Michael Potemra reviews "Is the Reformation Over? An Evangelical Assessment of Contemporary Roman Catholicism" by Mark A. Noll and Carolyn Nystrom in Nat'l Review:
In this well-written volume, Noll and Nystrom give a lucid — and often highly inspiring — account of the amazing distance Catholics and Protestants have traveled in the years since JFK’s statement. By 2004, evangelical politician Gary Bauer was able to say the following: “When John F. Kennedy made his famous speech that the Vatican would not tell him what to do, evangelicals and Southern Baptists breathed a sigh of relief. But today evangelicals and Southern Baptists are hoping that the Vatican will tell Catholic politicians what to do.” Bauer’s statement was hardly even controversial: In a poll that same year, evangelicals gave a higher approval rating to Pope John Paul II (59 percent) than to Jerry Falwell (44) or Pat Robertson (54).
The ice had melted on the Catholic side as well. In 1956, a commentator in the Catholic magazine Priest was still dismissing Martin Luther as “a lewd satyr whose glandular demands were the ultimate cause of his break with the Christian Church.” Less than a decade later, a writer in the same periodical admitted that “we’d feel quite silly today declaiming against Luther in the intemperate words of yesterday”; by 2004, a Catholic reviewer of a new Luther biography was declaring that Luther simply could not “have foreseen that the Church of Rome would some four centuries later, at Vatican Council II, adopt many of the reforms that he championed.”...
"What we see today may be described as an incarnation of Christ in Catholic form and an incarnation of Christ in evangelical form. Since there is only one Christ, these incarnations are pulled toward each other."
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