Welcome Guest [Log In] [Register]
We hope you enjoy your visit!
You're currently viewing Catholic CyberForum as a guest. This means you are limited to certain areas of the board and there are some features you can't use. If you join our online cyberparish, you'll be able to access member-only sections, and use many member-only features such as customizing your profile, sending personal messages, and voting in polls. Registration is simple, fast, and completely free.
Join our community!
Messages posted to this board must be polite and free of abuse, personal attacks, blasphemy, racism, threats, harrassment, and crude or sexually-explicit language.
If you're already a member please log in to your account to access all of our features:

Username:   Password:
Locked Topic
When Is A Protestant Not A Protestant?
Topic Started: Friday, 7. September 2007, 16:44 (759 Views)
Deleted User
Deleted User

Although as Catholics, we generally regard all the non- catholic religions who proclaim them selves to be Christian as Protestant it is actually a specific term referring to a particular group of Christians who protested against Rome.
Anglicans/Episcopalians and Methodists/Wesleyans are not protestant although there are elements of the low church Anglican which will have more in common with the Lutheran/ protestant faith than with the High Anglo Catholic element.
There are five main groupings of non- catholic religions who through having a Trinitarian baptism can claim to be Christian

Orthodox
Lutheran
Reformed/Presbyterian
Anglican/ Episcopalian
Methodist/Wesleyan
Baptist
Interestingly the Salvation Army is not a Christian organisation, in spite of the famous hymn by which they march, this is because they do not require baptism as a rite of admission. To though some members of the army are baptised and then join the army as a sort of Christian association, thus adding to the confusion because they are Christian but the group they represent is not although it acts in the name of Jesus. However, there are many 'Christian groups' who fail to act as Christians.
However I am not sure what any of this has to do with the price of cheese.
Goto Top
 
Rose of York
Member Avatar
Administrator
Does the Salvation Army believe in the Trinity? Does it accept that Jesus is divine?
Keep the Faith!

Offline Profile Goto Top
 
OsullivanB

Rose of York
Sunday, 3. May 2009, 14:52
Does the Salvation Army believe in the Trinity? Does it accept that Jesus is divine?
They believe both of those truths.
http://www.salvationarmyusa.org/usn/www_usn_2.nsf/vw-dynamic-index/CE33D354A0544F368025732500314AF5?Opendocument
"There is a principle which is a bar against all information, which is proof against all arguments and which cannot fail to keep a man in everlasting ignorance - that principle is contempt prior to investigation." Herbert Spencer
Offline Profile Goto Top
 
PJD


Add to these numbers all those for counting re Karl Rahner's coined phrase....... 'anonymous Christians'.

PJD
Offline Profile Goto Top
 
tomais

Tunnelvisagionists look in here !
So much arrogance when individual souls globally are running around day by day by year to eternity!
Christianity may well be morphed into Judaism Islamism
Now who will be around to sound off then ?
No one knows none; the end of the world will be one day nigh/
Tom
Offline Profile Goto Top
 
Bob Crowley

OsullivanB
Saturday, 2. May 2009, 12:10
When I find a copy, I will. It's too expensive for me to buy on a speculative basis.
Meanwhile I have two whole shelves of unread books relating to my own faith written by people with good credentials.
You can read the book online, or print it off for nothing by going to the following link.

http://www.tentmaker.org/books/MartinLuther-HitlersSpiritualAncestor.html
Offline Profile Goto Top
 
Bob Crowley

Penfold
Sunday, 3. May 2009, 13:10
Although as Catholics, we generally regard all the non- catholic religions who proclaim them selves to be Christian as Protestant it is actually a specific term referring to a particular group of Christians who protested against Rome.
Anglicans/Episcopalians and Methodists/Wesleyans are not protestant although there are elements of the low church Anglican which will have more in common with the Lutheran/ protestant faith than with the High Anglo Catholic element.
There are five main groupings of non- catholic religions who through having a Trinitarian baptism can claim to be Christian

Orthodox
Lutheran
Reformed/Presbyterian
Anglican/ Episcopalian
Methodist/Wesleyan
Baptist
Interestingly the Salvation Army is not a Christian organisation, in spite of the famous hymn by which they march, this is because they do not require baptism as a rite of admission. To though some members of the army are baptised and then join the army as a sort of Christian association, thus adding to the confusion because they are Christian but the group they represent is not although it acts in the name of Jesus. However, there are many 'Christian groups' who fail to act as Christians.
However I am not sure what any of this has to do with the price of cheese.
Where do the Copts fit in? What's their origin?
Offline Profile Goto Top
 
Deleted User
Deleted User

Bob thanks for forcing me back to the books :study:

Talking of Catholics and Protestants is to limiting. I listed the 5 main groups of non-catholic Christians (by non-catholic I mean non-Roman Catholic), there are several others.
If we wish to engage in meaningful ecumenical dialogue we need to acknowledge the differences and negotiate with the various groups from a position of respecting the true differences rather than simply regarding all from the prejudicial position of classifying anything that is not Roman Catholic as Protestant
As I understand it the Copts are often grouped along with the Eastern Orthodox churches but I accept this is an over simplification.
The Copts from the point of view of the Roman Catholic Church came into official existence after the formal split resulting from the Council of Chalcedon (Council of Chalcedon (Christianity)) in 451. Copts claim their origins go back to St Mark who founded their church in Alexandria in the first generation of Christianity
To add to the confusion there where Copts who accepted the theological rulings of Chalcedon and they became known as Melkite and again these split into those who accept the primacy of Peter and since the 18 centuary have been in full comunion with Rome and others who are in comunion with the Greak Orthodox Church. This I fear is the limit of my knowledge of the subject, O'Ratty over to you.
Goto Top
 
Bob Crowley

Penfold
Monday, 4. May 2009, 07:58
Bob thanks for forcing me back to the books :study:

Talking of Catholics and Protestants is to limiting. I listed the 5 main groups of non-catholic Christians (by non-catholic I mean non-Roman Catholic), there are several others.
If we wish to engage in meaningful ecumenical dialogue we need to acknowledge the differences and negotiate with the various groups from a position of respecting the true differences rather than simply regarding all from the prejudicial position of classifying anything that is not Roman Catholic as Protestant
As I understand it the Copts are often grouped along with the Eastern Orthodox churches but I accept this is an over simplification.
The Copts from the point of view of the Roman Catholic Church came into official existence after the formal split resulting from the Council of Chalcedon (Council of Chalcedon (Christianity)) in 451. Copts claim their origins go back to St Mark who founded their church in Alexandria in the first generation of Christianity
To add to the confusion there where Copts who accepted the theological rulings of Chalcedon and they became known as Melkite and again these split into those who accept the primacy of Peter and since the 18 centuary have been in full comunion with Rome and others who are in comunion with the Greak Orthodox Church. This I fear is the limit of my knowledge of the subject, O'Ratty over to you.
Well, as my old pastor said as he reflected on his admission that he wondered if Protestants get to heaven, and what he thought seemed to be what God was telling him,

"Boy! What a mess!!"
Offline Profile Goto Top
 
Deleted User
Deleted User

Bob Crowley
Monday, 4. May 2009, 09:10
Well, as my old pastor said as he reflected on his admission that he wondered if Protestants get to heaven, and what he thought seemed to be what God was telling him,

"Boy! What a mess!!"
ALas he was right,
Goto Top
 
Deleted User
Deleted User

I have nothing of my own to add here, and nothing at all of a historical or "technical" nature (sterile considerations of "validity" and so on). I wish only to recommend very earnestly two posts by my beloved Father Stephen. Both of these pieces address approaches, attitudes, habits of mind thought of as classically "protestant", but which are becoming broadly characteristic of modern Christianity in general. Father believes, as do I, that these are descriptive of something other than - if not utterly remote from - catholic, apostolic Christianity.

Quote:
 

How much is too little? How much is enough?
I am convinced that for an increasing number of Christians, an increasing number of essential elements are no longer essential to what they believe - the result being the creation of increasingly new belief systems. These may still be described as Christianity, because they are religions centered around the figure of Jesus Christ, but are, in fact, new belief systems...

...I believe that there is a truncated version of Christianity that is moving towards a dominant position with our religion. It is simply the atonement - largely taught in the language of penal substitution, as the only important dogma of the faith. Thus to believe that “Christ died for our sins,” means anywhere and everywhere that he paid a price that we could not pray and that by trusting in Him we will be spared the punishments of Hell. Everything else, if mentioned at all, is simply a corollary to that single thought...

...

There is no lowest common denominator of Christianity. There is no modest form of the faith around which we may gather. There is only the “faith, once and for all delivered to the saints” (Jude 1:3). Anything less is either no longer Christian, or building a foundation for something that in time will not be Christian.

How much is too little? How much is enough? I consider that if Christ thought it necessary to do certain things and to give us certain things, it was because they were needed for the fullness of our salvation.

How much is too little - anything less than everything.

How much is enough - only everything.


The second, from last week, spoke very directly to me, at the outset of my own second year in Holy Orthodoxy:

Quote:
 
Unbelief and the Two-Storey Universe
I have written extensively about what I have described as a “two-storey universe.” In short, this is a description of how many modern Christians see the world. There is the first floor - the natural world which operates according to naturalist, “secular” rules, and the second floor - the world of God, heaven, hell, angels, etc. The spiritual crisis of much of modern man is the inherent disconnect in these two worlds. It is a belief construct whose history goes back some centuries but whose fruit has been a very different form of Christianity and a growing tide of unbelief...

...

..Christian fundamentalism (one of the primarily proponents of the two-storey universe) and contemporary atheism [are] two-sides of the same coin. Their interminable arguments are a conversation that takes place in half a universe. One argues that there is a second floor while the other argues that the truncated, detached debacle of a first floor is all there is. However, they do not disagree about the fundamentals of the first floor. The daily world (and often the daily life) of a two-storey Christian is often as empty and secular as his atheist counterpart. He differs only in his anxiety to prove the existence of a second floor.

I believe it is important to go to the heart of these matters - to realize that when arguments take place between such inhabitants of the two-storey world - nothing authentic is taking place. Both positions are inheritors of a broken view of the world and neither will ever state the truth in a satisfactory manner.

It is interesting to me that there are atheists who do not belong to this category of “two-storey unbelievers.” Their lack of belief in God includes deep questions about the very character of the universe and the nature of human existence. As such, they share much in common with the Tradition of the Orthodox faith. Many converts to Orthodoxy must undergo something of an “atheist” stage in order to leave the mythology of the two-storey world and enter into the revelation of God as Christ has given to the Church. It is for this reason that in the services for the reception of converts there is included a formal renunciation of various errors. You cannot follow the “only truly existing God” while at the same time believing in a God who does not exist. We are to believe in but one God.
Goto Top
 
OsullivanB

Thank you, Bob. I have printed the book out, and will get back to you when I have had time to read it. I can't predict when that might be.
"There is a principle which is a bar against all information, which is proof against all arguments and which cannot fail to keep a man in everlasting ignorance - that principle is contempt prior to investigation." Herbert Spencer
Offline Profile Goto Top
 
Ned

Clare
Thursday, 30. April 2009, 14:35
The challenge is to find evidence that a teaching is compatible with what the Church has always taught. Not just what has been taught in the last 50 years and in flat contradiction with what was taught before.
Hi Clare,

I disagree very strongly with most of what you say, but I fear that there is some truth in what you say here.

Over the last fifty years there has been a major 'Faith-drift' in big chunks of the Church. It's been quiet and gradual, and people don't seem to have noticed. There have been changes in the meanings and usages of words.

About this topic of non-Catholic Christians, and whether they're really Christian. I'd say that it's all down to whether or not they believe in the Blessed Trinity, and that Jesus Christ is God the Son, the Word made Flesh, who died on the cross and rose again; and that belief has to be not just an intellectual belief but a personal commitment to Him. (After all, the demons in Saint Mark's Gospel know for a fact who Jesus is, but they're certainly not Christians.)

From what I've seen some Protestants are Christians and some aren't. It depends on the individual.

And it's the same with Catholics. Some of them are Christians and some aren't. And in some Catholic churches there can be a sort of pseudo-Christianity - there's a little neglected and unlit High Altar, and then all round the walls there are candles burning to different images of Our Lady - Our Lady of Lourdes, Our Lady of Fatima, a Filipino Our Lady, Our Lady of Prague - all different people, perhaps ?
Offline Profile Goto Top
 
Derekap
Member Avatar

Ned wrote:

"And it's the same with Catholics. Some of them are Christians and some aren't. And in some Catholic churches there can be a sort of pseudo-Christianity - there's a little neglected and unlit High Altar, and then all round the walls there are candles burning to different images of Our Lady - Our Lady of Lourdes, Our Lady of Fatima, a Filipino Our Lady, Our Lady of Prague - all different people, perhaps?"

In case anyone should think this is a consequence of Vatican 2 I can assure them such occurred prior to Vatican 2.

Penfold's explanation of the Coptic Church's complicated history may not (*) have shown some people that there is a Coptic Orthodox Church which is in Schism and a Coptic Catholic Church as loyal to the Pope as our Latin Rite Church. Both Churches are mainly in Egypt. There is, however, a Coptic Orthodox church in London.

(*) If it's just me that's dim - apologies)
Derekap
Offline Profile Goto Top
 
pete

Quote:
 
Ned said: there's a little neglected and unlit High Altar, and then all round the walls there are candles burning to different images of Our Lady - Our Lady of Lourdes, Our Lady of Fatima, a Filipino Our Lady, Our Lady of Prague - all different people, perhaps ?

I don’t quite get your point Ned, since when has the High Altar been adorned with lighted candles outside of Mass. When we make visits to the church we do light candles to Our Lady, Saints, and the Sacred Heart but who do you know would light a candle and place it on the High Alter?
Offline Profile Goto Top
 
1 user reading this topic (1 Guest and 0 Anonymous)
Go to Next Page
« Previous Topic · Archived Discussions · Next Topic »
Locked Topic