Foundational Tenets at the Roots of US Mainline Protestant Decline

Vivificat - from Contemplation to Action ^ | 19 July 2012. | TDJ

[Teófilo]

Brethren: Peace and Good to all of you.

This blog post presents a broader commentary to this MSNBC headline: Is liberal Christianity signing its own death warrant? I invite you to read that news piece.

I have said many times before that the decline among the US mainline Protestant churches (Episcopal, Lutheran, Methodist, etc.) is due to their embrace of secular values and pseudomorality.

In my opinion, their faithful departed are seeking a more vigorous or emotive faith and for that reason are leaving the so-called Mainline Churches and are joining Pentecostal or Evangelical communities. Or, they might become more interested in historical Christianity and therefore leave for the Roman Catholic, Orthodox, or independent Anglican churches. Or maybe they become agnostic or “spiritual” without belonging to any “organized religion” and the trappings that come with it.

I want to approach this matter from a different direction and look for the roots of the mainline Protestant drift to secularism and subjective morality. I find it in the Protestant foundational tenets themselves which I encapsulate in this: The problem with Protestantism is Protestantism itself.

In the following table, I'll analyze each of the foundational Protestant principles and detail their ultimate consequences:

	Tenet		Explanation		Consequence
;
	Sola Scriptura		That the written Scripture only is the sole rule of belief, morals, and practice for believing Christians.		The absence of a proven, credentialed and authoritative hermeneutics that is external to the individual believer leads to interpretative anarchy – for a single believer or group of believers will always find a purportedly compelling reason to reinterpret the Bible to suit their own agenda
;
	Sola Fide		That faith alone is necessary for the salvation of individual Christian and that good works lack intrinsic salvific value.		The experience of faith was emptied of any objective contents and was made subjective, enabling the individual to determine his status as “saved” by the emotive contents of his or her salvation experience – the individual believer is  now empower to approach Scripture individually, purportedly under the guidance of the Holy Spirit.
;
	Free Examen		That the individual alone exercises “priestly” power to approach Holy Scripture and to interpret it on the basis of his or her salvific experience alone, as permitted by sola scriptura and illuminated by sola fide.		Faith and belief having been emptied of objective contents and free from external hermeneutical authority. now depends on the subjective contents the individual believer deems fit to find. Dissent is built into this tenet for if the individual believer objects to what his pastor teaches and his community believes, he can leave to search for another community or found his own.
;
	Sola Gratia		That salvation is due to “grace alone” apart from individual efforts of sanctification and cooperation with grace.		The consequence is that there’s no Christian morality or orthopraxis that is ultimately binding. The “Grace vs. Works” conundrum being resolved in the favor of grace “through faith”, and faith having been subjectivized itself, they further built their morality on subjective principles such as “compassion, acceptance, understanding” defined apart from any objective grounds such as saving works.
;

Brothers and sisters, all Protestant foundational tenets conspire to produce these consequences. Even the most conservative, “Bible-oriented” Christian communities are not free from these vices. Since they have no external authoritative hermeneutics, their only resort is to scream their beliefs in an increasingly louder fashion.

The cure for this malady is for all Protestant and Evangelical churches to discard their foundational tenets, or to reinterpret them within the true Catholic-Orthodox theologicalframework. The alternative - and this is not a false choice - is their continuing decline (for the Mainline Churches), intellectual suicide (for the Evangelical communities) and eventual death (for all).

[LurkingSince'98]

yeah Is..

for every “catholic” who leaves the faith for a protestant denomination about 90% leave the sect they joined after the first year and leave that sect then next year and so on. In fact a very large percentage of “catholics” who fall away become areligious after several years.

However, for every three “catholics” who leave the RCC - one protestant crosses the Tiber and becomes Catholic and stays and stays and stays - I believe less than 10% revert to protestantism.

So you get our dregs and we get your best - I love it.

Lurking’

[ckilmer]

My church is stuffed with guys who left the RC. What’s most remarkable about them is that they tend to be real men. Why did they leave the RC. My guess is that they’re afraid of exposing their boys to the priests. There is a similar exodus of men from the liberal denominations for similar reasons.

[LurkingSince'98]

ck..

old old news and typical protestant disinformation

The verified peak of the priest abuse scandal was 1980 and it is has been down to levels below the 1960s for years.

see the study done by John Jay College of Criminal Justice which directly contradicts your premise: http://www.philvaz.com/apologetics/PriestAbuseScandal.htm

In our Diocese, for the last 6-8 years, if you want to work as a volunteer you are fingerprinted and have a CRIMINAL background check - do they do that in your sect. It is common knowledge that the protestant gay church elders are relatively unchecked in their preying on the protestant youth since there is and has been NO central and concerted effort to stamp it out.

It a little like the pot calling the kettle black.

BTW, the “catholics” that I am aware of who have fallen away are not Catholic at all, they believe in birth control and abortion, are in greater part divorced and remarried and very poorly catechized.

Again what leaves is the dregs or catholic don't wannbees.

Lurking’

[Cronos]

the article makes an error in Sola Gratia. Salvation IS due to "grace alone" in the sense that we are saved only due to the grace of God and we cannot save ourselves. Our individual efforts of sanctification and cooperation with grace is what we must do to accept this freely given grace.

It's like a farmer who wants to take in a sparrow into a barn on a cold winter's night. The door is open, the sparrow just has to fly in. Actually it's more than that, the sparrow just has to truly desire to be saved and it is..

[Cronos]

Not completely, fishtank — as the article points out the fallacy of believing that one can come up with one’s own interpretation and then just say “Lord, Lord” and be saved. That led to the first generation of reformaters (Luther) being superseeded by the second (Calvin, Zwingli) and soon the third AnaBaptists, Unitarians etc.). Each time there is a new reformatting, with a new piece of orthodoxy thrown away, until finally one has the Universal Unitarians...

[Cronos]

tr: One bishop named John Bell told Tyndale

Firstly, the story about John Bell is just that, a story with no real basis in fact. It's just another one of Foxe's embellishments/propaganda.

Furthermore the story itself in Foxe's tale doesn't say it was the bishop. it says that T had happened to be in the company of a certain divine, recounted for a learned man, and, in communing and disputing with him, he drove him to that issue, that the said great doctor burst out into these -- no mention of the bish.

[Cronos]

Knarf — the thing is that it is not emotion or reason, rather emotion and reason. God appeals to us spiritually, emotionally, through reason etc. It is not one or the other to exclusion. some 19th century groups veered too much to reasoning while others veer too much to just raw emotion (see Benny Hinn) — sticking to either extreme is incorrect.

[Cronos]

L —> there are some posters who are not part of any protestant denomination — they’re not even Christian as they reject Christ’s divinity and the Trinity.

[knarf]

Tell Salvation, HE'S the one that polarized and limited God's Grace.

I only questioned how he came to the conclusion that reason was involved.

Personally, the only reasoning I used to ask Jesus to save me was, I knew there was Hell, I was headed there, and I didn't want to go.

I believed the guy who was witnessing to me that Jesus wanted to 'save' me and take me to heaven when I died.

I was trained to be a Catholic and what's this 'saved' business ?

Whatever .. I didn't want to go to Hell and I wanted to believe the guy witnessing to me, so I followed a 'sinner's prayer' and asked Jesus to forgive me of my sins, save me and take me to Heaven when I died.

I think I tagged it with something like, "Oh yeah, and come into my life and be my Lord"

(but I'm not sure ... it was 1981)

[Iscool]

I don’t believe you...

[Iscool]

Still going with the personal false accusations since you seem to be incapable of defending your religion with scripture, or even discussing scripture, eh???

[Iscool]

I think I tagged it with something like, "Oh yeah, and come into my life and be my Lord"

So Jesus didn't come into your life and be your Lord, eh???

[knarf]

"So Jesus didn't come into your life and be your Lord, eh???"

Sorry .. zero's press secretary job's already filled ... thanx for playin'

[Teófilo]

This is happy catholic talk that comes due to a base ignorance of protestant theological issues.

A standard, boilerplate dismissal.

Sorry, but I know the Protestant foundational tenets very well, inside and out. Although I don't claim to know all its 35,000 variations, I know and understand classical Protestantism.

Whether you believe me or not, is irrelevant, it doesn't change reality.

~Theo

[Teófilo]

Exactly. You understood my piece.

~Theo

[Teófilo]

Thank you, Chaplain, for your input. As long as we can talk, we’ll talk! That’s a very important thing.

God bless,
~Theo

[Teófilo]

It is very rare for a Catholic FReeper to recall that liberal Protestants are just as Protestant as the Fundamentalists are. Normally Fundamentalist Protestantism is condemned while liberal Protestantism receives all sorts of positive ecumenical attention from mainstream Catholics.

That might be because, hypothetically, a "mainstream" Catholic may be closer in belief and practice - or "non-practice - to a mainstream Protestant than an observant Catholic, a Catholic who thinks both in and with the Church.

If we accept this distinction, then I do not identify myself as a "mainstream Catholic." I am an observant one.

Goodness gracious no, I don't want Fundamentalists to become liberal Protestants. I want both groups to become CATHOLIC. (grin)

As for those who will try to "sauce my goose or gander" by reversing my observation, I would ask for their reasons, please.

~Theo

[Teófilo]

My church is stuffed with guys who left the RC. What’s most remarkable about them is that they tend to be real men. Why did they leave the RC. My guess is that they’re afraid of exposing their boys to the priests. There is a similar exodus of men from the liberal denominations for similar reasons.

It is an established fact that less than one percent - or around one percent, I don't recall exactly at this minute - of priests between the 1940's and 2002 molested and underaged child. So the chance these men you speak about would've had their children molested by a priest was in itself pretty low.

In terms of sociology, the reasons why people move from one religion to another, or to no religion at all and back, are pretty complex. You should stop guessing, and just ask them why they did what they did. Doing so will help you put the sex-scandal in its proper perspective and stop spreading irrational fears through innuendo and baseless suppositions.

~Theo

[Teófilo]

The mainlines are dying because they have forsaken God’s WORD.

Simple.

No more complicated than that.

Why is your approach to Scripture better than theirs? Their assumptions and approach are basically the same. What makes yours "correct" and theirs "wrong"?

~Theo

[xzins]

See my #14

Cronos, Romans 10:14 says simply “whosoever calls on the name of the Lord shall be saved.”

I’ve no doubt that a sincere “Lord Save Me” will get a person saved.

We can then go to the multitude of other scripture that explains in more detail what goes on in that simple, sincere plea to our Lord Jesus. Simply staying in Romans 10, we can go up to Romans 10: 9-10, and we see a process that Paul boils down to his Romans 10:13 statement.

There is both simplicity and expansiveness in the scripture itself.

The thief on the cross, however, illustrates that when push comes to shove the simplicity is valid.