Posted on 11/03/2011 7:29:48 AM PDT by marshmallow
Imagine that the Occupy Wall Street protest continued for years, during which time the community of protesters divided into different factions, each with different beliefs, different demands, and different leaders. But the protests continued for so long that the protesters eventually built makeshift shanties and lived in them, and had children. These children grew up in the protesting communities, and then they too had children, who also grew up in the same communities of protesters, still encamped in the Wall Street district. Over the course of these generations, however, these communities of protesters forgot what it was that they were protesting. They even forgot that they were protesting. Life in the shanties in Wall Street was what these subsequent generations had always known. They did not even know that they had inherited a protesting way of life, separated from the rest of society.
When asked by a reporter what Wall Street would have to change in order to get them to return home, they looked at him confusedly, and responded, “We are home; this is home.” They no longer had any intention to ‘return to society’ upon achieving some political or economic reform. For them, camping out on Wall Street was life as normal, and those with whom they had grown up camping simply were their society.
What if Protestantism in its present form is the fractured remains of a Catholic protest movement that began in 1517, but which has long since forgotten not only what it was protesting, but that it was formed by Catholics, in protest over conditions and practices within the Catholic Church? What if Protestantism has forgotten that its original intention was to return to full communion with the Catholic Church when certain conditions were satisfied?
During the week approaching Reformation Sunday last year those questions prompted me to write, “Trueman and Prolegomena to “How would Protestants know when to return?”.” I included the term ‘prolegomena’ because before discussing the conditions under which Protestants can return to full communion with the Catholic Church, Protestants (and Catholics) must first recover the memory of our history, not only our shared history as one Church prior to the sixteenth century, but also the history by which we came to be divided during that century. Recovering that history shows not only that the early Protestants never intended to form a perpetual schism from the Catholic Church, but also helps us remember that Protestant communities are by their history, communities in exile from the Catholic Church, and thereby by that history ordered toward eventual reconciliation and reunion with the Catholic Church. According to that history Protestantism began as a protest movement initially made up of Catholics protesting the Catholic Church and seeking to reform her; it was never intended to remain perpetually in schism from her. Semper Reformanda does not translate as “perpetually in schism.” Hence in “Trueman and Prolegomena” I quoted Protestant professor of historical theology Carl Trueman, who wrote:
[W]e [Protestants] need good, solid reasons for not being Catholic; not being a Catholic should, in others words, be a positive act of will and commitment, something we need to get out of bed determined to do each and every day.
Yet even among those Protestants who retain the memory of Protestantism’s origin as a Catholic protest movement, Reformation Day is typically viewed as a day of celebration. On Reformation Sunday of 2009, we posted a 1995 Reformation Day sermon by the Protestant theologian Stanley Hauerwas, named by Time magazine as America’s best theologian. A few weeks ago I had a chance to talk with Hauerwas in person, and he said that he still affirms every word of that sermon. In that sermon Hauerwas says:
After all, the very name ‘Protestantism’ is meant to denote a reform movement of protest within the Church Catholic. When Protestantism becomes an end in itself, which it certainly has through the mainstream denominations in America, it becomes anathema. If we no longer have broken hearts at the church’s division, then we cannot help but unfaithfully celebrate Reformation Sunday.
Tomorrow will be celebrated by many Protestants as “Reformation Sunday.” To be sure, part of what Protestants celebrate on Reformation Day are what they believe to be the truths upheld and preserved within Protestantism. But without careful qualification, celebrating “Reformation Day” while remaining separated from the Catholic Church is a kind of performative contradiction, because it implies that separation, not reform, is the ultimate goal of the protest. Celebrating Reformation Day can be for that reason like celebrating a divorce, or more accurately, celebrating estrangement from our mother and from all our brothers and sisters who remain in her bosom, when in truth Christ calls us all to full communion and prays that we would be one. Moreover celebrating what is a division can blind the celebrants to the evil of that continuing division, just as celebrating divorce could blind children to its evil, or celebrating abortion could blind the celebrants to its evil.
But Reformation Day can be approached differently. It should be an annual reminder of the continuation of the evil in our midst that is the Protestant-Catholic division, a division that causes scandal to the rest of the world regarding the identity and efficacy of Christ’s gospel. In that respect, Reformation Day is a day to ask ourselves the following question:
What have I done, since the last Reformation Day, to help bring reconciliation between Protestants and Catholics?
If the answer is ‘nothing,’ then by our inaction we are in actuality perpetuating the schism which has continued now for almost five hundred years. Reformation Day ought therefore be a day in which Protestants are reminded to enter into authentic and charitable dialogue with Catholics, and Catholics are reminded to enter into such dialogue with Protestants, in order to put this schism behind us as a tragic event in Church history, through which God can nevertheless bring good. The lot of those who despair over the possibility of reconciliation is to die without seeing it. However, that generation who in faith truly believes that with God nothing is impossible will live to see it, and will be graced with the everlasting privilege of being the instruments through which this reconciliation is accomplished.
Having recollected our memory of our history, and a shared understanding of the early Protestants’ intention to reform the Catholic Church, not to form a schism from the Catholic Church, each Protestant faces the following question: How would I as a Protestant know when to return? No one Protestant can answer that question for all Protestants, because no one Protestant has the authority to speak for all Protestants. Each Protestant therefore must answer that question for him or herself.
But at the same time, the Protestant is faced with a second-order question and a second-order problem. The problem is that if we survey a thousand Protestants, and ask each what the Catholic Church would have to change, in order for him or her to stop protesting and be reconciled to the Catholic Church, we get almost a thousand different answers. When the Protestant reflects on his own act of setting conditions that the Catholic Church must meet in order for him to return to full communion with her, he is faced with an awareness that because each Protestant has a different set of conditions for return, and because he has no unique authority above that of all other Protestants to speak for all other Protestants, his very approach makes Protestant-Catholic reconciliation impossible. That’s because even if (per impossible) the Catholic Church could abandon her own doctrine and adopt a Protestant doctrine, the Church could not possibly adopt and simultaneously hold the incompatible Protestant positions on any particular theological question.
The Protestant who reflects on this cannot but notice that to approach reconciliation this way is to fall into ecclesial consumerism, as each person demands that the Church conform to his own interpretation of Scripture before he will submit to her. Implicit in the very nature of an “I won’t return unless the Church does x” condition for reconciliation is a denial of ecclesial authority, a denial that not only presumes precisely what is in question between Protestants and the Catholic Church with respect to the existence of magisterial authority, but implicitly exercises that magisterial authority. So the second-order question is this: How can a Protestant pursue an end to the Protestant-Catholic schism without falling into ecclesial consumerism?
If, as Neal and I argued in “Solo Scriptura, Sola Scriptura, and the Question of Interpretive Authority,” to make conformity to one’s own interpretation a condition for submission is performatively to make oneself one’s own authority, the Protestant’s very act of laying out a list of conditions for reunion with the Catholic Church is not a theologically neutral act. In this act the Protestant intrinsically arrogates to himself an interpretive authority exceeding that of the magisterium of the Catholic Church. He is therefore confronted not only with the changes he wants to see in the Catholic Church, but with the realization that if he sets conditions that the Catholic Church must satisfy in order for him to return to full communion with her, he is performatively arrogating to himself ultimate interpretive authority, and seeking to conform the Church to the image of his own interpretation of Scripture. So the question I invite our Protestant readers to answer is not “What would the Catholic Church have to change in order for me to return to her?” but rather, “What does the multiplicity of Protestant answers to that question reveal about both the prospects and presuppositions of that approach to Protestant-Catholic reconciliation?
Catholic-Protestant reunion will never happen.
Luther founded a new religion. There’s no comparison between how the early Christians believed and what Lutherans or any Protestant sects believe.
The idea that Luther rediscovered the early Church is a myth and is completely unhistorical.
The only Christians who have any grounds to question the Church of Rome on the degree of Roman centralism are the Eastern Orthodox.
The Protestant view of early Church history is unhistorical. Your demands that the Catholic Church conform to the Protestant view of scripture is typical of all revolutionary groups.
Luther and Calvin have more in common with Robespierre or Lenin than they do with St. Athanasius of Alexandria who resisted the Arian heresy and led the reform of the Church or St. Francis of Assisi who preached against corruption in the Church.
The Eastern Orthodox similarly anathematized Protestant theology because it is heretical. So have all of the Churches that have any sense of history (Coptic, Greek, Russian, Armenian, Syrian, Ethiopian, etc.)
Protestants are mission territory.
You’ve got it backwards, and I’m sorry about that.
Catholics believe only in Christ as our savior.
We ask Mary and the saints to pray for us, after all their spirits are alive in heaven, right? And they are much closer to Christ there, right?
Please check into upgrading your thoughts here and not believing some of the publications/comics, etc. that you may have been brainwashed with? OK?
Catholics WERE the first Christians. Or you could say it the other way.
Christians were the first Catholics......after all, didn’t Christ himself choose the twelve apostles and form his church from them?
No, those are mortal humans. You might as well be conducting ancestor worship.
The only way to God in heaven is through Jesus Christ.
That’s your belief. Not everyone’s. In fact, many disagree with you.
I am just not into human or ancestor worship.
The way to God goes through Jesus only, if you are praying to anyone else then you are not a Christian. Period.
The words Catholic and Pope do not appear in the Bible, do they? Did Christ claim that any man would be infallible the way Catholics claim the Pope is? Did Christ teach us to pray to dead ancestors or did he say the only way to God was through him (Christ)? So I guess those who followed Christ in his lifetime were NOT the first Christians?
Nope. None of the above.
Sorry, we're out of time for this show.
Well, that’s your opinion. Whether I am or not is not up to you, as you are not a religious authority, or any kind of authority, to me.
Ps. the words railroad train and atomic bomb do not appear in the Bible, either. Sid Christ claim that you would be infallible? Did He say you would be the religious arbiter of who was or was not His follower?
Nope, None of the above.
Did a Krakatoa Eruption in 535 A.D. Help Precipitate the Decline of Antiquity and the Spread of Islam?
http://www.semp.us/publications/biot_reader.php?BiotID=214
I’m inclined to agree with you Hacksaw. However, I would also ask fatboy the same question in return — Why are non-catholics so obsessed with getting Catholics to quit their church and join their groups? In places I’ve visited in India, Eastern Europe, even Western Europe, the targets of some non-Catholic groups were not non-Christians, not even liberals/secularists, but Catholics.
Who knows? They are like Libertarians obsessing over reefer laws while the nation is crumbling around us. You'd think by now they would have realized that Catholics are not "going away", but it has become a monomania. I'm tempted to put a statue of the Blessed Mother in the front yard as a polite way of saying "No Thanks".
or better put a Crucifix on the door with the sign: “I’m Christian Catholic, we’ve been around for 2000 years heard all of your marketing ploys and aren’t impressed. Bye-bye”
You will simply attract more missionaries that way.
Then, there are others who look at the current organization, ask how it got that way, and then target very specific items ~ e.g. loss of discipline in the ranks ~ always a good example since that has been the major impetus within Catholic circles for centuries.
All you have to do is read through "Lives of The Saints" to pick up on these things.
More recently (in the 1500s) there were movements in Spain that looked like they would create a schism between the Spanish church and Rome ~ the solution was to hand over the Americas to those elements in the Spanish church to keep them busy ~ and boy did they. You can find that material in "The Catholic Encyclopedia". It's right there ~ the threat of schism ~ and in older materials as well.
There's value in putting this stuff up front so that folks downstream in history can look at it and say "Wow, weren't those the guys doing the Spanish Inquisition? Wasn't Rome tough enough for them?"
I still haven't digested all of it, but apparently a full-blown Protestant experience was throttled in the cradle simply by sending out the Church's proponents of such to do missions.
Just in case there are folks who wondered what happened to the Reformation in Spain ~ apparently it won!
When it comes to going back all the way to the original congregation in Jerusalem, there is sufficient history (much of it extra-Biblical but contained in a variety of documents Catholics still lean on as justification for traditional practices) to do just that. Everybody has always known that.
If you wanted to recreate the First Century church you can do it except you won't have Jesus in the flesh AND the top guys will be running off to do some serious mission work. At the same time you could easily move forward just a tad and have a Second Century church, and surprise, surprise, it looks pretty much like the core of the Orthodox church but without much mission work.
Fourth Century is where you get a real bloom in Christianity when it became a state recognized body ~ Third Century you find some pretty serious persecution. But that Second Century church had a much more peaceful existence outside the main currents of Rome and it can be put together if anybody wants to.
Just ask the Catholics for the records and there it is.
This was, in fact, done by Alexander Campbell. It works. The idea didn't sweep Christianity, but it works, just like it did way back when.
Shouldn't be a surprise.
The movement to re-establish the original church is ALSO identified as a Protestant movement ~ which is actually bizarre if you think about it.
“I’d like to know if the Catholic Church has even repented of approving torture and death for heretics. Maybe they can’t satisfy all the different Protestant demands, but I think every believer in Christ should be able to agree that was a big mistake.”
A few years back a Pope made a very general statement that the church had made some mistakes in the past.
They do, all the time and every time they go to confession. The extraordinary thing to consider is how screwed up some of the leadership has been and how ineffective they have been at manipulating dogma for their ends. The problem is not the weak, sinful people that sometimes have leadership positions, it's our individual unwillingness or just plain sloth, to spend the time to truly understand what the church teaches and why. That and the fact that many non-Catholics want to continue to use birth control, get divorces miss church services, etc. with out much or any guilt.
Humans seem to have problems with rules, Adam and Eve only had one and look what happened there. Lucifer was the first free thinker and his not just against God but the very concept of hierarchy, he was the first anarchist. God gave form and structure to everything, seen and unseen, why wouldn't he do the same for His Church?
Well, I guess that’s a start.
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