The nonreligious conservatives and libertarians who visit must be getting a bit bored, but this is where the conversations have been going for awhile. Perhaps tomorrow will be different.
Rightwingprof was curious about my take on the language and conceptual differences between Christian denominations. I imagine there might be book-length treatment of this somewhere, but I had only a few thoughts.
Evangelicals don’t reference “mercy” that often. They will speak about the related concepts of forgiveness and generosity, and they certainly have a clear conception of mercy, but they don’t frame things that way. “Hope” is similarly less used. Evangelicals are more likely to focus on faith and love. The liturgical churches have references to mercy and hope built into their cycles of worship, so these thoughts tend to rise to prominence more. This is not a mere language change, but an emphasis that expresses a slight difference in thought.
The approach to God is different. In the Roman Catholic, and even more especially in the Orthodox churches, there is a strong sense of a spiritual world running independently and in parallel to our own experience. It touches this life at an infinite number of places, but is separate and must be sought. The evangelical picture is much more of God and the spiritual world invading this world and transforming it. Both groups would agree that the other is correct, and that the two are not mutually exclusive. The twin pictures, in fact, describe the same phenomenon. But the difference in emphasis leads to different approaches, particularly in the political realm. The evangelical would change events in order to influence society to change at a deeper level; the Catholic and Orthodox approach would be more to work on the deeper realities and do more rescue work than transformational work on the world’s ills.
Catholic and Orthodox believers have a strong concept of the different roles or descriptors of God. Pancrator, healer, victor, comforter, etc. Evangelicals tend to blend those. It’s a plus-minus thing. There is truth and advantage on both sides.
Orthodox churches remain strongly ethnic, which is a plus-minus for the expression of the Church Universal.
5 comments:
All of this is worth noting.
(I did discover in the last series of posts about Evangelicals that while I knew most of what was presented, I didn't have the ability to present it. There was also new information, and new ways of approaching the problem.)
As an aside: how much of the problem of Jewish/Evangelical relations is exacerbated by a language difference?
A week ago, I would have said yes. Now I'm wondering if that's an evasion.
"The approach to God is different. In the Roman Catholic, and even more especially in the Orthodox churches, there is a strong sense of a spiritual world running independently and in parallel to our own experience. It touches this life at an infinite number of places, but is separate and must be sought. The evangelical picture is much more of God and the spiritual world invading this world and transforming it."
Sorry, this is going to be a bit unwieldy. I don't have a great deal of time. Just want to throw a few thoughts into the discussion.
I agree with what you say, but it does get complicated. Tom Wright argues that evangelicals are distracted from much of the work of this world by an emphasis on personal salvation and the idea of salvation secured by faith. I don't know, because I've never been an Evangelical Christian, but in the past it did always seem to me that securing personal salvation was much more prominent in what I heard from Evangelicals than it has been in Catholic teaching and preaching that I know very well.
In recent years I have noticed much greater Evangelical attention to the poor outside of their own faith communities, but on the subject of Evangelicals I will say less because I know less. Instead, I'll focus more on Catholicism and political activism.
From the earliest age, Catholics are emphatically taught that faith and works are inextricable and that the personal aspect of faith is not a personal relationship with Christ. It is our relationships with every other human being, binding us to Christ through our treatment of other individual human beings (the vine and the branches) The emphasis is on all other human beings, which means de-marginalization of the marginalized. The direct contact with Christ, if you will, is experienced through the Eucharist and the grace conferred in personal relationships that manifest the expression of Christ (what you do to the least).
Catholic social teaching leads many Catholics to criticism of all political ideologies, in part, because ideologies move toward treating ideas as ontologically more significant than persons. In fact, many Catholics would say that God and personhood are the only things that are ontologically real. I don't know about that, but that is an important view that drives Catholic social teaching.
The other matter that affects Catholics in politics is the long history of tension and antagonism between Protestants and the Vatican. For hundreds of years in the Americas, Catholics were under suspicion because of the Vatican which was much reviled in the Protestant world. This antagonism was anything but a one-way street. The Vatican was extremely hostile to the notion of secular governments and the American experiment, in particular. During the 1890s Pope Leo XIII wrote a scathing letter to American Catholics, essentially denouncing American government and secular government as challenges to the teaching authority of the Catholic Church.
Sola Scriptura is an issue that figures into all of this. The Catholic Church sees teaching authority as the province of the Church, which, to Protestants, meant that Catholics and Catholic political views were under the control of the hated Vatican.
The eventual compromise that merged nicely with an emerging emphasis on Catholic social teaching was political neutrality within the American Church. That compromise has never been an easy one for Catholics. There is an ongoing pull from the Vatican and the powerful pull of Americanism that seeks great comity with fellow American non-Catholics.
continued...
ctd from the previous comment:
In recent years there has been some shifting of positions, but there are always factions that rise in influence and promote other points of view. Still, the everyday in the pew Catholic often feels skittish about linking politics with Catholicism based on a long history of tensions in this area. Both the Joe Scheidlers and the Mike Pflegers (Berrigans, Sheens, Sheehans) make many Catholics nervous.
Most of the priests I know (and I know many) don't want activists of any kind pushing a political agenda in their parishes. I have never, ever heard an anti-abortion sermon, an anti-capital punishment sermon or a right to medical care sermon in a local Catholic Parish. I'm sure it happens, but it's relatively rare even
Dr. X - I have recently read an exceptionally good description of the contrasts in Thomas Howard's Evangelical Is Not Enough. He was raised evangelical and still has enormous sympathies for their strengths, but is more liturgical in worship and (real) traditional in theology now.
Your observations reinforce and expand what I have already sensed - so of course I assume you must be brilliant and correct.
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