The Christian world is enamored with Pope Francis. Leaders and members of evangelical and Pentecostal churches are also mesmerized by Pope Francis’ videos as he has reached out to evangelicals and others over the past few months with simple direct words, and a mischievous smile. Pope Francis is trying to bridge the gulf between American Evangelicals and is getting a strong positive reaction.
He has met with evangelical leaders at the Vatican at various times, even high-fiving James Robison – a first for Francis’ life – when he insisted that a living relationship with Jesus stands at the heart of the Christian reality. Even in his encyclical Evangelii Gaudium (The Joy of the Gospel), he said, “I invite all Christians everywhere, at this very moment, to a renewed personal encounter with Jesus Christ.” Of course that means something different to Catholics an evangelicals, and perhaps all Christian groups and denominations.
Francis also frequently asks his audiences to pray for him, something he started back in Argentina and has carried it through with him into his pontificate.
Pope Francis has a genius for provocative symbolic gestures, like washing the feet of women and non-Christians, paying his own hotel bill in Rome, choosing to reside, in the modest Casa Santa Marta, driving in tiny cars.
His outreach goes beyond the mere symbolic, and is grounded in his own theological commitments. Catholics have been uncomfortable with the Evangelical emphasis on accepting Jesus as “my personal Lord and saviour,” because they fear it will lessen the mediatorial work of the Church in Catholic theology. Though pope Francis is certainly aware of this issue, he also believes that too much stress on the theology of the church can make Christian life abstract and institutional, something that Evangelicals deplore.
He also wrote, “It is impossible to persevere in a fervent evangelization unless we are convinced from personal experience that it is not the same thing to have known Jesus as not to have known him.”
In order to appeal to Evangelicals then, Pope Francis has taken on the risk that he will be misunderstood by Catholics. And Evangelicals lap it up. And Francis has an evangelical urgency in his bones. He is reaching out to evangelicals in a fervent attempt to unite them with Rome and remove any opposition to Rome’s teachings and practices. He knows that if he leads with Rome’s doctrines, it will merely become an intellectual debate. But if he leads with moral teaching, he will appear as fussy and puritanical. Therefore in his appeal to evangelicals and other Christian groups, he emphasizes the “Lordship of Jesus Christ,” language with which evangelicals viscerally resonate.
He emphasizes joy in the gospel (whatever iteration of it you might choose) and pokes fun at Christians who don’t have it. Christians who have turned “into querulous and disillusioned pessimists, ‘sourpusses,’” will never be successful evangelists. So pope Francis has dispensed with a preoccupation with the liturgy, doctrinal fussyness, and the emphasis on art, which makes the church like a “museum piece.”
Pope Francis emphasis on the missionary impulse and the use of contemporary cultural forms has much that resonates with Evangelicals.
There are still theological differences, including the doctrine of jusification, in spite of the late Tony Palmer’s declaration to Pentecostal leaders that the Reformation is over because the church has reformed, and that Catholics and Evangelicals believe the same on justification.
Pope Francis evangelical drumbeat is making a huge difference in the attitude of Evangelicals toward Rome, naïve as they may be. His emphasis on the Lordship of Jesus Christ and other innovations, has caused them to trust him, even if they know deep down that Rome places a different meaning on doctrinal language than they do. Yet, surprisingly they are willing to unite with the Pope of Rome and pretend there is some sort of unity between them, in order to be accepted by the Catholic Church.
“It is not without reason that the claim has been put forth in Protestant countries that Catholicism differs less widely from Protestantism than in former times. There has been a change; but the change is not in the papacy. Catholicism indeed resembles much of the Protestantism that now exists, because Protestantism has so greatly degenerated since the days of the Reformers.” The Great Controversy, page 571