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gurneyhalleck1
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We’re good in the closer category. Brian Wilson’s a keeper man! We just need some bats, dang! 
And the Phillies need a closer.
Jon
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DV56
Guest
We have Papelbon, but he’s been more of an opener for the opposing offense since the last third of 2009. What got me was when he said he was the next Mariano Rivera. What a joke!!!We’re good in the closer category. Brian Wilson’s a keeper man! We just need some bats, dang!
Mariano may be the greatest relief pitcher in the history of BB.
Have we hijacked this thread?
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ALLGIRLS
Guest
Why do so many of these theology threads turn into talks about sports or Star Trek?
Just a friendly question from a nonsportsfan nonTrekki (please don’t stone me!
)
In Christ,
Ellen
Just a friendly question from a nonsportsfan nonTrekki (please don’t stone me!
)In Christ,
Ellen
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DV56
Guest
Ellen, Ellen, Ellen! I know you can contribute to these sports discussions. Climb out of that shell and do it!!!Why do so many of these theology threads turn into talks about sports or Star Trek?
Just a friendly question from a nonsportsfan nonTrekki (please don’t stone me!
In Christ,
Ellen
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ajcstr
Guest
Sorry. My last post should have said Bishop Wright (not Rev Wright)
And PS - Ryan Howard is our closer !
And PS - Ryan Howard is our closer !
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gurneyhalleck1
Guest
Because it’s just natural for Lutheran and Anglican analysis to evolve into Star Trek and Major League baseball. If you go back to the Middle Ages, Thomas Aquinas in the Summa started talking about the Enterprise and photon torpedoes. Luther and Melancthon corresponded back and forth about the Romulans and Kardassians. And Calvin was irresistably drawn to the Klingons as well as the Chicago Cubs.
I don’t know, ALLGIRLS, it’s a friendly forum and we like to have a chat in between intense theological discussion. It happens…don’t worry, you won’t get stoned. Speaking of getting stoned, I wonder how Tim Lincecum will do when I go to see him pitch in May?
I don’t know, ALLGIRLS, it’s a friendly forum and we like to have a chat in between intense theological discussion. It happens…don’t worry, you won’t get stoned. Speaking of getting stoned, I wonder how Tim Lincecum will do when I go to see him pitch in May?
Why do so many of these theology threads turn into talks about sports or Star Trek?
Just a friendly question from a nonsportsfan nonTrekki (please don’t stone me!
In Christ,
Ellen
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gurneyhalleck1
Guest
Pap was a stud in that last world series. Haven’t followed the dancing one much since then. Mariano Rivera-like? PUUHLEEZ. Rivera is unrivaled and there is nothing close to that guy. He’s a freak and a phenom. At his age he’s still rollin’…And I say that grudgingly…I HATE THE YANKEES! I hate the Yankees, not as much as the Dodgers, but I am no Yankee lover. Better watch it, BlazerDave is a fan LOL…nobody’s perfect
We have Papelbon, but he’s been more of an opener for the opposing offense since the last third of 2009. What got me was when he said he was the next Mariano Rivera. What a joke!!!
Mariano may be the greatest relief pitcher in the history of BB.
Have we hijacked this thread?
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gurneyhalleck1
Guest
Ryan Howard is amazing. I wish he could’ve pulled it off against those Bronx twerps in the WS…I wish we had a tiny bit of the offense you guys have in Philly. What a team you’ve built out there…who knew?
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blazerdave
Guest
Honestly, I think it’s because there’s a lot of bitterness and feuding on too many other threads (and among our respective Churches in general)…I think here, with some of the individuals in this thread, it’s our way of trying to get along and enjoy some common interests without being at each others’ throats.Why do so many of these theology threads turn into talks about sports or Star Trek?
Just a friendly question from a nonsportsfan nonTrekki (please don’t stone me!
In Christ,
Ellen
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blazerdave
Guest
That’s right. Simil iustus et Yankee peccator!Pap was a stud in that last world series. Haven’t followed the dancing one much since then. Mariano Rivera-like? PUUHLEEZ. Rivera is unrivaled and there is nothing close to that guy. He’s a freak and a phenom. At his age he’s still rollin’…And I say that grudgingly…I HATE THE YANKEES! I hate the Yankees, not as much as the Dodgers, but I am no Yankee lover. Better watch it, BlazerDave is a fan LOL…nobody’s perfect
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TriuneUnity
Guest
LOL!! Woot… I knew I liked you for a reason, David. Soli Yankee Gloria! (sorry, gurney, I’m a New Yorker LOL)
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TriuneUnity
Guest
Blech. Sorry, LoL.
Baptism is never a bad subject. I don’t mind Scott Hahn all that much. I haven’t read much of his stuff, but I do like some of his discussions on the sacraments. Though, I think he relies on that whole covenant thing a bit too heavily. Which probably stems from his Calvinistic background.
Lutherans are closer on the sacraments. There are some Anglo-Catholics that emphasize the sacraments, but emphasis on the sacraments is built into Lutheran theology. Anglican, not so much. Anglicans are closer on liturgy, the episcopacy, and for Anglo-Catholics, on justification.
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GCMac87
Guest
I have a question that I hope my Anglican/Episcopal brethren (or former ones) can help answer; where are the “low church” parishes I read about in my studies regarding theological and liturgical variations in the church (Episcopal and Anglican parishes in the US specifically)?
Admittedly, I come from a rather Anglo-Catholic Episcopal Diocese and the dioceses closest to me also tend to sway that way or are somewhat “broad church” (and still “high church” at that). Even those parishes that swing to the more progressive side that I’ve seen still share the sacramental view and strict liturgical format of my own rather conservative Anglo-Catholic parish.
I live in the midwest and while going through classes with our priest prior to being baptized, he explained that the Anglo-Catholic presence in the midwest is due to one of the few bishops that was willing to head west to do mission work. Thus, I was under the impression that the “low church” parishes were on the East Coast and in the South.
I pose this question because it has been noted that Lutherans share more sacramental theology with the Catholics than do most Anglicans because our views run the gamut (a “motley crew” as GKC would say) save for the Anglo-Catholics; yet the closest thing to a “low church” or evangelical Anglican that I have seen in my region would be Methodists.
May the Peace of the Lord be always with you!
Admittedly, I come from a rather Anglo-Catholic Episcopal Diocese and the dioceses closest to me also tend to sway that way or are somewhat “broad church” (and still “high church” at that). Even those parishes that swing to the more progressive side that I’ve seen still share the sacramental view and strict liturgical format of my own rather conservative Anglo-Catholic parish.
I live in the midwest and while going through classes with our priest prior to being baptized, he explained that the Anglo-Catholic presence in the midwest is due to one of the few bishops that was willing to head west to do mission work. Thus, I was under the impression that the “low church” parishes were on the East Coast and in the South.
I pose this question because it has been noted that Lutherans share more sacramental theology with the Catholics than do most Anglicans because our views run the gamut (a “motley crew” as GKC would say) save for the Anglo-Catholics; yet the closest thing to a “low church” or evangelical Anglican that I have seen in my region would be Methodists.
May the Peace of the Lord be always with you!
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shark76z
Guest
- purpose of baptism
- the Eucharist
- prayers for the dead
- salvation by faith alone
- confession of sins
- any special reverence for Mary
Someone please correct me if I am wrong.
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Contarini
Guest
Indeed! (My wife was Methodist and recently became Episcopalian.)I have a question that I hope my Anglican/Episcopal brethren (or former ones) can help answer; where are the “low church” parishes I read about in my studies regarding theological and liturgical variations in the church (Episcopal and Anglican parishes in the US specifically)?
Admittedly, I come from a rather Anglo-Catholic Episcopal Diocese and the dioceses closest to me also tend to sway that way or are somewhat “broad church” (and still “high church” at that). Even those parishes that swing to the more progressive side that I’ve seen still share the sacramental view and strict liturgical format of my own rather conservative Anglo-Catholic parish.
I live in the midwest and while going through classes with our priest prior to being baptized, he explained that the Anglo-Catholic presence in the midwest is due to one of the few bishops that was willing to head west to do mission work. Thus, I was under the impression that the “low church” parishes were on the East Coast and in the South.
I pose this question because it has been noted that Lutherans share more sacramental theology with the Catholics than do most Anglicans because our views run the gamut (a “motley crew” as GKC would say) save for the Anglo-Catholics; yet the closest thing to a “low church” or evangelical Anglican that I have seen in my region would be Methodists.
As you note, the Midwest is more high church than other regions. I’m not sure how high is your high and how low is your low, if you get my meaning. My own parish tends to think of itself as Anglo-Catholic but is really pretty middle-of-the-road, and our priest is relatively low church by Midwestern standards (he comes from Virginia, which may explain it!). He’s basically a Barthian in theology and tends to discourage certain Anglo-Catholic practices. For instance, we didn’t get to venerate the Cross on Good Friday, we don’t have a Eucharistic Vigil on Holy Thursday, etc. But he hears confessions, so he’s hardly a true low-churcher.
You might also try visiting one of the AMiA (now part of the ACNA) parishes. For instance, the Church of the Resurrection in Wheaton, Illinois is a much more low-church experience than you’re likely to get in midwestern Episcopal parishes. There’s a similar congregation in my own town.
Still, if you want real low-church Anglicanism in America, you should visit something like Falls Church in Virginia. And by and large the low church is not very strong in the U.S. If one wants to be a low-church Protestant, there are plenty of better options! In England, on the other hand, there is a very strong low-church movement. The most stridently low-church Anglican I’ve met in America is Fr. Gerald Bray (I’m sure he wouldn’t appreciate the “Father”), who teaches at the Beeson Divinity School at Samford University in Birmingham. Alabama. The Birmingham diocese is generally low church, but Fr. Bray complained to me that many of the smaller parishes aren’t as conservative or as evangelical as the cathedral is, so even there it’s not uniform. He also said that in his opinion there really wasn’t a true low-church Anglicanism in the U.S., or not much of one.
To put this in some perspective, Fr. Bray gave a talk at a conference I recently attended at Wheaton (this is how I came to be talking to him) on the subject “Why Evangelicals are the True Catholic and Orthodox Christians.” Ironically, the Baptist Wheaton professor who responded to the talk rejected Fr. Bray’s entire line of argument–and on good evangelical principles too! (The Baptist professor’s point was that evangelicals have no business trying to claim to be somehow “better” than other Christians, because we are supposed to be pointing people to Christ.)
Edwin
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Contarini
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I’d prefer to let a Lutheran address this point. I find the differences between Lutheran and Catholic baptismal theology rather hard to articulate, since they don’t seem particularly substantive to me. The only real difference, as I see it, is created by the Lutheran doctrine of justification by faith, which ironically gives baptism *more *importance for Lutherans than it has for Catholics. For Lutherans baptism is God’s unconditional promise of forgiveness, and all you have to do to receive it is to believe. For Catholics, once a baptized person falls into mortal sin, you need to be restored through the sacrament of penance.
One problem I have describing Lutheran theology is that my knowledge of it is based mostly on Luther, and Lutheran theology isn’t simply a copy of Luther’s theology. So, for instance, my claim that Lutherans give baptism more central importance than Catholics do is taken from Luther’s Babylonian Captivity of the Church, which argues that baptism has been ignored because of monasticism and a distorted doctrine of penance. So I’d like to hear from some actual Lutherans!
Edwin
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Contarini
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If you mean N.T. Wright, the bishop of Durham, then that’s really not true–which makes his arguments on justification all the more remarkable (and all the more enraging to the hardline Protestants). Wright comes from the low-church evangelical wing of Anglicanism, though he’s very much a moderate representative of that school. Wright disagrees strongly with Catholicism on many other points, like the doctrine of the saints or Purgatory (though I think he has a bit of a caricature of the Catholic doctrine of Purgatory, since he thinks that the views of the current Pope, expressed before he was Pope, mark a retreat from the doctrine), or ecclesiology. But he has come to the conclusion that the Reformers were wrong in their reading of Paul in some fairly important ways.
I and another professor at the college where I teach just finished leading a book discussion group on Wright’s *Justification. *And one of the points that most struck (and frustrated) me about the book was Wright’s unwillingness to give Catholics credit for having been right all these years when Protestants were yelling at them for being un-Biblical. I don’t mean that he says anything unfair or ungracious, simply that he presents his position as simply being “what the text says” (admittedly this is partly a strategy for defending against accusations of having sold Protestantism down the river), without really stressing that this is what the Fathers and the medieval theologians thought, and what the 16th-century defenders of Catholicism insisted (not always very effectively) against the Reformers.
Sure, the “new perspective” isn’t quite the same as the traditional Catholic view. But the basic claim that “works of the law” refers to Torah observance in the Jewish ritual sense, rather than generally to good moral works performed in order to become holy and be united to God, is *exactly *what Catholic apologists of the sixteenth century claimed, and have been ridiculed for 500 years for claiming.
Edwin
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Contarini
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Ex opere operato is certainly the Catholic view. My difficulty with the Lutheran critique is that I can’t see that the Lutheran view is any different. Ex opere operato *never *claimed that you receive grace from a sacrament without being properly disposed. It simply claimed that the sacrament would convey the reality it signified unless you interposed an obstacle, and in the case of unrepeatable sacraments like baptism would start doing so as soon as the obstacle was removed.
The Lutheran view seems to me to be another way of saying the same thing. Lutherans think that the wicked and unbelieving receive Christ in the Eucharist (the irony is that medieval Catholics before about 1200 appear to have believed that you needed faith to receive Christ). They believe that baptism shouldn’t be repeated even if the baptized person wasn’t properly disposed to receive grace from it (i.e., didn’t have faith). And you certainly believe that sacraments are valid even if the minister is unworthy. These seem to me to be the basic pillars of the ex opere operato view. So I find it hard to understand why Lutherans react so negatively to this, except that they are just following Luther. That of course pushes the question back to why Luther reacted the way he did, but Luther (with all due respect) was weird, so it’s easier to explain.
The issue in Luther seems to be that the language of “not interposing an obstacle” doesn’t give faith a sufficiently active role. And furthermore, of course, Luther did not think that sin in itself was an obstacle to receiving grace (although he did think that serious, deliberate sin was incompatible in the long term with the presence of saving faith in a person). This second point, ironically, makes the Lutheran position a more *radical *example of ex opere operato than the Catholic, from my perspective.
Both Luther and later Lutherans seem to think that ex opere operato makes faith unnecessary, but that’s obviously false. You can’t receive grace from any sacrament, in the Catholic view, without having faith. Not having faith would be one of those “obstacles.”
It seems to me that Luther used “ex opere operato” as a scapegoat for what he thought was an overly magical view of the sacraments that downplayed faith and the word. It doesn’t seem to me that he ever succeeded in articulating just what was wrong with the position or how his own view was meaningfully different. But I’m open to being persuaded otherwise.
Let me put it this way: I can’t see what in the Lutheran theology of baptism ought to be unacceptable to an orthodox Catholic.
Edwin
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Contarini
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I think you are wrong about that first point. Anglicans don’t have a well-developed system of confessions and are not strong on systematic theology. This easily misleads more confessional Christians, such as Lutherans. But rather than saying “there are some Anglo-Catholics that emphasize the sacraments,” it would be truer to say “there are some extreme low-church Anglicans who don’t.” Certainly when it comes to regular Eucharist, I’d say that Anglicans if anything have a “better” record on this than Lutherans. Admittedly, my experience may be skewed by my having spent more time as an adult in Germany than in England, and having attended a lot more services in the EKD than in any American Lutheran church. Monthly communion is the norm in Germany (there are exceptions), but weekly seems to be the norm in American Lutheran churches. I know that less-than-weekly communion is more common in England than in America (in Anglicanism).
Edwin
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ajcstr
Guest
Yes - I am just referring to what it appears is his opinion on Justification.
Again, I am a cradle catholic (raised in a section of Phila where EVERYBODY was either Irish or Italian Catholic through high school). There was the “Protestant” church, but I had no clue what that was, beyond a classmate of mine got married there when his girlfriend got pregnant. BIG culture shock in college although it was a Catholic college. So pretty much everything I know or think I know about non catholic denominations comes from the various apologetics books I have read.
I digress, but I walked into this bible study expecting to get a lot of “Sola’s” and the first thing the leader says is that Luthor may not have gotten what Paul was saying correct and that he left the Presbyterian chirch because he did not accept the notion that once saved, salvation cannot be lost (He also was talking about blessings and curses of a covenant which I remembered from Scott Hahn’s “A Father that keeps His Promises” but someone earlier here mentioned that may stem from his Presbyterian backround which I would not have known).
We only finished one chapter of Romans but I am curious to see where this is going. He is also using NT Wright’s translation of Romans for the study. The pastor mentioned to the group that I am a Catholic and nobody seemed to care that much - its a small group 10 or so.
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