If you're counting noses, I don't see that that makes much difference. EVERY Catholic church--RC, EO, OO, OC, Indy, etc. has its own version of Tradition.
More accurately, it's own expression of tradition. It's kind of like a song that has been done in many different styles. The Eurythmics might do "Sweet Dreams" one way and Marilyn Manson another but at the end of the day, it's still the same song.
Then that should be how we look at every church, whether Catholic or Protestant, Sola Scriptura or Traditionist.
Protestant churches do not hold the same over all comprehensive view of Christianity as the Orthodox/Catholic or with each other.
It may look that way at first glance, but i think that's a mistake. While the Catholic churches consider their disagreement sufficient to break all intercommunion--the EO and RC, for instance, do not allow their people to communion in the other's churches--the great majority of Protestant churches consider all Christian churches to be valid and do not treat visitors from other denominations as not fully Christian. They also do not consider any of those issues you pointed to as necessary, as dogma, or as basic. But when the various Catholic churches have a disagreement, it's a "one true church" issue!
You do have a point. I do wish the Orthodox and the Catholics would come back into communion with each other. But from what I understand of the history and nature of the thing, the Orthodox are standing in the way of this more than the Catholics.
But at the same time, the flip side of that is that the Orthodox/Catholic are more committed to preserving the integrity of their respective practices.
you certainly do. You've picked on a few issues that have been "hot button" ones in recent years, but the disagreements do not pose the threat to fellowship that almost any disagreement between the Catholic-type churches does. They are still arguing over the shape of icons and who has the more prestige--the Bishop of Rome or the Bishop of Constantinople! With Creationism, there's at least a serious matter being debated.
First, I think that the true head of the Church is a much more serious issue than creationism vs science as far as the Church and the laity are concerned.
Creationism isn't a serious issue to the Church at all. The Church was creationist and now it endorses science. This has not effect whatsoever on Church doctrine or practice.
Secondly, there is no debate going on involving creationism where it does matter, that being in the world of science. The world wide scientific community does not and has not seriously considered creationism a viable scientific theory for centuries now and it is generally considered to be on the same level as "flat-eartherism."
This may be true. However, the reason Protestants switch churces more readily is precisely the opposite of what you are thinking. It's because they aren't seen as abandoning the "only real church founded by Jesus, etc." but that they are merely moving to another, equally valid, church of Christ.
That's true for some protestants but definitely not all. When a protestant has strong Biblical convictions, be they valid or otherwise, they attend the churches that agree with their convictions because they believe those churches to be closer to what God intended. And the flip side is that churches that don't agree with their convictions are further removed from what God intended. If the protestant doesn't have strong convictions, they tend to attend whatever church is the most entertaining.
Did you read the doctrines I identified when asked what basic or core doctrines there might be? Creationism certainly is not where any reasonable listing of "core doctrines" would start.
Yes, I did read the list and I agree with you. But not all people are reasonable and some do list believing in creationism as an essential for salvation.
That's what people who want to believe in traditions say, but there's absolutely nothing to it. These are traditions of men; they are traced to various men who are always quoted as the backing for them; and they can be identified as to when the seem to have started.
You can trace the start of the Catholic/Orthodox tradition to Moses, then the prophets and finally Jesus.
The men of which you speak merely named and defined for their contemporaries the traditions and concepts introduced by the prophets.
What of the alternative--Tradition? Not one person in a hundred can even tell you where this stuff came from.
I just did. And so can every Catholic, Orthodox Christian and every Orthodox Jew (they just leave Jesus off the list). Granted I can't tell you who exactly invented or defined the term 'purgatory' or when but I can tell you that the belief itself was introduced long before it was put into those terms. It is in the Bible in different places, just not in those words.
But so is the Trinity.
You are looking at the wrong things. Instead of looking at the belief or tradition itself and seeing where it started, you are looking at the words used to describe these traditions in different languages and seeing where they started and concluding these traditions started with the start of their most recent terminology.
And you are being somewhat arbitrary and inconsistent as to how you apply this. As an Anglican, I'm sure you believe in the Trinity but the term Trinity is to be found nowhere in the Bible. Instead, the term was introduced and defined centuries later. It has no more or less scriptural support than purgatory and the doctrine is no less a tradition.
In fact, the bible itself is no less of a tradition than any other part of the religious practice.
And you accept the tradition of the Bible and the Trinity as being of divine origin, yet you don't accept others.
Anyway, it is no shortcoming in Scripture if any of us consults a dictionary, Bible scholars, or anything else that helps. You'd dothe same with Tradition if you weren't content to say "Whatever the Catechism says, I'll go with that."
You seem to keep forgetting that I'm a convert. I wasn't brought up Catholic and grew up in a somewhat anti-Catholic part of the US around a lot of anti-Catholic people. I was an atheist for over a decade before coming to belief in God. I came to belief in Tradition as a code for unlocking and reading the Bible quite independently of the Catholic Church.
I used to think that the bible was a just a collection of writings from primitive people that was a mixture of "barbarian history, superstition and myth." I didn't see it as the Word of God at all. It was tradition that unlocked the Bible for me.
I started with Buddhist tradition. A friend of mine who was a Buddhist immigrant from Thailand taught me how to read eastern texts and I just started reading the Bible the same way as I did eastern texts. And by doing so, I realized it really was the word of God.
But only the Old Testament. I couldn't see how Jesus or Christianity fit in to it because the Buddhist tradition was only a general key and only unlocked first layer. Mainly, it didn't apply to many of the more straight forward writings of Paul.
I started attending synagogue and it opened the door for me to understand the OT in greater detail. What I learned was that Judaism holds that the Torah was handed down in two parts, the Oral Torah and the written Torah. But most of it was given through the Oral Torah. The only part that was written down at first was the ten commandments.
After a while I started attending RCIA for educational purposes. I also started attending mass and it was through the practice of the tradition that I learned to understand the New Testament. It wasn't that the Church necessarily taught me anything and I just accepted. It more that through the practice I came to many of the same conclusions that I would later find out that the Church teaches.
I converted because the Catholic Church agreed with all the conclusions that I had reached on my own and could verify. They turned out to be right about all the things I discovered on my own and knew about and so I started having faith that they were right about the things that I had yet to research.
