The Bible says …
What does a protestant mean when he says “The bible says…”? What he really means is “In my opinion…”. Now that sounds a little harsh. But you have to understand that most protestants do try and conform their opinions to what they think the bible teaches. They get it wrong but they don’t get it wrong because they fail to make a sincere effort. They get it wrong for other reasons. So because they are sincere they don’t really see the possibility that they are wrong. They would never claim infallibility but they do have a certain psychological infallibility. They need it. Christianity cannot work unless you can be sure about what the Christian faith is. As Pope Benedict says, you cannot make a question mark the center of your life.
So you have people who are sincere followers of Jesus honestly believing they know God’s mind when they don’t. You have many of them all giving different versions of what God’s mind is. So we learn to not take them too seriously. Even protestants learn not to take other protestants too seriously when they contradict their faith. As a protestant I was never bothered by someone saying you had to speak in tongues to be saved. Different strokes for different folks. If you think about it that is actually a serious doctrinal error but we didn’t think about it.
But it gets worse. The solution to all this, God’s solution, is the Catholic church. But what happens in the church? Well, you get a lot of people thinking like protestants. They dissent freely from the tradition of the church and the teaching of the magisterium. They do recognize the pope and the bishops as being legitimate leaders but only ceremonially. They are even missing many of the best things about protestantism. Like the love of scripture and the willingness to sacrifice for Jesus. So they have the worst of both worlds. They lack the zeal of the protestant and they lack the orthodoxy of the Catholic.
So where does it go from here? We have major spiritual problems growing in the church. We have technology creating all sort of moral challenges like birth control, pornography, abortion, and stem cell research. We have the rise of a very militant Islam. We know the church will come out of this still standing. But how is that going to work? I suppose it looked very bleak for the church at a few other points in history. How do we recover? How did we before?
This is what Pope Benedict is pointing us towards. First he gives us the year of St Paul which points us to a time where the church went from a tiny group to eventually taking over the Roman empire. How did he do it? By getting the gospel right and by living it without compromise. Now Pope Benedict puts before us the office of the priest. What is going on there? I think it again has to do with zeal and orthodoxy but the grace comes through the hands of the priest. The pope seems to know what the church needs to do. He is gently prodding them to do it. By them I mean everyone, protestants, orthodox, liberal Catholics, conservative Catholics.
John Paul II said we can never impose Catholicism on anyone. We can only propose it. It seems like we are starting to get to the point where it has been proposed to the bishops and for the most part they have accepted. The next step is to propose it to the priests. This is a slow process and the church is working on many other fronts as well. But I do see it as constantly proposing and slowly people are taking it up.
I do think we will see amazing breakthroughs in terms of church unity in the next few decades. The groundwork is being laid. It goes slow but it will happen. What has happened is more than anyone would have predicted 25 years ago but it is only the beginning.
Not that there won’t be people left behind. Remember proposals can be rejected. That will happen. But the church will come out purer and stronger. Lots of ideologies that are headed for destruction will get there. It might take many martyrs. It is hard to see how ugly things will get before people see the light. But I can see the whole thing coming together.
I also thought that these events might be fueled or contributed by 2 things: misunderstanding of the teachings of the Bible and poor communication – at the time.
So my logical brain tries to analyse (although knowing that Faith and Works of Law does not relate to logic) that in this day and age of lightning communication, these misunderstandings should be resolved very quickly.
Only then did I cerebrate that “Ignorance” always has and will continue to have a large part to play. Therefore I learn that I still need to bear in mind that a rebellion against Rome could still happen in future, in as large a scale as Lutheranism.
AND there’s the issue of “Grace” of course.
June 20th, 2009 at 3:41 amThen there is the corruption in the 16 century church. That certainly had something to do with it.
There was also some politics. Germans were feeling to much power was in Rome. Popes were constantly raising money from German’s for their pet projects and there was resentment.
Certainly Luther was taught a bad theology around faith and works. It was not Catholic but Luther thought it was.
These things were all there and all intermingled to create the reformation. In some ways we needed to learn how development of doctrine works in an age of technology. So we needed to do it wrong. The hope is the church will have figured out truth matters just when the world is ready to listen.
June 20th, 2009 at 12:49 pm