That is, read Akron Beacon Journal sports columnist Terry Pluto, who departs from his usual beat to comment on Pope Benedict's much reported remarks affirming the Roman Catholic Church (translation: "the one universal church that happens to be headquartered in Rome") as the one universal church that happens to be headquartered in Rome.
Pluto notes that Benedict's statement is no surprise and says less than is sometimes imagined. Benedict allowed that the Sovereign Christ has spread his grace through other "ecclesiac communities" after all, so it's not like he condemned all of us non-Catholics to heck or something.
Fair enough. We can work with that. We'd like more acknowledgement that the Vatican has learned a thing or two from Messrs. Luther, Calvin, Simons, Wesley, yea even Stone and Campbell. But that seems to be beside the point, not least when SWNID doesn't recall much public acknowledgment of what his ecclesiac community has learned from recent popes and their associates.
We also note the timing of Benedict's remark. Recently returned from Latin America, we wonder whether he was struck again by the reality that where the Roman Catholic Church is strongest, it is also feeding most vigorously the growth of various Pentecostal and evangelical ecclesiac communities. Like Seymour Krelborn in Little Shop of Horrors, we suspect he grows tired of those churches' constant demand, "Feed me!"
7 comments:
gosh, all this time i thought the Catholics had their strongest base on the west side of cincinnati - has the pope even bothered to visit there?? what, with all those festivals during the summer and folk dropping a dollar in the hat every sunday morning... there's a Catholic church on every corner! it's like the Walgreens of relgion! there are so many and they're running so short on available names that the newest one opening on Glenway is being called Our Lady of Perpetual Motion.
and on a completely unrelated note: i was hired to teach 5th grade reading / writing and social studies at an elementary school in pensacola.
as my brother said the next day, "umm.. don't you actually need to know something about the subject you teach?"
If I recall, the Catholic church has done quite a lot of reflection on Luther, Calvin and the like (I doubt Stone/Campbell are even on their radar). Catholic scholars and theologians have issued numerous statements on justification, etc. with Lutheran officials; and one might look to groups like "Evangelicals and Catholics Together," which looks for common ground.
However, more important to Catholics are the teachings of the early church fathers (many of them taught directly by the apostles) who speak clearly on apostolic succession, Chist's real presence in the Eucharist, devotion to Mary, and the primacy of Peter. It seems there is much for Protestants to learn from them. A good book to start with for evangelicals would be "Is the Reformation Over?" by Mark Noll (renowned evangelical historian). If one were really brave (and in for a real intellectual treat) they would pick up the theological works of the Holy Father, written when he was Joseph Ratzinger.
SWNID should read the document itself rather than an Akron sports writer's comments on it. The correct term is "ecclesial communities" not "ecclesiac."
http://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/congregations/cfaith/documents/rc_con_cfaith_doc_20070629_responsa-quaestiones_en.html
Anonymouses, did the Pope acknowledge his church's indebtedness to Protestants in this statement? One of you seem to have read it, so tell us. I believe that the point of the post was that if the Pope's going to reiterate the dogma that there's only one true institutional manifestation of the church, it would be nice to mention that hte church has learned a thing or two from dissenters.
As to your assertion about the church fathers being both apostolic and supportive of Roman Catholic dogma, I think you're fantasizing. I've read nearly all the extant Christian literature from the second century, and it provides slim pickins on the points you raise. Even a Roman apologist like Cardinal Newman didn't claim that the dogmas of the church existed at the beginning in anything other than "seed" form that needed centuries to develop. As to apostolicity, there's a sea change in the second century as the church's cultural moorings shift away from Judaism. The growing influence of neo-Platonic thought distances many church fathers from the perspectives of the NT.
The genius of Protestantism is that it says that the message comes before the institution, so the message critiques the institution, not the other way around.
Jim Shoes - the Church in her ecumenical pronouncements has quite rightly identified common ground with Protestants, but she remains Catholic and believes that the institution and the message are inseparable - without one you can't have the other. Just examine the reductionist tendencies in nearly every Protestant denomination.
Further, I find it quite clear that much of Catholic dogma lies in the teachings of the early church fathers, they certainly are not espousing the Protestant gospel. Further, if this rupture you speak of occured in the second century, why then do Protestant's accept the canon of Scripture as authoritative but not the teachings of the bishops and church fathers on whose authority the canon rests?
Anonymous (of July 16):
I think it fair to say that the canon rests not on the authority of the church fathers, but on the authority of its authors (whose authority, of course, is ultimately derived from God). The church fathers simply recognized that authority.
Bingo to JB in CA and Jim Shoes: what the Reformers understood, and what the second-century documents affirm if read thoroughly and without a view to institutional apologetics, is that the church didn't create the canon but recognized it. Even the super-authoritarian-bishop-promoter Ignatius knows that the bishop's authority flows from the gospel (that's the explanation of his otherwise-odd reference to the "archives"), not the other way around.
"Reductionist tendencies" indeed! The point of the Reformation was to eschew the accretions of tradition and return to the pure gospel, testing the former by the latter, to the degree that such is possible. Yes, Protestants have demonstrated excesses in that regard. But the history of the Roman and Orthodox churches hardly shows that Scripture plus tradition is an antidote to such excesses. Quite the opposite!
At any rate, we applaud every move of the Roman Catholic Church to affirm the primacy of Scripture and to reform its own dogma in light of Scripture. We also confess our complete lack of interest in debating again the grounds of authority that have been debated repeatedly by those on the road to Rome and those on the road to Wittenberg for going on six hundred years.
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