarship done by Catholics, huh?
Such visceral cross-denominational reactions are rooted in alternative conceptions of
what it means to be Christian, and those alternative conceptions are rooted in what it means for a
body of humans to make up the Christian church.
At this point it is natural to think about what might be done. But that desire might be
premature if it neglects asking why this fundamental difference exists and how it should be
interpreted, before trying to figure out what can be done about it.
Here I abridge severely what we hope to develop in the book. But I have come
increasingly to the conclusion that there exists four quite distinct types of Christianity in the
world. If I am right, then basic Catholic-evangelical differences on the church grow out of
different conceptions of what the Christian faith is in its essence.10 Here are the four.
(1) Orthodox, constituted in the third to fifth centuries and given shape by its adaptation
to Hellenism (by the translation out of Hebrew and Aramaic idiom into Greek). Today, the
survival of Orthodoxy represents a continuing Christian tradition in which the blinding
metaphysical reality of what it meant for God to take on flesh "for us and for our salvation"
continues to supply the spiritual lifeblood to the church.
(2) Catholic, constituted in the ninth to thirteenth centuries and given shape by its
adaptation to European Christendom (by the translation of Greek into Latin). Today, the survival
of Catholicism represents a continuing Christian tradition in which the tangible ideal of living all
life under God continues to supply the highest model for Christian community, the use of the
mind, and the expression of God's love in the world.
10 Louis Bouyer, Helmuth Thiellicke, Abraham Kuyper
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(3) Protestant, constituted in the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries by its adaptation to a
new Europe marked by nationalism and, eventually, the Enlightenment (by the translation of
Latin into vernacular languages). Today, the survival of Protestantism represents a continuing
Christian tradition in which the life-transforming implications of what it meant for Christ to live,
die, and reign pro me continues to supply a source of great spiritual comfort to individuals and
remarkable spurs to individual Christian activity.
(4) Pentecostal, constituted in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries by its adaptation to
global economics (by the translation out of European languages into indigenous tongues).
Today, the spread of Pentecostalism represents a new Christian tradition in which the living
possibility of union and communion with God through the Holy Spirit brings light in many of
the darkest places of the world.
The "mere Christians" in all of these traditions believe very similar things about the
inspiration and authority of the Scriptures, the Trinity, the centrality of the work of Christ for
human salvation, and the power of the Holy Spirit as the motive force for holy living in the
world. But each tradition expresses these realities with characteristically different emphases:
Orthodoxy, the mystical mysterious of God
Catholicism, the power of God to build his City
Protestantism, the civil society shaped by individual choice
Pentecostalism, the direct empowerment of the Holy Spirit
These major expressions of Christian faith may be likened to language families. Each
stands closest to the "language" from which it emerged: so Catholicism from Orthodoxy,
Protestantism from Catholicism, Pentecostalism from Protestantism. Each is a family of
languages rather than a single tongue. Each language family, however, has enjoyed much
contact with representatives of other language families. The result is much borrowing of
vocabulary, some cross-over of syntax, and often considerable ability to figure out what people
from other languages are saying--but still a basic divide.
Lewis University (3-5-04)
M. Noll, page 17
If this line of reasoning reflects reality, it helps to explain a great deal. For example, it is
only marginally useful for evangelicals to quote Bible verses at Roman Catholics for whom
authoritative interpretations of Scripture exist that deny the force of the texts as used by
evangelicals. Or again, it is only marginally useful for Catholics to describe the ineluctable bonds
between Scripture and Tradition to evangelicals for whom Scripture has long been valued for its
ability to challenge tradition.
In conclusion, what can we make of a world of multiple tongues? First, I think we can
recognize the continuing differences between Catholics and evangelicals as both a problem and a
gift. It is a problem because serious Christ-followers of one sort simply cannot understand why
serious Christ-followers of another sort believe and act in the details of how they believe and act.
It is a gift because, by the mercies of God, more and more Christ-followers of one sort are coming
to recognize the sanctity, the holiness, the telltale manifestations of the Holy Spirit among serious
Christ-followers of other sorts. The gift in this realization is to see that God has always been
bigger than our own group's grasp of God, that he has been manifesting himself at times, in
places, and through venues where we and our mates have not expected him to be present at all.
It is also a gift because continuing differences among different families, or languages, of
serious Christ-followers testifies to the capacity of the once-incarnate Son of God to repeatedly
and continuously incarnate himself again in human cultures marked by great cultural differences
among themselves. What we today see may be described as an incarnation of Christ in Catholic
form and an incarnation of Christ is evangelical form. What we can be confident that God sees is
his love shed abroad in the person of his Son to the whole world.
So what are we going to do about this situation? Historians look backward. I've said
about all I can say. By contrast, workers with other college students must look forward. Is the
Reformation over? This may not be the best question to be asking.
Better questions might sound like this: Is God truly going to draw people from every
tribe and tongue and people and nation [and major Christian tradition] to worship together the
Lewis University (3-5-04)
M. Noll, page 18
Lamb who was slain? And will he really make of them--all these tongues and peoples and
traditions--a single Kingdom united in the Body of his Son Jesus Christ? These might be the
more pertinent questions.
Do you doubt that the all-merciful God can still do such great signs and wonders. Think
about it. We have gathered here today as people who not so very long ago looked upon each
other as orcs and elfs, and were as repelled by orc-speech and elf-speech as it was possible to be.
Today, it is more like ents and hobbits, not yet speaking the same language, but nonetheless
getting quite a charge from hearing the other tongue and actually getting along quite well
together. Might God do even more? Look around you. Listen. It is happening right before your
eyes and ears.
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