Posted on 08/06/2003 8:17:24 AM PDT by kattracks
no you didn't it - you said gay people are summarily excommunicated and that there are no gay members of the church.
i corrected you, and as far as i can tell, you agree with my corrections since you largely repeated them back to me.
you ought to use more care when representing your faith to others, instead of bragging foolishly about how "tough on gays" your church is.
Sorry -- but my list is quite accurate:
"Calvinism prevailed in England since it was the theology behind the Thirty-Nine Articles (1563) of the Church of England" (Paul Enns, *Moody Handbook of Theology*. Chicago: Moody Press, 1989), p. 476.
The Episcopalians held as their subordinate standards the 39 Articles of Religion. This confession is Calvinistic in emphasis.
During that historic period, not only the 39 Articles of Religion ("Episcopalians"), but whenever you read of the Waldensians, the Bohemian Brethren (in Poland), the Huguenots, you're reading of churches that were Calvinistic.
Historic Protestant, Episcopalian doctrine is Reformed and Calvinistic. The Episcopalian church that adheres to its historic doctrine is still Reformed in the United States.
X. OF FREE WILL. 39 Articles of Religion.
The condition of Man after the fall of Adam is such, that he cannot turn and prepare himself, by his own natural strength and good works, to faith, and calling upon God.
Wherefore we have no power to do good works pleasant and acceptable to God, without the grace of God by Christ preventing us, that we may have a good will, and working with us, when we have that good will.
XVII. OF PREDESTINATION AND ELECTION Predestination to Life is the everlasting purpose of God, whereby (before the foundations of the world were laid) he hath constantly decreed by his counsel secret to us, to deliver from curse and damnation those whom he hath chosen in Christ out of mankind, and to bring them by Christ to everlasting salvation, as vessels made to honour.
Wherefore, they which be endued with so excellent a benefit of God, be called according to God's purpose by his Spirit working in due season: they through Grace obey the calling: they be justified freely: they be made sons of God by adoption: they be made like the image of his only- begotten Son Jesus Christ: they walk religiously in good works, and at length, by God's mercy, they attain to everlasting felicity.
* Luther was a Calvinist: Double Or Nothing: Martin Luther's Doctrine of Predestination Copyright © 1997 Brian G. Mattson
This is simply false.
The Thirty-Nine Articles were repugnant to British Calvinists, which is why the Anglican Church tried to suppress the Geneva Bible (the only English Bible approved by Calvin's followers in Geneva) and which is why the Puritans refused to swear an oath to adhere to the 39 Articles!
The Puritans who founded Plymouth Colony fled to America for a reason: their strict Calvinist beliefs caused them to be persecuted by the Anglicans!
To claim that the 39 Articles are Calvinist is just silly - they do not conform to Calvinism on the issue of Total Depravity, they do not teach pure Unconditional Election, nowhere is the doctrine of Limited Atonement to be found in them, and they teach cooperative grace and cast doubt on the Perseverance of the Saints.
And they flatly reject Calvin's notions of Church order.
the Waldensians, the Bohemian Brethren (in Poland), the Huguenots, you're reading of churches that were Calvinistic.
The Huguenots were Calvinists, certainly. They were nothing other than the members of the congregations that Calvin established in his native France.
But the Waldensians and the Bohemians (Hussites) were not even remotely Calvinist! Jan Hus taught transubstantiation in the Eucharist!
As for the Waldensians, I will quote their own Confession of 1655: "That good works are so necessary to the faithful that they can not attain the kingdom of heaven without the same, seeing that God has prepared them that we should walk therein; and there fore we ought to flee from vice, and apply ourselves to Christian virtues, making use of fasting, and all other means which may conduce to so holy a thing."
The Waldensians were hardly Calvinists.
OF FREE WILL
The article on Free Will is indistinguishable from the the doctrine of the Council of Trent.
OF PREDESTINATION AND ELECTION
Note that this article studiously avoids any mention of dual predestination.
Luther was a Calvinist
It's rather ridiculous to make this claim, since Luther's doctrinal positions were quite clearly expressed in the Augsburg confession while Calvin was still an unknown undergraduate.
The Augsburg Confession clearly contradicts Calvin on Church order and teaches that Baptism is necessary to salvation, as a sacrament which confers grace.
No, they haven't.
In no way do I plan to take the time to rehash all of that here.
You wouldn't say that if you had any means of refuting what I said.
It's interesting that you refer me to the entire works of long-outmoded historians rather than offering one substantive formulation in your own words.
Answer me this one question: If the 39 Articles of Religion are Calvinist and the Puritans were Calvinists, then why did the Puritans refuse to adhere to the Articles - why were they forced to flee?
Either Calvinists are in the habit of persecuting other Calvinists on religious grounds, or you're just plainly mistaken.
There were around three million persons in the thirteen original colonies by 1776, and perhaps as many as two-thirds of these came from some kind of Calvinist or Puritan connection"
This is simply false. 50% of the colonial population lived in NY, PA, VA and MD where Puritans and Presbyterians were a minority of the population - let's say one-third to be generous. Even if we assume that every last person in MA, CT and NH were Calvinists, which was scarcely the case, that makes up only 40% of the US population. If we assume that fully half the colonists in the Carolinas were Calvinists, which is also very generous, then that makes 50%.
A more realistic figure would be 35% - but there is no way that 66% can be squeezed, tortured or cajoled out of the numbers.
The only way you can get to 66% is by pretending that the Episcopal Church which persecuted the Calvinists was actually Calvinist in disguise and by pretending that Lutherans were Calvinists, an allegation which would certainly confuse any Lutheran pastor of the colonial period.
And, BTW, Boettner is an embarrassment. If any of you guys ever bothered to read Bancroft, you'd know that he was talking about the Puritans who agitated for independence in Boston and who later agitated for abolition: Bancroft was never so foolish as to suggest that Calvinists constituted a numerical majority of American colonists.
If you call the teaching of Calvin, "Hyper-Calvinism," then you're correct. I prefer to call Calvin's teaching, "Calvinism."
Calvin was the first to weave the scattered threads which he thought he had found in St. Paul, St. Augustine, Wyclif, Luther, and Bucer, into a strong network which enveloped his entire system of practical and theoretical Christianity. Thus he became in fact the systematizer of the dread doctrine of predestination. Although Calvin does not deny that man had free will in paradise, still he traces back the fall of Adam to an absolute and positive decree of God (Instit., I, 15, 8; III, 23, 8).Original sin completely destroyed the freedom of will in fallen man; nevertheless, it is not the motive of the decretum horribile, as he himself calls the decree or reprobation. Calvin is an uncompromising Supralapsarian. God for His own glorification, and without any regard to original sin, has created some as "vessels of mercy", others as "vessels of wrath". Those created for hell He has also predestined for sin, and whatever faith and righteousness they may exhibit are at most only apparent, since all graces and means of salvation are efficacious only in those predestined for heaven. The Jansenistic doctrine on redemption and grace in its principal features is not essentially different from Calvinism. The unbearable harshness and cruelty of this system led to a reaction among the better-minded Calvinists, who dreaded setting the "glory of God" above his sanctity. Even on so strictly Calvinistic a soil as Holland, Infralapsarianism, i. e. the connexion of reprobation with original sin, gained ground. England also refused to adhere to the strictly Calvinistic Lambeth Articles (1595), although in later years their essential features were embodied in the famous Westminster Confession of 1647 which was so strenuously defended by the English Puritans. On the other hand the Presbyterian Church in the United States has endeavoured to mitigate the undeniable harshness of Calvinism in its revision of its Confession in May, 1903, in which it also emphasizes the universality of the Divine love and even does not deny the salvation of children who die in infancy.
Of course not - Josephus is a primary source for historical data: which does not mean that his analysis should be accepted uncritically either.
But historians writing secondary accounts of events for which much more data is now available are quite capable of becoming outmoded: no serious historian would consider Gibbon an authority on Roman history any longer, nor would any serious historian consider Hume an authority on English history.
I hope you don't mind, but I'm not stupid enough to attempt to have a reasonable discussion with a person who holds such extremist positions.
You hold the extremist position.
I'm perfectly willing to give American adherents of Calvinism their full due as an important force in the creation and shaping of the American republic and its institutions.
Your notion - that America was populated and founded almost exclusively by Calvinists and that non-Calvinists barely even existed in colonial America - is the extreme position.
BTW - if you want to engage in a prolonged attempt to defend your religious beliefs, may I suggest you start a thread in the religion forum which has an apologetic section designed just for that purpose.
I'm not attempting to defend any particular religious belief on this thread - you are the one trying to Calvinize Luther and Cranmer, not I.
The fact is, you are factually wrong about the confessional makeup of colonial America.
You are factually wrong about who the Puritans were and why they came to America.
You are factually wrong about the professed beliefs of the Hussites and the Waldensians.
You are ignorant of the enormous conflict in Elizabethan and Stuart England over the 39 Articles - are you aware that the Calvinists of England engaged in a civil war with the Anglicans of that country over the doctrine and and structure of the Established Church?
Are you even aware that the most important English Calvinist confession - The Westminster Confession - was written to replace the 39 Articles, which Cromwell described as "popish"?
You really need to learn a bit about history.
1776 Declaration of Independence [excerpt]:
"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, *deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed*. [snip]
According to recent scholarship, this document was modeled after the Dutch Calvinist Declaration of Independence. In other words, this statement of basic principles was simply a restatement of what Protestant Political theorists and preachers had been saying for centuries. HERE
*
When one studies the history of New Testament "church government", one can readily see that the bottom-up, checks and balances, Republican form of limited government that America's Calvinist Framers gave us, is based straight out of the New Testament CHURCH GOVERNMENT example. [Acts 6:3; 1:15, 22, 23, 25; 2Cor.8:19, etc.] And Paul, Barnabus and Titus are shown as installing the elders that were chosen by the congregations [Acts 6:3-6; 14:23 and Titus 1:5].
Paul says to the whole church congregation: "Pick out from among you seven men of good repute, full of the Spirit and of wisdom whom we may appoint to this duty." (of servant aka deacon)
The apostles had the *unique authority* to found and govern the early church, and they could speak and write the words of God. Many of their written words became the NT Scripture.
In order to qualify as an apostle someone had to had seen Christ with his own eyes after he rose from the dead **and** had to have been specifically installed/appointed by Christ as an apostle.
In place of living apostles present in the church to teach and govern it, we have instead the writings of the apostles in the books of the NT.
Those New Testament Scriptures fulfill for the church today the absolute authoritative teaching and governing functions which were fulfilled by the apostles themselves during the early years of the church.
Because of that, there is no need for any direct "succession" or "physical descent" from the apostles.
*
John Adams - The Origin of Liberty of Conscience And Calvin's Geneva (Source, Charles F. Adams, ed., The Works of John Adams [1851] Vol. 6, p. 313-314) PRIMARY SOURCES
"After Martin Luther had introduced into Germany the liberty of thinking in matters of religion, and erected the standard of reformation, John Calvin, a native of Noyon, in Picardie, of a vast genius, singular eloquence, various erudition, and polished taste, embraced the cause of reformation.
In the books which he published, and in the discourses which he held in the several cities of France, he proposed one hundred and twenty-eight articles in opposition to the creed of the Roman Catholic church. These opinions were soon embraced with ardor, and maintained with obstinacy, by a great number of persons of all conditions.
The asylum and the centre of this new sect was Geneva, a city situated on the lake ancienty called Lemanus, on the frontiers of Savoy, which had shaken off the yoke of its bishop and the Duke of Savoy, and erected itself into a republic, under the title of a free city, for the sake of liberty of conscience. ....
*
Religion and Patriotism the Constituents of a Good Soldier Samuel Davies (1755) PRIMARY SOURCES
Samuel Davies-Presbyterian preacher and president of the College at Princeton. .. One of Davies' most fond disciples was Patrick Henry. .. The similarities between the tone and rhetoric here and the rhetoric of Henry are apparent:
"To protect your Brethren from the most bloody Barbarities--to defend the territories of the best of Kings against the Oppression and Tyranny of Arbitrary Power to secure the inestimable Blessings of Liberty, British Liberty, from the Chains of French slavery--to preserve your estates, for which you have sweat and toiled, from falling prey to greedy Vultures, Indians, Priests, French, and hungry Gallic Slaves, or not-more-devouring Flames--to guard your Religion, the pure Religion of Jesus, streaming uncorrupted from the sacred fountain of the Scriptures; the most excellent, rational and divine religion that ever was made known to the sons of Men; to guard such a precious Religion (my heart grows warm while I mention it) against Ignorance, Superstition, Idolatry, Tyranny, over Conscience, Massacre, Fire, and Sword, and all the Mischiefs, beyond Expression, with which Popery is Pregnant--to keep from the cruel Hands of Barbarians and Papists your Wives, your Children, your Parents, your Friends--to secure the Liberties conveyed to you by your brave Fore-Fathers, and bought with their blood, that you may transmit them uncurtailed to you Posterity --these are the Blessings you contend for; all these will be torn from your eager Grasp, if this Colony [Virginia] should become a province of France. And Virginians! Britons! Christians! Protestants! if these Names have any import or Energy, will you not strike home is such a Cause?...
*
William Livingston, "Of Party Divisions," Independent Reflector (1753) Swarthmore Edu.
"..Almost all the Mischiefs which Mankind groan under, arise from their suffering themselves to be led by the Nose, without a proper Freedom of Thought and Examination.
Upon this Priestcraft has erected its stupendous Babel, and Tyranny rear'd her horrible Domination. And indeed, well may we expect, as the righteous Punishment of our Guilt, to be abandon'd by Heaven to Delusion and Error, if instead of obeying the Directions of that sacred Ray of the Divinity, in Virtue of which we claim kindred with the highest Order of Intelligences, we blindly surrender ourselves to the Guidance of any Man, or Set of Men whatever."
Etc., etc., etc.
If you insist on engaging in an on-going discussion of Roman Catholic apologetics
I'm not on this thread to discuss the Catholic Church. I'm on this thread to discuss American history.
I'll ask you for the third time: if the Puritans who founded the Plymouth colony were Calvinists, and the Church of England was Calvinist, why were the Puritans fleeing religious persecution at the hands of the Church of England?
Why would Calvinists flee to the New World to escape the oppression of other Calvinists?
It's a question purely internal to Reformed Christianity - it has absolutely nothing to do with Catholicism whatever.
BTW
I'm sure that the Declaration of Independence was indeed modeled on the Dutch Declaration of Independence. But just because Jefferson used it as a model doesn't mean that the population of the Colonies was magically transformed into an all-Calvinist population.
As I said before, I don't dispute that Calvinists made a strong and important contribution to American Independence. What I dispute is your contention that no other group contributed in any meaningful way.
Posting provocative quotes that are off-topic doesn't change the fact that you know embarrassingly little about who founded this country and why they founded it.
If you have to prove it, you're going to hell anyway, don't you get it?
Better pick up some bag ice, chauvinist.
Why should he take it over there, while you bomb your bast and quote your aliquots proving your own wonderfulness over here? Seems to me that wideawake has the right to wax just as self-celebratory as you do, or to refute your self-consequent vaporings as he can.
I'll just stick around for a while to see if you start referring to yourself in the third person and citing and quoting your own dicta. Okay, you already are, but guys like you are fun to poke with sticks -- you need someone to hold up a mirror, lest you ripen in your error. So to speak, quoting myself.
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