Evangelicals and Catholics as Conservative Alliance

In the current Books & Culture, noted evangelical theologian J.I. Packer paints an intriguing portrait of William Shea's recent book, The Lion and the Lamb: Evangelicals and Catholics in America (Oxford 2004).  Shea traces:

the parallel between the Catholic and evangelical volte-faces during the past century and a half. The Catholic story is of defensive anti-modernism capped by Vatican II's new openness to dialogue with the world and with non-Catholic Christianities, a move that left integralists behind. The evangelical story is of anti-liberal fundamentalism trumped by the commitment of the 1942 National Association of Evangelicals to interactive engagement with both secularism and Protestant liberalism, a move that left fundamentalists behind.

In many ways, it seems conservative Catholics and evangelical Christians have more in common with each other than they do with the more liberal elements of their own faith tradition.  Packer explains that:

To all conservative Christians, liberals, however well meaning, appear as parasitic cosmeticians; cosmeticians, because they constantly aim to remove from Christianity that which outsiders, like some inside, find intellectually unsightly and unacceptable; parasitic, because they attach themselves to the historic faith and feed off it even as they whittle it down, diminishing, distorting, and displacing major features of it to fit in with what their skeptical conversation partners tout as factual truth. In mainline Protestantism, where doctrinal discipline is, alas, virtually nonexistent, liberals have a free run, but in Catholicism only a few steps along this road prove to be too far. Witness Hans Küng . . . . Liberal Catholicism may have charms, but has it a future? One doubts it.

Read the rest here.

Rob