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Source: (consider it)
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Thread: Kerygmania: Original Sin
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Mudfrog
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# 8116
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Gamaliel:
Sure, as I've said, the Wesleyan tradition is the one the Orthodox tend to feel is the Protestant strand that resonates most closely with their own position on these things, whilst acknowledging areas of difference of course.
What people might not realise is that whilst TSA describes itself as Protestant, we are neither Pentecostal nor Reformed (capital R).
We come from the Catholic Tradition via Anglicanism and then Methodism.
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"The point of having an open mind, like having an open mouth, is to close it on something solid."
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mousethief
Ship's Thieving Rodent
# 953
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Mudfrog:
What people might not realise is that whilst TSA describes itself as Protestant, we are neither Pentecostal nor Reformed (capital R).
We come from the Catholic Tradition via Anglicanism and then Methodism.
All Protestant churches come from the Catholic Tradition. Pretty much by definition. And I don't think anybody who knows a pittance about the Salvation Army doesn't realize its relationship to Methodism.
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Gamaliel
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# 812
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Posted
I can see why the Salvation Army would wany to position itself as a distinctive movement or strand within Protestantism or indeed the Western Christian traditions more broadly, though, Mudfrog.
I'm not convinced they are as distinctive as they like to make out, but they are distinctive certainly. Essentially, of course, they are a subset of the Wesleyan Holiness tradition with a few distinctive practices. I don't think they represent any kind of 'Third way' if you like between Pentecostalism on the one hand and the Big R Reformed on the other as I'm not sure things break down in as binary a way as that, but I can see why they might want to occupy that space.
It all depends how on perspective. From.an Orthodox point of view I'd imagine Protestantism and Catholicism represent two sides of the same coin and perhaps there are some groups that form the milled edge in between ...
Some Anglicans would claim to do that, of course. I'm not sure about the Lutherans. They are as rare as hen's teeth here in the UK.
That doesn't mean I dismiss or play down the importance of the Salvation Army. They have had significant impact. But they are a subset of a subset of a subset.
But we are veering away from Original Sin ...
However, the clue to the Salvationist emphasis is in their title, of course. What they say on the label. They are all about saving souls and they do take an holistic approach to that. However we cut it though, that emphasis is bound to involve some kind of stress on humanity'd lost and fallen state, and the remedy in Christ, so it's hardly surprising that they are going to emphasise Original Sin, even if that doesn't necessarily mean they are going to adopt a kind of TULIP schema as the Big R Reformed tradition did.
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Let us with a gladsome mind
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mousethief
Ship's Thieving Rodent
# 953
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Gamaliel:
It all depends how on perspective. From.an Orthodox point of view I'd imagine Protestantism and Catholicism represent two sides of the same coin and perhaps there are some groups that form the milled edge in between ...
Yes. Indeed, as you of all people no doubt realize already, that's exactly the phrase we use. The more cynical among us will add, "and the Pope was the first Protestant."
As to what's between the two sides, if anything, we don't much care, except as a matter of politesse between individuals.
[ 07. January 2017, 22:27: Message edited by: mousethief ]
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Evensong
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# 14696
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Mudfrog:
. and yo can see that the righteousness that was ascribed to Zechariah by Luke, and ascribed to himself by Paul was mere law-keeping and not personal heart-righteousness.
You are exegeting Luke via Paul here.
I'm totally with you that we use scripture to interpret scripture but using Luke to interpret Luke would be the better way to do that.
If Luke believes those he points out are righteous are not really righteous, why would he point them out? He says nothing about them "not really being righteous".
[ 08. January 2017, 09:55: Message edited by: Evensong ]
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Mudfrog
Shipmate
# 8116
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Evensong:
quote:
Originally posted by Mudfrog:
. and yo can see that the righteousness that was ascribed to Zechariah by Luke, and ascribed to himself by Paul was mere law-keeping and not personal heart-righteousness.
You are exegeting Luke via Paul here.
I'm totally with you that we use scripture to interpret scripture but using Luke to interpret Luke would be the better way to do that.
If Luke believes those he points out are righteous are not really righteous, why would he point them out? He says nothing about them "not really being righteous".
They are 'righteous' according to Luke's own parameters and definition from the one verse. It's all about the law.
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"The point of having an open mind, like having an open mouth, is to close it on something solid."
G.K. Chesterton
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Gamaliel
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# 812
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Posted
Well yes, Mousethief. I don't know why I put 'I'd imagine' as I know all too well that this is what the Orthodox say as it's been said to me many, many times over the last two decades!
![[Big Grin]](biggrin.gif)
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Mudfrog
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# 8116
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Posted
Gamaliel, I don't believe that TSA is a Third Way on its own. It's part of the Wesleyan tradition which is, I believe that Third Way in British Reformation History.
You have Catholicism that either remained as the developing Roman Catholic Church.
But you then have the Reformed Catholic Church that we call Anglicanism (And let's add the Lutherans alongside them in Europe).
Then you have the Calvinists and Puritans who became Baptists and Presbyterians, etc. They're on the other side.
In the middle you have Wesley who, coming out of High Church Anglicanism added stuff like Catholic and Orthodox Piety to Moravian thinking and that Zinzendorf bloke.
Out of him came directly Booth's Salvation Army, influenced also by the Palmers and a little bit by Finney from the US.
So, if you have Anglican/Lutheran/Episcopalian on the right, Calvinist/Baptist/Reformed on the left, you have Wesleyanism in the middle.
We might not be a full TULIP but we are certainly T
![[Biased]](wink.gif)
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"The point of having an open mind, like having an open mouth, is to close it on something solid."
G.K. Chesterton
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Gamaliel
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# 812
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Posted
More to the point, though, on the issue of people being 'righteous' or 'unrighteous' and whether righteousness is conferred in some kind of 'forensic sense' or 'legal fiction' and so on - us being 'declared righteous' because of Christ's finished work on the Cross and so on ...
Well, I can certainly see where those ideas come from in scripture, but there are plenty of material - particularly in the Gospels - that don't appear to fit that neat schema.
This is what I mean by all of us 'churchifying' or reading back into the NT whatever our ecclesiology or soteriology happens to be. Sure, we don't make it all up and then go looking for verses to 'prove' it - that's not how these things work ...
But I do think there is a two-way thing going on whereby we become convinced of something or other and then start to see it everywhere in scripture or else try to make things fit ...
I'd suggest that we all do that - the RCs, the Dispensationalists, the Reformed, the Pentecostals, the ...
At least with the RCs and the Orthodox there is the sense that they recognise what they are doing and that they are working within a Tradition / tradition ... not trying to make out that their particular interpretation isn't a tradition (small t) in any sense at all but simply what the plain-meaning of scripture teaches ...
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Let us with a gladsome mind
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Gamaliel
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# 812
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Posted
Sorry - cross-posted with Mudfrog ...
Yes, I get all that and I don't dispute that the Wesleyan tradition is a Third Way in British Reformation history. I'm afraid I'd understood you to mean that it's a Third Way per se - alongside Protestantism and Catholicism. That claim has been made for Pentecostalism, of course.
So I apologise for that.
It's also a tradition I have a lot of time for, so I am not knocking it - but neither do I want to over-emphasise its importance, but rather set it in its rightful place alongside the other strands.
As far as Wesley's High Church Anglicanism goes, a lot of Anglicans back then were 'High' in the Church and King sense - there were High Church Calvinists too. We have to be careful not to regard pre-Oxford Movement 'High Church' Anglican in an overly sacramental or ritualised sense. I'm sure you are up to speed on all of that.
So, if Wesley was aware of Orthodox and RC emphases, then so were his fellow High Church Anglicans who may have differed from him on the freewill/predestination issue.
As I've said elsewhere, Calvin was pretty steeped in Patristics too - although he made no bones about the fact that he preferred Augustine to Chrysostom and Jerome and other Church Fathers.
I'm not convinced that Wesley added 'Catholic and Orthodox piety' so much as he brought with him an understanding of the more sacramental approaches of those Traditions as well as an awareness of some of their spiritual disciplines.
He was also influenced by the Puritans and I'd suggest that his methodical approach came from there as much as anywhere else.
And yes, I'd see the Wesleyan and Wesleyan Holiness emphases as they subsequently developed as small r reformed - with more small c Catholic and small o Orthodox emphases than might be found in some Big R Reformed traditions. But even that is too simplistic, the Big R Reformed folk can be far more 'realised' in their understanding of the Eucharist than the more pietistic and revivalist folk.
As Jengie Jon has often reminded us, the Arminian reaction against hard-line Calvinism - which, arguably led in turn to Calvinism becoming more hardline at Dort - was itself a subset of Big R Reformed theology.
There are fuzzy bits and overlaps all ways round. These things don't neatly divide into segments like an orange or tangerine.
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Let us with a gladsome mind
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mousethief
Ship's Thieving Rodent
# 953
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Posted
I'd hardly say that Wesleyanism is more Catholic than the C of E. What does it mean to say he "added" Catholic piety to his CoE inheritance?
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SusanDoris
Incurable Optimist
# 12618
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by David Goode:
It's clearly allegorical. Surely no one believes it is factual.
Agreed!
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SusanDoris
Incurable Optimist
# 12618
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Posted
Seeing this topic referred to in Perg, I thought I'd have a look - and, on a grey and gloomy Sunday afternoon have enjoyed reading through this very interesting discussion.
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Gamaliel
Shipmate
# 812
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by mousethief:
I'd hardly say that Wesleyanism is more Catholic than the C of E. What does it mean to say he "added" Catholic piety to his CoE inheritance?
No, I think what Mudfrog meant was that elements of Catholic piety filtered into Wesleyanism from John Wesley's High Church Anglicanism.
Which is based on a misunderstanding, I would say, of what it meant to be a High Church Anglican back in the 18th century.
One could argue that the Moravians were 'Catholic' in their piety to some extent as Count Zinzendorf's hymns and prayers are full of images and meditations on the sufferings and wounds of Christ - to an embarrasing extent by modern standards.
A Methodist historian once told me that Moravian and later Methodist hymnody contained the first post-Reformation meditations on the wounds and sufferings of Christ - and were very reminiscent of some aspects of 15th century Roman Catholicism.
One could argue that the similarity is more coincidental rather than direct, but there is an almost medieval emphasis on the blood and sufferings of Christ that emerges around the time of the revivals of the mid-1700s that you don't get among the 17th century Puritans or the Carolingian Divines and so on.
We have to be careful how we handle some of these terms.
17th century Anglican divines such as Lancelot Andrewes and the poet Treharne had views that wouldn't be out of place in an Orthodox setting - and they remain popular with Orthodox clergy I know - as do some of the writings of the medieval mystics such as Richard Rolle.
But that doesn't mean that they were on the same page as the Orthodox on every issue.
The poet George Herbert can be read in a mildly Calvinist sense as well as in a 'High Church' sense.
Wesley wrote some very eirenic letters to Roman Catholics and there was also the bizarre incident where he tried to absorb some Apostolic Succession from an visiting Orthodox priest (or bogus bishop?) which he could then pass onto his lay-preachers ...
Historians argue about what exactly was going on there. Who knows? The guy was pretty mercurial.
As I've heard Bishop Kallistos Ware say in relation to the incident, 'One could say that Wesley was acting in accordance with Anglican principles as he would have regarded the Orthodox Church in 18th century terms as some kind of sister-church that was non-Roman, but as for the Orthodox Bishop - what did he think he was doing?'
![[Razz]](tongue.gif)
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Let us with a gladsome mind
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Mudfrog
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# 8116
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Posted
Gamaliel, I am very interested to read of the "meditations on the wounds and sufferings of Christ - (that) were very reminiscent of some aspects of 15th century Roman Catholicism..."
Might I offer a couple of Salvation Army songs that you might feel are in the same mould?
O Love Upon a Cross Impaled
and
Silent and Still I Stand Before That Weeping Tree
These are very deep and almost mystic; and both of them written by an SA General in the twentieth century, not the nineteenth let alone the 15th!.
Host note: corrected typo
[ 08. January 2017, 21:13: Message edited by: Moo ]
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G.K. Chesterton
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Gamaliel
Shipmate
# 812
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Posted
Sure, but whenever he was writing he'd have been drawing on earlier material, whether post or pre-Reformation.
I'll try to find some references. Zinzendorf's hymnody on these points can be embarrassing by modern standards.
E P Thompson, author of 'The Making Of The English Working Class' couldn't stand Methodism and thought the emphasis on the blood and wounds of Christ were psycho-sexual and somewhat sick.
That might tell us more about him than early Methodism.
FWIW, I do find something icky about some mediaeval meditations on the suffering of Christ and some of the more exotic understandings of the 'blood of Christ' that can be found in the outer reaches of Pentecostalism and among some charismatics.
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Let us with a gladsome mind
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Anglican_Brat
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# 12349
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Posted
Perhaps this article can shed some light:
http://religionnews.com/2017/01/13/author-jesus-didnt-believe-in-original-sin-and-neither-should-we/
I wonder if the issue of original sin arose because we find it hard to deal with people who are either wonderfully good or terribly evil.
Original sin's attraction is the notion that all humans are essentially same, sinful, in need of God's grace.
If we imagine Augustine and Pelagius debating today, we might find Pelagius saying something like "Look at Mother Teresa, if you are not perfect like she is, it's your own fault, and God has every right to judge you for failing at your duty to be a good person."
Augustine might respond "We all can't help ourselves, we don't always do the good we want to do, our will is fundamentally damaged, we need God's grace to restore and perfect us before we can do good."
I think original sin can be a good doctrine if it reminds us of our reliance on divine grace and love. It's not all good however, if it's meant to demean or diminish our humanity.
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Mudfrog
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# 8116
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Anglican_Brat:
I think original sin can be a good doctrine if it reminds us of our reliance on divine grace and love. It's not all good however, if it's meant to demean or diminish our humanity.
I wholeheartedly agree with you on that!
We must not diminish our value, our 'loved' status.
God did't sent his Son because he hated the world was cross with the world or despised the world; he sent his Son because he loved the world - could see what was worthy of love and, indeed, rescue.
Original sin does not mean and has never meant tat humankind is utterly evil or without merit.
Original sin simply means that for whatever reason (explained by myth or not) we stand condemned. I can't even say that it is God who is condemning us at this stage; bit what I can say is that God SO loves us that he sent his Son to be the means by which we can be fully rescued.
Original sin within is evident to those of us who have tried to not be sinners.
But it doesn't make us worthless.
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"The point of having an open mind, like having an open mouth, is to close it on something solid."
G.K. Chesterton
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mousethief
Ship's Thieving Rodent
# 953
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Mudfrog:
Original sin does not mean and has never meant tat humankind is utterly evil or without merit.
Original sin simply means that for whatever reason (explained by myth or not) we stand condemned. I can't even say that it is God who is condemning us at this stage; bit what I can say is that God SO loves us that he sent his Son to be the means by which we can be fully rescued.
Why would God care if somebody else was condemning us? Our condemnation only matters if it's by God.
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Mudfrog
Shipmate
# 8116
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by mousethief:
quote:
Originally posted by Mudfrog:
Original sin does not mean and has never meant tat humankind is utterly evil or without merit.
Original sin simply means that for whatever reason (explained by myth or not) we stand condemned. I can't even say that it is God who is condemning us at this stage; bit what I can say is that God SO loves us that he sent his Son to be the means by which we can be fully rescued.
Why would God care if somebody else was condemning us? Our condemnation only matters if it's by God.
Nonsense; that's what redemption is all about: releasing someone from the control of another. Of course God cares about who is condemning, accusing, imprisoning, etc.
Justice is an attribute of God - he is just, of course. Our condemnation is brought upon ourselves, we are accused by Satan (the accuser).
It's not the only reason for our need of redemption, cleansing, forgiving, healing, ransoming.
The atonement is not all about getting rid of condemnation; but it has to be there somewhere.
The other models of atonement deal with other situations that deal with our lack of oneness with God.
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"The point of having an open mind, like having an open mouth, is to close it on something solid."
G.K. Chesterton
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mousethief
Ship's Thieving Rodent
# 953
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Posted
I mean, why should anybody else's condemnation have any control over us, let alone over God? My next-door neighbor says "I don't like your kid." Fine. You don't like my kid. You don't have to. There's no need for me to do anything about it. Certainly not to die.
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Kwesi
Shipmate
# 10274
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Posted
Mudfrog quote:
Original sin simply means that for whatever reason (explained by myth or not) we stand condemned.
Condemned by whom? Not God, surely? Is it not bizarre to suggest that a just God would condemn a sinner for a condition for which he/she is not responsible? As John 3:17 reminds us: "God sent not his son into the world to condemn the world but to save it."
I mostly agree with Anglican_Brat's response of Augustine to Pelagius:
quote:
If we imagine Augustine and Pelagius debating today, we might find Pelagius saying something like "Look at Mother Teresa, if you are not perfect like she is, it's your own fault, and God has every right to judge you for failing at your duty to be a good person."
Augustine might respond "We all can't help ourselves, we don't always do the good we want to do, our will is fundamentally damaged, we need God's grace to restore and perfect us before we can do good."
I would, however, disagree that we are incapable of doing good without being perfected, but that we cannot be restored/ saved and perfected without God's restoring and sanctifying Grace. Perhaps the phrase "before we can do good" could have e been omitted, as it seems to contradict the earlier observation "we don't always do the good we want to."
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mousethief
Ship's Thieving Rodent
# 953
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by mousethief:
I mean, why should anybody else's condemnation have any control over us, let alone over God? My next-door neighbor says "I don't like your kid." Fine. You don't like my kid. You don't have to. There's no need for me to do anything about it. Certainly not to die.
Crickets.
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