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To: darrellmaurina

the problem is among us all. At the end it is conservatives v/s liberals


31 posted on 09/20/2012 7:00:09 AM PDT by Cronos (**Marriage is about commitment, cohabitation is about convenience.**)
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To: Cronos; wagglebee; little jeremiah; Dr. Brian Kopp; Diamond; napscoordinator; Antoninus; ...
31 posted on Thu Sep 20 2012 09:00:09 GMT-0500 (Central Daylight Time) by Cronos: “the problem is among us all. At the end it is conservatives v/s liberals”

Agreed, with some qualifications.

J. Gresham Machen, a professor at Princeton Theological Seminary who was regarded as one of the intellectual leaders on the conservative side of the American fundamentalist-modernist fight a century ago, wrote a helpful book entitled “Christianity and Liberalism” in which he argued that the differences between millennial views (a major issue then, less so now), the Arminian-Calvinist divide, and even the Roman Catholic-Protestant divide were far less important than the division between liberalism and historic Christianity.

Machen argued that while the other differences were important, liberalism not only is not Christianity, it is in an entirely different class of religions from Christianity. Liberalism, in Machen’s view, has more in common with non-revelatory religions which do not rely on propositional truth and an authoritative Scripture than it has in common with either Christianity or Judaism.

Machen is now known primarily as the founder of the Orthodox Presbyterian Church and of Westminster Theological Seminary. That's a fairly narrow sphere of influence. In the days when he was fighting the fundamentalist-modernist battles, he had a much greater influence, and while he was certainly a conservative Calvinist, he was willing to work with others in the shared fight.

One of the most interesting points about Machen is that in his day, when cooperation of conservative Protestants (or even liberal Protestants) with Roman Catholics was almost unheard of, Machen attended speeches of leading Roman Catholic apologists and clearly admired the Roman Catholic stance for truth on key issues. It is unfair to say that he believed in co-belligerency — that had to wait another half-century for Francis Schaeffer — but the level of evangelical and Catholic cooperation we see today in the pro-life movement simply did not exist until the chaos of the 1960s and 1970s.

Put bluntly, as traditional Roman Catholics and evangelical Protestants we need to recognize that we have important differences, but to realize that it is entirely possible to demand strict adherence to orthodoxy within our own confessional boundaries in our own churches while cooperating together to fight wickedness in the civil realm.

As a Calvinist, I find Abraham Kuyper's doctrine of sphere sovereignty to be helpful, i.e., that God had established separate and distinct governments in the sphere of the family, the church, and the state, and has tasked enforcement of His standards to different authorities in each sphere. Fathers have certain roles in the home into which neither the church nor the state may intrude, pastors and elders have certain roles in the institutional church into which neither the family nor the state can intrude, and the civil magistrates have certain roles in the state into which neither the family nor the church can intrude. For example, a father whose daughter has been raped may not take the law into his own hands and kill the rapist, the state may not decide who can and cannot come to communion, and the church may not wage war.

In the civil realm, the standards are those of Romans 13. That allows for a great deal of cooperation between traditional Roman Catholics, evangelical Protestants, Orthodox Jews, and even secularists who value the American Constitution or some other system of law based on external authority rather than individual and subjective personal feelings. All of us have far more in common with each other than we have with liberals, and we need to cooperate. If we don't do so, the liberals most certainly will exploit that division between us.

32 posted on 09/20/2012 9:31:14 AM PDT by darrellmaurina
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