It is not just a fluke or an aberration that the evangelical churches and the Catholic Church are coming into alignment with each other. The Catholic Church is taking a softer approach to the evangelical church, and the evangelical church is starting to downplay the traditional and significant differences that have kept it at bay with the Roman Catholic Church. While church history has witnessed martyrs who would not bend on doctrinal issues concerning salvation, today, we are witnessing a paradigm shift from an emphasis on biblical doctrine to the experiential and the mystical. The consensus is becoming that it’s not so important what we believe anymore but what we do—namely that we need to experience God and get along with everyone. And this is where the Catholic Church comes in as it promotes oneness (a unifying of all religious traditions under the umbrella of the Catholic Church) and a vast array of religious practices stemming back to the Church fathers to satisfy the draw to the experiential.
The following examples illustrate how this changing landscape is occurring—
- Rick Warren and EWTN…
- Beth Moore…
- Kenneth Copeland…
- Alpha Course/Nicky Gumbel…
- Wheaton College…
- Franklin Graham…
- Lifeway Survey (Southern Baptist)…
I haven’t named all these people or organizations in this chapter with the intent of lambasting them. My motive has been to show with this small sampling how the evangelical church is helping to bring about an ecumenical Catholic-bound landscape.
The Catholic-friendly individuals I’ve just quoted would certainly acknowledge there are differences between the evangelical and the Catholic faith. But they would relegate these distinctives as minor issues, and focusing on them in any negative way would be seen as theologically acerbic and divisive. The response most often given by evangelical pastors, church leaders, and those in authority is that criticism is judgmentalism—a vice rather than a virtue—and that those who bring up these objections, seen as minor issues, lead people away from what’s important.
However, our focus here is to show there are profound differences that affect salvation, that are not just unscriptural but anti-scriptural and anti-Gospel.
Examine the evidence here.