My friend Nick Morgan, whose letter to me at the end of 2008, and whose influence in my life as a friend led me to this five-part series of posts, is a godly man. He loves Christ and he loves the church. He also reads theology seriously. He did this while he was an evangelical and he still does it as a Roman Catholic. He reads theologians from both sides, as you can readily see. He often recommends good ideas to me by email and responds to the blog posts I write with genuine interest and charity. He also sends me private correspondence that gets forwarded to him. Lately he has sent me a number of conservative political pieces and asked for my input. I have cautioned him against allowing his soul to become preoccupied with the fiercest forms of criticism that poison the culture, from the left and the right. I have urged him to stay close to Christ, to fill his mind and heart with the glory of Christ and to stay faithful to the church by frequent communion and regular worship […]

My theology of missional-ecumenism says that we should all go back to the ancient standards of faith confessed by all Christians in the undivided church of the first five centuries. I believe in what has been called, by theologian Thomas Oden, paleo-orthodoxy. In these standards of faith we can find a place where all true Christians can stand together and contend for the historic Christian faith side-by-side, even while we continue to work on our remaining differences, which are considerable. To say we agree on a great deal, while we still work on our differences in a spirit of Christian love, is not compromise by any serious definition.

This kind of response, most common among very conservative evangelicals, and very conservative Catholics, is hard to explain but most know what it is when they see it. I am tempted to call it “fundamentalism” but this is neither entirely accurate nor seriously helpful. Whatever it is it amounts to reductionistic thinking. It often leads people to several fallacies in thought and practice.

One such fallacy is the dicto […]

In my correspondence with my friend Nick Morgan, in the aforementioned letter that I cited yesterday, he added the following:

I had a recent discussion with two different men from the evangelical church that my wife belongs too.  I had been forwarding the "ACT 3 Weekly" to them both.  One of them, a former elder, is an extremely gracious and Godly man and seems to appreciate what you are saying, even though he doesn't agree with all of it. He is a former Lutheran and really struggles with a truly sacramental view of baptism and the Eucharist.  However, he is encouraged by leaders like Pope Benedict XVI and about hearing the Pope's very evangelical sounding teaching regarding justification.

The other man is a former Roman Catholic. He has a very negative attitude toward the Roman Catholic Church and any pope, including Benedict XVI.  He's definitely of the mindset that no Catholic who's "truly saved" should remain in the Roman Catholic Church.  His impression of your articles was that you are basically saying "let's all just follow Jesus and […]

People sometimes ask me, “Do you still agree with what you wrote in the two books that you did on Roman Catholicism in the 1990s?” I think this is an excellent, yet provocative, question. I answer that I do believe almost all of what I wrote then, at least in all the major ways. I would write these two books very differently today but the essential content, at least in terms of where I differ with Catholic theology, would remain the same. I hope the way I would say it would be more mature and better stated in ways that are more irenic and helpful to unity

I am a Reformed Church in America minister. I embrace the major confessional tradition of the magisterial Reformers. Some accuse me of lying when I write such things but my accusers did not examine me before my Classis. They have never taken the proper measure of my beliefs in a sympathetic and helpfully critical way.I will say more about this later when I write about fallacies used in debate and argumentation.

What does […]

One of the most faithful regular readers of this blog is Nick Morgan, a firefighter in St. Louis. Those who read the comments on this blog for very long have seen Nick’s name appear in the “Comments” section now and then. With permission I want to tell you a bit about Nick and our friendship. I also want to share some items from a letter that he sent to me just before 2009 began. I do this not to “puff” this blog, or the work of ACT 3 (especially me) but rather to demonstrate just how a friendship between a devout Protestant, and an equally devout Roman Catholic, can actually work itself out in the real world where we do not agree on some very important Christian doctrinal truths.

First, let me tell you that Nick initially met me by attending one of our large conference events in Wheaton back in the days when I was viewed as a role model teacher by some conservative Reformed Christians. Nick, himself a cradle Catholic, had gone through a deep conversion experience and […]