Francis Beckwith gikk 28. april til skrifte i St. Joseph’s Catholic Church i Waco, Texas, og dagen etterpå ble han offentlig gjenopptatt i Den katolske kirke i søndagens høymesse. Han var døpt og konfirmert som katolikk, men forlot Kirken tidlig i tenårene og var nå (47 år gammel) en kjent protestantisk teolog, professor på baptistuniverstetet Baylor i Texas. Og enda mer; han var president for the Evangelical Theological Society (ETS).
Ikke alle i Norge vet hva «evangelikal» er; det er en konservativ protestantisk kristen, vanligvis med sterke kalvinistiske trekk. Mens lutheranere og anglikanere har hatt nære og grundige dialoger med oss katolikker i mange år, så er det ikke tilfelle med de evangelikale.
Siden doktor Beckwith er så kjent, har det vært veldig mye skriving på amerikanske blogger om ham siden nyheten ble kjent for 2-3 dager siden. Les gjerne det HAN SELV HAR SKREVET, inkludert rundt 100 kommentarer (en del svært negative).
Han skriver her om hvofor han gikk tilbake til Den katolske kirke; han hadde på nytt lest grundig gjennom hva de gamle kirkefedrene (og Bibelen) skriver om rettferdiggjørelsen, og funnet ut at det katolske synet på rettferdiggjørelsen (forholdet mellom tro og gjerninger) er bedre enn det protestantiske.
In January, at the suggestion of a dear friend, I began reading the Early Church Fathers as well as some of the more sophisticated works on justification by Catholic authors. I became convinced that the Early Church is more Catholic than Protestant and that the Catholic view of justification, correctly understood, is biblically and historically defensible. Even though I also believe that the Reformed view is biblically and historically defensible, I think the Catholic view has more explanatory power to account for both all the biblical texts on justification as well as the church’s historical understanding of salvation prior to the Reformation all the way back to the ancient church of the first few centuries. Moreover, much of what I have taken for granted as a Protestant—e.g., the catholic creeds, the doctrines of the Trinity and the Incarnation, the Christian understanding of man, and the canon of Scripture—is the result of a Church that made judgments about these matters and on which non-Catholics, including Evangelicals, have declared and grounded their Christian orthodoxy in a world hostile to it. Given these considerations, I thought it wise for me to err on the side of the Church with historical and theological continuity with the first generations of Christians that followed Christ’s Apostles.
Jeg har funnet litt mer informasjon om ETS:
The Evangelical Theological Society was founded in 1949 «to foster conservative Biblical scholarship by providing a medium for the oral exchange and written expression of thought and research in the general field of the theological disciplines as centered in the Scriptures.» As of 2002, the ETS had more than 3,600 members, and nearly 2,000 of them attend the organization’s national meeting.
The ETS membership consists of Christians from a wide variety of theological traditions including Baptist, Anglican, Methodist, Presbyterian, Adventist and Pentecostal. Among the academic disciplines represented by ETS members are theology, biblical studies, philosophy and history. Since 1958, ETS has published Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society.