Evangelicals and 'Rome Sweet Rome'
Michael S. Horton
January 1, 1996
"Why are contemporary evangelical intellectuals attracted to Roman Catholicism and what should the church do about it?" This is the question I was asked to address. While it may have appeared to Protestants a generation ago a most unlikely question for their descendants, it is not only in this time and place that the question has been raised. Even during the Reformation itself, when the stakes were not only eternal but temporal, young humanists had to choose their lot with the greatest reflection.
But the question has become especially acute in recent years, as incoming evangelicals pass outgoing Roman Catholics at the threshold. My purpose here is not to present an apologia for contemporary evangelicalism (that is increasingly difficult to do in any case), but to offer some possible explanations for the attractiveness of Rome to thoughtful evangelicals. What is an Evangelical? Why 'Rome Sweet Rome'? A number of reasons might be offered for the attractiveness of Rome to thinking evangelicals in our day. The following are merely a few ruminations.1. Historical Consciousness Reared in fundamentalist and evangelical churches myself, I am deeply sensitive to the frustration over the naive individualism and subjectivism that many in the evangelical community have sensed. Corresponding to Troelsch's "sect-type" of Protestantism, many of these churches are really not Protestant at all, but owe their view of the church more to American democratic (especially populist) sentiments. Many of us really believed that the history of the church began at Pentecost and picked up again with the ministry of Billy Graham. Other things happened in between, but we were not particularly linked to that history. At its worst, our consciousness began ...
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