American Evangelicals | Reunion with Rome

Billy Graham is probably the greatest Protestant evangelist of our time. Yet even he has become a supporter of the ecumenical movement seeking reunification with Rome. In 1981, the Religious News Service reported that "Pope John Paul II was closeted for almost 2 hours with the Reverend Billy Graham, the world's best known Protestant evangelist."ⁱ

"Dr. Graham and other religious leaders also heap praise on the pontiff for helping to...

The Star quotes Billy Graham as saying that the Pope is almost an evangelist.ⁱⁱ Graham praised the Pope for pushing forward the religious revival worldwide. On receiving an honorary degree from the Roman Catholic Belmont College, Billy Graham told his audience, “The gospel that founded this college is the same gospel which I preach today.”ⁱⁱⁱ

Evangelicals in the United States have subsequently accepted reunification with Rome. Thirty-nine leading evangelical Protestants and Roman Catholics affirmed each other as Christians, and vowed to reduce conflict between the groups. Such prestigious leaders as former Archbishop of New York Cardinal John O’Connor and Pat Robertson of the Southern Baptist Home Mission Board, as well as other distinguished archbishops, bishops, and scholars signed Evangelicals & Catholics Together: The Christian Mission in the Third Millennium.

After nearly four centuries of division and hostility, Protestants and Catholics have taken an important step toward unity. Forty key Evangelical and Catholic leaders signed a statement at the Institute on Religion and Public Life in New York City, on March 29, 1994, urging their followers to accept each other as Christians, put aside differences and contend for common civil causes.^iv

The drafters of the document included Catholic Richard John Neuhaus, head of the Institute on Religion and Public Life; Charles Colson, founder of Prison Fellowship; Catholic George Weigel, director of the Ethics and Policy Centre; and Kent Hill, president of Eastern Nazarene College.

The document accepts that Protestants and Catholics alike who accept Christ as Lord and Saviour are fellow Christians and members of one Church of Christ. It also recognizes that their "communal and ecclesial separations are deep and longstanding, and that they may never be resolved short of the Kingdom come."

Nevertheless, they promise to work together for Christ. The document calls for a strengthening of the relationship of trust:

Christians individually and the church corporately also have a responsibility for the right ordering of civil society…In the exercise of these public responsibilities there has been in recent years a growing convergence and cooperation between Evangelicals and Catholics. We thank God for the discovery of one another in contending for a common cause…We promise one another that we will work to deepen, build upon, and expand this pattern of convergence and cooperation. Together we contend for the truth that politics, law, and culture must be secured by moral truth.^v

Robert Schuller, renowned televangelist and founder of the Crystal Cathedral in Garden Grove, California, is reported to have said, “It is time for us Protestants to go to the Holy Father in Rome and ask him how we can come home.”^vi

Schuller has watered down the truths of the Bible and incorporated New Age teachings into his theology. This is attractive to many nominal Christians and even New Age worshipers.

Spiritual formation brings a common understanding between Christianity, the New Age movement, and other world religions. However, they are worlds apart and cannot be combined without serious compromise and consequences.

The Protestants of the United States will be foremost in stretching their hands across the gulf to grasp the hand of spiritualism; they will reach over the abyss to clasp hands with the Roman power; and under the influence of this threefold union, this country will follow in the steps of Rome in trampling on the rights of conscience. –Ellen White “The Great Controversy,” page 588.

i. Religious News Service (1981).

ii. The Star (June 26, 1979).

iii. Billy Graham as cited in: Jack T. Chick. Smokescreens (Chick Publications, 1983): P. 56 and Michael Bunker and Tony J. Woodall. Swarms of Locusts: The Jesuit Attack on the Faith (IUniverse, 2002): P. 105.

iv. Christian American: A Christian Review of the News, p. 4 (May/June 1994).

v. Evangelicals & Catholics Together: The Christian Mission in the Third Millennium, www.ewtn.com

vi. Robert Schuller, as quoted in Kevin Morgan, Sabbath Rest (TEACH Services Inc., 2002): 72.