Saturday, September 20

Would Graham Have Preferred To Meander Down The Canterbury Trail?

A Harvard University Press biography of Billy Graham claims that, if the world's most famous Baptist had his life to live over again, he would consider becoming an evangelical Anglican.

Such a spiritual and ecclesiastical path would have a number of things to commend it.

Foremostly, to be baptized into such a church, one would not necessarily have to be dunked underwater.

Anglicans also accept sprinkling and pouring as appropriate modalities of this primary Christian rite.

To Baptists, it is immersion or nothing at all.

Though identifying as Protestant and distinct from Roman Catholicism, Anglicanism is not so hostile to the other form of Western Christianity so as to forsake that which it is still capable of teaching the believer despite the shortcomings that have taken root in that particular theological expression over the centuries.

Some Baptists, on the other hand, are energized by little more than just how much they can stick it in the eye of the Church of Rome.

by Frederick Meekins