I honestly don’t know that I can come up with any tenets of Protestantism.
I can come up with some that it would not make any sense for a Protestant to hold. For example it would not make any sense for a Protestant to believe the Bishop of Rome is incapable of being incorrect when speaking on faith and morals.
If one were to hold this belief, the logical next move would be to convert to Catholicism. Why would one remain Protestant knowing that God gives special favours to the Catholics that He apparantly doesn’t give one’s own church. But it is theoretically possible I suppose.
One problem is that there is no ecclesiastical organization called “Protestant” to define what a Protestant must believe. So maybe I can start the 33,001 (since you claim there are 33,000 of them) Protestant denomination that believes the Bishop of Rome is incapable of being incorrect when speaking on faith and morals. Nothing is stopping me from doing so.
Nah…bad idea. That is totally ridiculous.
All that you can do is examine the tenets of faith of all the 33,000 denominations that you all claim exist and see what is common in these denominations that is not found elsewhere.
I can’t think of any. Not to say that none exist. But I am not smart enough to figure out what they are.
Well then, perhaps this definition can help you understand the “commom ‘denominational’ demoninator.”
Rationalism - In general it is the tendency to appreciate the value of human reason, applying it preferentially for the solution of all life’s problems, not excluding religion. In this sense, rationalism is intellectualism, and is opposed to voluntarism, mystical sentimentalism, agnosticism, skepticism, pragmatism, and all irrational or extrarational currents. This healthy and dignified rationalism does not conflict with faith; on the contrary, it is in perfect harmony with it. St. Thomas Aquinas, together with the better known Scholastics, is a luminous example of this kind of rationalism, in which faith and reason join their lights and help each other, the principle being fully respected of the subordination of reason to faith, and of philosophy to religion.
But rationalism, in the strict sense, is a system that claims the supreme and absolute dominion of human reason in all fields, subjecting to its controls every phenomenon and every truth, the supernatural world and God’s authority not excluded. This system tends to humanize the divine, when it does not eliminate it entirely, and to naturalize the the supernatural, when it does not reject it. Such tendencies to overvalue reason even in the field of faith reveals itself here and there since the first centuries of Christianity: e.g., in the latter part of the 4th centuryin the heresies of the Anomoeans, Nestorians, Pelagians, connected with the Antiochian School (naturalistic in tendency). But really heterodox rationalism began with Humanism, when the study of the classics awakened and accentuated in man a proud individualism, a fever for knowledge, for investigation, for scientific research, for autonomy in the theoretical and practical field, and an immoderate attachment of the mind to itself and to nature. Rationalism developed rapidly into a sinuous current of systems, from the naturalism of Telesio, Bruno, and Campanella, to the subjective construction of Cartesianism, to empiric scientism, to Luther’s free interpretation of the Bible, then to Encyclopedism and 18th century Illuminism, down to Kant, with his cult of autonomous and autochthonous reason, arbitor of theoretical and practical truth. With Kant rationalism reached its critical systemization; in the 18th century it resumed its developement to the most antithetical consequences, such as absolute idealism and materialistic monism.
With regard to the religious problem, rationalism runs the gamut from a vague deism to pantheism and, finally, to atheism. The Catholic religion has withstood the attack of rationalism throughout the centuries, contending every inch of ground and barring its passage. The phases of this struggle are pointed out in the Syllabus of Pope Pius IX and the definitons of the 1st Vatican Council.
a) High Church, conservative right-wing party (closet to Catholicism); (b) Low Church, moderate left-wing party, democratic, basically truly Protestant and, therefore, anti-Roman; (c) Broad Church, radical left-wing party, open to modernism and to all new currents to a point of compromising the basic truths of faith. Various efforts have been made to recapture that unity which, on the other hand, is the force and life of the Catholic Church