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To: SnakeDoctor
What I am trying to figure out is whether you see Protestantism inherently bigoted or not ... are non-Catholic Christians necessarily bigoted anti-Catholics and thus necessarily deserving of the scathing attacks and rebukes you regularly dish out?"

Protestantism is, by the stated reasons for its foundation, anti-Catholic. Protestantism to justify its continuing existence must declare Catholicism wrong, heretical, and not Christian.

To rationalize this Protestants constantly make bold proclamations about what the Catholic Church teaches and what Catholics believe without ever having read or studied the Church history and Catechism beyond the self-serving lectures and sermons of Protestant preachers whose livelihood is dependant upon fomenting anti-Catholic bigotry. Recognizing this and citing examples is not the sin.

342 posted on 05/10/2010 8:25:29 AM PDT by Natural Law
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To: Natural Law; SnakeDoctor
Protestantism is, by the stated reasons for its foundation, anti-Catholic. Protestantism to justify its continuing existence must declare Catholicism wrong, heretical, and not Christian.

A classic, backseat Catholic apologetic. I encourage you to take a History Lesson: Positively Protestant. Here's a quick summary:

What do the major historians of Protestantism say? Like almost all their colleagues, John Dillenberger and Claude Welch link the origin of the word Protestant to the ‘Protestation’ of the German evangelical estates in the second Diet of Speyer. But they see in that term “the duality of protest and affirmative witness.” That protest, they write, was
from the standpoint of affirmed faith. Few churches ever adopted the name “Protestant.” The most commonly adopted designations were rather “evangelical” and “reformed.” ... [W]hen the word Protestant came into currency in England (in Elizabethan times), its accepted significance was not “objection” but “avowal” or “witness” or “confession” (as the Latin protestari meant also “to profess”).
That meaning lasted for another century, say Dillenberger and Welch, and it referred to the Church of England’s
making its profession of the faith in the Thirty-nine Articles and the Book of Common Prayer. Only later did the word “protest” come to have a primarily negative significance, and the term “Protestant” come to refer to non-Roman churches in general.
....When Edward VI was crowned, the word still had a positive connotation. On the CultureVulture blog for the Guardian, Sean Clarke notes that it was 60 years from the introduction of Protestant in English until its first use in the extended sense of "object, dissent, or disapprove.” That (according to the Collins Etymological Dictionary) was first recorded in English in 1608. The Online Etymological Dictionary places the first use of protest to mean “statement of disapproval” in the year 1751—another century and a half. Through much of that history and well after, protest continued to mean “avow,” “affirm,” “witness,” or “solemnly proclaim.”

Poor, misunderstood protest has had a history something like that of another word—apology. That word has gone from its positive, head-held-high sense of “a formal justification or defense” (as in “the essay was an apology for capitalism”) to something tinged with shame and remorse (“a statement of regret or request for pardon”).


348 posted on 05/10/2010 8:37:22 AM PDT by Alex Murphy (Pretentiousness is so beneath me.)
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To: Natural Law

I have heard Catholics say Protestants are not Christian, just as I have heard Protestants say Catholics are not Christian.

However, Protestant Christianity has never doctrinally claimed exclusivity in its relationship to Christ and the Almighty (though some denominations thereof certainly have). The very nature of Protestantism is that Salvation is achieved through grace and a personal relationship with Christ. Salvation is therefore individual, not through a specific denomination. A Baptist can be just as saved as a Calvinist, Methodist or Catholic — some denominations may be more conduscive than others, but doctrinal errors are one of many sins covered by Grace.

Catholic doctrine does claim exclusivity. So, it would seem to me that Catholicism is more invested in the failure of Protestantism than vice versa. If Protestantism succeeds, Catholicism is wrong in its claim of being the one true church of Christ. To Protestants, the success of Catholicism makes Catholicism but one of many branches of Christ’s chuch, as Protestants have claimed.

As far as I am aware, most mainstream Protestant denominations regard Catholics, though wrong in several respects, as brothers in Christ. Catholics very often seem to regard Protestants as heretics. However, I will acknowledge that Protestantism has fundamental objections to Catholicism which define it, and that Protestant denominations do not hesitate to make those objections known.

I think the characterization of Protestantism as anti-Catholic is a bit too heavy. There are doctrines which are specifically contrary to Catholicism, but mainstream Protestants do not typically regard Catholics as non-Christian. I certainly don’t.

SnakeDoc


354 posted on 05/10/2010 8:47:45 AM PDT by SnakeDoctor ("The world will know that free men stood against a tyrant [...] that even a god-king can bleed.")
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To: Natural Law; SnakeDoctor

why label christianity at all?


361 posted on 05/10/2010 9:02:27 AM PDT by marajade (Yes, I'm a SW freak!)
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