I’ve been involved in ecumenical works for almost thirty years, and am all for divided Christians growing closer to each other, but my heart leaps a bit when I come across a Protestant writer saying “We’re right and they’re wrong.” It may feel like a bucket of ice water thrown on a group hug, but it wakes everyone up.

It’s bracing to find people still fighting the old Protestant-Catholic battles. A leading young Evangelical writer, Tim Challies, just published his rejection of crucifixes, which Religion News Service liked so much that they featured it in their daily email. That’s not a fight you see anyone starting anymore.

I’ve been involved in ecumenical works for almost thirty years, and am all for divided Christians growing closer to each other, but my heart leaps a bit when I come across a Protestant writer saying “We’re right and they’re wrong.” It may feel like a bucket of ice water thrown on a group hug, but it wakes everyone up. As I say, bracing.

Because we still disagree and the disagreements matter a lot. At a lecture a few years ago, a theologically-educated Presbyterian lecturing to a mixed group of Catholics and Presbyterians said that church government was just a matter of which arrangement you preferred, the personal or the collegial. Each had its good points and its bad points, which one needed to weigh, but there was no right or wrong answer. It was up to each of us to decide which model we liked. Catholics liked the personal model and had a pope and Presbyterians liked the collegial model and had presbyteries. I thought, “But God prefers the personal model.” The Catholic priest who was also speaking that day gamely tried to correct him, but couldn’t.

I dealt with this on Monday in The Stream — an ecumenical enterprise run by a Southern Baptist minister and a Catholic convert — in an article titled Don’t Be Nice to Other Christians, which developed a point I’d made here in High Fivin’ the Pope. We disagree on very important matters and the way to real friendship runs through the differences, not, as is so common today, by acting as if we don’t really disagree or the disagreements don’t really matter.

A great benefit of the serious Evangelicals who have kept fighting these battles is that they remind us that we really disagree. They work in a somewhat insular culture that gives them the freedom to say the thing other people won’t say. You read them and sometimes feel, “Gosh, he sounds so nineteenth-century.” It’s as if he walked into your house in a swallow-tail coat with those enormous sideburns some men used to sport. But there’s something to be said for the nineteenth century.

We tend to think that we don’t have to fight the old battles, that everyone’s gotten beyond them. Back then, Catholics and Protestants were set against each other socially and politically as well as theologically, therefore they fought about every little thing. We aren’t, so we don’t.

I think that’s quite wrong. The specific reasons the apologists and polemicists of the sixteenth through the early twentieth centuries fought about remain for the most part dividing issues. People say, for example, that Dei Verbum on the one side and the growing Protestant appreciation for tradition on the other have very much narrowed the difference in our understanding of Scripture.

That’s true, but only sort of. There is a very, very big gap between Dei Verbum’s declaration that “both sacred tradition and Sacred Scripture are to be accepted and venerated with the same sense of loyalty and reverence” and the Protestant understanding. To take the doctrinal statement of the Evangelical Anglican seminary for which I once worked, the Anglican 39 Articles: “Holy Scripture containeth all things necessary to salvation: so that whatsoever is not read therein, nor may be proved thereby, is not to be required of any man, that it should be believed as an article of the Faith, or be thought requisite or necessary to salvation.”

I can see the look on my former colleagues’ faces if I were to say, “Look at this! We agree!” Thoughtful, kind, serious Christians all, they’d say, “Absolutely not” and remove any alcoholic beverages and sharp objects from my reach.

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