Joe Carter of the deservedly popular Evangelical Outpost blog observes:
Over the past thirty-six years I?ve been, at one time or another, a pre-post-a-millennialist, dispensational-covenantal, semi- charismatic, Reformed-Arminian, Wesleyan-Calvinist attending a Southern/Independent/Fundamentalist Baptist, Free-Methodist/Free- Evangelical, Presbyterian (USA/PCA), Pentecostal/Assembly of God, Bible/non-denominational church.
He concludes:
Where does it end? When will we stop being ?wife beaters? of Christ?s bride? And when will we finally heed the exhortation of Titus to, "Avoid foolish controversies and genealogies and arguments and quarrels about the law, because these are unprofitable and useless."
Speaking as a recovering evangelical, I would invite Joe to consider crossing the Tiber. The water's fine!
On a somewhat more serious note, I want to use this opportunity to plug one of the books that was most influential on my evolution from evangelicalism to Catholicism: Thomas Howard's Evangelical Is Not Enough. Here's the Amazon review:
In this deeply moving narrative, Thomas Howard describes his pilgrimage from Evangelicalism (which he loves and reveres as the religion of his youth) to liturgical Christianity. He soon afterward became a Roman Catholic. He describes Evangelicalism with great sympathy and then examines more formal, liturgical worship with the freshness of someone discovering for the first time what his soul had always hungered for. This is a book of apologetics without polemics. Non-Catholics will gain an appreciation of the formal and liturgical side of Catholicism. Catholics will see with fresh eyes the beauty of their tradition. Worship, prayer, the Blessed Virgin, the Mass, and the liturgical year are taken one after the other, and what may have seemed routine and repetitive suddenly comes to life under the enchanting wand of Howard's beautiful prose. Howard unfolds for us just what occurs in the vision and imagination of a Christian who, nurtured in the earnestness of Protestant Evangelicalism, finds himself yearning for "whatever- it-is" that has been there in the Church for 2000 years. It traces Howard's soul-searching and shows why he believes the practices of the liturgical Church are an invaluable aid for any Christian's spiritual life. Reminiscent of the style and scope of Newman, Lewis and Knox, this book is destined to be a classic.
