muledog,
You are wrong about the role of the Pope in dispensationalist eschatology. In fact, dispensationalism broke with much previous Protestant tradition in denying that the Pope was Antichrist. Rather, dispensationalists believe that the Antichrist is a future figure and is an individual rather than an office. Many dispensationalists are anti-Catholic and thus hold that the Antichrist (or more likely the “false prophet” as in Left Behind) will be a Pope who will unite all the world’s religions. But this isn’t essential to dispensationalism. What Moody himself believed about the Papacy I don’t know. I have quite a bit of experience with Moody folks because they have an aviation school in East Tennessee, where I grew up, and several of my best friends’ parents worked or studied there. Moody is sort of on the boundary between “fundamentalist” and “evangelical” (if we’re making that distinction)–which way you define them depends on how strictly you’re defining “fundamentalist.” They generally use the NIV rather than the KJV and they love Billy Graham. They would believe that the Bible is inerrant in the original autographs, and most of them would believe in seven-day creation. They would tend to focus on your “personal relationship with Jesus” rather than on whether you dot all the doctrinal i’s. In my experience, their attitude to Catholics tended to be that Catholics generally don’t know Jesus as their personal savior and hence are not “real Christians.” They would definitely admit that Catholics could be Christians, but in common speech would tend to assume that most of them aren’t. They might, for instance, say things like “I used to be Catholic, but now I’m a Christian,” or ask people to pray for the salvation of Catholic relatives. However, they are not as paranoid about Catholicism as fundamentalists are, and they are increasingly open to accepting Catholics as fellow-Christians based on shared witness on issues like abortion. I suspect, though I can’t prove, that they’re less anti-Catholic now than they were when I was in contact with them. Most evangelicals are.
In other words, they’re typical of conservative evangelicalism, distinct both from hardline fundamentalism and from the more moderate evangelicalism that would gladly welcome Catholics as fellow-Christians. These really are three distinct attitudes among evangelical Protestants, although they do flow into each other and have fuzzy edges.
In Christ,
Edwin
Being in a hostile environment means that your beliefs would be challenged, the tenets of your faith put to the test. In response to this pressure, one of two things would happen: