Scott1 said:
What do we have in common? What are the major doctrinal differences?
Can there be unity? What can we agree on?
Linus and I had a wonderful chat going on about the origin of sin in humanity on another thread, and I would love more input.
About all I could gather is that we both agree that we are saved by the Grace of God.
Anything else?
Peace,
Scott
This site:
http://anglicanhistory.org/usa/claremont19214.html
seems to be clear on the doctrinal differences.
III. The Fundamental Difference between Protestantism and Catholicism.
There is one great common bond between Protestantism and Catholicism. It would be a sin against truth not to state it. It would be a sin against love, which is a greater matter than even truth, to underrate it. The saints of both systemsand both systems
have saintshave a burning zeal for the service of God and a burning zeal for the service of men. Both systems are meant to promote these ends. Each system is to its followers the best way that they have been able to see to find God, and help the world. That finding God and helping the world are the two best ends in life, both parties are agreed. They differ as to what God offers us as ways and means of reaching the great end. In trying to set forth some present characteristics of the Protestant Movement, I must speak somewhat of its history, but first of all I must state What seems to me to be the fundamental and essential difference between modern Protestantism and that Catholicism which is of all time. To put it all in a single phrase, Protestantism is a religion of inspiration; Catholicism is a re-of revelation. Perhaps I may express it better by say that Protestantism is a religion of a single revelation, Protestantism says that a man must find his way to God by his own best thoughts. They are what God has en him, and God has not given him, and could not give anything else. A hundred years ago almost all Protestants would have said that the Bible was a book of infallible religious teaching and included much of revelation. Movement has moved on far since those days, and the majority of Protestant thinkers now take the line that no inspiration could ever make a man, even the writers of Holy Scripture, to be an infallible teacher, and that God cannot, the laws of the universe as He has made them, make Revelation of His truth to the creature, man. Catholicism the other hand, that we really have a revelation. God has made known a portion of his own thought as an illuminating message and a healing medicine. He has made this message known so that men can really know. A man must submit himself, says Catholicism, to this divine message, with its accompaniment of a few special directions, and of a few particular supernatural gifts, called Sacraments, and if the man finds that anything which has seemed to him before to be a part of his own best thoughts appears now to be in conflict with this gift of the thoughts of God, the man must, of course, thankfully submit his mind to be corrected by God's revelation of the truth.
I think that few Protestants will quarrel with my statement that their system teaches a man to follow his own best thoughts, and teaches him further that he has nothing else to follow. If they mention the Bible, it will be only in the sense of the good Baptist lady who said to me, more than forty years ago, "I believe that everything in the Bible is inspired which is inspired to me!" But our Protestant friends so little understand our claim to the possession of infallible guidance, that I must take time to express our difference in another way. This time, I will put the Catholic claim first.
The Catholic Church remembersthat is our great wordthat our Blessed Lord, in the forty days between His Resurrection and His Ascension, gave to His Apostles certain instructions and directions, "speaking the things concerning the Kingdom of God." What those things were, the Church was not told in any book of the New Testament. Of course, not. The Church remembered what those things really were, and needed no reminder. In fact, the Catholic Church remembers, and has never ceased to testify, that in that teaching-time our Lord delivered a faith unto the saints,what S. Paul speaks of as "the Gospel",and delivered it once for all. The Catholic Church remembers what that delivered faith included, and the Church knows that what was included in that faith was true. It is not a part of the old, original Catholic claim that the Church can make any fresh revelation of her own at any time, add any new articles to this "faith," re-write this "Gospel." S. Paul anathematizes any such attempt, and the great Council of Chalcedon echoes him. We claim only that the Holy Spirit, guiding God's people into all the truth, enabled the Church, in the controversies of the fourth and fifth centuries, to see truly and decide justly as to whether certain new religious teachings were, or were not, antagonistic to the ancient faith. The Church pronounced that these opinions were inconsistent with the remembered faith. It was not a judgment as to whether new views of certain great subjects were true or false as a matter of philosophic theology, but whether they were consistent with a remembered revelation. What our Lord gave to His Church to keep safe, He enabled His Church to keep safe. That is the claim of the Catholic Church, and of every faithful Catholic. Yet here honesty as to Catholic faults and fairness as to Protestant faults require of me an important admission. The modern Protestant position looks to us Catholics like a wilful refusal of light. But we need to remember that the mistakes of noble men have always a noble origin. We need to face the fact that the Protestant fault in the Reformation-movement arose out of a Catholic fault. The Mediaeval Church had greatly abused the principle of authority in Religion. It had not been content to remember the infallible teachings of our Lord, and demand men's allegiance to the once-for-all delivered faith. The Mediaeval Church had yielded to the temptation to regard its own judgments as infallible, and demand submission to everything in the way of either theology or Church order which the ruling authorities of the Church might agree to impose. The Mediaeval Church departed from the lines of a true Catholicism by adding "necessary things" of its own devisingsuch necessary things, for example, as the Theory of Transubstantiation, of the Papal Supremacy, to the "necessary things" of our Lord Himself. By setting up in this way a false "authority" it poisoned the minds of men with a morbid suspicion and dislike of the whole idea of Church authority. Because the Mediaeval Church did use its authority to impose upon men things which clearly our Lord did not impose, therefore it came to be a fundamental position of the Protestant mind that to receive anything on the authority of the Church is to set up another authority in place of the authority of Jesus Christ. The Church as we know it has repented of that sin, and stands now on a truly Catholic foundation. But the revolt of Protestantism was in its beginning a revolt against something un-Catholic. The complaint of Protestantism said, "The Church has tried to compel us by its authority to believe things which come not with God's authority, and are not true. We will never submit our minds to the authority of the Church again." The Protestant complaint was just. The bitter sense of having been imposed upon and tyrannized over by the Church, which Protestantism has brought down the centuries from the Reformation-period as one of its most treasured traditions, is in a measure just. We ought to acknowledge that much. We may still insist that in casting off the false "authority" they should not have cast away the true. They did cast away the true "authority" with the false, and then, suffering the Nemesis of their unhappy mistake, they set up that same evil of a false "authority," the making by groups of men of "creeds" that were only their own "creeds," all over again. They set up precisely that antithesis from which they had tried so desperately to break away, the imposing of the opinions of men instead of the facts of God.
Protestants generally think of us as making claim, which the Roman Church does make, that the Catholic Church has an office as a revealer of truth, and not merely as a faithful rememberer of a revelation once made. But even when we have made clear our more modest position, Protestantism will have none of it. Protestantism will not allow that the Church has any continuous, unchanging memory, what I may call a "corporate memory," of its own past, even of such a fact as our Lord's rising from the dead. Protestantism holds that the only means we have of finding any facts of early Christian history is to study the New Testament writings, with their manifold allusions to things which were then matters of common knowledge, and try to piece these allusions together, and so find out what it was that the Church then knew so familiarly. And Protestantism in these days generally adds that the writers of the New Testament books may in some cases need to be sharply corrected by modern scholars, as having gravely misunderstood the religious teachings of Jesus of Nazareth.
