Theology Pub Night

This is a bit of an incoherent rant, and it isn’t well thought out,
but I wanted to share some thoughts I had after some recent discussions
at the BHT. Knowing that my logic isn’t tight here, give it a read
anyway, and let me know your thoughts.

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I know I’m asking for a fisking for this, but that never stopped me before.

For all these stories I read about Catholics going Protestant,
Evangelicals going Catholic, etc., I wonder how much any of them has to
say is a case of the grass being greener on the other side of the
Tiber. Theological differences aside, so many “converts” stories center
around perceptions of dead religion in one camp or the other. Maybe
(not for every example, to be sure) the case is that they had been
laboring under the delusion that the religion they were personally
practicing was dead, and that when they had their “conversion,” they
had to move to another tradition to get away from everything that
represented their deadness.

I see this tendency in myself, too. I’m an evangelical. I was saved in
college, and the people who were ministering to me were evangelicals. I
grew up in a mainline, so obviously I thought the mainline was full of
non-Christians and dead spirituality. (This is an attitude I have
repented of.) Later, going back to my childhood church, I heard the
gospel clearly in the liturgy. The problem wasn’t with that church, it
was with ME. I was dead, and now I’m alive, thanks be to God. Had I
gone to that church regularly at the time God was getting my attention,
I might still be in that tradition. Of course, now that I’ve had plenty
of time to steep in the Evangelical tea, I’ve slowly perceived problems
there as I read “the dead guys.” This is making me want to go back to a
liturgical form.

When you bring someone’s theological convictions into all this, it gets
messier. I hear beloved brothers and sisters make comments to the
effect that they are praying for a Catholic neighbor to get saved. This
makes me sad. I think to myself, maybe they need saving, and maybe they
don’t. Why don’t you talk to them about Jesus and see if they trust Him
or not? The same thing could work the other way. I checked out a
Catholic book store in my neighborhood a few months ago, since the
evangelical Christian bookstores around here certainly don’t have much
in the way of the early Fathers and church History. The person working
there was a former Baptist turned Catholic who, upon learning that I
was an evangelical, spent the rest of our conversation subtly
witnessing to me of the Catholic faith.

I know there are many real problems of theology and praxis between
Christian denominations. Still, there must be some way to see
Christians for who they are, without resorting to picking on
denominational errors(!) that probably don’t disqualify us from the
Kingdom.