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I hear far fewer sermons these days than I did when I was a kid about how the church of Rome is the harlot of Babylon and the pope is the current version of the Antichrist. You can still go to churches where you hear that sermon on Sunday, but it's far less prominent in the evangelical subculture than it was 30 or 40 years ago. I think that's partly due to Pope John Paul II.

This is the first pope that most evangelicals have actually known who he was. Almost anybody in the world who is semi-intelligent now knows the face of John Paul II, and they know he's the pope. If you had asked people in 1965, Who is the pope, they wouldn't know and probably wouldn't care. John Paul II has become a world figure and certainly within the Christian world in a way that evangelicals know him, appreciate his stand on many, many issues, resonate with his piety and spirituality, and know he's a man of prayer and deep faith—even though we can't follow him all the way into his Marian devotion. There's still a resonance there that connects to evangelicals in a way that no other pope has.

We've seen the tremendous influence God has had through one man in John Paul II as pope. What should we evangelicals pray for as we watch the selection process?

I do think it's appropriate that we pray for the Roman Catholic Church and for this decision, because it has momentous implications for the whole world Christian movement.

I would hope for the new pope to be in many ways like John Paul II. I don't mean in personality, of course, but in terms of his deep core values, that he would honor the historic Christian faith and defend that faith against forces that would undermine it and sidetrack it both within Catholicism and beyond.

We could pray that the next pope would continue the mission of John Paul II in reaching out to other Christians and particularly to evangelicals in realizing some of the things we do share in common and building on them.

Are there any candidates in particular?

Far be it for me to name the next pope! I'm not sure I want to endorse the Roman Catholic view that it's the Holy Spirit who does all of this choosing. I've been around too many pastor selection committees in Baptist churches to know the Holy Spirit gets blamed for a lot of things that he's probably not guilty of.

But in any event, a few months ago in New York I met one of the people who is being at least mentioned as a possible successor—Cardinal Arinze from Nigeria. I was enormously impressed with him. He's a very devout man, a magnanimous personality. Of course he's an African, which would give a radically different image to the church. I think it would be a wonderful, providential happening if the first Polish pope would be followed by the first African pope. I think that's a long shot, actually, but in God's providence that might happen.

He would, in many ways, represent the future of the church, which is no longer Italian and European, but is a world community. But there are others as well. I think Cardinal Shonborn in Austria would be a very wonderful leader of the church.

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April (Web-only) 2005, Vol. 49