Francis Beckwith

Former ETS president speaks about what he takes from evangelicalism back to the Roman Catholic Church. Read his interview and his blog.

Well, if you know me, I've always defended Catholicism. (Even though I'm a Baptist, I don't like calling myself "Baptist" though, Baptists are like the worst bunch of people in discriminating against many people... sigh... I know not everyone is like that, but seriously, so many of us do this kind of disgusting thing, it hurts whenever I thought about it...)

I like many Catholic stuff and beliefs. Here're some interesting stuff from the interview and his blog. (in purple, those in black are my own opinion.)

I still consider myself an evangelical, but no longer a Protestant. I do think I have a better understanding of what sometimes the Catholic Church is trying to convey. Protestants often misunderstand. The issue of justification was key for me. The Catholic Church frames the Christian life as one in which you must exercise virtue—not because virtue saves you, but because that's the way God's grace gets manifested. As an evangelical, even when I talked about sanctification and wanted to practice it, it seemed as if I didn't have a good enough incentive to do so. Now there's a kind of theological framework, and it doesn't say my salvation depends on me, but it says my virtue counts for something. It's important to allow the grace of God to be exercised through your actions. The evangelical emphasis on the moral life forms my Catholic practice with an added incentive. That was liberating to me.

I have to say I agree with this, this is what I've always been saying... We've been emphasizing too much on grace/faith and accusing anyone who dared to talk about action/work as heretic, when this is clearly also an important part in the Bible.

Looking at tradition would also help evangelicals learn about Christian liturgical traditions, like Eastern Orthodoxy and Catholicism, that evangelicals reject because they say liturgy is unbiblical. When did these practices come to be? It turns out many of them came to be very early on in church history when people were close historically to the apostles themselves. There must be something to these practices that the early Christians thought was perfectly consistent with what they had received from the apostles.

I have always like the liturgical traditions of Catholicism. We're too "free" in my opinion.

I thought to myself, How come every evangelical book that I've read on Catholicism didn't get this right? Part of it is a paradigm problem. I don't think it's duplicity. I just think if you hold to a highly cognitive, almost legal model of justification, there is no component for God's grace working out salvation within you.

Well, STOP reading those books about Catholicism you can find in Christian bookstores, all of them are rubbish!

As you probably know, my work in philosophy, ethics, and theology has always been Catholic friendly, but I would have never predicted that I would return to the Church, for there seemed to me too many theological and ecclesiastical issues that appeared insurmountable. However, in January, at the suggestion of a dear friend, I began reading the Early Church Fathers as well as some of the more sophisticated works on justification by Catholic authors. I became convinced that the Early Church is more Catholic than Protestant and that the Catholic view of justification, correctly understood, is biblically and historically defensible. Even though I also believe that the Reformed view is biblically and historically defensible, I think the Catholic view has more explanatory power to account for both all the biblical texts on justification as well as the church’s historical understanding of salvation prior to the Reformation all the way back to the ancient church of the first few centuries. Moreover, much of what I have taken for granted as a Protestant—e.g., the catholic creeds, the doctrines of the Trinity and the Incarnation, the Christian understanding of man, and the canon of Scripture—is the result of a Church that made judgments about these matters and on which non-Catholics, including Evangelicals, have declared and grounded their Christian orthodoxy in a world hostile to it. Given these considerations, I thought it wise for me to err on the side of the Church with historical and theological continuity with the first generations of Christians that followed Christ’s Apostles.

So what is stopping me from converting to Catholicism? =P I cannot honestly say I'll never do it. However, the thoughts of "Virgin Mary", "Pope" still bug me... (I can understand why Catholics believe these, but I can't say I totally agree with them) not to mention my friends in my church, and some reason you may be able to guess if you know me. =P And most of all, I cannot accept the idea that everyone may be saved even if they don't believe in Jesus... (it isn't as bad as it sounds, but I'm not going into details here.) even though I think I know the logic behind...

I really hope Catholics will be understood better by Protestants. In the meantime, I guess I'll continue in my role as a staunch supporter of Catholicism among Protestants. =)