I haven’t seen that. I have seen Catholics, Orthodox, Lutherans, Anglicans and other liturgical Christians disagree with what some people claim the Bible says, because their interpretation is at odds with the traditional interpretations inherited from the Early Church, the
consensus patrum, to use a term interestingly coined by Calvinist theologians. All my Catholic friends on the forum including but not limited to
@Lost4words @Valletta @Michie @chevyontheriver @concretecamper and seceral others certainly believe they are following the Bible according to its correct interpretation, and also regard, as per the Catechism of the Catholic Church, the Bible to be the center of the Magisterium, just as we Orthodox regard it as the heart of Holy Tradition.
Indeed, prior to the rise of Fundamentalism, and the Neo-Orthodoxy of Karl Barth, all Calvinist theologians were very interested in Patristics and Church Tradition, as John Calvin saw himself as reforming the church so as to more properly express what he believed was the Patristic interpretation of Scripture. He was mistaken - in fact, Calvinism was largely unprecedented, and perhaps the realization of this fact explains the popularity of Neo-Orthodoxy and Fundamentalist Calvinism, which deprecate or in the case of Fundamentalism outright reject the importance of Tradition and the
Consensus Patrum.
Note that I myself have done a great deal of ministry as a Congregationalist, and Congretionalism was influenced by Calvinism, being descended from, but not identical with, Puritanism (Congregationalism was a more mature movement which rejected the darker aspects of Puritanism), although specifically as a Comgregationalist I have always regarded myself as a Reformed Catholic in the tradition of Mercersburg Theology and the Scoto-Catholic movement in the Presbyterian churches, and more specifically, a high church movement in various Congregational churches, such as the celebrated King’s Weigh House in the City of London, whose minister at the turn of the 20th century, Rev. John Hunter, wrote Devotional Services for Public Worship, one of the most beautiful liturgical service books ever composed, vaguely similiar to the Book of Common Prayer, but stylistically more elegant in its prayer and petitions, while still every bit as scriptural and rational, retaining the qualities that John Wesley praised the BCP for, while eliminating some of its more problematic aspects.
His successor, whose name escapes me, also published a beautiful service book, Devotional Liturgies, and attempted to use the King’s Weigh House as a place where Roman Catholicism and Protestantism could be reconciled, but unfortunately, he was ahead of his time; if he had tried that after Vatican II, it could have had a very positive impact. However, it was not meant to be, so he gave up and retired to a Roman Catholic monastery. Then World War II happened, and after the war the residential population of the 1 square mile area of the actual City of London plummeted, dropping to just 9,000 or so today, as most of its inhabitants moved to adjacent boroughs, the wealthy to the adjacent City of Westminster or the Borough of Kensington and Chelsea, the middle class to Islington, Greenwich, Blackheath and Wandsworth, and the poor to Hackney, Tower Hamlets, Southwark, Lambeth, Vauxhall, Brixton and places further afield such as Croydon. Most of the Anglican and other parishes in the City no longer offer Sunday services, and the ones that do attract specific congregations based on ethnicity (various Orthodox churches, a Church of Scotland and a Welsh language parish, and a Dutch church) or particularly high quality liturgics (St. Magnus the Martyr and St. Bartholomew the Great are particularly popular high church Anglican parishes), or affiliation with specific professions (the Temple Church, for instance, an Anglican church with beautiful liturgies that serves half of the Anglican barristers who live and work at the Inns of Court, specifically those of Inner Temple and Middle Temple; Gray’s Inn and Lincoln’s Inn have their own chapels), and the rest either provide services on weekdays, like St. Stephen Walbrook, whose Thursday services are quite beautiful, or are their own attraction, for instance, the chapels at the Tower of London, and St. Paul’s Cathedral (Westminster Abbey, as the name implies, is in the adjacent City of Westminster, part of Greater London, and also home to most of London’s tourist attractions
aside from St. Paul’s and the Tower of London). The King’s Weigh House could not survive, and the church is now a Ukrainian Catholic cathedral, which seems fitting.
An American equivalent, Old South Church in Boston, where I once aspired to preach, for it embodied the liturgical Congregationalism I love so much, with its neo-Byzantine Venetian-style architecture, its glorious choir and splendid services, and its central role in the history of the cultural center of Colonial New England and the early United States, tragically was taken over by theologians advocating various new heterodoxies such as liberation theology, queer theology, womanist theology, neo-Gnosticism, and so on, for unlike the conservative Congregationalist bastion of equal antiquity, Park Street Church, which I have also always loved, Old South Church became part of the ultra-liberal United Church of Christ.
As I see it, Old South Church typifies the denomination you
ought to be opposed to, rather than the Roman Catholic Church. You might compare these two services, and tell me which one is more Biblical:
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This “Drag Queen Story Hour” in the month of June (in which sexual perverts commit the sin of pride while celebrating their sexual perversion) is now extremely common in the United Church of Christ, which I resigned from because contrary to their ad campaign, I believe we should not put a comma where God intended a period (my friend
@actionsub is familiar with that).
Now, compare that literal travesty in which no Bible is opened and if a Gospel is preached, it is not the one handed down by St. Paul, and should be considered anathema (Galatians 1:9) with this beautiful Roman Catholic liturgy the very next day:
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At this liturgy, there are are three Scripture lessons in addition to an appointed Psalm, and the theme of the liturgy is the teaching and celebration of the essential Christian doctrine of the Holy Trinity. The scripture lessons and most of the liturgy are in English, conducted in a beautiful and reverent manner using the revised Pauline missal (as modified at the behest of Pope St. John Paul II and the future Pope Benedict XVI to correct certain severe errors in the initial 1969 release) - people who attended the traditional Latin mass using the ancient Tridentine missal (that Pope Francis is trying to abolish despite its beauty and antiquity) also heard the Scripture lessons in English.
So my view is this: rather than constantly criticizing the Roman Catholic Church, usually on the basis of invalid reasoning, urban legends, and misconceptions perpetuated by polemicists like Jack Chick, conservative Protestant members of Christian Forums should recognize traditional Catholics as their allies, and join with them in opposing liberal mainline churches like the United Church of Christ, as well as liberal theologians who have seized control of the United Methodist Church in violation of its own Book of Discipline and the resolutions adopted at the last General Conference in 2018 and who prevented a conference from being held in the summer of 2022, ostensibly due to covid (but as we all know, by the summer of 2022, Covid was no longer a valid reason for avoiding anything, and teleconferencing and other approaches could have been used to minimize the risk for attendees who were elderly or immunocompromised). And these same liberal theologians are trying to seize control of the Roman Catholic Church and every other denomination, and recently have made inroads in several Evangelical churches.
So, I say,, rather than oppose the pious, traditional churches that happen to be Roman Catholic, who sincerely believe they are following Scripture, and who read it aloud, in English, at every Sunday (and who are
required to attend every Sunday or on Saturday evening, and on major holy days, unlike most Protestants; failure to do so is regarded as sinful in the Catholic Church, specifically a failure to honor the Sabbath and keep it holy) we should oppose the churches that chose to openly defy scripture and fly the rainbow flag and campaign for “reproductive justice” (abortion, that is to say, infanticide) and which seek to influence our naive and suggestible children with “Drag Queen Story Hours.” Travesty was an object of mockery to children raised just a decade ago, (this is why British children historically found Pantomime so amusing) but now the media has many youngsters look up to drag queens as celebrities, and the thought of “drag time story hour” happening in a church that has set aside the month of June not to celebrate the lives of the Apostles, which is what Eastern and Oriental Orthodox churches do, or the Trinity and Holy Communion, which is the Roman Catholic practice, but to celebrate homosexual perversion as condemned by the Torah, the New Testament and the Early Church Fathers, such as St. Basil the Great and St. Gregory of Nyssa (who some liberal Christians foolishly admire because they mistakenly believe he was a Universalist, when in fact he is one of the Church Fathers who was most critical of homosexual perversion and who wrote a special disciplinary canon that applied in the diocese of Nyssa of which he was bishop to reprimand Christians who dared violate the clear Scriptural teaching on sexual morality, and defile themselves in the manner of Sodom and Gomorrah.
In closing, who cares if the Roman Catholics read Maccabees or Sirach, when literally all of the mainline Protestant churches are now flying rainbow flags?
