At a New York news conference held during Holy Week, Evangelical and Catholic leaders unveiled “Evangelicals and Catholic Together: The Christian Mission in the Third Millennium.” The document, which carried 40 signatures, expressed the two sides’ fundamental theological agreements and their common social concerns. Citing Pope John Paul II’s 1990 encyclical Redemptoris Missio, it expressed the hope that, if the Second Coming is delayed, the new millennium beginning in 2001 will be “a springtime of world missions.”
Catholic signers included Cardinal John O’Connor of New York, Archbishop Francis Stafford of Denver, Fr. Avery Dulles, historian James Hitchcock of St. Louis University, philosopher Peter Kreeft of Boston College, constitutional lawyer William Bentley Ball, Keith Fournier of the American Center for Law and Justice, and Michael Novak of the American Enterprise Institute.
Protestant signers included J. I. Packer, well-known author and an editor at Christianity Today; John White, president of Geneva College and former president of the National Association of Evangelicals; Bill Brigh, founder of Campus Crusade for Christ; Pat Robertson, founder of the Christian Broadcasting Network (now the Family Channel); and Larry Lewis, head of the Southern Baptist Home Mission Board.
The principal drafters of the document were Fr. Richard John Neuhaus, a former Lutheran minister, now a Catholic priest and head of the Institute on Religion and Public Life; Chuck Colson, Protestant author and founder of Prison Fellowship; Kent Hill, former director of the Institute on Religion and Democracy and current president of Eastern Nazarene College; and George Weigel, a Catholic who is president of the Ethics and Public Policy Center.
“Evangelicals and Catholics Together” proclaims, “This statement cannot speak officially for our communities. It does intend to speak responsibly from our communities and to our communities. In this statement we address what we have discovered both about our unity and about our differences.”
“The two communities in world Christianity that are most evangelistically assertive and most rapidly growing are Evangelicals and Catholics. In many parts of the world, the relationship between these communities is marked more by conflict than by cooperation, more by animosity than by love, more by suspicion than by trust, more by propaganda and ignorance than by respect for the truth. This is alarmingly the case in Latin America, increasingly the case in Eastern Europe, and too often the case in our own country. While we are gratefully aware of ongoing efforts to address tensions among these communities, the shameful reality is that, in many places around the world, the scandal of conflict between Christians obscures the scandal of the cross, thus crippling the one mission of the one Christ.”
The document lists common beliefs, including the Trinity, that Christ is Lord and Savior, and that the Scriptures are the inspired, infallible Word of God. It also declares that we are justified by grace through faith which “is active in love.” Also listed are differences in belief between the two communities, including the nature of the Church, the sole authority of Scripture (sola scriptura), apostolic succession, the sacraments as means of grace, the Eucharistic sacrifice, baptismal regeneration, and devotion to Mary and the saints.
It is admitted that Protestants have disagreements among themselves, yet “on these questions, and other questions implied by them, Evangelicals hold that the Catholic Church has gone beyond Scripture, adding teachings and practices that detract from or compromise the gospel of God’s saving grace in Christ. Catholics, in turn, hold that such teachings and practices are grounded in Scripture and belong to the fullness of God’s revelation. Their rejection, Catholics say, results in a truncated and reduced understanding of the Christian reality.”
A later section urges the two communities to work against social problems such as abortion, pornography, and the faults in public education. “We will do all in our power to resist proposals for euthanasia, eugenics, and population control that exploit the vulnerable, corrupt the integrity of medicine, deprave our culture, and betray the moral truths of our constitutional order.”
The final section perhaps will be the most controversial in the document. It states, “The question of Christian witness unavoidably returns us to points of serious tension between Evangelicals and Catholics. . . . Today, in this country and elsewhere, Evangelicals and Catholics attempt to win `converts’ from one another’s folds. In some ways, this is perfectly understandable and perhaps inevitable. In many instances, however, such efforts at recruitment undermine the Christian mission by which we are bound by God’s Word and to which we have recommitted ourselves in this statement.”
“It is understandable that Christians who bear witness to the gospel try to persuade others that their communities and traditions are more fully in accord with the gospel. There is a necessary distinction between evangelizing and what is today commonly called proselytizing or `sheep stealing.’ We condemn the practice of recruiting people from another community for purposes of denominational or institutional aggrandizement. At the same time, our commitment to full religious freedom compels us to defend the legal freedom to proselytize even as we call upon Christians to refrain from such activity. . . .
“[I]n view of the large number of non-Christians in the world and the enormous challenge of our common evangelistic task, it is neither theologically legitimate nor a prudent use of resources for one Christian community to proselytize among active adherents of another Christian community.”
A new science fiction series, Babylon 5, is taking a consistently more respectful attitude toward religion than others have taken. For example, the recently canceled Star Trek: The Next Generation was peppered with anti-religious remarks. In one episode (“DataLore”), Captain Picard proclaimed that humans are merely bio-chemical machines. In another (“Who Watches the Watchers?”), he declared that a race of proto-Vulcans had “wisely abandoned their religion” some time earlier–the implication being that it was good to abandon any religion, not just a bad religion.
Babylon 5, set on a space station of the same name, takes a different approach to religion and does not portray the future as a secular, humanist wonderland. In one episode, the station hosts a symposium on religions in which each alien race gives a public presentation of its world’s dominant religion. When the time comes for Earth’s presentation, the station commander introduces alien dignitaries to a receiving line of human religious leaders, including a Catholic priest, a Protestant minister (Bible in hand), a rabbi, and a Muslim.
A later episode centers on whether the station’s doctor should perform surgery on an alien child belonging to a race that believes its souls will escape if an incision is made. When the doctor goes ahead and secretly performs the operation, against the commander’s orders, he prays to God for the child’s life.
Babylon 5 does not present Christianity as the universal religion of mankind (or of other races), but it treats religion in a consistently respectful manner. It has shown characters with serious religious differences staying faithful to their convictions–refreshing both for science fiction and for television.