Crossing the Tiber

There's a very interesting discussion going on over on Scot McKnight's blog today, about the Wheaton prof who converted to Catholicism.

Evangelicals “cross the Tiber” for four reasons: to find certainty, to establish a connection with history, to discover unity in the Church, and to land upon a final authority. One can find in each of these themes (certainty, history, unity, and authority) an inherent weakness to the evangelical movement, which does not provide for some enough certainty, history, unity or authority.

As always, I think Scot does an excellent job of summarizing the lay of the land, and if you take the time to read the comments on his post, you'll see that these things seem to resonate for people who have left for Rome.

Several things interest me in this.

1. Why Rome? Why not the Reformation? Options seem to be: a) people might be unaware of what the Reformation was all about, b) churches which take pride in their Reformation heritage might be more modern/evangelical/fundamentalist (and less Reformational) than they realize. Or maybe it's a mixture of both.

2. It's interesting how non-emergent the conversations on Scot's blog got in response to this - it just seemed to drift quickly into a very "modern" sounding conversation. This is NOT a critique of Scot, btw.

3. Speaking of Emergents, I'd be very curious to know how the EM intersects with this whole "Crossing the Tiber" thing - is it appealing to them? Why or why not?

Just some thoughts as I sip my morning coffee...