Calling any non Roman church Protestant is distorted and unfair

[Traveller1534]

I am Anglican and we find many things with Evangelical churches very off course with real early church Christianity just as Catholics do, so why should we be lumped together with all other Protestants in your eyes. I believe it is a very self centered act by the Catholic church to deny that others such as ourselves contain just as much tradition as the early church if not more. It is really sad that Catholics don’t consider us Anglicans anywhere more in the realm with themselves as lets say the Jehovas Witnesses. Very sad that we can’t consider each other at least somewhat in focus together.

 

[dbacks5439]

I am Anglican and we find many things with Evangelical churches very off course with real early church Christianity just as Catholics do, so why should we be lumped together with all other Protestants in your eyes. I believe it is a very self centered act by the Catholic church to deny that others such as ourselves contain just as much tradition as the early church if not more. It is really sad that Catholics don’t consider us Anglicans anywhere more in the realm with themselves as lets say the Jehovas Witnesses. Very sad that we can’t consider each other at least somewhat in focus together.

You protest the pontifical authority. You protest several Catholic doctrines such as faith and good works needed for salvation, transubstantiation, and Sacred Tradition. In essence, you protest the Truth.
Just because we clump you all in one generic group doesn't mean we hate you, it's just a way to distinguish the two groups. We joyfully anticipate the day when all will be brought back home to the Church.

 

[Uriah]

Hello Traveller,

All Protestant demoninations (whether they be Baptists, Evangelicals, Methodists, or even Anglicans) cannot be called Roman Catholic. What makes a Roman Catholic a Roman Catholic is our being in communion with the Bishop of Rome. All those who are not in communion with the teachings of the Roman Catholic Church…not in communion with pontifical authority…cannot call themselves Roman Catholic.

It is not a slight or a slap to the face. This is a stone cold fact of life. All Protestant goups split from the Roman Catholic Church…the Roman Catholic Church did not leave them.

If my arm decides it does not want to be apart of my body anymore and it, of its own choice and freewill falls off, does it have the right to call itself a member of my body?

 

[Eileen_T]

I tend to use the term non-Catholic Christians these days.

 

[Dauphin]

I am Anglican and we find many things with Evangelical churches very off course with real early church Christianity just as Catholics do, so why should we be lumped together with all other Protestants in your eyes. I believe it is a very self centered act by the Catholic church to deny that others such as ourselves contain just as much tradition as the early church if not more. It is really sad that Catholics don’t consider us Anglicans anywhere more in the realm with themselves as lets say the Jehovas Witnesses. Very sad that we can’t consider each other at least somewhat in focus together.

Catholics don’t lump Anglicans with evangelical Christians. We just recognize the extreme wrongheadedness of certain “progressive” doctrinal changes. Evangelicals have strayed from tradition in one direction. Anglicans have strayed in the other direction.

That being said, my father an one entire side of my family is Anglican. Anglicans are great people! I grew up surrounded by them!

 

[Caesar]

“Protestant” is an umbrella term that encompasses many denominations. Anyone who “protests” the authority of the Church, under the Roman Pontiff, if a Protestant, and that includes Anglicans.

 

[JKirkLVNV]

If Henry VIII’s church, that he “removed” from Rome by Act of Parliament, had been left precisely as HE left it (the old reprobate), you might have a point. He changed nothing, except to “remove” it from the authority of the Pope. Unfortunately, the Edwardian reform (carried out by the regents of Henry’s son, Edward VI) altered the Church (the Edwardian ordinal, used for ordinations, so altered the nature of the Church in England’s priesthood that it ceased to be a valid priesthood capable of confecting the Sacrifice); the Church was further reformed under Elizabeth II. Both of these movements were influenced by the continental Protestant Reformers, though Edward’s was more so. As a strain of Protestants, yes, the Anglicans are a bit different. They are, however, Protestants still.

 

[Caesar]

The problem is, Anglicanism is so divided that it is hard to say who is closer to Rome then others. There are many sects in the Anglican communion- High Church Anglicans, Low Church Anglicans, Anglo-Catholics, Charismatic Anglicans, and then each of those has it’s own conservative and liberal factions.

 

[cestusdei]

No one has heard of the Protestant Episcopal Church? They call themselves Protestants.

 

[colliric]

You protest the pontifical authority. You protest several Catholic doctrines such as faith and good works needed for salvation, transubstantiation, and Sacred Tradition. In essence, you protest the Truth.

Just because we clump you all in one generic group doesn't mean we hate you, it's just a way to distinguish the two groups. We joyfully anticipate the day when all will be brought back home to the Church.

Not entirly true:
I was a high church anglican for 9 years, They do not protest “Faith and Good Works” they do not protest “Transubstantiation” and they in a sense do not protest “Sacred Tradition”, they actually believe the Catholic Church is Apostolic as much as all other “traditionalist” churches are. They, like the Orthodox, simply believe that the Pope is not infallible but is still head of a valid church of christ. In fact they believe they have apostolic sucession ALONG with the church of rome, because they believe when they seperated it was something like what happened with the orthodox.

They believed that the Reformation allowed all churches even slightly decendant of rome to remain “Apostolic” and even “Catholic”(and therefore universal), hence they actually call themselves “Anglo-Catholic” and accept all christian denominations as fully functioning Christian, it is this doctrine which allows the compete Anglican Church expansive doctrines ranging from very Catholic, to very protestant.

High Church Anglicanism is so close to Catholocism it isn’t funny, in fact it’s rather stupid. They should just recognise the Pope and rejoin the church.

 

[Roman_Catholic_1]

High Church Anglicanism is so close to Catholocism it isn’t funny, in fact it’s rather stupid. They should just recognise the Pope and rejoin the church.

Are there a lot of these types of Anglicans? Or are they the minority?

God bless

 

[Kitty_Chan]

“Protestant” is an umbrella term that encompasses many denominations. Anyone who “protests” the authority of the Church, under the Roman Pontiff, if a Protestant, and that includes Anglicans.

Well, depends on ones point of view, doesnt it?

(Im not one) But 7th Day Adventists say ANYONE who worships on Sunday is lumped in with the Catholic Church and just LIKE them not different in the least.

They consider themselves authority as well. So to SDA we are all Catholics.

 

[colliric]

Are there a lot of these types of Anglicans? Or are they the minority?

God bless

Majority in England, in their overseas cathedrals and in their older Church parishes dating from the 19th century and before, not at the “modern church” local level where Low church Anglicanism and evangelic Anglicanism is the majority on the local levels of that particular church.

 

[kellie]

I am Anglican and we find many things with Evangelical churches very off course with real early church Christianity just as Catholics do, so why should we be lumped together with all other Protestants in your eyes. I believe it is a very self centered act by the Catholic church to deny that others such as ourselves contain just as much tradition as the early church if not more. It is really sad that Catholics don’t consider us Anglicans anywhere more in the realm with themselves as lets say the Jehovas Witnesses. Very sad that we can’t consider each other at least somewhat in focus together.

I would say, by your previous posts such as …

Traveller1534:

I take offense to one referring to Anglicanism as junk or containing junk. I didn’t enter here in a fury about all the wrongs of Catholicism but yet this is what I am being faced with. There are many reasons why I left Catholicism and social behavior is just merely one of the smaller reasons. True tradition and doctrine would be two much larger ones.

and

Traveller1534:

There is a very encompassing notion when you are a Catholic to only accept that which comes from the magisterium if it is not written in scripture and sometimes accept what the magisterium says even in contradiction to scripture. This is much more focused to one that has been out of the Catholic realm for quite some time. Why do you believe that mary was taken into heaven body and soul? First, I do not believe this at all, but you must in order to be Catholic. What is the belief built upon?? Certainly not scripture, you won’t find a hint of this. It was a pope who declared this as dogma. This disproves your belief of the truth as never changing. If you believed this to be true before the pope of this time declared it as dogma you would have been involved in heresey. If you didn’t believe it after the pope declared it dogma, again you would be in heresey. How can the truth change all in one person?? Scripture does not speak to that ever!

…that you have indeed protested.

 

[GKC]

Not entirly true:
I was a high church anglican for 9 years, They do not protest “Faith and Good Works” they do not protest “Transubstantiation” and they in a sense do not protest “Sacred Tradition”, they actually believe the Catholic Church is Apostolic as much as all other “traditionalist” churches are. They, like the Orthodox, simply believe that the Pope is not infallible but is still head of a valid church of christ. In fact they believe they have apostolic sucession ALONG with the church of rome, because they believe when they seperated it was something like what happened with the orthodox.

They believed that the Reformation allowed all churches even slightly decendant of rome to remain “Apostolic” and even “Catholic”(and therefore universal), hence they actually call themselves “Anglo-Catholic” and accept all christian denominations as fully functioning Christian, it is this doctrine which allows the compete Anglican Church expansive doctrines ranging from very Catholic, to very protestant.

High Church Anglicanism is so close to Catholocism it isn’t funny, in fact it’s rather stupid. They should just recognise the Pope and rejoin the church.

This is reasonably close to my position, except the parts that aren’t, so I’ll not make further comment. But, (to the OP), to the RC eye, Anglicans **are **Protestants. Let it pass.

GKC

*Anglicanus Catholicus *

 

[Rawb]

It is really sad that Catholics don’t consider us Anglicans anywhere more in the realm with themselves as lets say the Jehovas Witnesses

Actually, most Catholics would consider you closer to the truth when compared with a Jehovah’s Witness, as you are a Christian, and a Jehovah’s Witness is not. No Trinity = No Christianity.

But I think there’d be this problem no matter what we called Protestants. If we called Protestants “Non-Catholic”, then they’d say “But we are catholic, because catholic means universal!”. We can’t say “Non-Roman” because there are Catholics who are Non-Roman. In absence of a better term, I still use Protestant (actually, I used Protestant when I was Protestant, and was proud of it because that was the only term that actually described what I was. Well, that and “Non-Denominational”.)

 

[Tantum_ergo]

Reminds me a bit of the Vermont joke, “If your cat had kittens in your (obviously cold) oven, would you call them cupcakes?”

I have absolutely no problem calling a person whatever ‘denomination’ he gives me–Anglican, Lutheran, Baptist, Holy Roller, Church of the Brethren, you name it. But if I do not know that denomination, or if I am speaking of one, several, or all of the thousands of denominations, I have to use the term “protestant” because, by nature, that is how those ‘denominations’ came to be.

Every one of their historical roots goes back to one (or several) events which involved a founder/s ‘removal’ of himself and others from the Catholic Church. Whether it is the Anglican whose forebears removed themselves under Henry VIII, Edward VI, Elizabeth I, etc., or the Methodist whose forebears (themselves with forebears who ‘removed’ from the Catholic Church to Anglican) ‘removed’ from Anglican to Methodist, etc., etc., those ‘moves’ were a protest against some or all of a given Church’s teaching. There is no getting around it.

Therefore, the denominations are protestant. If you like, you can say, “Protestant against doctrine X” of the Catholic Church (though some denominations might then take several days in listing the doctrines they ‘protest against’).

If you’re worried that you (personally) are much closer to ‘the true faith’ (and that does seem to be the OP’s contention, that because his faith is ‘so close’ that they really didn’t protest much–if at all–and should not be called something which to his mind ‘fits’ another group which pretty much rejects a lot of stuff he does not)–there is a solution which would keep you from being (not ‘being called’ but being. . .there is a difference) protestant.

Come home to Rome!

 

[catsrus]

Anglicanism/Episcopalians = protestants.
Period.
They do not recognize The Pope as Christ’s Vicar on earth.

 

[rr1213]

Anglicanism/Episcopalians = protestants.
Period.
They do not recognize The Pope as Christ’s Vicar on earth.

Neither do the Orthodox Churches.

 

[catsrus]

originally posted by rr1213
Neither do the Orthodox Churches.

That is correct.
That is way I self identify as Roman Catholic or Latin Rite Catholic.
There is only one Holy Catholic Church established by Christ.