Joined: Sat Apr 06, 2002 3:35 pm
Posts: 1285
Location: Richardson Texas
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Pastor Bob DeWaay wrote an interesting article titled, WHY EVANGELICALS ARE RETURNING TO ROME, The Abandonment of Sola Scriptura as a Formal Principle. His opening paragraph for many Christians is a real attention-grabber. Are we seeing only a vague indicator of endtime events or a clear and easily recognizable trend toward the coming together of a great triumvirate of evil in fulfillment of Seventh-day Adventist eschatology? Ellen G. White wrote: The Protestants of the United States will be foremost in stretching their hands across the gulf to grasp the hand of spiritualism; they will reach over the abyss to clasp hands with the Roman power; and under the influence of this threefold union, this country will follow in the steps of Rome in trampling on the rights of conscience. The Great Controversy, p. 588. Pastor Bob DeWaay wrote: The February 2008 edition of Christianity Today ran a cover story about evangelicals looking to the ancient Roman Catholic Church in order to find beliefs and practices. What was shocking about the article was that both the author of the article and the senior managing editor of CT claim that this trip back to Rome is a good thing. Says Mark Galli the editor, "While the ancient church has captivated the evangelical imagination for some time, it hasn't been until recently that it's become an accepted fixture of the evangelical landscape. And this is for the good." I just now finished reading the Christianity Today article that DeWaay refers to, all 9 pages. I believe that he has interpreted the article correctly. Here are the paragraphs from The Future Lies in the Past in Christianity Today that caught my eye: During this same period, Campus Crusade leader Peter Gillquist founded an early church-focused school and press, and brought a group of former evangelicals into union talks with the Orthodox Church. At the same time, Drew University's Tom Oden began his transformation from a theological liberal to a leading spokesman for evangelicals' return to tradition. p. 2.
So what to do? Easy, says this youth movement: Stop endlessly debating and advertising Christianity, and just embody it. Live it faithfully in community with others—especially others beyond the white suburban world of many megachurch ministries. Embrace symbols and sacraments. Dialogue with the "other two" historic confessions: Catholicism and Orthodoxy. Recognize that "the road to the church's future is through its past." And break out the candles and incense. Pray using the lectio divina. Tap all the riches of Christian tradition you can find. p. 5.
Campbell quotes Father Thomas Brindley, an Episcopal priest at St. Columba Retreat Center in Inverness, California, who sees young people gravitating toward the lifestyle of the monks at the Orthodox Church in America (OCA) monastery near his parish. They say to the monks: "Wow, we don't like the world any more than you do." p. 6.
Ever since the 1960s and 1970s, one possible response to the evangelical "identity crisis" has been conversion to Roman Catholicism or Orthodoxy. For example, about a half-dozen of the signers of the Chicago Call left Protestantism for other pastures. Most prominent among them were Thomas Howard, formerly of Gordon College and now Catholic, and Gillquist, formerly of Thomas Nelson Publishers and now Eastern Orthodox. By the late 1970s, evangelical Protestant ecumenism was growing. Observes historian Timothy Weber, "At the beginning of the 1970s, most rank-and-file evangelicals probably still viewed Catholicism in … negative terms; but a growing number was ready to reconsider."
Why the new ecumenical openness? Some Protestants and Catholics found a common experience in the charismatic movement. Others began looking at evangelical low-church (and at times anti-sacramental) worship styles in light of the early church, and found the former wanting. Still others found evangelical theology ungrounded in historic Christianity, and sought to reconnect doctrinally with "the one, holy, catholic, and apostolic church"—which inevitably meant "examining the differences that still divided evangelicals and Catholics of various kinds."
Some regard the occasional conversions resulting from dissatisfactions with the evangelical church as historically naïve. Weber concludes this about Gillquist's "New Covenant Apostolic Order," a group led by ex-Campus Crusade folks who eventually left Protestantism altogether, joining themselves to the Eastern Orthodox Church. Weber derives from their story a moral about the dangers of the evangelical proclivity toward "primitivism" (the belief that one can discover and return to a mythical "golden age" of the church). Robert Webber himself fell into this naïveté at the beginning of his decades-long crusade to raise evangelicals' awareness of their heritage. In Common Roots, he seemed to be saying that we can return to the pristine, original church. He called for "a purging of our modernity and a return to Christianity in its historic form" and argued that "if evangelicalism as a movement is going to be more representative of the historic faith it must become more conscious … of … the aspects of the historic Christian faith which it has forgotten." p. 6.
But some evangelical "deconversions" have been deeply considered. Take, for example, the reversion to Roman Catholicism last spring of Francis Beckwith, former president of the Evangelical Theological Society. There's no denying that sustained engagement with the historic church in its two major non-Protestant forms, Roman Catholic and Orthodox, reveals a "hole in evangelicalism" that must be filled by reengaging historic Christianity. Evangelicals can be pardoned for wondering whether Cardinal John Henry Newman, himself a famous convert from Anglicanism to Catholicism and no mean historian, had it right: that "to read deeply in history is to cease being Protestant."
The evangelical abandonment of historical liturgy, doctrinal understanding, and church discipline may seem to constitute, in the words of D. G. Hart, "the lost soul of American Protestantism," or to have resulted in what Nathan Hatch called "churches without walls." At least some evangelicals have concluded that therefore, the only option left is to jump ship. p. 7.
One of the thousands of bloggers who weighed in on Beckwith's conversion made this same point, expressing it as a hope: that conversions of prominent evangelicals such as Beckwith will "continue to stir Protestant evangelicals to become more acquainted with who they are in light of the broader tradition of the church." In short, the search for historic roots can and should lead not to conversion, but to a deepening ecumenical conversation, and a recognition by evangelicals that the Roman Catholics and Eastern Orthodox are fellow Christians with much to teach us. p. 7.
From Tom Oden, D. H. Williams, and living, practicing Eastern Orthodox and Catholic brothers and sisters, they must learn both the strengths and the limits of engagement with the whole tradition of the whole church—one, holy, catholic, and apostolic. p. 8.
From "missional" pioneers such as Lesslie Newbigin and George Hunsberger, and from such diverse sources as the Anabaptists and the Anglicans, they must learn the crucial power of the church. And they must understand it not as a pragmatic set of programs and organizations to be manipulated by managers into a cash machine for the needs of modern Westerners, but as the powerful, untamable, Spirit-driven, Mysterious Body of which Paul spoke. p. 8.
This is the road to maturity. That more and more evangelicals have set out upon it is reason for hope for the future of gospel Christianity. That they are receiving good guidance on this road from wise teachers is reason to believe that Christ is guiding the process. And that they are meeting and learning from fellow Christians in the other two great confessions, Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox, is reason to rejoice in the power of love. p. 9.
The ministry of Todd Bentley and the so-called Lakeland revival is the most current manifestation of spiritualism that is all the rage in Charismatic Churches and has the approval of mainstream evangelicals. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZnvBNV7TBBohttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qVa70lofc0Ihttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GNGPjFYdgJwhttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JMEKB2UUmachttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fliqcEqYUX0http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q6DMK_A2L3chttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Mn0Xb3EnFwhttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kSlt0_8HwMkhttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HtSK9TyduR4Are we seeing the initial coming together of the dragon, beast and false prophet?  
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