JK: "A relative term. Which Protestant thinks he is NOT a "Bible-believing" person?"
But you have been showed a relatively consistent faith on these boards. Yes, I freely admit the synergist-monergist problem and I freely admit the disagreement on baptism. But at the core, from the vast majority of us you are getting the same message.
If there is any unity among Protestants, it would be that each person believes that the Bible is the sole source of Christian doctrine.
Yes, and you have seen that.
They freely interpret it as they see fit.
That is your personal interpretation of our interpretation. :) We believe the Spirit leads us.
Thus, even the most liberal of Protestants will fall back on "I am getting my interpretations from the Bible" and refute the more conservative Protestant who disagrees with them - even about homosexuality or women priests. (GACK!) And so disunity multiplies, as doctrines multiply as the number of heads increase in Protestantism...
I could start listing wayward Catholics but there are bandwidth concerns. :) I don't think you want to criticize Protestantism just for the fact that there are liberals who claim to be Protestants. I would say that we are all in the same boat on that one. You know the one faith I represent and you know of many others here on FR who share in it. You have to admit that if you read a certain theological comment from the blind you would have no idea if it was authored by me or any of a large number of people here.
FK, you yourself admit that we have NOT seen a cross-section of Protestantism on our "back-woods" threads. Most of the Protestants here are of the Reformed persuasion. I do not know why that is. However, most of you guys are Calvinists or some variation. I am in contact with Lutherans, Baptists, Episcopilians and Methodists. Again, I just don't think Protestantism is as monolithic as you are trying to make it out to be. How can you even state such if you do not know the beliefs of other Protestants?
We believe the Spirit leads us.
Can you show me some Scriptures that tells us that the Holy Spirit leads us in Bible study? I am curious, as it doesn't ring a bell. Maybe I skipped over it. Thanks.
I could start listing wayward Catholics but there are bandwidth concerns. :)
You could, but you would be wasting our time. Catholic TEACHINGS are monolithic. Now, whether "Catholic" people become "Protestant" and decide to pick and choose, that is not the Catholic way. The word "catholic" means "totality of the whole". By definition, the Greek word means we believe ALL of revelation, not what we decide suits our fancy. Thus, since there is only one body of teaching, there is only one faith in Catholicism, unlike Protestantism. The problem is not the teaching, but some of the people who are too attached to the world and prefer to think our faith is a democracy, rather than a revealed religion.
Regards
Now cut that out! (Jack Benny)
I think this is partly a terminology problem. I think we should retire to committee and come up with an acceptable term for more or less Calvinist, "Bible-believing" Protestant type personnel. That should take only about 6 months.
I am currently reading a (tendentious but not all that bad) collection of conversion stories. Of course a collection of conversion stories is going to be all about what a great choice it was. But so far all the non Episcopal converts were troubled by the wide range of doctrine, discipline, and worship practices among the various denominations, though some started out thinking that a multitude of denominations was a good thing on the grounds that at least one agreed with one's homies so there wasn't strife all the time. (My personal experience is that if it's a small country church there's gonna be strife. Ain' no fight like a church fight.)
One guy argues that as the Constitution needs to have a Supreme Court, so the Bible needs to have some kind of magisterium. If I were arguing for the Prots I'd say,"Have you heard of the Warren court?"
I'm not arguing one way or another here, but offering this for comment.
In my Friday inchoate thoughts, I'd like to say that when I was in the bidnis, I was pretty much a stickler for worship exactly as our denomination prescribed it. This included a wealth of possible variations, so it wasn't at all confining. My alleged THINKING was that we had accepted our orders from this branch of the Church and had sworn oaths of obedience and had acknowledged implicitly at least that the muckety mucks had the right to lay out what was and what was not acceptable liturgical behavior. It just seemed to me to be a matter of simple moral thought.
On a more group dynamic level I also thought we owed "our" people NOT our own particular notions of how things should be but their church's notions. They hadn't signed up in the Church of Mad Dawg but in the Episcopal Church. What was it about the temptation to lay MY trip on them and why would I not be content with the sermon as a chance to inflict my views on them?
But from the beginning - from "you have been faithful in little, take dominion over much," it seems to me that obedience in the relatively insignificant matter of whether the final benediction goes before or after the final hymn should be easy. It doesn't cost anything, it doesn't make the service longer or shorter, by any objective standard it's a matter of complete indifference. The only thing that makes one way "better" than the other is my whim.
And if I cannot give up my whim on a matter of indifference, how can I think that I will obey God on a matter of importance? If I cannot obey when obedience is easy and costs me nothing, where will I find obedience when the matter is hard and may cost me my money, my ease, my safety, my family, even my life?
What was clear was that for many in clerical vestments, the maxim is, "My way or the highway," no matter how lofty the expression of it.
It may be that one day God will ask something great of me. ("Okay, Mad Dawg, lose ten pounds.""No Lord, not THAT!") I'd like to think that when that happens I at least have had some experience in not having things my way. (I mean other than what I've learned in 32 years of marriage AND raising he thugatera mou -- it's not for nothing that the Greek word for daughter looks like 'thug'.)
Okay, I'll take my medication now.