Beckwith Comes Back With...

...hopefully, a trail of other converts and "re-verts" in his wake. I'm speaking of Dr. Francis Beckwith, a very highly regarded Christian scholar who has returned to his Catholic roots. Considering his high-profile standing as the president of the Evangelical Theological Society (he has since resigned), this couldn't have been an easy decision for him.

I pray for him and his family, because I went throgh a similar struggle myself when I returned to the Catholic Church, after years in Protestant ministry. I hope you'll pray for him too, as he will undoubtedly face many trials of criticism and misunderstandings, along with the support he's bound to receive as well.

For more on the reasons why Dr. Beckwith returned to the Catholic Church, read his blog, Right Reason, which features a hot-off-the-press Q & A with Beckwith by Christianity Today, as well as a post by Beckwith himself about his move:

The past four months have moved quickly for me and my wife. As you probably know, my work in philosophy, ethics, and theology has always been Catholic friendly, but I would have never predicted that I would return to the Church, for there seemed to me too many theological and ecclesiastical issues that appeared insurmountable. However, in January, at the suggestion of a dear friend, I began reading the Early Church Fathers as well as some of the more sophisticated works on justification by Catholic authors. I became convinced that the Early Church is more Catholic than Protestant and that the Catholic view of justification, correctly understood, is biblically and historically defensible. Even though I also believe that the Reformed view is biblically and historically defensible, I think the Catholic view has more explanatory power to account for both all the biblical texts on justification as well as the church’s historical understanding of salvation prior to the Reformation all the way back to the ancient church of the first few centuries. Moreover, much of what I have taken for granted as a Protestant—e.g., the catholic creeds, the doctrines of the Trinity and the Incarnation, the Christian understanding of man, and the canon of Scripture—is the result of a Church that made judgments about these matters and on which non-Catholics, including Evangelicals, have declared and grounded their Christian orthodoxy in a world hostile to it. Given these considerations, I thought it wise for me to err on the side of the Church with historical and theological continuity with the first generations of Christians that followed Christ’s Apostles.

You can read the rest of that post here.

Welcome home, Dr. Beckwith!