Some time back I wrote a little piece called \u201cDiscovering Wales<\/a>\u201d in which I noted that, because Evangelicals are serious about discipleship and oriented toward truth, they tend to keep stumbling upon Catholic doctrines, since those doctrines are, in fact, a map of reality.\u00a0 Sez I:<\/p>\n I have thought more than once that it might be handy to compile a Catholic\/Evangelical phrasebook that would allow both parties to speak to each other.\u00a0 Evangelicals have a profoundly pragmatic approach to the faith which tends to overwhelm their own professed doctrines by sheer confrontation with reality.\u00a0 So try as they might, they tend to adopt Catholic ideas under other names, because Catholic theology describes reality.<\/p>\n For instance, Evangelical jargon has long employed notions like \u201conce saved, always saved\u201d and espoused a vague notion that if you have once asked Jesus into your heart as your personal Lord and Savior, then you \u201ccan\u2019t lose your salvation.\u201d A Catholic can argue the flaws of this theology, of course (and there are plenty of flaws to point out).\u00a0 But the interesting thing to note is that Evangelicals are, themselves, bumping up against hard reality and recognizing the futility of calling Jesus \u201cLord\u201d but not obeying Him.\u00a0 And so, as the impulse toward what Catholics call \u201cformation\u201d and Evangelicals call \u201cdiscipleship\u201d grows (under the inspiration of the Spirit) Evangelicals discover by experience a truth taught by the Catholic Church since the beginning: \u201cjustification\u201d means we are to be changed into the image and likeness of Christ and not merely \u201cdeclared righteous\u201d while remaining the sinners we were.\u00a0 This does not mean Evangelicals necessarily realize they are discovering a Catholic truth, any more than my friend\u2019s charismatic companion realized she was stumbling on the Cult of the Saints.\u00a0 But it is true, nonetheless.\u00a0 An Evangelical who sports a bumper sticker reading \u201cPlease be patient, God is not finished with me yet\u201d has adopted, whether he realizes it or not, a soteriology that is much closer to the teaching of the Catholic Church than to any of the \u201cfaith alone\u201d or \u201conce saved, always saved\u201d jargon of Protestantism.<\/p>\n In similar ways, Evangelicals can often adopt an essentially Catholic view of sin while not realizing it.\u00a0 For example, while residual anti-Roman rhetoric may linger on in the Evangelical mouth, so that Evangelicals can still be found denouncing the Romish doctrine of mortal and venial sin, what you will often find is that once the need for polemics goes away, Evangelicals on their own turf essentially embrace the idea of degrees of sin.\u00a0 How?\u00a0 Usually by adopting a different terminology whereby venial sin is referred to as \u201cstumbling\u201d and grave or mortal sin is called \u201cbacksliding\u201d.<\/p>\n I hasten to emphasize that it is a mistake for Catholics to regard this as dishonest or a conscious subterfuge.\u00a0 It is, rather, a product of a culture that really did believe Catholics cooked up the distinction between mortal sins and venial sins in order to \u201cget away\u201d with something (an understandable misperception, given some of the more tiresome moral ingenuities we sometimes encounter from skilled Catholic sophists). But once polemics is gone and Evangelicals set about the hard work of living out the pastoral realities of everyday life, they are forced by the School of Hard Knocks to relearn what Catholic theology describes.\u00a0 And so, when Billy goes off to school and loses his temper at a fellow student, Evangelicals assure Billy that he \u201cstumbled\u201d but that, though a righteous man falleth seven times, he riseth up (Proverbs 24:16). On the other hand, if Billy goes to off to college, abandons his faith, starts sleeping around, dealing drugs, and winds up in jail for murder, he hasn\u2019t \u201cstumbled\u201d: he\u2019s \u201cbackslidden\u201d. There is a clear understanding that the gravity of these two manifestations of sin is not the same and that the grace necessary to cure them, while all from Christ, is not the same sort of grace.\u00a0 Once again, the Evangelical drive toward reality overwhelms the vestigial anti-Roman rhetoric and the Evangelical winds up embracing essentially Catholic ideas, albeit using different jargon.<\/p>\n A final example of this curious phenomenon can be found in the Catholic concept of \u201ctemporal punishment for forgiven sin\u201d which plays such an important role the Catholic understanding of salvation.\u00a0 Here again, Evangelicals tend to hear something the Church is not saying: namely, that after Jesus has borne our sin on the cross and paid 50% of the Atonement Fee, it is necessary for Catholics to pay the other 50% and help make up for Jesus\u2019 inadequate attempt at redemption.<\/p>\n Not surprisingly, Evangelicals reject this theology (as, of course, do Catholics).\u00a0 But then they head out into the real world in the attempt to live biblically.\u00a0 And what they find is that, like it or not, suffering comes to forgiven disciples of Jesus, often as the result of sins of the past.\u00a0 Christian converts on death row get executed for crimes they committed before they became believers.\u00a0 Christian drug addicts have to struggle with addiction.\u00a0 Converts who once beat their wife or child are faced with divorce or jail despite the fact that they have repented and their sins are forgiven by God.\u00a0 Forgiveness does not cancel back taxes.\u00a0 And so, as a pastoral reality, the Evangelical has only two choices, regard this suffering as meaningless junk that just happens for no reason or regard it, in the words of Hebrews 12:5 as the \u201cdiscipline of the Lord\u201d which now turns the pain of our sins into a vehicle of grace to transform us into the image of Christ. If he opts for the latter, the Evangelical has once again embraced the basics of Catholic teaching about \u201ctemporal punishment for sin\u201d. He just doesn\u2019t realize it.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n I think about that phenomenon as I notice that, once again, Evangelicals are stumbling over the reality mapped by Catholic teaching.\u00a0 Here, for instance, is Evangelical Greg Laurie <\/a>arguing that the dead are aware of us and know what\u2019s happening on earth (pretty much all you need in order to likewise argue that the dead pray for those on earth\u2013and then you are off and running with that whole \u201ccommunion of saints\u201d thing that Catholics are on about).<\/p>\n