A good read in eclessial Christian history would help you understand your false presumptions and see that the “Church” Jesus established was and is the Catholic church. This is WELL documented by non-Catholic and secular sources. And you have your Bible because of the decision first made by the Catholic church in 382 AD…
Unfortunately, so did Catholics (re: Spain and Portugal). Which just proves we are all sinners needing God’s forgiveness.
I never saw any teaching of the Catholic Church that everything about the Church is biblical. The Church did not come from the bible. It came directly from God Himself. The bible is primarily salvation history. It came from God, through the authority of the Catholic Church.
Sinful acts happened on both sides of Christiandom but that only proves that Christians sometimes don’t live up to their calling by God. To make this type of argument is dumb. It would be like saying because there are corrupt doctors all medicine is corrupt or because there are corrupt lawyers all law is corrupt. Because there were corrupt Protestants doesn’t make all Protestantism corrupt.
Yet what did Jesus do in the Temple? (John 2) He ran the money changers out with authority and righteous anger.
You do not yet understand what is meekness. A person or persons can be “meek” and still be authoritative.
You have NO idea of what eclessial (means “church”) history proves. The texts of the Bible were NOT even an issue in 325 A.D when Constantine lived. Anachronism’s are a part of your modus operendi. The Bible was first cited in canonical form as it is today in 382 AD under Pope Damasus at the council of Rome.
Straw man argument. Knock down what doesn’t exist.
So, obviously you don’t hold to sola scriptura nor Catholicism, to what do you hold as your final authority?
That again is a FALSE and naive view of what Jesus meant by first and last, meekness and humility. From your position, NO person could be “in power” and still be saved because he/she couldn’t have both “power” and yet be as “meek” as a child. That’s just plainly false. Meekness has nothing to do with power; it has everything to do with humility!! And when Jesus said in
So when Jesus returns in “power” and glory in Luke 21:27, does that mean Jesus isn’t meek? According to your version of what “meek” means it would.
Magisterium means “teaching authority” and the prophets used sacred Tradition passed to them from age to age and direct revelations from God to which I’m sure He hasn’t given you.
It’s a handy historical label, no more. Actually, insofar as Anglicans are theologically Protestant (i.e., leaving aside those who explicitly reject the Reformation in favor of the consensus of the first thousand years), they do believe in a form of sola scriptura. But sola scriptura is almost as useless a concept as “Protestant.”
Protestantism is not a community. The only positive identity all Protestants share is, in my opinion, the one we share with Catholics and Orthodox–Trinitarian, Chalcedonian Christianity.
I would have said that The only positive identity all Protestants share is a rejection of the Authority of the Catholic Church under the leadership of the Bishop of Rome [a.k.a. The Pope].
What proportion of Anglicans would you say "explicitly reject the Reformation in favor of the consensus of the first thousand years? Are such Anglicans the same as “Anglo-Catholics” or distinct from those?
I am just curious (and not trying to cause to trouble
)-- do you consider Unitarians, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Mormons, etc. “Protestants”?Actually I do have an idea, I however made a stupid mistake and must stand corrected. Thanks for the correction. I was thinking about Constantine in relation to the Arian heresy when I wrote this. That is what I get for trying to dash off a long answer without thinking about it.
You are exactly right. I don’t rely on or feel a need for authority or references to authority. I believe that as long as one holds to the two great commandments, then they will encounter the Kingdom. I don’t believe (nor does the Church) that salvation is out of reach for non-christians. God will sort it out in the end.
You are right again.
Hi Edwin,
That was my attempt to give some kind of succinct but fairly precise definition of “Anglo-Catholics,” since the term is vague and many people find it confusing. Part of the problem (and the reason it’s almost impossible to answer your first question) is that vague Anglo-Catholic attitudes and Anglo-Catholic liturgical practices have been disseminated throughout Anglicanism, so that (at least in the Episcopal Church) the number of explicitly Reformation-oriented Anglicans is probably even smaller than the number of real Anglo-Catholics. Most Episcopalians (the C of E is a bit different, with more sharply defined parties and a much stronger low-church Protestant wing, and of course other parts of the Anglican world are different again) subscribe to some sort of vague shibboleth about being both Catholic and Protestant. So I probably misspoke–I should have said something like "insofar as they . . . . " since most Episcopalians (at least) fall somewhere in between Anglo-Catholicism and a full-blown endorsement of the Reformation. I would say that no more than a tenth, maybe less, would explicitly reject the Reformation. But probably a majority would say that the consensus of the “undivided” Church (somewhat of a fantasy concept, I know) is more important than what is peculiar to the Reformation, and would be very hesitant to affirm any form of sola scriptura. The dominant understanding of the sources of theological authority in the Episcopal Church today is the so-called “three-legged stool” of Scripture, tradition, and reason. Unfortunately, this is often understood to mean that these are three equal sources, which is in a sense much farther from Sola Scriptura than the Catholic position (since effectively either Scripture or Tradition can be “outvoted” if your reason opposes it and if you can find some kind of support, however tenuous, in the other “leg”–for instance, appealing to James Boswell’s theory that there were same-sex unions in the medieval Eastern Church and thus claiming that tradition is really in favor of such unions). Similarly, liberal (and even many moderate) Methodists reject sola scriptura not in favor of the Catholic position but of the so-called “quadrilateral” (the three-legged stool plus experience).
In the historical sense, yes. Mormons most problematically, but that is still where they come from, even if they don’t admit it. I would describe all three of these groups as “more Protestant than Christian.”I am just curious (and not trying to cause to trouble
There are a lot of Protestant churches that profess adherence to the Nicene Creed without using it in worship. In fact, only Anglicans use it regularly in my experience, though I think Lutherans use it quite often as well. Methodists use it occasionally–it’s in their “Book of Worship.” But more often, Methodists, Presbyterians, Lutherans, and similar churches will use the Apostles’ Creed. Many more “low-church” Protestants do not like to use a creed at all liturgically (and this is true of some congregations in the previously mentioned denominations). However, they will typically proclaim allegiance to the Nicene Creed as a historic summary of the basics of the faith. For instance, even the Plymouth-Brethren-influenced “Christians according to the Gospel” in Romania (about as low-church a tradition as you get) maintain the Nicene Creed as an official statement of faith in order to try to demonstrate to the Orthodox that they are not some kind of utterly heretical “sect.”
as far as I am concerned, this is needless sarchasm and attacking. Many of you accuse us of coming in here and attacking but yet you do this. be a bit more charitable, you may also find that quality very Christian-like.
Thanks, Edwin, as usual, for the informative post!
Now there’s a phrase that’s bound to make you enemies in some quarters!In the historical sense, yes. Mormons most problematically, but that is still where they come from, even if they don’t admit it. I would describe all three of these groups as “more Protestant than Christian.”
It does seem to me that many Protestant churches (like your Romanian example) have professed lip-service to Chalcedonian Trinitarianism as a kind of shibboleth in an environment dominated by states committed to upholding Trinitarianism while losing a sense of what precisely that theology really teaches about the nature of God and of Christ. It was inevitable perhaps that some groups would get the nerve and take the Arian/Muslim step of disavowing Trinitarianism altogether.
