I think you might have missed what I was saying. You cannot just put your faith in Jesus Christ because there is no one to tell you about Jesus Christ. It is not just you and Jesus. You need fathers like everyone else needs fathers and generations of them to convey wisdom and understanding. I need fathers too, they are not the object of my faith, but they are an object of my trust towards the object of my faith. Without them I might as well just join a cult. You have placed your fathers on the table, but then reject them as irrelevant. Don’t do that my friend.
Actually, that’s not what I’ve done at all. I never said John Wesley, George Whitefield, John Stott and J. I. Packer were spiritual fathers or even theologians that I look to form my faith. I only offered them as examples of Anglicans who are clearly Protestant. Just because I note that a person is Protestant does not indicate that I look to them to form my own faith.
As a Pentecostal, I am indebted to John Wesley, whose teachings continue to resonate through the Pentecostal tradition, via Wesleyanism. John Stott and J. I. Packer represent a Reformed Anglicanism that is quite different from the High Church Anglican primitivism that Wesley embodied and that in some forms even persists within Pentecostalism today.
The one thing I usually see written on that protestant card (and everyone I met is slightly different), is not theology, doctrine, etc as you have defined protestant. It is ultimately the commonly held statement “objection to the Catholic Church”. It is manifest in the necessity to convert Catholics, it is manifest in many other ways too. The protestant primarily is defined as having an objection to the Catholic Church, no relationship or affiliation. That is defined on their protestant card. It would be impossible for a protestant to exist if there were no Catholic Church because they are dependent on its existence to define themselves.
Not really. I’m actually in agreement with a lot of the basic beliefs of the Catholic Church (Pentecostals are a lot closer to Catholics on issues like free will, synergism, the role of works, the miraculous, etc. than other Protestant traditions). There are areas of disagreements, but Protestantism itself does not exist solely to object to differences with Catholics.
That last sentence might have been true a couple centuries ago, but it is highly anachronistic now. For one thing, Protestantism is so big now that it is its own universe of universes. Evangelicals have their own interests. Mainline Protestants have their own interests. Protestants, if they want to, can be entirely consumed by intra-Protestant affairs.
At the same time, traditional lines of demarcation are not as relevant as they once were.The infiltration of modernism within historic Mainline Protestant churches has led to the situation where many traditional Protestants find more in common with Catholics than they do with members of their own denominations.
My friend, your logic has failed to justify the premise. Get rid of the Great Awakening, it is an unjust appraisal, it has obviously been ran through the marketing department of a small subset of culture and regarded as big history by those who are open to its small history.
I would even regard it as almost arrogant.
Well, I think it’s arrogant for a Catholic to dismiss a religious event that was truly historic and formative for Protestantism within English-speaking North America. In case you’ve forgotten, until relatively recently Protestantism formed the foundation of a common American religious/moral philosophy. It wasn’t until massive Catholic immigration from Italy and Ireland in the 19th century that Protestant hegemony over American life was even put into doubt.
So, whether you want to acknowledge it or not, a massive movement within the colonial Protestant churches did have long lasting influence on American history and culture. It was not a “small subset of culture.” At the time of the founding of the United States, there were 4 million people in the colonies and only 30,000 of those were Catholic and Jews numbered 3,000.
