Categories: uncategorized
Date: 21 January 2008 20:04:57
After yesterday's post I remembered reading The Protestant Revolution. This follows the history of the Protestant faith from the Reformation until today and looks at how it has evolved and the impact it has had on our modern way of life - not just the religious but the secular impact as well.
One of the things that comes out is that the Protestant movement has no unifying tenets, as you would find in Catholic or Orthodox belief. In addition there has never been any real form of theological unity but sects have split off as they form their own belief structure. In anything other than religion this could be seen as a good thing as thought evolves. However faith should be a unifying instrument.
One of the problems the authors noted is that Protestant belief puts a great emphasis on the directing influence of the Holy Spirit and personal belief. One thing it points out is that this can be used by any crackpot as a basis for sowing dissent and splitting the church apart further. As their is no unified theological body in the Protestant body then there is no place to test these theological differences and gain concensious. Having said that you only have to look at the Anglican church to see how that isn't always possible even when there is such a body.
Yet we need to find a way to both unify our divided faith, if only to better defend ourselves from the attacks that rain down on us from all sides at the moment. It is difficult to fight government policies and aethisitic propaganda when we are victims of our own divisions.
In theory we should have no problem because we should be unite by our Christian beliefs. Yet we can't even decide whether some things are wrong or should be tolerated. As much as Jesus' teaching was clear about faith in God, He was never one to pull away from criticising the wrongs that He saw. Unfortunately not everything He saw and spoke out against is recorded. If it were then our path wold be a lot easier than it is now.
This can be refelcted in the WWJD movement. We can't all follow this in every day life because our own interpretations are put on the decisions we'd make. Therefore this could be described as a heresy in itself.