Didn't say it did, raz.
But as you admit “My way of interpreting their interpretations is governed by my own cultural traditions, just as yours is.” Your cultural tradition starts with a presumption of egalitarianism ala America and a knee-jerk anti-Catholicism. Consequently, if Catholics believe A you believe B.
There you go again, thinking you KNOW what I believe. I believe, and have stated so numerous times on this forum, that a great many things I agree with the Catholics. They did, at one time, hold to the same truths taught by the Apostles who in turn enscripturated those very same truths. Where a religion holds to those truths, I agree with them.
Protestants cut the cord of Christianity’s organic development out of Judaism. Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy cannot be understood without understanding pre-rabinnic Judaism. This is especially true of the Ethiopian Church, which largely converted from Judaism to Christianity.
I completely REJECT your assertion. You seem to be forgetting that what you casually refer to as Protestantism came about FROM the orthodox faith. Need I remind you that the early reformers were almost to a man Catholics? How could you presume Protestants do not honor the same Judeo/Christian heritage? I studied the Old Testament as well as the New, so I believe this is a "knee-jerk" reaction you have to anything that isn't hardcore Catholic. That word at one time MEANT universal but it has lost that meaning NOT at the fault of Protestants.
Tell ya what, I'm done hashing the same topics back and forth with you. It is obvious that you have no interest in learning or even hearing other views. You seem to be too busy labeling people and defining everyone else as some kind of heretic or another to actually engage in dialog. I hope you find the truth. Good night.
I completely REJECT your assertion. You seem to be forgetting that what you casually refer to as Protestantism came about FROM the orthodox faith. Need I remind you that the early reformers were almost to a man Catholics? How could you presume Protestants do not honor the same Judeo/Christian heritage? I studied the Old Testament as well as the New, so I believe this is a “knee-jerk” reaction you have to anything that isn’t hardcore Catholic. That word at one time MEANT universal but it has lost that meaning NOT at the fault of Protestants.
>>The Radical Reformation whose heritage your views seem to embody came about through the rejection of historic Christianity and even the rejection of the magisterial reformers like Luther and Calvin.
Your forebears created a new religion. If it bore any resemblance to Judaism, it was the rabbinical Judaism that was prevalent the 16th or 17th century in Northern Europe.
Rabinnical Judaism has very little in common with how Judaism would have been practiced in Christ’s era.
Well, you studied the Old and New Testament through the prism of the assumptions of the Radical Reformation. If you had been an Orthodox Jew chances are you would have had a completely different take.
http://www.jewsforjudaism.org/
Early Catholicism (I’m referring to the early Semitic/Hellenistic variety rather than the Western scholastic version you are accustomed to.) arose from the traditions of Hellenistic Judaism, which differed in many ways from modern Rabbinical Judaism.
Frankly, having dialoged with Orthodox Jews, Eastern Christianity has far more in common with Judaism than either Protestantism or Western Catholicism.
If you want to understand Orthodox/Catholic worship, you have to delve into the sacrifice of the lamb book of Revelation and into the Jewish temple. The reminders of the temple are far clearer in Eastern Christian worship than in the post-Reformation West.
Everything we do is symbolic of imagery from the Book of Revelation. That’s why our priest wear vestments, etc. The Semitic Churches of the Middle East still draw a curtain during the most solemn point of the liturgy.
Visit a Coptic Orthodox or a Syriac Orthodox parish sometime because they have more faithfully retained the essence of primitive Christian worship than any other Christian bodies.
I’m sorry but I stand by my perspective that the Radical Reformers created a new religion out of their imaginations of what the early Church was like. They engaged in serious eisegesis that began with the rejection of all things Catholic.
For crying out loud the early Lutherans saw themeselves as Evangelical Catholics. Lutheranism and possibly orthodox Anglicanism has far more in common among the Protestant sects with early Christian worship and practice than the Reformed or the Radicals.
You seem to be too busy labeling people and defining everyone else as some kind of heretic or another to actually engage in dialog.
>>The feeling is mutual. Trouble is. I’ve heard views of people such as your own my entire life. How could I have avoided it growing up in a Protestant household with a Fundamentalist uncle who would come over to my house spewing fire and brimstone.
Not to mention, all of my friends in college were Evangelical Protestants. I thought over the arguments you have been presenting almost 20 years ago and decided that they were incomplete and/or erroneous.
The rot of the mainline Protestant denominations into liberal apostasy, which actually began with the rise of Pietism in the 17th century, shows Protestantism’s fruits.
Matthew 7:16.
Protestantism’s bitter fruits have been felt within the Catholic Church since the rise of Jansenism in the 17th and 18th centuries and Modernism in the 19th-21st centuries.
Conservative Protestants use the same arguments as the liberals, but arrive at opposite conclusions.