I know many will refuse to believe this but I actually have (used to have?) Roman Catholic friends. No, I wouldn’t normally talk this way about Mary in front of them. If you are perceived as insulting someon’s mother it is pretty hard to get them to like you. I would avoid that. Keep in mind that, from my own point of view, I’m vindicating Mary from false charges of sexual perversion.

But my post had other considerations in mind. When I witness RC converts and would-be converts acting like this whole pack of dualistic myths are credible and worse “pious to believe,” I think it is appropriate to break the spell. There is no substance to the case here: high-sounding speech is the argument.

As far as “locker-room” language is concerned, all I can say is that some Christians must have gone to High School with a really prissy gym class.

Regarding this, I will add that Josh had some helpful insights here. I’ll be glad to see a reasonable response.

Really though, this whole conversation is not about Roman Catholicism in its own integrity but about why Reformed or Lutheran or Anglican Evangelicals would find Roman Catholic ex-Evangelical apologists attractive. How can one recoil (as I do) from most of the Protestant “apologists” out there and then claim that the RC apologists are all so compelling?

Sophistication in rationalization is not intellectual activity.

And that only touches on the problems. How do you write something like this, and forget to mention the Fourth Crusade? If this is how they will whitewash the issues in the case (and to the harm) of those closest to them, then why trust anything they have to say to “fundamentalists”?

This is reality, not fiction. But it seems as creepy as any horror TV series.

I don’t have time to summarize the first chapter, but it is even better than I remembered. Obviously, Alexander Schmemann was not a Reformed Protestant. But he was still well worth a discriminating read.

His writing was not only helpful but also beautiful.

Below I noted that you can’t have it both ways. If a tradition is established then it cannot later slowly evolve into being. If an early Bishop of Rome does not believe he is the Pope, but later bishops believe they are the Pople, then the idea and practice must have devoloped over time. Whatever sort of authority might be behind such an arrangement, it makes no sense to press for such authority and at the same time claim that this idea or practice was estalished by Jesus initially. That is self-contradictory.

Tim Enloe has some interesting thoughts on this matter.

My post below has prompted a reaction.

I’ll let Kevin speak for himself but make a couple of points about what is said of my own words:

Oh my. So invocation of the saints and the veneration of images, practices long, long practiced by both the Eastern and Western Churches, are condemned as necromancy. The Angelus just rang at the Catholic Church next door. I stopped my typing and prayed the Hail Mary three times. Was I engaging in necromancy? Of course not. What a silly suggestion. I was participating in the prayers and intercessions of the communion of saints. Catholic Christians have always known the difference between the invocation of the saints and necromancy. Mr. Horne appears to be stuck back in a time before the incarnation and resurrection of the Son of God and his Pentecostal outpouring of the Holy Spirit had occurred. Like the iconoclasts of the seventh and eighth centuries, who did not see how the incarnation of the Son of God necessitated a reinterpretation of the second commandment for Christians, Horne does not see our baptismal incorporation into the triune life of God through the sacred humanity of Christ Jesus has affected the life of prayer for the people of the New Covenant. In Christ we share in the wondrous mystery of communion with the saints and all the faithful departed. We are upheld by the prayers of the saints and are bidden by the Church to invite their intercessions. None of this was possible before the death and resurrection of Christ but is wondrously possible now in the Holy Spirit.

OK, the writer never engaged in necromancy and Bill Clinton never had sex with Monica Lewinsky. God prohibits contacting the dead. If this was retracted at some point, we would expect to see some major sparks flying over this. There are tens of thousands in Judea, we are told in Acts, who remained loyal to the Law as Christians. This caused some huge arguments about circumcision and diet. But we are supposed to believe that people began praying to the dead and it never provoked a ripple of concern?

When Moses constructed the Tabernacle and later Solomon the Temple the Spirit as fire fell upon the altar so that the priests had to retreat. At Pentecost, rather than falling on things, the fire fell on people as living sacrifices and living stones in the Temple of God. From this huge difference we are expected to learn that it is now OK to to venerate objects and talk to dead people? Venerate the living.

If you have to stay RC, you can still use this, OK? If you ever get to meet the Pope kiss his hand rather than his ring.

Iconoclast? I have three bona fide Eastern Orthodox icons on the wall not ten feet away from where I sit. The only thing is that I’m never on my knees in front of them except when I am searching for one of the remote controls (which raises uncomfortable questions about whether or not there is an iconostasis in the living room that my family “adores.”) I think the “iconoclast” label is being stretched rather widely, especially in a piece that complains about imprecision.

Of course, there can be no argument. The writer claims to represent the group that is always right by virtue of holding their own opinions. If they say it isn’t necromancy then, by definition, it is sin to say otherwise. I make no claims for hoping to persuade the writer of anything. I can’t cure autism. I’m writing for people who aren’t sick yet, who can still hear the living.

This is confusing, and insulting, and it’s difficult to see a proper response. That it is possible to invoke the saints and venerate images and not fall into gnosticism is evidenced by the long history of the Church. These are completely different issues. The grounding of both communions in the incarnation and sacraments is solid protection against the retreat into gnostic interiority. As to whether Protestantism is a superior protection against gnosticism, I refer the reader to Philip Lee’s Against the Protestant Gnostics.

Good book. But no one in the Church is a gnostic or else he wouldn’t be a professing Christian. It is still possible to find gnostic tendencies in the Church. My point is that Protestants for all their faults (which Lee is right to point out) have the resources to more easily overcome this. My assumption is that gnostic tendencies affect the entire church East and West and the question is how to root them out.

I didn’t take time to argue about how gnosticism affects the RC communion other than the obvious ways I critique on other grounds (which the writer simply states can have nothing to do with gnostic impulses). So I can see why this was difficult to respond to. Since I completely share in the incarnation and the sacraments (and other practices which I might not want to technically call “sacraments” but still see as real means of grace and gracious gifts) we can just stipulate that there is no real gnosticism here.

Need I point out that Zwingli, Luther, and Calvin, as well as other reformers, believed in the perpetual virginity of Mary. As far as the tendency of many Christians in the past to associate sexual intercourse with sin, I certainly agree that this was unfortunate. It’s a tragedy the Church Fathers did not listen to and learn from the rabbis—one of the evil consequences of the first great schism, the schism between Church and synagogue. In any case, contemporary Catholicism certainly cannot be accused today of demeaning sexual intercourse or identifying it as evil. Mr. Horne should carefully read the reflections of the celibate John Paul II on the sacredness of the nuptial union.

Again, sort of had in mind a reader different from my critic–one who would recognize Benedict Pictet as a late Protestant Scholastic. If I’m stipulating that he was at least open to the perpetual virginity of Mary I’m stipulating that the Reformers also held to it at least as strongly and probably more so. You don’t need to point out anything about Luther or Calvin or Zwingli (can anyone be surprised about Zwingli?) except to the extent that I used in-house sorts of references that went past you. So thank you for making my intended meaning clear, which is: Luther and Calvin and Zwingli and Pictet were in error on this point.

Whatever spin (and this may involve nothing but solid truths) can now be put in celibacy, the historical fact is that it was considered to demeaning to the Theotokos to be penetrated by her husband. It is a sick superstition which needs to whither and die rather than be perpetuated by anyone. This still comes across even when moderns try to come up with acceptable rationalizations. EO apologist Peter Gilquist claims in Becoming Orthodox that if his wife had given birth to God that his respect for her would be greatly heightened. And there it is: husbands defile their wives by virtue of sex. This needs to be terminated and cauterized.

A proper response to this criticism is beyond this article, and most likely my competence. I am persuaded by the arguments of Newman and others, but I acknowledge that the papal claim, based on the historical evidence alone, is less than coercive. But the Catholic does not properly ground his belief in the supremacy and infallibility of the successors of Peter on the scholarly, and not so scholarly, research of historians but on the authoritative teaching of the Catholic Church (see my article “Newman did not become Catholic because of the Pope“). The authority of the Catholic Church comes first, then the authority of the Pope.

OK, I’m not able to read your essay on Newman at the moment, but I appreciate your candor here (Having read what you said earlier about Pope Leo I was all set to pounce). But still, you seem to have simply stopped time at the age you want. The church produces the Pope and then everything else is illegitimate rather than a further development in the Church. You appeal to the Church as your standard of truth for giving you the Pope but you only recognize as the Church that which is associated with the Pope.

On the Vulgate I’ll simply wait until I have time to collect sources. The idea that Trent represented a huge step backwards, a reinvention of the Church, is not simply a piece of Protestant self-justification. But arguing further in that direction needs to await another day.

One other thing: the writer seems to see himself as open to Eastern Orthodoxy in some way. This is interesting in light of Luther’s debate with Eck:

As for the article of Hus that “it is not necessary for salvation to believe the Roman Church superior to all others” I do not care whether this comes from Wyclif or from Hus. I know that innumerable Greeks have been saved though they never heard this article. It is not in the power of the Roman pontiff or of the Inquisition to construct new articles of faith. No believing Christian can be coerced beyond holy writ” (Roland Baintan, Here I Stand: A Life of Martin Luther [Nashville: Abingdon Press] p. 89, emphasis added).

“Some reasons I am not a Roman Catholic”

I like this stuff. Here are a few comments of my own.

WARNING: Sensitivities might be offended!
Proceed at your own risk.

• While God in his mercy includes all sorts of people who have been ill-taught (including all sorts of Protestants), it is nevertheless eternally dangerous to embrace serious sin when one knows better. It is an act of unbelief. Contacting dead people and praying to/through images is high-handed sin. Some of the severest warnings and punishments in Scripture are assigned to such practices along with murder and sexual perversion. Sure, grape juice in the Lord’s Supper is an abomination. But it is your abomination, the one God assigned you to deal with. Trading that for necromancy and idolatry doesn’t seem remotely safe.
• More positively, the Protestant Faith seems like a much more likely place to truly escape gnosticism. After all, for all the real virtues one finds in the Roman Catholic or the Eastern Orthodox communions, whispering prayers to omniauditory ghosts and talking to pictures is hardly an affirmation of anything embodied or alive, let alone both. We have the potential, at least, to truly put the community back in its proper place as the embodied inhabitation of the Spirit of God. Other people are God’s images, his icons. And when you are face to face with them you can and should ask them to intercede for you. In interacting with other living, present people, rather than artificial images or imaginations, God will renew us in the image of Christ. Idolatry leads the other way:
  

  The idols of the nations are silver and gold,
  the work of human hands.
  They have mouths, but do not speak;
  they have eyes, but do not see;
  they have ears, but do not hear,
  nor is there any breath in their mouths.
  Those who make them become like them,
  so do all who trust in them!

  Emphasis on the “blank wall” in church architecture is a distraction from what the Second Commandment really means, but it is one that can be more easily cured. Everyone knows the Sixth Commandment means “Love your neighbor as yourself.” Eventually people will figure out that the Second means we should regard one another as a means of grace.

• More on the anti-gnosticism thing: While even as late as Benedict Pictet vile allegations against the Mother of God were deemed pious, we are now all happy that Mary and Joseph joyfully did it to and with one another and gave Jesus a bevy of brothers and sisters. God blessed Mary and Joseph with orgasms and children. Deal with it. Even if nothing more had been at stake, the idea that antique squeamishness and false view of spirituality and deity should be permitted to be perpetuated would alone be worth a reformation and a schism or two if necessary. I do appreciate the way that orders of celibates can accomplish great things for the kingdom. If that can be continued without making sex evil, more power to such groups. If not, we’ll have to live without them.
• You can’t play both the institutional card and the development card in the same hand and expect to win anything. If the Papacy was instituted by Christ, then everyone from Peter on down knew about it. But, as anyone who reads Clement’s letter to Corinth knows that he was unaware of this great bequest So we come to the idea that the Papacy naturally evolved. It probably did. And it also withered quite drastically. Why would we chain all the present and future church to an arrangement that was so obviously an adaptation to the world of Classical antiquity. No one denies that the Pope can serve as a transnational reference point (i.e. compare the German Roman Catholics to the German Evangelicals in the struggle against Nazism). But these benefits can probably be derived from a more stable foundation. In most cases the doctrine of the Papacy seems comparable to burying a widow alive in the grave of her husband.
• And how can any Protestant who takes church history seriously not simply shake one’s head at the historical revisionism that must be swallowed. The relationship between the medieval church and Trent is that of a pregnancy to a late abortion. Christendom flowered with new knowledge and scholarship and suddenly we are told that all theology must come from the Vulgate. This form or reactionary repristinization is as revolutionary as anything Luther ever dreamed of and is an obvious kick at the Jerome who thought so highly of recovering the true text of Scripture. I don’t think it would be hard to point out many other discontinuities. There is nothing in history that compels anyone into Rome.

Some good things to think about.

Some day the word “Rome” will mean nothing but to a few scholars who specialize in early Christian history. 182 thousand years from now a few people will speak of TBN and Origen as belonging to a single age of the Church Perhaps somewhere there will be a sect demanding that we “go back to the earliest churches” and join something called “Calvary Chapel.” They will teach that it was pastored by Irenaeus, no doubt. The entire myth of Rome will be forgotten. No one will know why Washington DC had all those columns. The cultural force of the whole mystique that has affected the architecture of our capital and the religious identity of Russia will have long since evaporated.

Nor will there be any doctrinal standards geared to the Protestant / Roman Catholic divide. Other errors as yet undreamed will be repudiated by name. The Reformation will mean nothing to anyone outside of some obscure branches of academia.

My point is that as important as the divisions are now, some day there will be a church with a whole different set of issues. The differences between Irenaeus and Billy Graham will probably be miniscule compared to the difference between us and our descendents in a hundred thousand years. Or a million. This will pass. We have to be faithful in our time, but God will bring things right some day.

Wow. Blogger and Gmail include buttons!

P.S. But Firefox can’t read my rss feed. What’s up with that?

Apparently, some presbytery is appealing to a higher court to take “original jurisdiction” over some notorious heresiarch somewhere…

Hat Tip: Scarecrow

I’m in a mixed marriage. Jennifer uses a PC.

We keep our calendars in sync by using Yahoo’s free service. But this only works when wifi is available. I would much rather use some other system in my computer and sync with either Jennifer or the Yahoo calendar. I’ve tried double-calendaring and it gets tiring. I fail to keep up.

Another option would be to find a way to get my yahoo calendar loaded for offline browsing. But while that is possible on the PC I haven’t yet found that feature available in a browser for the Mac.

Any suggestions?

And while I’m on the subject of computer organization, is there any reason I should keep Entourage on my hard drive. I like Microsoft Office in general, but the Mac already comes with a calendar and email system. Off hand it looks to me like Entourage is not as searchable. Does anyone out there prefer Entourage. What about the firefox/thunderbird system? Are there some benefits there I don’t know about?

P.S. I just noticed Mozilla has a calendar as well. I’m wondering of the PC and Mac versions can export data to one another…. Anyone know?