Mark Driscoll, who is beginning to inhabit the darker regions of my consciousness like some baleful theological bogeyman, recently announced by Tweet that Charles Haddon Spurgeon is his favourite mentor outside of scripture. You have to wonder what sort of nightmarish world Driscoll is living in if he is willing to let himself be mentored by someone who not only is dead but was, as Driscoll himself writes, ‘kicked out of his own Baptist denomination for his unwillingness to stop teaching such things as eternal torment in a literal hell, the literal truthfulness of Scripture, a literal creation by God, and the perfection and divine inspiration of Scripture’. I just don’t see what hammering on about everything being literal and perfect is supposed to achieve these days.

Ecumenism:

What do the members here think of ecumenism of evangelicals with Roman Catholics? Do you think the Catholic church has a false Gospel? I have many years of working with and dealing with Catholic Charismatics and have my testimony of this on the net.

It looks as though we can all sleep peacefully in our beds at last then. My recollection of things is unfortunately very hazy - was it John Paul's namesake who presided over Vatican 2? And wasn't it he who on his deathbed repeated the prayer "A new Pentecost . . .". And my dates may be confused, but I think it was around then (or shortly thereafter), in the early/mid 1970's, that many parts of the Catholic church in Europe began to experience pentecostal phenomena - the signs of a new life. In Brussels in 1983/5 I met Catholic brothers who were reaching out for fellowship with believers from other Christian traditions - and were experiencing this move of new life, which was expressing itself in a renewed interest in the creative arts, drama, etc as ways of demonstrating the faith. Here in Guildford, in the mid 1970's, the Catholic church also experienced signs of renewal, accompanied by a reaching out to the rest of the body of Christ. In Brussels, Cardinal Suenens was at the centre of this renewal movement - though renewal in the protestant meaning of the word; for the Catholic, renewal is the new birth - the beginning of new life.