The Reformation Comes to Rome? An Evangelical Reviews "Evangelical Catholicism"

Much of Weigel's exposition mirrors exactly what I also would like to say to Catholic brothers and sisters from my perspective as an evangelical Protestant of Reformed convictions modelled by, say, Abraham Kuyper.

George Weigel's Evangelical Catholicism provides very interesting reading for a historian with pietist and Calvinist convictions who happens to teach at the University of Notre Dame. It is also greatly interesting to see a lay American Catholic, known for his conservative political convictions as well as for his comprehensive biography of John Paul II, address the inner life of his church with a mostly apolitical analysis.

The book is partly historical as it charts what Weigel describes a "deep reform" of the Catholic Church that began with Pope Leo XIII in the late nineteenth century, progressed gradually through the first decades of the twentieth century, received a strong impetus with the Second Vatican Council, and then accelerated rapidly under the pontificates of John Paul II and Benedict XVI (the book was written before the accession of Francis I). He depicts the 350 years from the time of Martin Luther to the First Vatican Council (1870) of Pope Pius IX as "Counter-Reformation Catholicism" during which the church featured strict internal discipline, morality defined in legal-juridical terms, and a tight "clerical caste system"—as often as possible abetted by cooperating governmental regimes. Weigel suggests that this stance was necessary for the Church to sail between the disruptive Scylla of Protestantism and the destructive Charybdis of the Enlightenment. But with the altered circumstances of the modern world that Leo XIII intimated and later popes appreciated fully, the Church has been moving toward a program of "evangelical Catholicism."

"Weigel suggests that this stance was necessary for the Church to sail between the disruptive Scylla of Protestantism and the destructive Charybdis of the Enlightenment."

"disruptive"? An evangelical Catholic is an oxymoron. If you are an evangelical, there is obviously no need for a Roman Catholic Church and all its trappings.

I sincerely apologize to the prof if any rain falls on his parade, but, don’t a great many Reformed teachers see the RCC as jumping right into the One World “Church” when that starts to shape up; if it hasn’t already?

If so, I see the RCC as being involved in forcing people to accept the OWC, and possibly the Mark of the Beast. And wouldn’t that make the good Professor a Reformed In Name Only. His being a prof at Notre Dame is my first clue....very much like an RCC Priest being a prof at Dallas Theological Seminary.

Is my view too nafrow in some way?

You’re confusing Reformed (that is Calvinist) teachers with generic evangelical teachers. End-times beliefs among Reformed scholars—no matter how conservative or evangelical they are— usually don’t deal with things like “the Mark of the Beast,” the antichrist or the rapture.

Even the most conservative/fundamentalist Reformed scholars, are usually amilennial, post-milennial or partial-preterist—and these interpretations understand the 2nd Coming of Jesus to happen all at once....at the very end of the world, without all the complications of rapture/tribulation/ re-built temple/antichrist/1000 year reign etc., which popular teachers like Tim LaHaye or Hal Lindsey—and most of Dallas Theo Seminary believe.

It is very wrong to call such Reformed scholars “liberal” too, as most of these same guys believe in young-earth creationism....

It’s notable that NO ONE believed the complicated/popular (called dispensational) view of the end times, before about the 1830s...when the movement which gave birth to the (odd,fringe group of the) 7th Day Adventists began. Luther, Calvin, Aquinas, Augustine—basically all the leading lights of the ancient/medieval & reformation church—believed some sort of amilennial/post-milennial or non-literal interpretation of the visions in Revelation and Daniel.

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