Challenging Catholics: A Catholic Evanglical Dialogue Book

A tract for the times? This pocket-sized popular paperback packs more of a punch than its size would suggest. It records a debate between John Martin, an evangelical Anglican and ex-editor of The Church of England Newspaper, and Dwight Longenecker, Catholic writer and broadcaster, once an Anglican vicar, before that a student at Bob Jones University, a famed fundamentalist establishment in America's Deep South. Curiously, both the protagonists and their debate are representative of new movements in the churches. Martin began life in more or less fundamentalist Brethren circles, then spent his formative years under the influence of the conservative evangelical Anglican churches in Sydney, which is probably the most Calvinist Anglican diocese in the world, and proud of it. Since coming to England he seems to have broadened out somewhat, in a way characteristic of many contemporary "new-style evangelicals", influenced by authors such as Tom Wright. He looks with sympathy rather than scepticism on several other Christian traditions, and is even prepared to see good in certain aspects of Catholicism, while retaining enough of traditional Protestant thinking to argue vigorously against others. Longenecker started life in similarly fundamentalist circles in the USA, before falling in love with England and becoming a vicar here. Fifty years ago it would have been almost unheard of for an evangelical of this ilk to become a Catholic. Since Vatican II, however, and particularly in the past 20 years, there has been a steady trickle of evangelicals "crossing the Tiber" to Rome. The Longenecker-Martin debate shows how these two trends have opened up new possibilities for friendly discussion, in which the more open kind of evangelical can relate to Catholics who understand evangelical concerns enough to allow a meeting of minds. The authors are commendably courteous, but their friendliness does not prevent the discussion from becoming pretty frank on occasion--phrases such as "I just don't buy it" start appearing, notably with reference to papal infallibility and to Mary. In other areas they find an amount of common ground that may surprise readers who haven't kept up with recent evangelical-Catholic discussions--on the communion of saints, to a degree, and even more on the question of justification, the starting point for the Reformation. The great benefit of the book is that it provides a lucid, concise, balanced introduction to an increasingly important discussion, most of which has taken place at a high and rather technical level. The authors skilfully simplify key aspects of this discussion. For example, they refer to the remarkable joint Catholic-Lutheran statement on justification, in which the top leadership of the two churches stated that they now agree on the very question that began the Catholic-Protestant divide, and to other such documents, notably those involving Anglican-Catholic and Catholic-Pentecostal discussions. They touch on most of the main points of historic disagreement, and show that alongside the new common ground there are still massive theological stumbling blocks in certain areas. The tone of the debate, however, friendly and fair even when feisty, lends credence to the authors' optimism when at the end of the book they consider the possibilities for increasing co-operation between evangelicals and Catholics. --David PickeringRead More