This is the last installment proper of the present series, and is meant to explicate, in terms of contemporary ecclesial identities and locations, something of the “heart” of Catholicism. We tend to think of evangelicalism as inherently Protestant, and perhaps on that count alone opposed to whatever Catholicism must be. To be sure, in the last 200 or so years, many self-nominated evangelicals and Catholics have borne out this sort of an oppositional stance in their theology and in their relations (or lack thereof) with one another. As recently as the mid-1990s, American evangelical leaders were castigated by their confreres for consorting with Roman Catholics in the Evangelicals and Catholics Together initiative of Richard John Neuhaus and Charles Colson that has continued to produce remarkable consensus statements on longstanding points of disagreement (mission, justification, Scripture and tradition, the communion of saints, Mary) between Christians in the modern West. And Roman Catholic authorities have sometimes returned the favor, as in occasional dismissals of evangelical groups as intrusive and unwelcome “sects” that lack any ecclesial basis or substance (notwithstanding Trinitarian baptism, plus devotion to Christ and Scripture as God’s Word).

There are also plenty of success stories, however, and it is really these that I am concerned with here: instances of creative blending of traditions within a broadly Catholic ambit, that bring with them what the Second Vatican Council courageously called reform and renewal, after a scriptural pattern of justification by faith. The charismatic movement of especially the 1970s notoriously cut across all denominations, including “Catholic” ones, and left behind it an undeniable renewal in many places: revived parishes and seminaries; an outpouring of vocations to religious life; zeal for visible Christian unity. Visit Ann Arbor, Mich., or Steubenville, Ohio, for continued evidence of this fruitfulness, not least intellectually, but above all in radiant holiness of life and zeal for the Lord and his House. Analogously, many Protestant evangelicals found in Pope John Paul II a brother in Christ — unafraid to speak persistently of the primacy of Scripture, faith in Jesus, the cross as norm for our own conversion, mission “ad gentes” as the highest of all Christian calls, and the urgency of transdenominational cooperation to the end of repentance and reunion, for the sake of the world. Thus, by George Marsden cum David Bebbington’s influential measure of what it means to be evangelical, even Roman Catholics can fit the bill. And they likely will do more and more, as serious-minded evangelical Protestants routinely migrate in a Catholic (in one of its varieties) direction, not as a repudiation but rather fulfillment of their christological and scriptural commitments. A sacramental and apostolic structure is seen to be an aid, and necessity, for reflective formation, rather than a dispensable distraction, or worse.

Anglicans have long claimed loyalty to a kind of reformed Catholicism, by which we have meant in part to distance ourselves from some versions of evangelicalism and Catholicism both. It is no secret that in the main the early Anglican reformers of the 16th and 17th centuries presumed that Rome had erred in her innovations, and so was not fully or even properly “Catholic”; while at the same time radically Presbyterian, as well as Baptist and Puritan, versions of Protestantism were finally excluded from the mainstream articulation and codification of Anglican worship and order, not least in terms of the centrality of episcopal office as an effective sign of apostolic continuity. From these judgments followed centuries of formal exclusion and persecution of Christian minorities — papists and non-conformists alike — in England, that has left its scars on modern British life in countless, complicated ways (to say nothing of her colonies!).

And yet, there seems to be latent in Anglicanism what the great Hans Frei of Yale University (an Episcopalian in the Reformed tradition, as he insisted) termed “generous orthodoxy” — a gift that we have tried to give to ourselves amid our own uninspiring divisions into competing parties (high church, latitudinarian, evangelical) as well as to the wider Christian household. Witness the creativity, intellectual flexibility, and charity of our best-known early divines, who declined to foreclose all sacramental significance in the competing traditions on the right and the left; a habit of mind that helped to form, among other things, the best of the “liberal” Anglican tradition: a “centripetal” penchant for “stepping back, untangling the skein, reconciling conflicting views, toning down exaggerated positions, forging coalitions, squaring circles, finding commonsense ways through,” as Oliver O’Donovan puts it.

In this context, we might think it almost inevitable, and certainly providential, that “evangelical catholic” currents continually emerge in Anglican history, more or less explicitly so-called. A standout example in the American context is of course William Augustus Muhlenberg (1797–1877), who sought to join an emphasis on personal experience and faith with a commitment to Catholic worship and order. But no less illustrative of the impulse, albeit in a more stringently Catholic direction, are the likes of DeKoven, Ewer, and Grafton — a later generation that has remained a touchstone of courage and holiness in an ecumenical mode, beyond the confines of “ritualism” in a 19th-century sense.

If there is a common thread in all of this, it would be a fervent hope, and expectation, that imitation of Christ yields transformation — healing and elevation — after the pattern of his image to a salvific end. God comes as a man in order to save; thus the “incarnational principle,” beloved of Catholics, anticipates and is fulfilled in a soteriological one, beloved of evangelicals. And principle subsists in practice: faithful, obedient discipleship. “Take up your cross and follow me.”

The only thing that remains to be said is that, for evangelical Catholics, there is no following Christ apart from his visible Church on earth, given in a sacramental system that is itself the form of communion. This is the non-negotiable locale of the gospel, its proper home. Extra ecclesiam nulla salus est, after all — in Christ.

Christopher Wells