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Looking at some of the statements of Rome, it is easy to see how some Protestants could be confused and feel obligated to consider Roman Catholics fellow christians. Consider this quote of the Pope from Catholic News:
"The pope's speech Dec. 21 focused in large part on his trip last May to Brazil, where he inaugurated a major meeting of Latin American bishops.
The theme of that encounter was "Disciples and Missionaries of Jesus Christ."
...In response, he emphasized a point that has become a touchstone of his pontificate: the Gospel cannot be implemented without a personal encounter with Christ.
Becoming a "disciple," he said, means getting to know Christ -- through Scripture, participation in prayer and the sacraments, and learning about the witness of saints.
"One can never know Christ only theoretically," he said.
That, in fact, was a key point in Pope Benedict's best-selling book, "Jesus of Nazareth," published last spring."
Of course,"a personal Encounter with Christ" is a very evangelical-sounding phrase. That must be good, right?
But when considering Rome one must consider all of Rome, and I offer this recent article on indulgences highlighted by Irish Calvinist:
"Pope Benedict is seemingly trying to get ahead of the vacation planning for the upcoming year. According to this article, the Pope is offering “relief from purgatory to Roman Catholics who travel to Lourdes over the next year”."
When you have "a personal encounter with Christ" you do not travel to a place where Mary has supposedly appeared to pray at the feet of her statue in order to earn a reduced sentence in purgatory for yourself and/or others.
(For more details on the Lourde's Indulgence, see here)
"This people honors me with their lips, but their heart is far from me; in vain do they worship me, teaching as doctrines the commandments of men." Matthew 15:8-9
HT: Gene for the Lourdes post
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14 comments:
I have most assuredly had a deeper personal encounter with my Saviour, Jesus Christ, by approaching His Mother and beseeching her intercession on my behalf.
Really? And can you give us an objective measure of that encounter?
Funny, that argument runs across the same objections that apply to neo-orthodoxy. Nice to see Romanism reduces to liberalism...
I am sure I will regret asking this, but here goes anyway. Carrie's post about the nature of spiritual encounters and their results is pure subjectivism, leaving the critical reader wondering who Carrie is to comment on the personal, interior experiences of others and why her judgment should be given any credence. Why should anyone think that Carrie has any competence whatsoever to judge the internal spiritual experiences of other people--let alone any business doing so?
Yet Gene Bridges comes along and demands that an equally subjective testimony from a Catholic about a spiritual encounter be judged by an "objective measure." What gives? What is the "objective measure" being referred to? How is it established to be "objective"?
Carrie's post about the nature of spiritual encounters and their results is pure subjectivism, leaving the critical reader wondering who Carrie is to comment on the personal, interior experiences of others and why her judgment should be given any credence.
Tim, you lost me. To which post of mine are you referring?
Carrie,
I'm referring to the post on which these very comments are being written--your post on "Personal Encounters and Lourdes." You sound very confident claiming that some Protestants are "confused" in their belief that Catholics are fellow Christians, and you're even more confident that "When you have "a personal encounter with Christ" you do not travel to a place where Mary has supposedly appeared to pray at the feet of her statue in order to earn a reduced sentence in purgatory for yourself and/or others."
You give the impression that you have superior knowledge of the nature of true spiritual experience, such that you can judge when others are "confused" about it and also what they will and will not do if they have it. Yet, you give no arguments for your standards of judgment, no defenses of your views--you just baldly state these things as if they're self-evident facts. Personally, I think you're the one who is confused, along with all who subjectivize the faith and its defense by elevating personal spiritual experience to the level of defining characteristic of religion. It seems to me that there's an interestingly implicit "theology of glory" being smuggled into the explicit professions of having a "theology of the Cross."
This sort of purely subjectivistic apologetics is an intriguing phenomenon, and I can't help but wonder about the self-critical abilities of those who practice such tactics. On blogs like this, I rarely ever see any kind of self-critical examination of one's own hermeneutics and standards of judgment. Mostly it's just "That belief of those guys across the way is obviously false because the Bible plainly teaches..." and "Of course those guys across the way aren't real Christians, and anyone who thinks they are is just confused..." and so forth.
Rarely ever do I see any of you folks stopping for a few minutes to go "Hmm, what does 'plain' mean, and if my views are so 'obvious' how come other rational people don't see it, and what does 'objective' mean, and how do I know my views have that quality?" Ninety percent of the time most of you focus on attacking others with great confidence and vigor, but if self-critical examination gets anything at all, it's maybe ten percent of the time.
Given that Christianity is a historical religion rooted firmly in the world of external experience (the world outside of subjective, personal, inward states), subjectivism is the great enemy of Christianity, and it turns apologetics into mere exercises in uncritically universalized autobiography. Yet many of you who engage Catholics apologetically seem quite blind to how you subjectivize the whole faith and its defense, and wind up merely insultingly acting as if your own personal intuitions about Scripture, Truth, and history have the same kind of self-evident status as, say, 2+2=4.
What's up with that, is what I'm asking. Can you do anything more than rip Catholics to shreds on the basis of your own subjective impressions? Can you actually give a coherent, non-self-referential defense of your standards of judgment? I think that's a fair question to ask of people involved in apologetics.
You give the impression that you have superior knowledge of the nature of true spiritual experience, such that you can judge when others are "confused" about it and also what they will and will not do if they have it.
Actually Tim, you tend to read your own subjectivism into my posts and come to sweeping conclusions which I was not implying. I am not saying that every single individual that travels to Lourdes (or their local center for honoring Mary) is not Christian, but that particular behavior/belief is not within the pale of Orthodoxy.
Can you do anything more than rip Catholics to shreds on the basis of your own subjective impressions? Can you actually give a coherent, non-self-referential defense of your standards of judgment?
Yes, I can. But I work off the presupposition that Catholicism is not a legitimate profession of faith. It is not my intent to defend that judgment in each post I write. Those who understand that indulgences, purgatory, and the intercession of Mary are counter-biblical beliefs will understand the jist of my post.
I am sure I will regret asking this, but here goes anyway. Carrie's post about the nature of spiritual encounters and their results is pure subjectivism, leaving the critical reader wondering who Carrie is to comment on the personal, interior experiences of others and why her judgment should be given any credence.
This is comical coming from you. Is this your subjective opinion or your objective opinion? Who are you to judge what Carrie or I says, and what makes it your business? If you were remotely consistent, you'd keep your mouth shut and your commentary to yourself. Can you you do anything put rip Protestant,not to mention specifically Baptist persons to shreds on the basis of your own subjective impressions? Can you actually give a coherent, non-self-referential defense of your standards of judgment? Your post, like so much of what you write these days is ironically littered with little more than mirror-reading.
What is the "objective measure" being referred to? How is it established to be "objective"?
Tell us, Tim, where does Scripture license "personal encounters" with Christ via the Virgin Mary?
I was simply pointing out, of course, that the language Mr. Burgess used is remarkably convertible with that used by the Neo-Orthodox. It is remarkable in my opinion that deniers of the clarity and perspicuity of Scripture run to the language of personal encounters on a regular basis.
Oh, and I should think what makes your statements all the more comical here are your past ramblings, including your affirmation that this:
There is no "argument for" Catholicism, because Catholicism is not a subjective belief; rather, it is an objective reality. It is the objective reality, not one's own imperfect perception of the reality, that is the ground of unity.
from one of your friends was a actually a good argument.
Then we have statements about being "adversarial" like this:
August 13, 2006
Tim Enloe: Reformed Polemicist, R.I.P.
I hereby openly repudiate the entire mode of discourse that underlies the materials linked on that page—namely, the fundamentally adversarial mode and its entrenched negative intellectual and social orientation. I deny that truly constructive, properly Christian discourse with other Christians, and chiefly between Catholics and Protestants, can be carried on from an adversarial standpoint. I want nothing to do with this type of “dialogue.” It is a sham that lives in the worst parts of the past (bitterly carrying on the 17th century Wars of Religion by different means) and the worst parts of the present (taking Fundamentalist Protestantism and Fortress Catholicism as normative).
I hereby formally repudiate that mode of discourse and all my doings from within its paradigm. Although there are things within the linked materials with which I would probably still agree and things with which I probably would not, I consign the whole mass to the category of “Fruitless Bickering” carried on, at least from my end, by someone whose priorities were deeply out of order.
of course, one month later to the day we read this:
Thanks, Mr. White, for confirming all of my points…Real scholars don't act that way. Propagandists do.
That's OK, though. It's hard work to do real scholarship, and often enough it doesn't pay off in immediate apologetic dividends that the pop-intellect addicts in your chatroom can soak up by osmosis without ever doing any real work for themselves. Hey, we all know that it's really important to provide answers to blowhards like Jerry-Jet and Miki…What a sad spectacle, but then, I gave up expecting any truly scholarly engagement from you on historical and theological matters long ago. You're a smart man; you could do if you wanted to. But alas, in you Fundamentalist apologetics and Modernistic "evangelism" eat everything else up.
As it stands, you're only familiar with one very narrow school of the thing, and can't be taken by any serious student as a reliable source of information about anything outside of that one narrow school.
Thank you for confirming that you have no answers to any of the very serious charges that have been raised against you over the last few years. By your own words--or more frequently, the lack thereof--you are condemned.
http://utbrito.blogspot.com/2006/09/why-baptists-are-not-and-never-will-be_13.html
So, Mr. Enloe, pardon us if we find it a bit humorous that you seek to castigate others for their adverarial comments. When you can make up your mind and be true to your own word, we might just take you a little more seriously.
Gene, I don't know you from Adam and as far as I know I have no direct troubles with you, so I feel no need to take great offense at your diatribe against me. I do note with some irony, though, that if I had written the way you did I would hear no end of criticisms about my misuse of "rhetoric" and my irrational-emotional "ranting," and so forth. Perhaps I'm not the only one who needs to look in a mirror. The dialogical modes employed by you Triabloguers are some of the nastiest and grace-less to be found the Internet, but since everyone of us, myself included, very often forgets the last half of 1 Peter 3:15 and since I don't care to play endless rounds of Tu Quoque, I won't bother to go collect samples. When it comes to abuses of rhetoric, I think each one of us needs to take care of his own problems rather than trying to take care of those of others.
At any rate, I'm glad you're so proficient with a search engine as to be able to locate and cut and paste all manner of supposedly self-damning things I've said in the past, but unfortunately your use of my past words here is not only inaccurate but also way behind the times.
As a matter of fact, I've made quite a few ARGUMENTS against the subjectivizing trends of baptistic theology over the years. I've even quoted Baptist scholars lamenting the fact that Baptist theology has played right into the hands of the subjectivizing impulses of the Enlightenment's assault on all religion. I've given FAR more than my own personal, subjective opinions about things, and have deployed a wide range of scholarship about Evangelicalism to support nearly everything I've written in critique of its subjectivizing, culturally-backwoods and theologically introverted perspectives. Of course merely citing scholars doesn't prove anything, and a lot of times it's possible to find other scholars making counterarguments to the first set. I have no problem with that sort of thing where it has been brought against me, but unfortunately that's been too few times and too far between for my liking. That's alright, though. Conservative baptistic American evangelicalism isn't where the future of really robust, world-transforming Christianity is at, anyway. The best anyone can do for it is try to help as many people as possible off the ship before it goes down. Whenever I make pleas for the development of a self-critical sense in Evangelical apologists, that's really all I'm trying to do.
As for your other pasted remarks of mine, please note that I am not at war with Dr. White any more, and I will not be drawn into a fight about him or anything he does. I asked him to forgive me for all my past sins against him, he extended the forgiveness, and that's that. The Internet may still preserve those past dialogical sins, but unfortunately it doesn't always allow for updates of personal contexts that alter the significance of the preserved statements. I trust that in the future, now that you are informed, you will be more careful in what you cut and paste.
Carrie, thanks for not answering my questions. Once again I will withdraw and leave you to carry out your crusade in peace.
Tim,
It's Christmastime, geez.
Not everyone is blogging over the Christmas holidays.
Patience is a virtue.
Rhology, in fact Carrie did reply to my post, showing that she had some kind of time on her hands. Nevertheless, she didn't answer my questions to her, and indeed, gave me every impression of not even having understood their relevance to her M.O. on this blog. So, I wasn't merely being impatient.
In the meantime, if anyone else wishes to respond meaningfully, I would be glad to consider the responses and, if needed, to adjust my impressions accordingly. As a reminder, what I was interested in hearing from Carrie was some sort of intelligible, non-self referential account of the hermeneutics that underlie the treatment of Catholics and Catholicism on this blog. Words like "plain" (as in "plain meaning of Scripture") and "objective" (as in "objective truth") don't mean much these days unless they come with robust explanatory apparatus that demonstrate they are not merely accounts of what is going on inside one's own head--or at least the collective heads of one particular group.
Carrie is pretty confident that truly regenerate people don't do things like go to Lourdes, and most of you are pretty confident that true believers in the true Gospel don't believe most of the things that Catholics believe. Confidence is a nice thing, mind you, but if it can't be defended with more than slogans (like "Scripture plainly teaches," and so on) with which only your own group agrees, it's pretty useless in terms of public discourse. All I'm saying is that on blogs like this, I very rarely see any attempt to expose one's own views to critical scrutiny, to demonstrate that one is grappling with intelligent alternate accounts rather than just mocking them as unreasonable lies believed by people who don't like Truth and who maybe-probably aren't really Christians (like those on this blog obviously are) etc.
Eventually, the discerning reader wants to know why he ought to keep giving such self-referential stuff his time. Not to mention that it gets very distracting in terms of the reader trying to locate the really useful material. I don't want to have to sift through fourteen diatribes about unregenerate Catholic morons who don't like Truth (like those on this blog obviously do, of course) and prefer silly man-made Traditions to the plain meaning of Scripture just to find some good stuff about a Luther quote. Can't the standard be raised?
You know what, never mind. I take it back. I keep saying I'm going to get off the Internet, or at least, stop messing with apologetics activities, but then I don't do it, and then stuff like this happens. I'm sure with these questions about "clarity" and "objectivity" I look like little more than a troublemaker to you guys, so I'm just going to back off again and let you all be. Have a good New Year's.
Tim,
I did answer your question, just not to your satisfaction. At least that is my subjective opinion but you are entitled to your own subjective opinion.
Carrie is pretty confident that truly regenerate people don't do things like go to Lourdes,
Fine, Tim. Then make your argument for why truly regenerate believers DO go to Lourdes. And you can also make your argument for the necessity of Mary's intercession with Christ since you are so quick to defend Mike in your first comment. Instead of a diatribe on my personal motives and beliefs why don't you actually attack the content?
I don't want to have to sift through fourteen diatribes about unregenerate Catholic morons who don't like Truth (like those on this blog obviously do, of course) and prefer silly man-made Traditions to the plain meaning of Scripture
Is that suppose to be an objective summary of what I say here? Can you actually quote me saying anything close to "unregenerate morons"?
Eventually, the discerning reader wants to know why he ought to keep giving such self-referential stuff his time. Not to mention that it gets very distracting in terms of the reader trying to locate the really useful material.
I have a solution - don't read my posts! Seriously, that should solve your problem.
Sorry Tim, but your opinion matters little to me and your criticisms are a bit hypocritical. Your defense of Catholics while denigrating Protestants is not behavior I can respect or trust. I don't expect a blind allegiance to all Protestants, but your attempt at embracing "catholicism" is humorous as you lash out at what should be considered your closest brethern.
Now, I am done with this.I don't really care to have this discussion but since you won't let it go, I decided to respond. I apologize for getting personal back but it seemed necessary to point out your inconsistencies in critiquing my "M.O.".
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