20 January 2024
Protestants seldom realize just how much they agree with Catholics.
I've had plenty of unpleasant encounters with evangelicals who are openly hostile to Catholicism. They are quite unforgiving that about my friendliness toward Catholics, just as I am not that difficult with other religious traditions. I get along okay with Orthodox, Mormons, and JWs just as much as I do with pagans, atheists, and even Satanists.
But it's not ecumenism or spiritual accommodation. There are boundaries, and oddly enough, those groups are better about recognizing them than the Evies. One of the things that marks Evies is their hesitance to discuss common interests with anyone else. So, on a forum somewhere discussing how to handle certain real troubles in life, they have a tendency to disrupt cooperation over the insistence that there is only one true path of religion. They simply cannot learn from others.
Historically, there was a time when Catholics refused to discuss religion except on their own terms. They were the One True Church, and no one was allowed to even suggest otherwise. But then the Reformation broke that. Except, the Reformation moved forward with the notion that there could only be one religion in any given state, that government must be one religion or another. With the Enlightenment, all of that was reasoned away so that religion and government were supposed to be separate things.
Modern American Evies want to return to the Reformation standard of having religion enforced by government. They may even deny that, and yet, act as if that is their basic assumptions. They want a form of theocracy. They may range all over the map how they define the boundaries of it, but the basic principle of government ordering a moral code to their liking is still there.
They don't draw the boundaries where God did in the Old Testament, and yet insist they do. How did King David get along so well with his grandmother's folks back in Moab? How did they come to terms with any of the pagan nations around them? The issue was whether their neighbors antagonized them. The underlying principle is that Israel understood implicitly that, so long as the pagans weren't hostile and stayed out of the Promised Land Jehovah granted them, there was no expectation that those other nations had to worship Jehovah.
Even the nations Israel allowed to stay in the land (there were several) were permitted to remain Gentile, as long as they obeyed the Covenant of Noah. Do you understand that the fellow who owned the plot of land David bought for the future Temple was a Jebusite? The Jebusites weren't slaughtered when David took their fortress for his palace. They were subjugated under the Law of Noah as a vassal nation. And the Gibeonites who lied their way into a treaty during the Conquest? They were also compelled to adopt the Law of Noah. It was that Law, which God Himself took seriously, that constrained their terms of recompense regarding Saul's transgression of the treaty, when David allowed them to hang seven members of Saul's family later.
Yes, the context can be complicated, but the terms of peaceful coexistence were always there in the Law of Moses. Those terms manifest themselves in the New Testament teaching about getting along with a non-Christian world. How did Jesus handle the Woman at the Well? He didn't push His answers until she chose to discuss certain questions. If she had minded her own business and walked away, the several days of miracles and teaching in Samaritan cities there would have required some other means of getting started.
Did the Good Samaritan try to push his brand of religion on the man he found nearly dead on the road?
The point is not what God made of each encounter, but how the people involved handled themselves regardless of how God used the moment. If the Lord wants to give you some territory (whether literal, virtual or figurative), then by all means, conquer in His name. But don't assume that's your mandate in every situation. It's not hard to recognize the common ground between yourself and anyone else in this world. Being prickly about how someone else uses the name of Jesus Christ is not a good witness.
People are not moved to faith by reason. Reason remains within its own boundaries. It cannot give birth to faith. If you believe it does, then you agree with Catholics, who teach that the human mind is not fallen with the rest of the flesh. That's why they evangelize as they do; for them, conversion is fundamentally a rational choice. I make no secret of denying that. Faith is a gift directly from God, a miracle and nothing less. People are moved to faith by seeing faith in action, and usually by a direct encounter with someone else's faith intruding into their lives.
We can persuade people to join our religion, but absolutely nothing any human does can generate faith where it does not exist. My first commission from God is not the spread my religion, but to bring them into the family of faith. Covenant obedience is a separate issue in practice. There are millions of family members out there who don't obey the Covenant, and aren't reaping the blessings. That's a human choice.
Spiritual birth is not a human choice. Recognize the difference. When it's time to discuss practical matters of how we do things (religion), there's nothing to gain by hostility. Recognize the human boundaries and either participate or don't. Your faith will not shine when you disrupt things for a dick-waving contest about religion.
There's nothing wrong with comparing notes just to clarify things. There's nothing wrong with announcing you won't cooperate, but then to hang around and harass folks is working for the Devil, not for Christ. You must first gain the credibility to speak about your faith by demonstrating its power. No one thinks of the Crusades as missionary activity. The Crusades were clearly not how God works in this world.
This document is public domain; spread the message.