Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!csd4.csd.uwm.edu!cs.utexas.edu!rutgers!aramis.rutgers.edu!athos.rutgers.edu!christian From: horton@b11.ingr.com (Mac Horton) Newsgroups: soc.religion.christian Subject: Protestantism as Church (long) Message-ID: Date: 4 Sep 89 10:07:12 GMT Sender: hedrick@athos.rutgers.edu Organization: Intergraph, Deep in the Heart of Dixie Lines: 235 Approved: christian@aramis.rutgers.edu I've been thinking about the recent discussion in t.r.m of whether the Catholic Church is a schismatic body and am posting some comments here instead of t.r.m in hopes that the question will get a bit more thoughtful attention. The notion I'm exploring is that though few or no Protestant denominations regard themselves as being "the Church" in the same way that Catholicism does, Protestantism taken as a whole does exhibit a strong tendency in that direction, though it is not explicitly declared. There is no authority to decide what constitutes Protestantism, but there is a very strong consensus. Let me say at the outset that I'm really not drawing any real conclusions from this, but rather musing aloud on a way of looking at Protestantism. In t.r.m, Charley Wingate wrote: > As far as schizm is concerned here, let this event speak for itself. A > few years back, we had a service here at the chapel in celebration of the > 25th anniversary of the Epsicopal chaplain's ordination. It was a > eucharist. The entire christian chaplaincy turned out for this service > (except the mormons, assuming they are christian), including the RC > chaplain. Well, we get to communion, and while all the various protestant > chaplains are up there ministering communion in various ways, the RC > chaplain is standing, alone, in his pew. I can't think of anything that > speaks more eloquently to schizm than this. We could argue forever about whether the "RCC" is right or wrong in maintaining this separation, and I have no desire to do so. But along with the picture of Roman intransigence this story also suggests to me a picture of Protestant unity--a picture of Protestantism as a sort of Church unto itself, containing many communions which all afford each other more or less equal status, and within which doctrinal disagreements are not considered extremely serious. This Church is characterized very broadly by an emphasis on Scripture and individual judgment as the foundations of doctrine, with Church authority given a much smaller role. It is very conscious of itself as being in opposition to the Roman Catholic Church. Its doctrine is (again speaking very broadly) that of the Apostles' and Nicene Creeds (with perhaps an asterisk by "one holy catholic and apostolic Church"), and so it is in general conscious of being separated from certain other bodies such as the Latter Day Saints and Jehovah's Witnesses which depart from or add to those creeds, or to the Bible, in significant ways. (I know that some communions, the Baptists for instance, oppose the use of creeds, but I believe their doctrine remains mostly that of the creeds mentioned.) Some illustrative items follow. On the more fundamentalist side of Protestantism: -- Joe Applegate dismisses Catholicism as a non-Christian cult. Joe is far from being alone in the evangelical/fundamentalist/charismatic world in holding this view, cf. Jimmy Swaggart. -- David Buxton gives us a list of early (and not-so-early) Protestants who viewed the papacy as the anti-Christ. I was quite impressed (and depressed) by this list, especially as it included people who came along two hundred years later, such as Wesley. I had previously tended to think of these charges of "anti-Christ" as being hot-headed talk, not theology. (Catholics said much the same things about Luther at the time--from the Catholic point of view he would have seemed a monster luring people from the body of Christ--but while we continue to regard him as having been profoundly mistaken, I've never seen a Catholic statement of recent times which regarded him as uniquely evil.) Dave backs off some from the idea that the papacy remains the anti-Christ but seems to remain worried about a reversion. -- Barry Olson views Catholicism as having driven Christianity underground for a thousand years, and concurs vigorously with the anti-Christ view. I would be very surprised to find that he regarded any Protestant denomination so harshly, even if he had major disagreements with it. On the more "liberal" (how I've come to hate that word, as well as its supposed opposite, "conservative", but I keep using them because people probably know what I mean by them) side: -- Charles Hedrick views the Catholic Church (as well as the Mormons) as schismatic on the grounds that we do not recognize the sacramental actions of Protestant bodies; this implies the Church view of Protestantism, in that it becomes the body from which the schismatics are separate. (It is also a very Protestant definition of "schismatic", but that's another subject.) -- Charley Wingate seems to concur with Charles Hedrick. He complains about Catholicism's refusal to see itself as "just another denomination" (or words to that effect); again there is this implication of there being a body from which Catholicism is separated, and that body is not the Anglican or Lutheran or Presbyterian Church, but rather those communions which regard each other as equals--i.e., the Protestant Churches. -- In a long exchange with me on church authority and related issues, Michael Siemon, certainly not a man who seems to feel constrained to toe anyone's line of orthodoxy, nevertheless is willing to characterize his position as Protestant. This is interesting because he is as much at odds with many Protestants as he is with Catholics, yet he is willing to lump himself, if lump he must, with the P's rather than the C's. Again there is this sense of some basic common ground (the basically individualistic approach to doctrine which is fostered by Protestantism, I'd surmise). In general, -- Miscellaneous snide remarks and teasing from Protestants are hardly ever directed from one Protestant denomination to another, but rather to Catholicism or to one of the groups which are often or mostly considered outside the pale on the other end--Mormons, JW's. This suggests a sense of family or community among Protestants. Outside the net: -- A friend of mine who's a Presbyterian minister was recently thinking of becoming an Episcopalian. In talking about it with him I kept looking for, and not finding, the doctrinal reason for the change, since there is certainly a divide between classical Calvinist Presbyterianism and Anglican sacramentalism. But he kept talking about things which seemed to me to be mere matters of style. Eventually I realized that the old doctrinal arguments simply didn't matter much to him or, from what he said, to his denomination. And it occurred to me that we rarely or never speak of "converting" from one Protestant denomination to another, but do speak that way of transitions between Catholicism and Protestantism. Catholics tend to speak of "converts from Protestantism". A Jimmy Swaggart recruiting a Catholic might use a term like "saved", but there would still definitely be a sense of someone going over the wall. -- In my Protestant youth I often heard it said that "it doesn't matter which church you belong to". But looking back on it I realize that the implied scope of that indifference is really limited to Protestant communions; to become a Catholic is something else altogether. (Anecdote for Episcopalians: you're Romish enough to get included in that, too, sometimes, at least by Southern Protestants. A friend of mine who was being confirmed in the Episcopal Church invited her Baptist mother to the ceremony. When the bishop, robed and mitred, walked in, the mother burst into tears.) All in all, the application of the term "schismatic" to Catholicism has proven very fruitful to my thinking on this subject, not so much for what it says about Catholicism (I knew that already) as for what it says about Protestantism. There was a book published a while back on the American religious experience entitled _Protestant, Catholic, Jew_. The phrase comes to mind now; the three categories are sufficient to cover most traditional American religion but also distinct enough from each other to warrant separate consideration, while the differences among Protestants are of relatively much less significance. In the militant early days of my conversion to Catholicism, I tended to focus on differences and see Protestantism and Catholicism as almost being separate religions. More recently I've focussed on similarities, but have been pushed back in the other direction by net discussions. I think it's very much a matter of perspective, of whether one wants to see the glass as half-full or half-empty. I prefer to think of it as half-full. There's a missing piece here, of course, one which is missing from nearly all the Usenet discussions of Christianity. What of the Eastern Orthodox? Their doctrines are, I understand, not significantly different from Catholicism, barring the papacy and a few other things, and their perspective is shaped not by the Reformation but by very ancient tradition far afield from Euro-American Protestantism. Do they maintain the posture which is, in Hedrick's terms, schismatic? I suspect they do, but haven't had time to investigate it. What do they think of Protestantism? What do Protestants think of them? -- Mac Horton @ Intergraph | horton@ingr.COM | ..uunet!ingr!horton -- A love that's real will not fade away. --Petty/Hardin (via Buddy Holly) [You may be right in practice about Protestantism being in effect a single church. But I think this exaggerates both the unity among Protestants and the separation between at least the more liberal Protestants and Catholics. (I fear some of this exaggeration may be my fault, by the way.) It's hard to speak for all Protestants, but I don't know of any evidence that Protestants think of Protestantism as a super-church. Rather, I think when they speak of "the Church" in an absolute sense, they mean the entire Body of Christ. Protestants differ in their attitude towards Catholics. But I think aside from those who think it is the anti-Christ, the Protestant tendency is to consider the Roman Catholic Church as just another denomination. For myself, I certainly consider the RCC as prt of the Church, though it does from time to time act in ways that seem to deny its membership. Among Protestants, there is far from one happy family. I believe almost all of us acknowledge that there is only one Church. But cooperation is by no means uniform. You quoted Charley's experience with campus ecumenism. Certainly cooperation tends to be stronger. among campus ministers than in some other contexts. But even there it may be spotty. I heard a rather amusing story about a Methodist school in which no sponsor could be found for a Baptist youth group, so they ended up with the Catholic chaplain as their advisor! But cooperation tends to be on a case by case basis. There are general organizations to handle missions, Bible translation, preparation of Sunday School material, etc. Denominations participate in these organizations or not as seems appropriate. There may be a number of such organizations, for different groups of denominations. I don't think there is any organization to which every Protestant church belongs. The more conservative churches do not participate in the National and World Councils of Churches. There is a world alliance of Reformed churches (NB: the term "Reformed" means churches in the Calvinist and Zwinglian tradition, not all Protestant churches) that probably comes as close to acting the way you'd expect an ecumenical council to act, though of course everyone understands that in the current situation there can't actually be an ecumenical council that speaks for the whole church in the way that the early councils did. They actually had an official heresy proceeding a couple of years ago, and declared apartheit to be a heresy. But this group only includes one wing of the Protestant tradition. Yet despite the lack of organizational unity, I think there is a de facto agreement on meta-ecclesiology: that individual churches are "denominations" in one Church, which is the Body of Christ. And I think there is generally a respect for the actions of other churches, except where there are specific impediments (e.g. churches in the baptist tradition will not accept baptisms done by other churches unless they were done as an adult by immersion). I don't think anyone would fail to recognize a minister of another Protestant church as a minister, at least not for organizational reasons. In some cases they might refuse to recognize them as Christian, but the criticism would be that they rejected an essential tenant of the faith, not that their ordination wasn't valid. Similarly, people from extremely different churches might feel uncomfortable at each other's communion services. For example a Baptist might feel that "smells and bells" is not Biblical. But I don't think the issue would be one of validity in the sense that it comes up between Protestants and Catholics. It wouldn't be that a high church was somehow organizationally unauthorized or not a true church. There would just be objections to specific actions or beliefs. --clh]