Posted on 07/17/2011 9:28:15 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
The fact she left WELS because she was seeking higher office doesn’t sit well with me.
I can understand the issues it would pose, but if she didn’t believe what the Synod taught, she should have left before now.
The only defense could be that she is a Flake.
Odd that there is media interest in the details of the church a presidential candidate used to attend. There certainly wasn’t in 2008.
It doesn’t sit well with me either, redgolum.
This is now going to be used as a weapon. They are going to start doing this with every Christian body. Someone will dig up the X canon of the Synod of Y against some heretic or other and pressure a candidate to leave their church. We Christians tear each other apart, and Old Scratch’s agenda moves even farther.
I’m ashamed at those oversensitive Catholics who got all upset about this.
agreed. i like to think i take a back seat to no one on here defending the One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Faith. the fact that Bachmann belongs or belonged to a Lutheran sect that teaches the Pope is the Anti-Christ is no shock to me and would not preclude me from voting for her.
we all need to keep our eye on the ball, namely defeating zero and his leftist allies in congress. if bachmann is the person to beat him, count me in.
If she does’t get the nomination and runs for her seat again, she may have even tougher time as her district is predomately Lutheran...
If America is willing to put an ineligible Muslim in the WH it should be willing to put ANYTHING in it.
The orthodox Lutherans should point out that Luther hated the Jews a lot more than he hated the Catholics. Also, that Luther taught that it’s an unforgivable mortal sin to disobey the government.
These religious dogmas proved a tad bit embarrassing about 1944. One of the reasons there are more American Lutherans of German descent than there are German Lutherans nowadays.
Seems like Adolf Hitler was more of an anti-Christ than the Pope.
On the other hand, the guy wrote inspired church music.
Let’s not forget that Luther wasn’t the only founding Protestant; John Calvin provided as much, or more, of the intellectual rigor of Protestantism than Luther. And I say that as Lutheran.
(I used to be Anglican, but the Episcopalian church left me.)
All Protestant churches have an anti-Catholic subtext...the Anglicans spent their time ripping out statues and altars and killing Catholic clergy and faithful, and Lutheran and Calvinist-descended churches did everything they could in their areas to destroy Catholics. Anti-Catholicism was a standard feature of 19th century America, and even resulted in Catholic deaths at the hands of lynch mobs in places ranging from New York to the South to San Francisco.
There is a certain automatic anti-Catholicism in particular areas (in the South, for example, among both Anglicans and Evangelicals), and as a Catholic living in the South, I do occasionally find it difficult.
But both the Anglican and the Evangelical churches are coming to the realization that they will either be taken over by their liberal or flake wings or they will become more orthodox, and this means dealing with Christian history and the Catholic Church. So this story isn’t over yet. The Protestant churches (including both Anglicans and Lutheran/Calvinist descended churches) are only 500 years old, even younger than Islam, and the Catholic Church is 2000 years old.
That said, modern Protestant churches that come out of this “tradition” may hold to anti-Catholicism as one of their tenets, but it’s only theoretical and in most cases is not what they spend their time talking about. You could probably be a member of one of those churches for a long time without even knowing their theory on Catholics. As a member, you might have a mild cultural aversion to Catholics, but you probably wouldn’t realize that your church had initially regarded them as evil incarnate.
I doubt that Bachmann focused on the anti-Catholicism of her church, but on their faith, so I can see why she would have bailed on the church only after she had had to examine it more closely because she planned to run for office.
I don’t think she’s anti-Catholic or self-serving, and I think this is yet another attempt by liberals to divide us.
Yeah yeah and Romneys church adopts many really strange views as do the Roman Catholics..
Barry Half-Whites church is off the scales with weirdness..
If I might contrast Luther and Calvin, Luther was a pietist Christian, very emotional, perhaps this was the source of his truly wonderful prayers and music. Calvin was a theologian, very logical, and perhaps this was the source of his difficult to fathom doctrines that, when presented in simplified ways, seem ridiculous.
Luther harkened back to (certain) Old Testament prophets, to the (early) Fathers of the Church, and perhaps most especially to Augustine. He opposed Thomas Aquinas, the great scholastic. Luther developed a theory of free will in which only some were free, e.g., the princes of Germany, who could establish the church within their realm and against which decision the common man could not disagree.
Calvin proposed a more discerning doctrine of free will, such as we have free will given his doctrine of predestination. It was that we cannot, as individuals, revolt against secular authority, because of the awful cost involved. But, we could, as members of communities (or states within nations) do so. Effectively, this represented something of a middle ground between the radical individualism in at least some of the Thomistic scholars of the Catholic Church, and the Theocrats of the Lutheran Church.
Of course, in the Founding of the United States, it was Calvin along with Enlightenment thinkers that prevailed. We had a Calvinist-Deist consensus. Then, establishing religious freedom (which took quite a while), we became a refuge for all kinds of persecuted religious folk, from German Mennonites to English Quakers and also a variety of home-grown churches.
But, the influence of Calvin in the capitalist revolution in Europe is also evident. Holland, Switzerland and Scotland, where his ideas took root, emerged as places of industriousness, thrift, and the reform of the poor laws (so as to replace government welfare with private charity). Adam Smith and Thomas Chalmers and many others, steeped in Calvin’s ideas, developed the philosophy of a free society, from the workings of the market place to the workings of the family, the church and other forms of voluntary civic organization, and the proper, limited role of the government.
From time to time, the Catholics claim that they, too, hold to the limited government point of view, claiming that they are centrists in the sense of being somewhere between radical individuals and authoritarian state. But, my goodness, that is a wide expanse of territory.
To get back to orthodox Lutherans, from my point of view they need to evolve. Say that Luther’s criticism of the Catholic Church should be view as an application of the old adage “Power corrupts” (or, to quote Lord Acton precisely, “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely”). And as to whether the Catholic Church at one time in the past, with the apparent sale of indulgences, was so corrupt as to warrant being described as an Anti-Christ is an historical question that no longer has any religious importance. Nevertheless, the principle remains true We should always be on guard for the corrupting influence of power.
The biggest issue that any politician on the national stage would have with the WELS is that they forbid prayer with other synods or churches not in communion with themselves. This is just about what everybody did up to the early 1900’s or so. This would mean no prayer services, no prayer breakfast, etc. Honestly, I don't have an issue with that as the “prayers” tend to be so watered down you could be praying to your shoe.
But to leave your synod for political reasons is dang close to a mortal sin (or was in the old days). I think it was viewed as a form of Simony, but I am correctable on that count. If her motivations were sincere, and she felt she could not be WELS anymore, so be it. But the implication is she did it out of political necessity.
Interesting! To me, this indicates that perhaps she left it not because of anything to do with Catholics but because it had simply become such a restrictive splinter group that as she moved out into the big world she realized that it could never be, in a sense, the "true Church," and that anything that exclusionary was essentially a sect in the worst sense of the word (very akin to cult).
It sounds as if they didn't even get along with other Protestants or even other Lutherans, not to mention Catholics.
Makes family gatherings rather strained at times!
Calvin attempted to establish a theocracy, virtually the only one attempted in Christianity, and it failed. Some Calvinist-descended church groups (such as our Puritans) also attempted this, and it failed. Christianity and theocracy do not mix, which is why Mohammed had to invent an entirely new religion in his attempt to take over the world.
However, what Calvinism left was a bizarre type of civil religion, where abiding by the laws of the country was tantamount to being a good Christian. In other words, Calvinism in many ways set us up for liberalism, where the secular world becomes all important.
At the same time, because the secular world was so important, Calvinism made its adherents very attentive to the demands of civil society: earn money, pay your taxes, don’t rock the boat. It arose at a time when there was considerable civil strife in Europe and the new mercantile middle class was defining itself.
There are no Calvinist saints, that is, people who suddenly, impelled by the love of God, undertook vast works of charity or assistance. Members of Calvinist descended churches did the type of good works you would expect: they founded libraries (Andrew Carnegie) or did other improving activities. These are NOT bad things and I’m not criticizing them, but they are different from establishing leper hospitals! “Improvement” in secular terms was key, and now their descendants join up with Planned Parenthood...
The Catholic Church and the secular powers have fought each other virtually since the beginning, which was 1,500 years before Protestantism was even a gleam in Luther’s eye.
That said, treating one’s civic and economic duties as religious duties, which is fundamental to Calvinism, was definitely helpful in the establishment of the economies of Northern European countries and the US, when the time came. Perhaps both the Catholic and Orthodox churches had their eyes too much on Heaven at that time, although sadly the problem with Calvinism is that once its borrowed faith runs out and it stops looking to Heaven altogether, it turns into the rankest, most statist secular humanism, which is what we now see in the liberalism of places such as Massachusetts and other areas where Calvinism once held sway.
I suspect that having a Lutheran, or a former Lutheran, in the White House is preferable to having a muslim there.
Then again, maybe Bachmann’s religious opponents are right; maybe we should wait, not voting, until someone absolutely perfect comes along, someone who appeals to 100% of the American public.
I would have no problem with a WELS person in the White House. Would actually be kind of fun in that some of inside Lutheran baseball would get further play. I do have an issue of her deciding to leave solely on political grounds.
Looking at some old history, many Calvinists viewed material success with signs of God’s favor. The issues with that are obvious.
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