A Dangerous Evangelical Theologian and Author

Others have written enough on the conversion of Evangelical Theological Society president Francis Beckwith to the Catholic Church. I was simply taken by this comment from an interview in the Washington Post:

His thinking began to change, he said, as he read more deeply into Catholic theology, including works by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict XVI. After studying Ratzinger's book "Truth and Tolerance" last year, he said, he called a prominent evangelical philosopher, read him a passage about whether theology is really knowledge, and asked him to guess the author. "He reeled off the names of a bunch of evangelical theologians," Beckwith recalled. "I said, 'No, it's Ratzinger!' And he said, 'So he's one of us!' "

Yes, you can't be too careful reading this particular evangelical theologian. Peter Holmes and I both caved in after reading his "Called to Communion", and I can highly recommend "Truth and Tolerance" which I myself finished reading a month or so ago. I often feel that if evangelicals and protestants and Lutherans etc. just tried reading Ratzinger for a bit, they would indeed find that he is "one of them" -- although there is always the danger that they might find themselves, like Beckwith, as "one of us"!