Along the lines of the blog Stuff White People Like, I was thinking about things Protestants like.
I got to thinking about this after reading a post on a friend's blog. So I'm going to throw out the first one. If you have ideas or things you think Protestants like, let me hear from you.
The first thing -- probably the biggest and for some, an almost defining thing -- is not being Protestant.
Not that they're Roman Catholic. Or Eastern. Or Coptic. Or whatever. The signboard on their church reads "Presbyterian," or "United Methodist," or "Lutheran," or "Two-Seed-in-the-Spirit Predestinarian Baptist." Or whatever.
So you would think they were Protestant. But if you engage theologically oriented Protestants for more than 15 minutes, you will come up with some variant of this:
"Oh, we're like the original, early, primitive church, before it became corrupted." (Sometimes they leave out the "like.")
"Purifying the church from the springs of its primitive life, and raising it besides into a new and higher form," was the way Phillip Schaff (1877) put it. But Protestants never want to claim that they are doing anything different from what St. Paul or St. Priscilla would have done. That would open them to the whinings from Rome that their's is a new church, not the primitive church.
Thus, the first thing Protestants like: not being Protestant. Doesn't make a lot of sense, but some things in this life don't.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
1 comment:
I don't get this post. Protestants protested the development of the RC church as a development that went away from the church as it was in the times of the apostles and the church fathers. So I don't get why you think protestants don't like being protestants. I've never ever heard a protestant who was ashamed to admit he was a protestant. Frankly, I am not even sure what the point of this post was.
Post a Comment