Wednesday, April 25, 2012

Capitalizing evangelicalism?


From the February 2012 issue of First Things:
Alert readers may have noticed the unusual capitalization of "Evangelical" and "Evangelicalism" in a couple of the articles. The stylebooks frown on this, because Evangelicalism is a movement and not an official body, but we do it to give Evangelicalism a kind of typographic equality with Catholicism and Orthodoxy.
But of course, that's precisely the issue in contention. The Roman Catholic Church and the Orthodox Churches are identifiable bodies with definite (if not always consistently held) doctrines and boundaries. Evangelicalism is nothing of the sort: as an ontological fact, it is not an "equal" of Catholicism and Orthodoxy in the sense that it is an entirely different kind of thing.

Which, in connection with the recent death of Charles Colson, reminds me of a suspicion I've long held regarding "Evangelicals and Catholics Together." This association discusses sundry theological and religious topics and occasionally publishes a paper outlining what they perceive to be agreements and/or disagreements between the Catholic and the consensus evangelical views on one of those topics. At its beginning, Colson was a de facto leader of the evangelical wing, and worked closely with Richard John Neuhaus, the Roman Catholic founder of First Things (which publishes the association's papers when they are released). 

My suspicion, whether justified or paranoid, is that Roman Catholics would rather dialogue with evangelicals than with representatives of an actual Church body: evangelicalism, being amorphous and insubstantial because it is fundamentally anti-ecclesiastical, will always find itself unable to offer a substantive argument against a well-defined set of doctrines supported by an actual ecclesiastical body. That is, Rome would prefer to enter an argument it's guaranteed to win.

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