A Southern Baptist Among the Roman Catholics | The American Spectator

Not long ago, in a coffee shop, I found myself seated beside a genial couple with a Martin Luther biography on their table. I volunteered that I was an old Baptist seminary professor and that the book had caught my eye. They said they were Catholic, and she mentioned that she’d done work for both Catholic Digest and Our Sunday Visitor. I told them that I’d once been a subscriber to both of those periodicals as well as others, including Sursum Corda and Catholic Answers. We were all working at our computers, but, now and then, they’d indulge my recollections and questions (Q: Is limbo for unbaptized infants still a doctrine? A: No, not since 2007.) I expressed my appreciation for a number of Catholic contributions, including some medieval writings and the beauty of cathedrals just visited — Chartres and Sagrada Familia. It was a pleasant and instructive exchange.
As for the subscriptions, I secured them as a member for several years of an SBC team of eight who met annually with eight from the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, whether at the SBC building in Nashville, Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, a Catholic order’s house in D.C.’s Brookland neighborhood, or Beeson Divinity School in Birmingham. In those days, the Southern Baptist Convention passed a resolution “On Southern Baptists and Roman Catholics,” drafted in response to the just-published “Evangelicals and Catholics Together,” a document with prominent signatories and detractors. The resolution encouraged “the Interfaith Witness Department of the [SBC] Home Mission Board to pursue ongoing [and already underway] Southern Baptist-Roman Catholic conversation while maintaining our Southern Baptist confession without compromise.”
From the get-go, we stipulated that this was a “conversation,” not a “dialogue”; the aim was understanding, not persuasion or coalescence. Representing the largest Protestant and non-Protestant denominations in America, we were both convinced that the other side ha…