We are not one among many. I do not accept your "Mere Christianity." This is not one room in the house; this is the house. I can say this because the conceit that allows your Mere Christianity some surface plausibility is Catholic truth. Those of you who are not completely sucked into fundamentalism or individualism (but I repeat myself) are incoherently relying on some Catholic means or truth to make some semblance of a narrative out of Christian history without the Catholic Church.
It mystifies me that people passionately committed to objective truth in other areas of life, who battle relativism wherever it is found in the natural world, become rank postmodernists in theology and ecclesiology. Anything to avoid becoming Catholic. Yes, I'm talking to you, Protestant. Get some Protestants in a room, and it sounds like a bumper sticker. "Co-Exist." Peace and love. One big happy family. Based upon what? United by what? Anti-Catholicism? What would be the point of being a Lutheran Christian (for example) if, when push really came to shove, for all my passionate commitment to Lutheran doctrines, they'd take a back-seat to the whole of what God was doing in the "Church"? Seriously, stop wasting my time. I know the way you talk and think. So I have my truth, and your truth, and here's his truth, and her truth, and on and on. The only real sin is to believe that either we made a mistake in getting to this point, or God must be crazy, at best. Because God is God, I have to go with the first option.
When Dr. Carl Trueman said that Catholicism was the default position in the West (even though it should be the default everywhere) it bothered people. I mean, he's not Catholic. Does he want to give the papists ammunition? But I understood. I'm not staking my soul on a 'maybe'. Whatever I believe, I believe it with everything I have. I'll be circumspect about the weather, or my favorite Garth Brooks album. If the stakes are eternal life, and God come in the flesh, forgive me if I see a limited usefulness in a polite confab that doesn't really help us know or love Him better.
Is there any other science in human life where the truths we affirm are the ones least objectionable to others? This is what I sense when I hear "Mere Christianity." It's merely whatever it is. "Jesus is Lord." That's what we're left with. What does that mean? You're gonna die for a bumper sticker now?
The reason why being Catholic really wasn't that hard is that if somebody makes a promise to give us clearer truth and purer lives instead delivers confusion and the same crap, different day, the prudent thing is to do is at least get rid of the cause of (doctrinal) confusion. If Sola Scriptura fails to produce agreement on the precise content of the gospel, the promise has failed. At least have the guts to say it was man's failure. Does Christianity still exist without the "Reformation"? Yes, duh.
There are 20+ centuries of human failure to stack up as reasons not to be in the Catholic Church. You really gonna tell me the wickedness 16 centuries in was SO BAD that we had to start over? Assuming that were true for the moment, why would there be a different way of ascertaining gospel truth as a result? I guess God really hated the human race for like a thousand years. He (apparently) let a completely fake "universal church" impersonate the real one. Millions of people (no, billions) went to Hell probably, doing exactly what the fake Church told them to do. Thank Heaven Luther and the rest of them showed up! What would we have done? Because people are always doing the right and true thing if they say the Holy Spirit led them. Don't worry if lots of these guys said so while saying radically different things. Because the Incarnate Word does that all the time. It's like a rave. When Jesus said "tell it to the church", He was totally talking about a nebulous, immaterial concept that varies in shape and content from person to person.
I hate to be rude. I love you. I want all of us to draw as close to Christ and each other as we can. What would He ask you to do that you would refuse? Is there a closeness with Him or with others that you don't want? Granting the fact that we agree on tons of things, I gotta ask about the rest of it. You could maybe dig back in history and find ambiguity on something to cast reasonable doubt on the exclusive claims of the Catholic Church. That's fine. I do know one thing: Your church didn't exist. Wherever that common truth came from, it didn't come from there. Just sayin'. Are you going to keep painting the target around the arrow, and hoping I don't notice?
It mystifies me that people passionately committed to objective truth in other areas of life, who battle relativism wherever it is found in the natural world, become rank postmodernists in theology and ecclesiology. Anything to avoid becoming Catholic. Yes, I'm talking to you, Protestant. Get some Protestants in a room, and it sounds like a bumper sticker. "Co-Exist." Peace and love. One big happy family. Based upon what? United by what? Anti-Catholicism? What would be the point of being a Lutheran Christian (for example) if, when push really came to shove, for all my passionate commitment to Lutheran doctrines, they'd take a back-seat to the whole of what God was doing in the "Church"? Seriously, stop wasting my time. I know the way you talk and think. So I have my truth, and your truth, and here's his truth, and her truth, and on and on. The only real sin is to believe that either we made a mistake in getting to this point, or God must be crazy, at best. Because God is God, I have to go with the first option.
When Dr. Carl Trueman said that Catholicism was the default position in the West (even though it should be the default everywhere) it bothered people. I mean, he's not Catholic. Does he want to give the papists ammunition? But I understood. I'm not staking my soul on a 'maybe'. Whatever I believe, I believe it with everything I have. I'll be circumspect about the weather, or my favorite Garth Brooks album. If the stakes are eternal life, and God come in the flesh, forgive me if I see a limited usefulness in a polite confab that doesn't really help us know or love Him better.
Is there any other science in human life where the truths we affirm are the ones least objectionable to others? This is what I sense when I hear "Mere Christianity." It's merely whatever it is. "Jesus is Lord." That's what we're left with. What does that mean? You're gonna die for a bumper sticker now?
The reason why being Catholic really wasn't that hard is that if somebody makes a promise to give us clearer truth and purer lives instead delivers confusion and the same crap, different day, the prudent thing is to do is at least get rid of the cause of (doctrinal) confusion. If Sola Scriptura fails to produce agreement on the precise content of the gospel, the promise has failed. At least have the guts to say it was man's failure. Does Christianity still exist without the "Reformation"? Yes, duh.
There are 20+ centuries of human failure to stack up as reasons not to be in the Catholic Church. You really gonna tell me the wickedness 16 centuries in was SO BAD that we had to start over? Assuming that were true for the moment, why would there be a different way of ascertaining gospel truth as a result? I guess God really hated the human race for like a thousand years. He (apparently) let a completely fake "universal church" impersonate the real one. Millions of people (no, billions) went to Hell probably, doing exactly what the fake Church told them to do. Thank Heaven Luther and the rest of them showed up! What would we have done? Because people are always doing the right and true thing if they say the Holy Spirit led them. Don't worry if lots of these guys said so while saying radically different things. Because the Incarnate Word does that all the time. It's like a rave. When Jesus said "tell it to the church", He was totally talking about a nebulous, immaterial concept that varies in shape and content from person to person.
I hate to be rude. I love you. I want all of us to draw as close to Christ and each other as we can. What would He ask you to do that you would refuse? Is there a closeness with Him or with others that you don't want? Granting the fact that we agree on tons of things, I gotta ask about the rest of it. You could maybe dig back in history and find ambiguity on something to cast reasonable doubt on the exclusive claims of the Catholic Church. That's fine. I do know one thing: Your church didn't exist. Wherever that common truth came from, it didn't come from there. Just sayin'. Are you going to keep painting the target around the arrow, and hoping I don't notice?
Comments
For example: there is no authority that defines the literary canon. Some people would include authors others would exclude. Does that mean talking of a literary canon is meaningless? Of course not, since we can point to the vast majority of overlap.
I would never ever accept the Catholic argument if it applied to any other realm of ideas. Why should I accept it here, if I don't accept a priori that I should and I have been enough of a student of history to firmly believe the Catholic interpretation that everyone was unified until the 11th century is far too simplistic.
Why would I die on a hill against my Lutheran brethren, for example, when I see the vast majority of what both of us care about and believes is exactly the same? When the crux of the Gospel is Christ and him crucified, I don't really see how it isn't pretty easy to get along with others who acknowledge the same.
Of course, I'm upfront that I'm a postmodern sympathizer. I think modernism was a terrible lie and postmodernism recognizes -- even if it doesn't realize it -- the impact of the fall. We disagree, we can't communicate, etc., and that's exactly how things go in the Bible.
I think the problem is that while your argument makes good, sound sense if you already believe the presupposition that the Catholic Church is the Church to the exclusion of all else, us Protestants need a lot less insistence and a lot more evidence.
There is plenty of evidence. My posts tagged 'Conversion' and 'Resources' have everything I read, and every question that I asked.
Basically, you tell me why I should accept your specific doctrines and authority over against any others. If you're not willing to affirm precisely these ideas, and show how alternatives are obviously incorrect, I submit you don't take any of this seriously enough. If you cannot, why should you blame anyone for thinking the whole Reformation was a useless, counter-productive enterprise.
United by knowledge of our own fallen condition, faith that Jesus died and rose again to redeem us from it, and reverent submission to his authority over our lives. That is not anti-Catholic.
My point about simplification is in itself quite simple: I've read historical documents. I've read historians -- including Catholic ones that weren't apologists, per se -- interacting with those documents with great skill. The church wasn't a unified block. There wasn't One Great Theology and then the Reformation came along and mucked it up with new ideas. The Reformation isn't an anomaly, it is something that is rather unsurprising after the lead up of the Great Schism, the Avignon Papacy, the anti-popes, the Conciliar movement, etc. Keeping in mind that the German church was probably more German than Roman for many times during the late middle ages, Trent was nearly as innovative as the Reformation. There was a very real tension between who was over whom re: the pope and the Holy Roman Emperor. There were real debates on the nature of the Eucharist. There were real debates on church polity. There were even major different strands of interpretation of Scripture -- Heiko Oberman has written the authoritative work on that.
My point, more generally, is that Protestants don't accept the notion we need to find an infallible authority beyond the written Word. All authority is derivative, ultimately, from God, so the question is merely at what point God's granting of authority comes into play. A centralized earthly authority isn't necessary -- it didn't exist in Israel, it doesn't exist in any other aspect of life... and people are able to survive OK. If anything, the Old Testament seems to consider centralized authority as a sign one has turned away from God as the king (when the people ask for a king).
That doesn't disprove your argument, but insisting that we need to prove Protestant authority according to Catholic terms only sounds good if you already accept the Catholic argument. And then, you might as well be Catholic. However, if we reject the argument, first somehow you need to get us Protestants to accept your presuppositions... if your goal with these posts is to convert us. If it is just to beat up on Protestantism, I guess that's a different matter.
Your reply just isn't true. But it has an unstated premise worth addressing: You assume that a crisis confers legitimacy on those who instigate it. There was only ever one pope at any given time; there can be only one at any time. For every Council, there might be considerable effort in discerning its meaning and application, but there is no doubt as to its authority. The very reason there is a pope in the first place is to clarify questions that arise, authoritatively.
The question was put to Luther: Do you accept the authority of the Councils as such? It's yes/no. If you say 'yes,' you're a Christian. If you say 'no', you're an innovator, making up a new faith. I'm punching a hole in derivative authority, nothing more, and nothing less. I don't care about the rest.
To be clear, the question to Luther on the councils was very intentional and done because the whole idea of the Pope deciding things wasn't a decided matter. By asking Luther to take a clear stand on the councils (and, as they suspected, a negative stand), Luther was forced to give up the support he had from the conciliarists.
The Church's faith is not defined by expert opinion, or PhDs, or thousands of pages. You are wrong. And so were the conciliarists.
It intrigues me that you place the comment here, as there has not been a fresh comment here for some time. Anyway, you cannot be holding the majority report on the faith once delivered if the community from whence you offer it did not physically exist at a previous time (after Christ established the Church).
While history is by no means a science, I do think one's background in faith or anything else shouldn't be a prerequisite to doing generally acceptable historical research. That is, if good historical evidence based on historical reports, artifacts, etc., suggests what I am saying is correct, why would that be invalid?