Copyright holder: Tyndale University, 
3377 Bayview Ave., Toronto, Ontario, Canada M2M 3S4 
Att.: Library Director, J. William Horsey Library

Copyright: This Work has been made available by the authority of the 
copyright owner solely for the purpose of private study and research 
and may not be copied or reproduced except as permitted by the copyright 
laws of Canada without the written authority from the copyright owner. 

Copyright license: Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International 
License

Citation: Perry, Tim. “Evangelicals and Vatican II.” Paper presented at the Annual 
Wesley Studies Symposium, Tyndale University College & Seminary, Toronto, Ontario, 
April 25, 2018. (MPEG-3, 35:04 min.)

***** Begin Content ******



We're going to continue on with our afternoon presentation. Very pleased to have Tim Perry with us. Tim is a theologian, systematic theologian. He studied at Durham in England, which, if you if you don't know that, is one of the elites globally. I think it's been ranked number one a couple times on the university rankings for religion and theology. So it's a very top notch theological school, and he's written a lot on Catholic evangelical relations. He has a well known book on Mary for evangelicals and currently co pastoring Wesleyan Church in his hometown of Shawville, Quebec. And so we're very pleased that he's able to be here with us today.

So.

Thank you, Tim.

If you'll indulge me a bit. We're headed into the fifth Sunday of Pentecost, if you follow the church year, and that means it's almost Ascension tide. So if you want to buy a book, $10. My brother Aaron has them. Aaron Wave there's aaron, he gets all $10. I don't get a cent. It goes to fund his ministry at Indiana Wesley University. This book grew out of a collection of sermons that I preached a number of years ago on the Ascension. And basically, it's kind of a pastoral application of the doctrine of the Ascension. Aaron co wrote it with me. It's published a number of years ago by Paraclete Press. If you're looking for something to do around Ascension and into Pentecost, have a look at this $10. Good book. All right. Evangelicals and the reception of Vatican Two. It doesn't sound like a ringing title for a Wesley's Studies conference. A Wesley Studies conference. I will bring Wesley, I think, in toward the end. But the talk was not devised with a view to this conference. The talk today is a result of kind of two surprises in my life. A little over two years ago, my dad was diagnosed with stage four cancer, and as a result, my wife and I moved back to my hometown, where I ended up as pastor at the church at which I grew up.

And at that point, I figured the academic part of my life was well and truly over. Just a few months ago, I got an email out of the blue saying, would you please write a chapter on evangelicals in the reception of Vatican Two for the New Oxford Companion to the Second Vatican Council? And I said, sure, but you really should ask Mark knowle. And the editor wrote back and said, we did. He's too busy. He said you'd do it. So that was the first surprise. So I started to work on this project, and then James emailed me and said, would you like to present something at the Wesley Studies Conference? I said, Well, I have nothing really on Wesley on the go right now. And he said, well, what do you have? And I mentioned this. He said, well, do that. So here we are. It doesn't really fit, but maybe I will be able to tie it in at the end. I'll try and hit the Wesley angle and the Tyndale angle as well in the conclusion so evangelicals and the reception of Vatican II there can be no doubt that since the conclusion of the Second Vatican Council the relationship has changed between Catholics and evangelicals, particularly though not exclusively in North America.

And you don't have to go far to find lots of evidence of a warming in relationships. I think the best book is still it's a little bit older now, but it's still mark Nolan, Carol and Nystrom's book is The Reformation Over? And I'd like to begin the talk this afternoon with just a few examples of that change. The first example, most directly related to the council is the advent of formal dialogues between the Roman Catholic Church, specifically the Pontifical Council for the Promotion of Christian Unity, say that five times quickly and various church bodies. So if you survey the Vatican website, for example, you can find any number of documents produced by formal dialogues between the Pontifical Council and the Global Baptist Federation or the Pontifical Council and the Mennonites or the Pontifican Council. And most interestingly, the pentecostals. So that's an example of a warming of relationships. The challenge with the formal documents is of course, evangelicalism is not a denomination. And so while many evangelicals would say they're Baptists, not all Baptists would say they're evangelicals. And the same is true for Mennonites, the same is true even for Pentecostals. So while that's good and important, it doesn't really capture the whole of the warming of relationships.

Of particular interest here is of course the dialogue with the Pentecostals, the diological documents, and you can look them up on the Vatican website are all very careful in their title they talk about a dialogue between representatives of the Pontifical Council and some Pentecostals. And that's because the dialogue with Pentecostalism was largely driven on the Pentecostal side by one person, David Duplexi, and it's broadened from that. But the free church ecclesiology of all of those denominations and particularly of Pentecostals means no one on the Protestant side of those dialogues speaks for the whole. So formal dialogues are interesting, but they don't capture the whole thing. The number of informal dialogues as well. Informal dialogues on mission between the Pontifical Council on Missions and the World Evangelical Alliance led to the publication of two documents on how to engage in evangelism alongside each other, with each other that are very, very important, largely. About Ecclesial good manners more than anything else. But still important. Where you have informal dialogues leading to more formal dialogues and then being written up. But again, the World Evangelical Alliance claims a fairly broad scope. But does it speak for every evangelical?

Hard to say. Nevertheless, an important, an important informal dialogue. Of course, the Evangelicals and Catholics together in North America, the Canadian equivalent of which James is a participating member, both important informal dialogues taking place. Third, academic interaction. It's simply taken for granted now that in Biblical scholarship and theological scholarship that as a theologian you will be or as a Biblical scholar, you'll be interacting with scholarship regardless of where it comes from. And that's a good thing. One of the most interesting developments along that line is the New Catholic Commentary on Sacred Scripture, which is self consciously a Catholic Commentary series written by Catholics for Catholics, published by Baker Bookhouse, right? Which is kind of odd at first blush. It gets even weirder when you realize the general editor is Scott Hahn, who is a convert from Presbyterianism to Catholicism, and the lead commentary is on the Book of Romans. That's our book. But anyway, I think that's a good thing. So you have a classically evangelical publishing house publishing the Catholic Commentary on Scripture. That's a good thing. You have intervarsities ancient commentary series there on Holy Scripture, the New Reformation and medieval commentary series, all evidence of a warming of relations.

You also have, perhaps more importantly than all the others so far, growing levels of parish or congregational cooperation. You think of the March for Jesus, for example, or coordination on life issues, things that simply wouldn't have happened prior to the Second Vatican Council. And also, finally, the importance of personal friendships. You think, for example, the Evangelicals and Catholics together. The first document toward a common Christian mission in the new millennium began as a dinner conversation between RJ. Newhouse and Charles Coulson over what to do about Evangelical Catholic rivalry in Latin America and wanting to avoid, if at all possible, the polemics and violence that marked Europe after the Reformation. So there a personal friendship led to something substantive in Canada, the personal friendship between David Maines and Father Bob MacDougall. Right. That, I think more than anything else in Canada is significant for a warming of relationships between evangelicals and Catholics that's born fruit on both sides of the Reformation divide. And I'll say more about that toward the end. So a very, very quick survey of the evidence and this has been a very, very quick survey, I'm told. I only have 20 minutes, so I'm going to try to be quick.

A very, very quick survey of the evidence makes it very clear that there's been a significant thaw. And that's remarkable because both communities reacted to modernity in a profoundly defensive way, and it could easily have gone another way. It could easily have become that we became even more suspicious of each other. In large measure, that has not happened. And the question that I was tasked to ask was what role did the Second Vatican Council play on the Evangelical side of that warming? I think you can make a very easy and strong case that on the Catholic side it was the most important factor. There's a very deliberate call to turn outwards towards other Christian communities to engage in these kinds of conversations. But my question was a little bit different. It was what role did it play for evangelicals? Mark Knoll and Carolyn Neistrom in Is the Reformation over locate the beginning of the Thaw in 1960, and specifically they locate it to the death of John the 23rd in Christianity Today in evangelical periodicals. This was the first time that the death of a pope was covered at length and sympathetically. And this led to a number of positive comments in the letters the letters to the editor.

So they document the year 219 60. And of course this suggests maybe the Second Vatican Council the council that John the 23rd called after all, maybe the Second Vatican Council had something to do with it. So the question I was tasked to answer is this one to what extent was the Second Vatican Council responsible for the change? And you note the asterisk there the asterisk meaning simply I'm speaking simply from the evangelical side. I need to begin that answer with a little bit of an excursion that I've hinted at already, and that is, can one say anything substantive about evangelicals anymore? And it's a good question. The first challenge we run into is the challenge of definition. I think the best definition of evangelicalism is that given by David Bevington in his book Evangelicalism in Modern Britain, where it's a renewal movement within Protestantism oriented around conversionism. The Christian life begins at a specific point in time. Biblicism the sole authority in determining matters of faith and morals is the Bible activism. We're engaging in social work and evangelism to spread the gospel. And the fourth one just left my head. Thank you. Crucintrism a focus in salvation on the atonement or the cross of Jesus.

Thanks, James. And that's great. That definition, ably captures everybody from john wesley to billy Graham. Right. Separated by time, by confession, by continent. And yet it kind of wraps us all up. Here's the problem. In the late 1990s, the Canadian pollster Angus Reid did a survey of evangelicalism in Canada using Bevington's four markers as the basis for his question. 25% of Christians who self identified as Roman Catholic agreed with at least three. Okay? In fact, a significant number of those wanted to say they were evangelical Catholics. So we have the problem of definition. It's so broad as to incorporate Roman Catholics. Is it too broad? Is it too porous at the edges? So that makes saying anything about evangelicals challenging. The second challenge is the challenge of diversity or the collapse of the Anglo American center. Here evangelicalism is a little bit a victim of its own success. The explosive growth of peculiarly, but not exclusively pentecostal forms of Christianity in the global south has led to a large number of Bible teachers and theologians from the Southern hemisphere who are saying things different from kind of the traditional John Stott. J. I. Packer Anglo American Evangelical Center and in some way we recognize these new teachers as our brothers and sisters.

We want to recognize them as within the evangelical fold, and yet they're clearly not saying the same things as has been taken for granted by evangelicals prior to at least fairly recently. So you've got a diversity of teaching wanting to claim or being labeled as evangelical. A really interesting example here comes from the country of Nigeria. If some of you are familiar with the Anglican Church of Nigeria, you know that a kind of a traditional evangelical piety is the Church of Nigeria, and it's a huge church there. More Christians will pray in Anglican churches in Nigeria on Sunday than in Canada, the US. The UK and Australia put together. So it's a big church. At the same time, Nigeria is also a hotbed for growth, for Pentecostal and indigenous expressions of African Christianity groups whom one of my Nigerian friends, a bishop in the church, calls the Pentarascals. They are deeply suspicious of each other, and yet somehow they fall within this big evangelical umbrella. The diversity kind of has become unwieldy, particularly in the global south. Third, we have the challenge of expertise. The challenge of expertise. Christian Smith wrote extensively about this in his little book, the Bible Made Impossible.

How many of you have seen that book? Only one. Two. Goodness me. Get that book. Read that book. It's excellent. The Bible made impossible. The subtitle is why biblicism is not an evangelical way to read scripture. I think it's a brazos publication. Christian Smith teaches sociology at Notre Dame, by the way, and at least was at the time of the writing of this book, an evangelical Christian. His argument, and I'm convinced by it anyway, is that in its bones, evangelicalism is an antiauthoritarian movement. And one of the unhappy consequences of that is that there is no way formally within evangelicalism to arbitrate between competing interpretations of scripture. So when even someone with the informal but real authority of A-J-I. Packer can be accused of being a heretic for siding with the Catholics right, this is the problem you went into. There's no way of arbitrating between competing claims, particularly when those claims are being made by respected authorities. As a result, evangelicalism is a broad term. It's best thought of as naming groupings of family resemblances, and they change and they shift from time to time. There is not, nor will there ever be the equivalent of a Magisterium or the Catechism of the Catholic Church for evangelicals.

One of the interesting things in Nolan Neistrom's book is the Reformation over is their reportage about how many evangelical churches and groups are actually turning to the Catechism of the Catholic Church as at least a fixed point over against which they can figure out how and where they disagree, because there simply is no equivalent within evangelicalism. We have a kind of an informal network of respected teachers, respected colleges and seminaries like this one, but no formal body to say this is what evangelicalism believes and whenever some group tries, like the Gospel Coalition, they are roundly ridiculed by people who disagree with them. So all that to say, there is nothing that I'm going to say in what follows that's indisputable. I think I can make my case pretty strongly, but at the end of the day some of you might be able, might want to stand up and say, well, that's just your opinion and there's no way of fixing that disagreement. If my evidence is not good enough, I don't know what else I can do to persuade you, but I'm going to try. So to what extent was the Second Vatican Council responsible for the warming of relationships on the evangelical side of the equation?

Are you ready for the answer? Here it is. It wasn't. Evangelicalism was blissfully unaware that the Second Vatican Council even took place in the Evangelical Academy. Interaction was limited. In my research I discovered two books david Wells Revolution in Rome, which is a more journalistic account, and GC. Burke hours more theological. The Second Vatican Council and the new Catholicism. Wells was far more cautious in many ways he was far more predictive and I think in some ways prophetic in terms of the impact of the council, particularly in describing what would happen to the Catholic Church through the council was implemented. But sometimes in his wearing his predictive hat, he just gets things spectacularly wrong. He was quite right to say that there were at least three groups actively working at the Second Vatican Council. There were the hardcore conservatives represented by the Curia, and there were at least two groups of progressives. Some progressives who seemed to be taking their cues from liberal Protestantism, and some progressives who wanted to return to the Church fathers and to the Bible. And he predicted that by 1980 there would be a Vatican Three at which the liberal progressives would win and would clean up.

And he simply did not foresee the papacy of Pope St. John Paul II or of Benedict XVI. Right. And those two Popes, I think, cemented the biblical patristic, progressive vision as the authoritative interpreters of conciliate documents. Whether or not that can be undone in the Franciscan era is anybody's guess. I don't know. Maybe John Paul II and Benedict only resisted for a time. The Spirit of Vatican II. But certainly if there is a Vatican Three now, and I don't think there will be, but if there is a Vatican Three now, there are a whole lot more African bishops who will definitely intend to have something to say and it will not be a Eurocentric or liberal council by any stretch of the imagination. So the second book, a far more theological and in depth account, is Burke Hours Second Vatican Council and the New Catholicism. He is, I think, more perceptive with respect to the importance of the progressive vision that wants to return to the Bible, return to the Fathers, the nouvel teolaghi of Jean DaniLou and other theologians. And it's still a really interesting book as far as he is concerned. The problem that the Second Vatican Council exposes, and it's a problem which Catholics and Protestants together have to address is the problem of historical consciousness in theology.

Namely, the problems that arise once you realize that while truth with a capital T is unchanging, human perceptions thereof evolve. So how can doctrine said to be an expression of unchanging truth and evolving at the same time? Because if you look over history, that is what you see. And we know that from the Protestant side. Relativism and an entrenched biblicism neither work. So what's the right answer? And Berkhauer says this is a question that Catholics and Protestants happen to be working together on. And I think that challenge in terms of theological method is still an open one. I don't think it's really been sufficiently addressed together. Maybe it will be in the future, I don't know. But the point here is simply evangelical academic interaction was limited wells written for a more popular audience. I think it had larger sales at the time. But really only two books addressed the council outside the academy. The Second Vatican Council simply did not penetrate the popular consciousness of evangelicals in the early 1960s. When it came to matters catholic Christianity today was far more preoccupied with the Kennedy presidency than the Second Vatican Council. That's not a dig, that's just true.

So it wasn't. So that means we have to come up with alternative explanations. Here's the first one the mainstreaming, and I would add now and then marginalization of evangelicalism and Catholicism in the USA. It is post Vatican II that Catholicism ceases to be kind of an ethnic enclave religion in the states. It is also from the evangelicalism begins to supplant liberal Protestantism as the voice of Protestantism in the states. And they come into their mainstream in the late, late eighty s and through the what we've seen in the last 20 years is a marginalization of that on both sides. So they came into the mainstream together. They're now being pushed to the margins together. And that means we have discovered we've got more to talk about than we've had before. Just this past Sunday in my church, we were very fortunate to have the general superintendent of the Conference of Standard Wesleyan Churches of Egypt with us. And he talked about how the recent persecution under the Muslim Brotherhood forced the various Christian bodies into greater degrees of cooperation and interaction than had previously existed in recent history in Egypt. I am not at all for a moment beginning to say we are facing the same thing in North America because we're not.

Our churches are not being burned down by the government and then being rebuilt by an apologetic successive government. It's simply not the world we live in. But we are being divested of our privilege might not be a bad thing, but it certainly is a painful thing, and it's opening up avenues for conversation that previously wouldn't have taken place. So it's in the mainstreaming and I've said and marginalization of evangelicalism and Catholicism in the States. Second changes in Global Christianity. Changes in global Christianity in two ways. First of all, you have rivalry in the Southern Hemisphere, particularly in Latin American countries. Catholics and evangelicals are bumping up against each other. Catholic countries in Latin America are being evangelized. A very provocative article was written a number of years ago. I think it was in Time or Newsweek with I can't remember the title, but the subtitle was, when the Catholic Church Turned to the Poor, the poor became Pentecostal. So there's a situation of rivalry there, and it's that rivalry that led to the publication of ECT One, right? And a desire on the part of coulson and Newhouse not to have polemical and violent interactions such as were common in Europe during the Reformation era.

And second, we have, as I've already mentioned, what Timothy George called the ecumenism of the trenches in the north. There's more to it than simply the enemy of my enemy is my friend. But there is something to that description, too. We are being pushed together by circumstances largely outside of our control. And like I say, that's not entirely a bad thing. I think it's forced us to think seriously about what is the Gospel. Yeah, but it's a difficult thing, and it's a difficult new moment. Third, and this really can't be understated as the impact of the global charismatic movement. In my own work in Protestant Catholic dialogue, I am regularly reminded that Protestants and Catholics share the same faith but speak very different languages, and we mean very different things when we use the same words sometimes. An interesting outcome of the global charismatic movement is that it has given charismatically renewed mainline Protestants, evangelical Protestants, and Roman Catholics a common language. That was my one joke. Has some of you the light come on. The rest of you are still wondering what I'm on about. Speaking in tongues gave Christians a common language. There we go.

Okay, fourth, the Popeye of Pope St. John Paul II. Right? You read his inaugural sermon given in October of 1978. Do not be afraid. Open wide the doors to Christ. I mean, he sounds like a Baptist firebrand, right? So a friend of Timothy Georges said to a Catholic friend of Timothy Georges, you guys have a pope who knows how to pope. Now, the irony of that is John Paul II was probably the most Marian pope since Pius XII. Think of his coat of arms, has a great big M on it for Mary. And yet his language of personal piety and love for Jesus is immediately recognized by evangelicals, such that when he began in the later part of his papacy to speak on social issues, we increasingly recognize someone who not only spoke alongside us, but spoke for us. I think, anyway, that's a papacy that is in ecumenical dialogue, I think, still bearing fruit. And finally, there is no underestimating the power of personal friendships. David Maines and Bob McDougall in Canada, colson and Newhouse in the States, david Duplesi and any number of Catholics in the Curia in Rome. It's these kinds of actual encounters where we recognize beneath real differences, which require hard conversations, where we recognize a common love for the Lord.

Those are far more important, I think, from the evangelical side than the Second Vatican Council. So I'm to the end of my talk, I did say that I would bring Wesley in to the end of it. And I want to begin with a quote from my theology teacher here at Ots that's a long time ago, back in the day, john Vissers, maybe you know John. Okay, great guy. I'm quoting John. My problem with Wesley is that he basically has a Catholic doctrine of salvation. And I can remember sitting in John's systematic theology class and being really annoyed by that. But over the last few years, as I hear talk of prevenient grace leading us to conversion and then cooperating with grace afterwards, and then I go and listen to Robert Barron or I read an essay by Benedict the 16th, and I think Vissers was on to something. Amongst the groups of evangelical Christians, I think it's easier because of our emphasis on salvation as a journey in which we are always growing until Glorification, it's easier for us to enter into conversations with Catholics. So I was particularly encouraged by your comment on sacraments, by the way.

I want to talk with you further about that after. So I think Viscerals was on to something. And so I think in terms of this warming of relationships, we're already further along than maybe some of our more baptistic or Reformed brothers and sisters. And that's a good thing. I think that the Catholic aspiration to sainthood shares a lot with the Wesleyan aspiration to sanctification. Right? Listen to this. This is from a Catholic writer named Leon Blois. The only real sadness, the only real failure, the only great tragedy in life is not to become a saint. Okay? Now, we can take out one word, and it will sound very Wesleyan. The only real sadness, the only real failure, the only great tragedy in life is not to have been sanctified. And we can interchange those words because they mean the same thing, right? There is a shared vision of piety there that emphasizes growth, the impartation of grace, the optimism of grace, and the attainment of sainthood. That, I think, is a bridge to conversation. So I'll leave you with Wesley's quote from his letter to a Roman Catholic. Right? Wesley could write in a way that Luther couldn't.

If your heart is as my heart, give me your hand. That's where we begin in these kinds of conversations. Vatican II was important in turning the Catholic Church outwards. We don't know a whole lot about the second Vatican Council, and that's okay. But it's our opportunity to receive that turning outwards in good faith and to extend a hand. Okay. Okay. Thank.


***** This is the end of the e-text. This e-text was
brought to you by Tyndale University, 
J. William Horsey Library - Tyndale Digital Collections *****