I dont think you know many Orthodox. They feel the same way about their Church as Catholics do about ours.
I should and do apologize. I got overheated. But, my mind has not changed.
God became incarnate in the person of Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ dwells in his Church. The Church is not a bunch of people who come together because they each believe in Christ. The Church is an organic unity in which Christ dwells and is manifest in his sacraments (which are other forms Christs manifestation).
The church cannot be created. The Church is given to humanity at pentecost. It is not a club or voluntary association. It is not a legal entity. It is Christ’s body carried to each generation through the laying on of hands of clergy and the baptism of the faithful. Its unity is organic, real, visible.
It is not your churches which are unworthy of respect, but you idea of church that is so impoverished that it excuses the historical and real mess the reformation has made of things. Every time protestants make a mess, they invent a new theology to excuse it. Gay theology is just the latest example of this.
Protestant ecclesiology is first of all a misnomer. And, secondly, it is just wrong. By spiritualizing the church as some entity known only to God that included the true believers or the saved or whatever you comfort youselves in your folly and utter rejection of the unity that Christ prayed for.
The zillions of Protestant Churches are the origin of relativism and thus are responsible for the ongoing breakdown of Western Civilization.
Actually relativism manifested in post-modernism today is a reaction to the 18th Century Enlightenment, a movement largely promulgated and founded in France, a country which, after its monarch slaughtered tens of thousands of Protestants in the 1550s or hounded them out, was 95%+ Roman Catholic. Many contemporary post-modernist thinkers today hailed from France—and have no “Protestant” background to their atheism.
To blame the lack of faith in the West today on the Reformation is silly, as the festering boil of late medieval Roman religious corruption was bound to pop sometime, and those who lanced the boil reduced its infection—even while preaching the bible in lands which didn’t burn them alive. America’s first English colonies themselves were in a way a continuation of the Reformation—and to love America at all one must be grateful for the religious toleration which only eventually came out of majority Protestant places—like the USA. Even now, try being a Baptist in Spain or France... It’s not easy.
I dont think you know many Orthodox. They feel the same way about their Church as Catholics do about ours.
I can't vouch for how they feel, I can only say I rarely hear/read the sort of anti-Protestant remarks from them that I do from Catholics. That's just my experience.
I should and do apologize. I got overheated. But, my mind has not changed.
My mind hasn't changed either (imagine that!), but I also apologize. I shouldn't have used certain words (esp. "obnoxious"). We'll probably be forced to sit at the same table at the wedding feast of the Lamb, like bratty kids forced to sit at the same Thanksgiving table.
Every time protestants make a mess, they invent a new theology to excuse it. Gay theology is just the latest example of this.
Why is it when Catholics make a mess you explain it by saying they're not really Catholics, but you don't extend the same logic to Protestants? "Gay theology"? What is that? Is that like Catholic pedophile theology? There's no Potestant gay theology, just like there's no Catholic pedophile theology. Both Catholics and Protestants have their loons. Some get found out, some don't. Some get the boot, some don't.