Sunday, August 30, 2009

Protestant Misunderstanding

As usual, someone (Internet Monk - whose name I find a little odd considering his sola scriptura leanings) with absolutely no clue about why Catholics or Orthodox have a communion of Saints (and obviously no real desire to find out as he would rather bash them with his own misconceptions and misunderstanding of the role of Sacred Scripture) writes a blog article about why we shouldn't pray to Mary and belittling a little girl (or at least the theology she comes from) for not having a complete understanding of her religion. His answer, that praying to Mary wasn't in scripture, which was pretty awful, considering that Orthodox do not believe in "Sola Scriptura" for good reason and that Mary was alive during the writing of almost the entire New Testament with perhaps a couple exceptions, shouldn't be so surprising to him that it didn't work. I also guess he's never read Revelation how the saints bring the prayers up to God...but what can you do? At the very least you would think he might know why we have all the books of the Bible rather than leaving out the ones Luther cut from the Bible....

Sigh...

4 comments:

sarahbais said...

I can't understand why an adult would pick on a child's faith like that. To what purpose does his post make?

Anonymous said...

I agree. I think all the misunderstandings are unfortunate, so we continue to pray John 17. The wording of "the Mary" instead of just "Mary" sounded funny.

Surely the state of the church in the world is not what Christ intended.

cheryl said...

Something I've discovered a long time ago (in my online debate days):It's really not about this or that issue. It's about authority. You either believe the Catholic Church cannot err in matters of doctrine or you don't. If I find something in Scripture that I think is helpful then that's great. But I don't like when Scripture gets tossed back and forth like ping-pong ball. I don't mean to sound preachy, but here's the thing every 'sola scriptura' protestant should keep in mind when saying, "This catholic teaching is not in the Bible...". It doesn't matter. For a Catholic, Tradition alone suffices. I think that's something a lot of apologist need to remember as well. I think trying to prove the truthfulness of the Catholic Faith via Scripture is a great act of charity on the part of apologists in that they want to meet "sola scriptura" protestants on their own terms. But the nature of Catholic doctrine is such that it cannot be filtered through a 'sola scriptura' framework. And where it can, the doctrine in question is so mangled compared to it's former self, that I just can't personally approve of arguing in such a manner. It's like straining dried out, week-old flour paste through a small kitchen strainer.

~Joseph the Worker said...

Very good thoughts Cheryl! Thanks for visiting.