Thursday, December 13, 2007

Worst Blog Post Title of the Month

It has to be this: "Just Say No to Ecumenism".

Because of course Jesus was just kidding when he prayed that we might be one (and for those who want to pretend that some ridiculous "invisible" oneness is sufficient for this, the Lord went on: "that the world may believe that thou hast sent me.")

Shame on all of us for our disunity, but shame, shame on anyone for actually preferring that disunity!

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hello, my name is Tim. I wanted to say how much I agree with you. Thank you for your wonderful insight. I think the topic of unity and division is such an important one and needs to looked at more fully (much more than I could post here). When others talk of unity it is different from that of the Catholic faith. They see unity through moral relativism. They use God against himself to force division. But the Catholic Church's idea of unity is different. It is to bring everyone to Christ. But not by force nor wavering from moral truth.

Fred Noltie said...

Hello Tim,

Thank you for your kind words.

I think that for most Protestants the sort of relativism that they might stumble over isn't so much a moral one: they aren't willing, on average (I exclude the liberals among them from this observation), to compromise on moral issues. What they are willing to do, unfortunately, is to to say that differences of belief are almost all irrelevant. We could say that they are relativists - at least partly - with regard to the content of the Faith. Aside from certain bare minimums - which don't vary a whole lot - almost everything else is a dealer's choice.

In part this is what drove me from Protestantism: an inevitable conclusion of this relativism of belief is that God does not operate in the way that Protestants say he does in order to communicate the truth of the Bible to them. If he did, there would not be the kind of disagreements that there are among them on issues that cannot reasonably be described as matters of indifference. I do not say that Protestantism's truth depends upon 100% unanimity amongst its adherents, but when they cannot agree on something that is obviously and unarguably not a matter of indifference - say, for example, the meaning of the sacraments (and even their number if you count Anglicans in the mix) - when they cannot agree on something as fundamental as that, it's clear that Protestant epistemology doesn't work.

I will confess that as a Protestant I probably could have said something like the author of the Worst Blog Post Title of the Month did. So I don't mean to suggest that I'm pure as the driven snow. But if it's wrong, it's wrong, and it needs to be recognized as such.

Peace,

Reginald de Piperno

Mike Burgess said...

I hope you won't mind, but I've added your site to my blogroll at my new website. I have enjoyed your commentary and posts here and elsewhere for some months now. Please stop by my fledgeling site and take a gander.

http://syzygus.wordpress.com

Fred Noltie said...

Hello Mike,

Thanks for your kind words, and thanks also for blogrolling me. I'll stop by your new place and take a look.

Regards,

RdP