A Southern Baptist Among the Roman Catholics | The American Spectator


Not long ago, in a coffee shop, I found myself seated beside a genial couple with a Martin Luther biography on their table. I volunteered that I was an old Baptist seminary professor and that the book had caught my eye. They said they were Catholic, and she mentioned that she’d done work for both Catholic Digest and Our Sunday Visitor. I told them that I’d once been a subscriber to both of those periodicals as well as others, including Sursum Corda and Catholic Answers. We were all working at our computers, but, now and then, they’d indulge my recollections and questions (Q: Is limbo for unbaptized infants still a doctrine? A: No, not since 2007.) I expressed my appreciation for a number of Catholic contributions, including some medieval writings and the beauty of cathedrals just visited — Chartres and Sagrada Familia. It was a pleasant and instructive exchange.

As for the subscriptions, I secured them as a member for several years of an SBC team of eight who met annually with eight from the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, whether at the SBC building in Nashville, Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, a Catholic order’s house in D.C.’s Brookland neighborhood, or Beeson Divinity School in Birmingham. In those days, the Southern Baptist Convention passed a resolution “On Southern Baptists and Roman Catholics,” drafted in response to the just-published “Evangelicals and Catholics Together,” a document with prominent signatories and detractors. The resolution encouraged “the Interfaith Witness Department of the [SBC] Home Mission Board to pursue ongoing [and already underway] Southern Baptist-Roman Catholic conversation while maintaining our Southern Baptist confession without compromise.”

From the get-go, we stipulated that this was a “conversation,” not a “dialogue”; the aim was understanding, not persuasion or coalescence. Representing the largest Protestant and non-Protestant denominations in America, we were both convinced that the other side had it wrong on some key issues, and neither of us came to the table with a breezy, “different strokes for different folks” relativism in mind or heart.

Of course, they wished we’d cool our jets over the Five Solas of the Reformation and the “priesthood of believers,” and hoped we might come on board with their sacramentalism, sacerdotalism, and Marian devotion. But that wasn’t the agenda. Rather, we both wanted to be sure that we weren’t cheap-shotting each other along the way. In this vein, I think we persuaded them to stop calling all Evangelicals “Fundamentalists,” and they underscored the fact that we all subscribed to the Nicene and Apostles’ Creed. We learned about “folk Catholicism” and they heard us out on biblical inerrancy.

One day on our lunch break, a theology prof from one of the Loyolas asked me about the Southern in Southern Baptist, and I gave him a quick rundown of Baptist groups, including the American, National, Progressive, Conservative, and Missionary brands. I was a little sheepish in that the list suggested fragmentation, but he hastened to assure me that Catholics were tribal as well. I picked up on his Jesuit school name and asked him about their order’s distinctives. After he noted that five of their eight team members were Jesuit (the other two, diocesan priests plus a Maryknoll Sister), he offered an explanatory joke:

Three priests were playing golf and were getting frustrated as they were stuck behind a painfully slow party ahead of them. But then they noticed the golfers were blind and were working their way gradually down the course as they responded to the beeps of special golf balls, which they gingerly tapped toward the green. Immediately, the Dominican dropped his clubs and delivered a homily on the graciousness of God in providing them compensatory technology. The Franciscan hustled down the course to help them locate the balls and shield them from the sun with an umbrella as best he could. The Jesuit sized up the situation and asked impatiently, “Why don’t they play at night?”

Thus, the USCCB had, in effect, sent in the “tough guys” to deal with scrappy Southern Baptists. And then he added another funny: “There are three things that God doesn’t know — 1. How many religious women there are; 2. How much money the Franciscans have; 3. What the Jesuits are thinking.”

I picked up a third joke when I got back to Kansas City, where I had occasion to report on my conversation to a Jesuit priest from Rockhurst College, now University. Hearing the jokes, he added one he’d just heard at a retirement party: A man came to first a Dominican and then a Franciscan to ask them to offer a novena on his behalf that he might acquire a Lexus. They asked, “What’s a Lexus?” and then turned him away when he explained it was an expensive car, even though he tried to defend his purchase in terms of quality investment in the stewardship of funds. So, he tried a Jesuit, who responded, “What’s a novena?”

Not surprisingly, the USCCB team wasn’t so keen on Cardinal Ratzinger’s work at the Congregation (now Dicastery) for the Doctrine of Faith. I’m sure they were upset at his installation as Pope Benedict XVI, and I know they welcomed his early retirement, making way for the late Pope Francis.

Though I grew up in a small Southern town with few Catholics and a small Catholic church, I’ve had many encounters with the denomination and its legacy, so let me touch on nine others that have shaped my understanding.

Encounter One

After I did my grad work at Vanderbilt, I found myself teaching philosophy at Wheaton College west of Chicago. I first saw the school when I drove up for their annual philosophy conference, and I enjoyed being one of the hosts for six years thereafter. In a day when skeptics ruled the roost in the American Philosophical Association (acolytes of Bertrand Russell and A. J. Ayer, or, across the English Channel, Heidegger and Sartre), the Wheaton gatherings were something of a strength rally for believers. They came from far and wide, big and small schools, a selection of denominations — Plantinga and Wolterstorff from Calvin, Yandell from Wisconsin, Mavrodes from Michigan, Hasker from Huntington, Adams from UCLA, etc. A Protestant cornucopia. But we also had visits from McInerny and Sayre from Notre Dame. As I put it, “In the context of professional philosophy, anyone who didn’t spit when you said ‘Jesus’ was your brother.”

And then a big surprise. The distinguished philosopher of religion, William Alston, the chairman at Illinois, was wonderfully converted while on a study leave in England. When he came back, he was so enthused that he suggested we form a Society of Christian Philosophers within the APA itself. It seemed a stretch, but we thought we’d give it a go, so we scheduled a test-the-waters gathering at the upcoming Western division meeting in Cincinnati. As I recall, we set up around 30 chairs, figuring that if we spread out, it might make for a decent photo. But around 80 showed up, and some had to stand outside and look through the door. We were astonished at the response, and the Society (with the journal Faith & Philosophy) is still at it.

Since then, the group has had presidents from traditionally Baptist (Baylor), Reformed (Calvin), and Catholic (Saint Louis) schools. And, as I’ve taught in Protestant schools, I’ve had colleagues with degrees from Catholic universities (Notre Dame and Dallas) and students who’ve gone on to do PhD work at Notre Dame and Marquette. Again, the theological and ecclesiological differences can be substantial, but not as great as those you encounter at grindingly secular graduate schools.

A qualifying word: Virtually all colleges and seminaries that identify with the faith have slid “left” in their eagerness to accommodate the culture. I’ve seen it among traditionally SBC schools as well as at Catholic schools. (This past year, on a teaching stint in Idaho, I visited Gonzaga in Spokane, where I heard a priest lament such slippage.) I use a helicopter to illustrate the challenge: Yes, the big main rotor gives the craft lift, but that furiously spinning, much-smaller tail rotor pushes against the torque and keeps the copter from whirling out of control. Similarly, if religious institutions don’t continuously push against the prevailing, secularizing force, then they will lose their distinctives. (Of course, since truth is the main issue, change can be good if the founders’ vision was wrong-headed, but that’s another matter.)

Two

Not long after I began teaching philosophy at Wheaton, the Francis Schaeffer film series, How Then Shall We Live?, was released, and those of us in the department were tapped to lead discussions on it in local churches. We were grateful that Schaeffer had supplemented Bible commentary, devotional literature, and inspirational biography with critical engagement toward the likes of Kant and Sartre. And his subsequent film, What Ever Happened to the Human Race? pressed us to take a strong stand against abortion in the wake of the 1973 Roe decision. (Incidentally, Roman Catholics were out ahead of Southern Baptists on the abortion issue. Before the late 20th-century “conservative resurgence” in the SBC, our Christian Life Commission promoted a resolution affirming Roe, and they were in no mood to cheer the Hyde Amendment, initiated by a Catholic Congressman.)

This being said, my chairman, Arthur Holmes (an Englishman who wrote the article on “Christian Philosophy” for Encyclopedia Britannica) was still not so keen on how Schaeffer dismissed Aquinas for elevating reason to the level of faith, thus threatening fealty to sola scriptura. Make no mistake, we Wheaties subscribed to the “plenary verbal inspiration” of the Bible (“inerrancy”), but Holmes wanted to be sure that, while affirming the sufficiency of Scripture for salvation and theology, we had respect for general revelation and natural law and their application to the framing of human law. Since then, I’ve followed his footsteps in assigning my students “Treatise on Law” in Summa Theologica. I don’t, however, treat Aquinas’s writing on the level of Scripture. For instance, I took exception to his (and Augustine’s) prohibition against all verbal lying when I defended Rahab’s false “They went thataway!” to the men from Jericho who were after the Hebrew spies, Joshua and Caleb.

Of course, Catholic writers show up in most all my syllabi, e.g., Suarez and Vittoria (Peace and War), Francis of Assisi (environmental ethics), Pieper (Work and Leisure), and von Balthasar (Aesthetics). I also drew on G. E. M. Anscombe’s translation of Wittgenstein in my dissertation. And no, I don’t agree with them all, but I do take them very seriously.

Three

My work with Kairos Journal has put me in the company of a range of Catholics, from (now “laicized”) Frank Pavone of Priests for Life; to Cardinal Timothy Dolan (at whose table I sat at the Manhattan Declaration luncheon in New York); and to John O’Sullivan, Richard John Neuhaus, and Cardinal George Pell in a gathering at the Marianist Retreat Center on the heights above Vienna, an assembly of conservatives to discuss the Islamization Europe as its Judeo-Christian foundations eroded. (Our “Legatees” booklet set out the case.) And speaking of Vienna, I’m grateful for Jan Sobieski, the Polish Catholic who stopped a Muslim invasion of Europe at that city.

Our Vienna meeting included Jewish voices, e.g., British journalist Melanie Phillips and Hudson Institute director Herb London, with whom I later traveled to Israel as a part of an FIDF group. Also present was Nigerian Anglican Archbishop Peter Akinola, for whom I edited tapes of Muslim atrocities in the country’s north, with scenes of mayhem and murder in cities such as Kano, Kaduna, Jos, and Maiduguri. One focused on the shrunken body of a burned priest, along with others recording the sacking and savaging of a range of Protestant churches. We speak of co-belligerents (as when an SBC officer shared a platform with a rabbi and a priest in protesting partial-birth abortions), but we may also speak of Protestants, Catholics, and Jews as “co-prey” as far as a shocking number of Muslims are concerned.

Four

As part of that SBC/RC-conversation team, I subscribed to Karl Keating’s Catholic Answers, and I jumped at the chance in the late 1980s to attend a Defending the Faith conference on the campus of Franciscan University of Steubenville, Ohio, a gathering with Keating on the program. (I called ahead to see if this Southern Baptist would be welcome and was assured I would.) As I recall, that was my first exposure to Paul Vitz and Peter Kreeft, whose fine talks in a plenary session focused on defending Christianity in general. But Keating’s breakout session in the cafeteria was more parochial in its focus. I was familiar with his responses to a dozen or so objections from Protestants, e.g., priestly celibacy, papal infallibility, purgatory, transubstantiation, and the perpetual virginity of Mary. He began with this last topic, explaining that New Testament translations referring to Jesus’s “brothers” should really speak of “cousins.” But not long into the session, with as many as a hundred in the room, things went off the rails as a couple of attendees raised concerns over doctrinal departures by priests themselves, toward universalism in particular. I had a similar experience when, as a pastor, I’d made reference to a Baptist difference with Catholicism. A young woman in the congregation, one with a Catholic background, invited me to a weekly orientation session in the church just down the street. I did attend and listened as the nun was introducing the faith to some “newbies.” But not long into the session, she countenanced universalism, and I ended up citing Catholic doctrine to the contrary.

Five

Both Southern Baptists and Roman Catholics have presented the world with scandals and deplorables. About a decade ago, I was tapped to write a little book on the problem of “bad Christians.” For illustration, I touched on a Pennsylvania grand jury report that found instances of sexual abuse by priests. I also recounted an incident from my youth in the early 1960s, where two hundred in my Southern Baptist congregation in Jim Crow Arkansas voted to deny membership for a Nigerian who’d worked with our missionaries and had come from Africa to attend our local Baptist college. (Fortunately, four hundred voted to receive him.) In sizing up these disgraceful behaviors, I raised the issue of “false professors” — Christians in name only — and noted that real believers are works in progress, whether the righteousness of Christ is fundamentally “imparted” (Catholic) or “imputed” (Protestant).

Of course, the political range of adherents is remarkable. Bill Clinton was raised Southern Baptist; Ted Cruz became one. Al Gore was raised Southern Baptist; so was Mike Huckabee (who once preached for me in my church when we were both Arkansas pastors). Samuel Alito is Roman Catholic; so is Sonia Sotomayor.

Six

Through the years, I’ve profited from a range of Catholic, non-fiction writers, appropriating many of them in my own work, whether through essays, lectures, or reading assignments. A sampling includes Michael Novak (The Joy of Sports; On Two Wings); E. Michael Jones (Degenerate Moderns; Living Machines; Dionysos Rising); and G. K. Chesterton (Heretics; Orthodoxy). Of course, I do take exception to some of what I read in these books; the freewheeling Jones said that Luther started the Reformation because he wanted a lady, but I did like what he said about Freud, Mead, Kinsey, and Picasso.

Moving on in literature and the other arts, I’ve quoted Gerald Manley Hopkins’s “God’s Grandeur,” given thanks that Peter Jackson took Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings to the silver screen, and played Haydn’s Trumpet Concerto for a high school band festival piece.

Seven

I’ve spent a lot of time on volunteer mission trips around the world (on every continent, save Antarctica). The Catholic scene varies widely from place to place, as does our relationship with Catholics. In Romania and Indonesia, we Southern Baptists have common cause with Catholics who are facing governmental and cultural headwinds from, respectively, the Orthodox and Muslim majorities. On my trips to Brazil, I saw things I hadn’t seen in Chicagoland, where I lived for 17 years. For instance, in Para, I came across a French liberation-theology priest who was marshalling the poor to seize ranch lands by becoming squatters — not a thing I’d noticed in Cook and DuPage counties. And then, up in Belem, locals explained why a statue of Mary stood in a glass case in a city park pavilion, a home to which she is carried, according to her wishes, from a nearby cathedral once a year. We had trouble wrapping our Baptist heads around that account, but it’s hugely persuasive down there, the center of the Our Lady of Nazareth Festival. And when, as part of an ROTC color guard, I marched in a Mardi Gras parade in New Orleans, I sensed this event lacked Baptist roots.

Eight

Michael Novak’s The Joy of Sports helped open my eyes to the way that prevailing religions shape cultures. He sketched the difference between festive Italian cars (Maserati, Lamborghini, and Ferrari) and stolid Lutheran cars (Volvo and Saab). Once, when we spoke during his visit to our SBC seminary in Louisville, he went on to distinguish Lutheran, Big-10 football (with substantial corn-fed linemen pushing up and down the field) from Southern Baptist, SEC football (slinging passes all over the field). And so, yes, traditionally-Catholic Latin America ain’t traditionally-Protestant America, though European settlers hit both shores around the same time. It made a difference that Cortez and Pizarro were prominent down South, while Standish and Oglethorpe were more decisive in the North.

The intertwining of religion (and irreligion) and culture is momentous, as I can testify, having taken evangelistic bike trips up the Nile from Luxor to Aswan and also through Flanders Fields in Belgium. And, in America, I’ve benefitted from the Grand Rapids mix, whether attending conferences at Father Robert Sirico’s Acton Institute or browsing the bookstores of publishers in the Dutch Reformed tradition who established their companies in that city — Zondervan, Eerdmans, Kregel, and Baker.

Nine

Though there are no Southern Baptists on the Supreme Court, we “deplorable,” Evangelical Southern Baptists voted at over 70 percent (compared to under 60 percent by Catholics) for the man who put Catholics (Kavanaugh and Barrett) on the Court. And in the late 20th century, Billy Graham (a Southern Baptist) did much to bolster the number of Evangelicals in America, the majority of them joining with conservative Catholics at the ballot box.

In earlier days, before Baptists divided North and South in 1845, they helped lay the groundwork for our First Amendment, through the work of Roger Williams (whose Rhode Island surpassed Massachusetts in religious freedom) and John Leland (who successfully pressed James Madison to champion this cause in the Constitutional Convention). And this has worked its way into our denominational confession, the Baptist Faith and Message, as we’ve stood, in Article XVII, for “a free church in a free state.” And I think that approach has blessed Roman Catholics as well, including the originally Catholic colony of Maryland. (This doesn’t mean our nation needs to go value neutral, a point I argue in The American Spectator regarding the Satan statue in the Iowa state house.)

Protestants and Catholics have been pretty hard on each other across the centuries. In England alone, Anglican Henry VIII prompted the assassination of Catholic Sir Thomas More. Henry’s daughter, Catholic “Bloody Mary,” martyred Anglicans Ridley and Latimer. And then Anglican Elizabeth I forced Catholic clergy to hide in “priest holes.” Today, Anglican Brits celebrate Guy Fawkes Night to commemorate the frustration of the Gunpowder Plot. And neither the monarch nor his wife may be Catholic. And, so it goes in nations where the church is “magisterial” — a decidedly non-Baptist setup. [Incidentally, Southern Baptists trace some lineage to the Swiss Anabaptists (who insisted on credo-baptism after paedo-baptism and who fled to Holland to avoid persecution); another branch became pacifist Mennonites.]

Yes, we’ve ranked each other down. Our SBC “belief bulletins” categorized Roman Catholics as a “sect,” along with Seventh-Day Adventists, but not as a cult, along with Jehovah’s Witnesses, Mormons, and Christian Scientists. Catholics long held to Extra Ecclesiam nulla salus [“No salvation outside the (Roman Catholic) church”], but Vatican II opened the door to more broadly defining “Church.” Be that as it may, it’s not just a matter of taste; truth is at stake, and, with it, spiritual soundness and eternal destiny. We’re not talking a preference for Rocky Road over Pralines and Cream. Either Southern Baptists or Catholics are wrong on some big things.

Nevertheless, there is substantial overlap and mutual benefit, which leads me to recount the case of the woman who brought her husband to the psychiatrist with the concern, “Doctor, he thinks he’s a chicken.” “Don’t worry, I’ve dealt with similar problems, and I’m fairly confident I can help.” “Not so fast! We need the eggs.”

So yes, we differ on who needs to have their heads examined, but, in the meantime, we can enjoy each other’s roles in the enrichment of our faith and practice.

READ MORE:

The Spectator P.M. Ep. 145: Southern Baptists Seek to End Same-Sex Marriage

Christian Conservatives Present Unity Despite Denominational Differences



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