Posted                       

quote:

---

Originally posted by HCH:
Is this spun off from some other thread? The phrase "more to the point" seems to require a context.

---

Posted                      

quote:

---

Originally posted by Frankenstein:
More to the point… can the 'rest of the church at large', consisting of thousands of denominations, expect the Catholic Church to change its ways and why?

---

Posted                         

quote:

---

Originally posted by Arethosemyfeet:
I would say it's not that diversity if belief is desirable, it's that a lack of diversity of belief is more likely to be a sign of a dangerous ecclesiastical setup than is a diversity of belief. Diversity is simply an indicator that belief is not being imposed - where unity occurs amid diversity it is because of agreement rather than enforcement.

---

Posted                       

quote:

---

Originally posted by South Coast Kevin:
Frankenstein, would you prefer the RCC to be even more strict on unity of belief and practice, to the extent that groups like the Jehovah's Witnesses or even the Church of Scientology are? They show admirable unity, it seems to me...

---

Posted                   

quote:

---

Originally posted by Arethosemyfeet:
- where unity occurs amid diversity it is because of agreement rather than enforcement.

---

Posted                      

quote:

---

Originally posted by Zach82:
It makes sense that diversity of belief in the Church should be tolerated in some matters (and only in some matters), but some people seem to have gotten the idea that diversity of belief is actually desirable. Which is completely ridiculous, because there can be only one truth, and we all ought to believe it. Diversity of belief is ultimately a bad thing, and the Church only tolerates it in a world of sin and ignorance.

---

I can practically smell the burning heretics now!

--------------------
Humani nil a me alienum puto

Posted                       

quote:

---

Originally posted by Zach82:
. . . there can be only one truth

---

Posted                      

quote:

---

Originally posted by Zach82:
Oh golly. Assert the law of non-contradiction and people start pitching a fit about heretic burnings.

---

Posted                      

quote:

---

Originally posted by Crœsos:
It was more about the way you lamented religious toleration and equated it with sin and ignorance.

---

Posted                       

quote:

---

Originally posted by Crœsos:

quote:

---

Originally posted by Zach82:
It makes sense that diversity of belief in the Church should be tolerated in some matters (and only in some matters), but some people seem to have gotten the idea that diversity of belief is actually desirable. Which is completely ridiculous, because there can be only one truth, and we all ought to believe it. Diversity of belief is ultimately a bad thing, and the Church only tolerates it in a world of sin and ignorance.

---

I can practically smell the burning heretics now!

---

You really think that any Christian thinks that ours isn't a world of sin an ignorance?

--------------------
Some say that man is the root of all evil
Others say God's a drunkard for pain
Me, I believe that the Garden of Eden
Was burned to make way for a train. --Josh Ritter, Harrisburg

Posted                       

quote:

---

Originally posted by Zach82:
I think believing the truth is always good, and believing lies is always bad.

---

Posted                      

quote:

---

Originally posted by Zach82:
Diversity of belief is ultimately a bad thing, and the Church only tolerates it in a world of sin and ignorance.

---

quote:

---

Originally posted by Zach82:
Read closer, because I said nothing of the sort. The fact that the truth isn't obvious and embraced by all is the result of sin and ignorance.

---

Posted                      

quote:

---

I'm pretty sure if you diagram out that first sentence it attributes toleration by "the Church" to "sin and ignorance".

---

quote:

---

The interesting corollary of your position is that anyone who has been told the truth (i.e. anyone who doesn't fall into the "ignorance" category) is deliberately and dishonestly trying to suppress the known and obvious theological truth.

---

Posted                      

quote:

---

Originally posted by Zach82:
It really isn't. Having been told the truth is not the same as not being ignorant of the truth. Plenty of sincere, learned scientists argued against a Copernican solar system back in the day not because they were stupid, vicious people, but because they thought they had really good reasons for rejecting it.

---

Posted                      

quote:

---

So you're citing a disagreement that you say doesn't stem from either sin or ignorance as support for your belief that sin and ignorance are the reasons differences of opinion can be tolerated? What was that you were saying earlier about non-contradiction?

---

Posted                       

quote:

---

Originally posted by Zach82:
It makes sense that diversity of belief in the Church should be tolerated in some matters (and only in some matters), but some people seem to have gotten the idea that diversity of belief is actually desirable. Which is completely ridiculous, because there can be only one truth, and we all ought to believe it. Diversity of belief is ultimately a bad thing, and the Church only tolerates it in a world of sin and ignorance.

---

Posted                         

quote:

---

Originally posted by Cara:
So instead one can choose a denomination where the church's stand on this or that aspect of belief is not the point.
It's a community of people trying to follow Christ... .

The church has been accused of being "wishy-washy" or of (in your words) needing to "grow a pair" but maybe its evolving into a different sort of thing--the idea of a church or denomination as no longer having a unified set of doctrines but rather a unified
allegiance --to Christ and the Christian life, more than to the denomination. But the denomination has a particular colouring or flavour of spirituality--born of its history and tradition-- that means one feels more at home there than in other groups professing allegiance to Christ.

---

Posted                       

quote:

---

Originally posted by Frankenstein:
More to the point… can the 'rest of the church at large', consisting of thousands of denominations, expect the Catholic Church to change its ways and why?

---

Posted                       

quote:

---

Originally posted by Forthview:
non-Catholic Christians

---

Posted                       

quote:

---

Secondly, please don't leave the word "Roman" out of the phrase "Roman Catholic". Describing it simply as "Catholic" suggests everyone with whom the Bishop of Rome has entered into a schism with at some point is a heretic, when virtually every other denomination holds that it is he who has erred in matters of faith (some obvious examples). Using "Catholic" on its own is polemic, and invites the counter-polemic of "Papist" and "Romanist"; the compromise term for that denomination was hard-won.

---

Posted                      

quote:

---

Originally posted by Forthview:
It is also not a good idea to speak of the Bishop of Rome and his curia as 'inventing' doctrines.

---

Why? Will the Inquisition come knocking on our doors at 4am if we do?

As for one truth vs. diversity of belief, of course there can only be one truth. The world is as it is and wishful thinking can't change it.

BUT we are ignorant and uncertain. So diversity of belief actually exists. So an honest church would allow that diversity to be expressed. And people know that - when a church, or a corporation, or a political party, or a government suppresses all disagreement and speaks with one voice, everyone "on message", it makes people suspicious. It looks dishonest. Honest disagreement and open admission of ignorance or doubt are much more attractive than clinging tightly to the party line.

And also, there can be more than one expression of one truth. God doesn't change but we do, and our language and customs and biases and prejudices change. If you only allow one expression of the one gospel, you end up crushing the truth in an over-disciplined rigor mortis of censorship. Whether its certain kinds of evangelical insisting that penal substitution is the only story we can tell about the Atonement; or the currently ascendant authoritarian theological liberals insisting that PSA is a kind of thought crime and editing the hymn books to expunge it from our history; or the (Roman) Catholics coming up with the idea that we can't even talk about ordaining women because the Pope said so even if he wasn't being infallible at the time its still a sin to disagree with him; or some Orthodox sticking their fingers in their ears and going la-la-la we're the One True Church no-one else even is a church and they don't even really exist and anyway WE CAN'T HEAR YOU; or other kinds of evangelicals making shibboleths out of homosexuality, or speaking in tongues, or young earth creationism, or voting Republican, or not believing in the Real Presence, or using a worship band in church, or not using a worship band in church, or tiptoeing through or round the TULIPS depending on personal biases for or against various long-dead Reformers they never actually read, and using them to police the boundaries of their churches to keep Them out and Us in; or some Anglo-Catholics insisting on a kind of rigid magic-juice interpretation of tactile Apostolic Succession in a way that de-churches everyone from the Kirk on down so that the only True Christians are me, thee, Father Cyril at St Austin-Morris in Aristotle Lane, and the Pope - and I'm not so sure about you and the Pope; and Oh Lord have mercy, the Jehovah's Witnesses.

They're actually a good example. The JWs tend to speak with one voice. They show little disagreement or dissent in public. They mostly toe the party line. Does that increase your respect for them?


The church needs to speak with more than one voice. The whole Church on Earth and also each individual church. A healthy and honest church will have a variety of preachers, not just one Father-knows-best fount of all wisdom. They ought to be free to speak in different ways about different things, and sometimes even to disagree with each other. In public. From the pulpit even.

That's a good Biblical principle of course. The Bible has two accounts of the history of the Kingdom of Israel, from different points of view, and other stories again in the Prophets. And they don't always agree with each other, at least on the surface (Do we really think that Jeremiah and Ezekiel were always on the same side as each other in the feuding around the fall of Jerusalem?). Peter and Paul seem to have taken opposite sides on a number of issues.

We have four Gospels. Right there at the very beginning of Christianity, the founding documents of the Church on Earth, our only witnesses to the life of Jesus speak in different voices and say different things and at least sometimes seem to disagree on the facts. I don't actually think they do disagree but they certainly seem to and that did the early Church no harm.

Right at the beginning of Hebrews, it says God has spoken in many ways and many styles (I love it that the first word of the Greek epistle is "Polymeros", one thing made of many parts, even if we use it to mean synthetic plastics these days - the other one is "polytropos" many styles or manners or ways of doing something, which tempts me to waste the afternoon browsing the addictive TV Tropes website. No! Resist! Resist!). So if God did it that way, who are we to insist on numbing conformity to a single message?


We are in the prescience of the Living God and a great cloud of witnesses, not Peter Mandelson and Tony Blair and some kind of 1950s Stalinist politbureau. (Total aside, a lot of the New Labour project of the 1990s and 2000s was about using methods developed by the authoritarian wing of the Left in the interests of the Right. Actually it's not a total aside - the New Labour gang attempted to control the public image of the party, and later the government, by demanding that everything an MP or party spokesperson said in public should be "On Message". They even issued lists of what the talking points of the week were, so if you were interviewed by a journalist you were supposed to ignore the questions they in fact asked and steer the conversation to the official topics, and then make exactly the same points as the party HQ did. Did that make you respect them more? Do you want your church to be like THAT?)

So there we have it. On the side of enforced unity we have the Spanish Inquisition, the Pope of Rome and all his enormities, Stalinism,YEC, some very angry Russian monks with long beards, advertising agencies, assorted PR drones and managementspeak clones, torturers, secret policemen, estate agents, privatised phone companies, the Tea-party, homophobes, Jehovahs Witnesses, the Mormons, David Cameron, Peter Mandelson and an entire army of smarmy 1990s political hacks. On the side of diversity we have God, Jesus, the angels, the Bible, the Prophets, Patriarchs and Evangelists, the trees in the forest (who talk to each other secretly at night through cables of cooperative fungi), honesty, truth, beauty, art, music, fluffy bunnies, kittens, and life itself.

Which shall we choose?

--------------------
Ken

L’amor che move il sole e l’altre stelle.

Posted                          

quote:

---

Originally posted by Frankenstein:
When I lived in Ealing, London, I was met by a couple of Ulster lads who were looking for a church. I told them about the Methodist church, the two C of E churches, the Baptist church, and playing devil’s advocate I said there was the Catholic church.
“No you mean chapel.” They said.
How silly of me to get it wrong!
I rest my case.

---

Posted                       

quote:

---

Originally posted by South Coast Kevin:
For me, Christian faith is absolutely about allegiance to Christ, and absolutely not about signing up to a set of doctrines. So, as I think I've said upthread, unity means having a shared purpose (and indeed allegiance) for more than it means believing the exact same things.

---

Posted                       

quote:

---

No this is split between Scots and English. In the Scots usage "chapel" is the correctly used of the Roman Catholic Churches. The same way that in English usage it is used of Non-Conformist Churches.

I have seen offence taken the other way because of this! A local newspaper article about seventy years ago described my home congregation as a "chapel" and as good Presbyterians Scots that rankled still fifty years later.

Jengie

---

Posted                      

quote:

---

Originally posted by Greenleaff:

quote:

---

Originally posted by Zach82:
It makes sense that diversity of belief in the Church should be tolerated in some matters (and only in some matters), but some people seem to have gotten the idea that diversity of belief is actually desirable. Which is completely ridiculous, because there can be only one truth, and we all ought to believe it. Diversity of belief is ultimately a bad thing, and the Church only tolerates it in a world of sin and ignorance.

---

Hey Zach, feel free not to answer this, but how can you feel this way and remain in the Episcopal church? (Sorry, I read your profile.). I'm Episcopalian too, and I happen to agree with you, but the plurality of beliefs and noncommittal positions on everything from the imporance of baptism to the ressurection of Jesus is totally confusing to me. Have you figured out how to avoid the angst? If so, please let me know, because I'm really not up for shoppping for a new religion. I wish the one I'm in would grow a pair. Sorry.

---

Posted                          

quote:

---

Originally posted by Frankenstein:

quote:

---

No this is split between Scots and English. In the Scots usage "chapel" is the correctly used of the Roman Catholic Churches. The same way that in English usage it is used of Non-Conformist Churches.

I have seen offence taken the other way because of this! A local newspaper article about seventy years ago described my home congregation as a "chapel" and as good Presbyterians Scots that rankled still fifty years later.

Jengie

---

Excuse me! I can tell an Ulster accent from a Scottish accent.
I have lived in Scotland since 1985. What you say may be true but do not exclude our Ulster friends.

---

Posted                       

quote:

---

No this is split between Scots and English. In the Scots usage "chapel" is the correctly used of the Roman Catholic Churches. The same way that in English usage it is used of Non-Conformist Churches.

I have seen offence taken the other way because of this! A local newspaper article about seventy years ago described my home congregation as a "chapel" and as good Presbyterians Scots that rankled still fifty years later.

Jengie

---

Posted                       

quote:

---

Originally posted by Cara:

You can believe that the Holy Spirit is guiding one particular denomination in the way of truth more than any other, and that this denomination's claim to hold the oldest, truest repository of the Christian faith is correct--then you join the RCC. Or the Orthodox....
Or you can believe that God is such a mystery and has remained so hidden to us that neither of those ancient denominations, especially considering that they have inevitably changed over the centuries, can possibly be 100% right. And they certainly can't both be, so how can we possibly know which one is the more spirit-guided? Yet each demands of their followers allegiance to the whole detailed structure.

So instead one can choose a denomination where the church's stand on this or that aspect of belief is not the point.

The church has been accused of being "wishy-washy" or of (in your words) needing to "grow a pair" but maybe its evolving into a different sort of thing--the idea of a church or denomination as no longer having a unified set of doctrines but rather a unified
allegiance --to Christ and the Christian life, more than to the denomination. But the denomination has a particular colouring or flavour of spirituality--born of its history and tradition-- that means one feels more at home there than in other groups professing allegiance to Christ.

---

Posted                       

quote:

---

Originally posted by Zach82:
[Unity in the essentials, and in all else charity. [/QB]

---