The economy was viewed differently than today, but the church issued decrees regulating banking and trade. Who were the equivalent of economic advisors for the church and what were their objectives? How did they formulate their decisions and whose interests did they serve?
@Dan 1) If your concern is self-identification, I doubt most Oneness Pentecostals identify as Protestants. 2) I've never heard of fundamentalists excluding any of the groups you named from Protestantism. What I have heard of, is fundamentalists saying that it doesn't matter whether you're a Protestant or Catholic or whatever; you're not "saved" unless you too are a fundamentalist, independent of your Protestantism or non-Protestantism.
I can't vouch for the accuracy/quality of the free summary over the actual work
but not bad to check it out
@curiousdannii ok then we may be misunderstanding each other, because I thought you were implying those folks are not Protestant, despite many no longer believing in the inerrancy of scripture, the historical accuracy of biblical accounts, the resurrection, etc.
@curiousdannii so if i understand correctly, you also still consider them to be protestant despite many of those groups having departed from the fundamentalist beliefs
which is my point exactly - it isn't the beliefs, it's the historical descent/lineage that makes them protestant
@Mr.Bultitude ok, so we misunderstood each other
@Mr.Bultitude so groups like episcopalians are still protestant, even when they no longer require belief in the resurrection of jesus from the dead, virgin birth, inerrancy of scripture, historical accuracy of gospels, etc.
(which has been my point all along - but I thought you were disagreeing)
@Dan Neither fundamentalism nor evangelicalism are equivalent to Protestantism. They are subsets or child branches of Protestantism.
@Dan Those are not the core beliefs of Protestantism. When Anglicans reject belief in God (like the tiny sliver who follow Spong), or when they go against the solas (like some Anglo-Catholics get close to), then it is fair to say they have left the bounds of Protestantism.
@Dan I should clarify that the resurrection of the dead and the virgin birth are core beliefs of Protestantism, because they are core beliefs of Nicene Christianity.
The inerrancy of scripture and historical accuracy are much more beliefs of evangelicalism, not Protestantism. And while the sixteenth century reformers would no doubt have also affirmed them, they arose because of debates from the 18-19th century with liberal Protestantism, which has resulted in the current broad division of Mainline and Evangelical Protestantism.
("Mainline" is mostly used only in the US, but I think it can be usefully applied to liberal influenced non-evangelical Protestant churches in other countries too.)
@Dan The doctrine of biblical inerrancy developed much more recently than Protestantism did, going back only a couple of centuries at most. It certainly is not what defines Protestants as Protestants.
@Dan Christian fundamentalism also came on the scene much more recently than Protestantism did. The major mainline Protestant churches never "departed from the fundamentalist beliefs." They existed long before those beliefs were defined.
@curiousdannii The sixteenth century reformers probably would have affirmed the general historical accuracy of scripture. At that time there still wasn't much challenge to the Bible on that front, and its historical accuracy was simply assumed.
@curiousdannii However, I do doubt that many of them would have affirmed the inerrancy of Scripture as that is held to in evangelical Protestantism. I don't believe they were all that worried about the Bible being without scientific or historical error. My sense is that they saw the Bible primarily as a source of moral and spiritual instruction. The probably would have considered the present-day inerrancy debates to be missing the point.
Sola scriptura is not the same as biblical inerrancy. It's about Scripture as the sole source of doctrine. It really isn't about the Bible being without error. It's about the Bible being the only proper source of the doctrines of the church.
@LeeWoofenden Sure, I wasn't using inerrancy to mean strict scientific inerrancy, but a general inerrancy/infallibility. There are too many debates over whether and how those terms should be distinguished. I just meant if you asked Luther or Calvin "Is the Bible filled with errors?" they'd answer No
@curiousdannii Right. I'm not really interested in entering into those debates. But I do think that the Reformers' approach to the Bible was quite different than that of present-day Evangelicals.
I simply don't think they were concerned with it being "without error" in the sense that Evangelicals believe.
I don't think they gave much thought to the Bible as a scientific or historical textbook. They saw the Bible as the primary source for moral and spiritual teaching.
@LeeWoofenden Just like with most of these issues, people start being really concerned when someone else starts saying something contrary to their less well defined assumptions. That's why church divisions have a helpful effect in the church - they force us to think about issues more deeply
Even Swedenborg, a couple centuries later, often casually spoke of stories in the Bible as having taken place as described. But if you were to present him with scientific evidence to the contrary, I don't think he would have thought of it as important, since his main point was that the Bible was where we get our teachings about God and salvation.
@curiousdannii Sure. Science has made Christianity think more carefully about its beliefs.
But what I'm saying is that I really don't think that the Protestant Reformers of the 16th century would have insisted upon the inerrancy of scripture as present-day Evangelicals use that term. I think they would have thought of it as being beside the point.
I think the advent of modern science sucked a segment of Christianity down into thinking in materialistic and scientific terms about the Bible, and caused them to invent new doctrines in order to "defend" the Bible on a material level. This is something that I don't think the Protestant Reformers, living in a pre-scientific age, would have bothered with or thought was important.
@LeeWoofenden In their context, but if they were transported to ours when even among Christians it is common for people to say the Bible is either not the word of God or only unreliably the word of God, then I think they would very strongly argue for the inspiration, truth, and reliability of the scriptures, even if they would use different arguments than many evangelicals would now.
@curiousdannii Well, you really can't transport people out of their age and speculate about what they would have said and done if they had been born half a millennium later . . . .
And though I agree that they would argue for the "inspiration, truth, and reliability of the scriptures," I don't think they would think of that in terms of material truth.
@curiousdannii I don't think I'm doing it. I think I'm saying that they simply didn't think the same way about the Bible that present-day Evangelicals do.
So in my view it's wrong to assume that Luther, Calvin, and Co. would have been fundamentalists or inerrantists if they had just lived 500 years later.
Back-dating doctrines that developed later to an earlier time period just isn't a very good idea in general.
@LeeWoofenden Okay, I don't disagree with that (though I'd note that not all Evangelicals think they way you think they think). But they all would have affirmed the historical resurrection of Jesus and the future bodily resurrection of the church, and I think most would have affirmed an historical fall too.
It's similar to my objection to Protestant apologists who attempt to back-date sola fide and penal substitution to the early Church Fathers, when we know that those doctrines developed and were defined at the time of the Protestant Reformation.
@curiousdannii I believe those doctrines can be found stated explicitly in Protestant writings from long before the advent of modern evangelical and fundamentalist Christianity.
The resurrection of Jesus really isn't a "scientific" issue. Though secular scientists, of course, would say that no such thing happened, it really isn't an issue on which science can make a definite pronouncement, since there were no scientific instruments present to record it.
A future bodily resurrection would also generally fly in the face of modern secular science. But it also can't really make a definitive statement about that. As for the historical fall, that one has greater problems, since science does have a large body of evidence about the origins of the human species, and that evidence pretty conclusively rules out the Genesis account as being literally, historically true.
@curiousdannii (And I am aware that there is a wide variety of perspective among Evangelicals. Many of them really do seem to be focused primarily on what the Bible says about having faith and being a Christian, and don't waste a lot of energy debating Creationism vs. Evolution and so on.)
@curiousdannii I was not entirely aware of this distinction. When I think of evangelical, I think either of Lutherans (they are just called Evangelicals in German) or of a conservative political movement that statistically (according to Barna and others) as little to do with beliefs aside from being "born again" and conservative political stances (but little moral grounding to their statements statistically)
@LeeWoofenden precisely
@LeeWoofenden I dunno, there are numerous early Church Fathers who identified disparities in chronology and otherwise in biblical accounts
@Dan Yeah, it's complicated. In the US, and perhaps in a lot of Europe, "Evangelical" is often more of a political term. Most Lutherans are liberal influenced and could be considered "Mainline" (if the term is allowed to be used outside the US.)
@curiousdannii to each their own. I see no reason to divide over many of these issues
@LeeWoofenden let alone the ancient authors and redactors themselves, who clearly felt free to edit the text and modify stories to fit their present circumstances
@Dan Would you be reunited with the miaphysites? The nature of the gospel is just as important as the nature of Christ to most Christians. If two Christians disagree over what "sin" is, then it is very difficult for them to cooperate in mission and evangelism, which is a primary reason why Christians have divided through history.
@Dan "Evangelical" today means something quite different than it did in the early history of Protestantism. It was common in the first two or three centuries of Protestantism to use "Evangelical" to mean the Lutheran branch of Protestantism, and "Reformed" to mean the Calvinist branch.
so generally i'll say fundamentalist for those fundamental beliefs, or conservative when i mean political issues (traditional heterosexual views on marriage / sexuality, role of women in society, etc.)
@Dan I don't disagree. But I'm not too sure what good alternatives there are. "Progressive" is used by many liberals now, but it probably wouldn't be an appropriate label for the liberals of the 19th and early 20th centuries who opposed homosexuality for example.
@curiousdannii I do believe the miaphysite / monophysite distinction is largely semantic and a result of historical circumstances and a desire to distance from Nestorianism
@curiousdannii I discovered that only because it confused the heck out of me years ago when I read in Swedenborg about "Evangelical" Christians (which I didn't think existed yet in the 18th century) and "Reformed" Christians, until someone explained to me that he was talking about Lutherans and Calvinists.
@Dan Good point. I also don't think the early Church Fathers were overly concerned about the historical accuracy of Scripture. So although they noted those disparities, and sometimes came up with ingenious explanations for them, the disparities didn't seem to constitute a major challenge to their faith.
@Dan Right. I think modern day inerrantists and literalists would be quite shocked if they knew how the biblical texts were generated in the first place. The idea that God dictated them to Moses and they've been the same ever since simply can't hold water. There is plenty of evidence that these texts developed over time, and didn't reach their final forms sometimes until many centuries after their earliest origins.
From my perspective, that is not a negative, but a positive. It gives God more time to mold the texts to tell the spiritual and moral story that God wants told. But many conservative Christians find the possibility that the Bible has changed over time to be very threatening to their beliefs, so they generally just deny it out of hand without seriously considering the evidence for it.
@curiousdannii It is true that different doctrines are what divide Christians. However, I agree with @Dan that it needn't necessarily do that. The very focus on doctrine is, in my view, a departure from the teachings and example of Jesus Christ, who did not focus on doctrine, but rather on love for God and the neighbor, and living in a way that expresses that love.
I believe that if Christianity were to pay more attention to that, then their varying doctrines would be nowhere near as divisive as they have turned out to be.
@curiousdannii to be fair, I genuinely try to be Orthodox. But I also personally struggle with agnosticism. And "struggle" is the correct verb.
But I think this critique of my approach is valid sometimes:
"[They confuse incomprehensibility with agnosticism, while they make mystery into an excuse for doubting divinely revealed propositions, and they pervert paradox by denying the very ground on which it is created: an a priori commitment to absolute, logically consistent Truth.
Their doubting is not any kind of "epistemological humility"—it's intellectual (and spiritual) suicide. Finally, Emergents repudiate logic while simultaneously angling the conclusions of their own humanistic reason against the Scriptures. It's an epistemological potluck on the village green, complete with half-baked chicken, stale heresy-crackers and the moldy rolls of relativism. I've also heard the salad isn't too fresh."
@Dan Right. Which is why despite all the charges against Swedenborg for "departing from historical Christian beliefs about the Bible" due to his heavily metaphorical method of interpreting the Bible, I think he was actually returning to historical Christian beliefs and resurrecting them from the death they died around the time of the Protestant Reformation.
@curiousdannii I genuinely want to believe in the resurrection (and currently do) and that God is real and can be encountered (and currently do)
but thanks to the Lutherans, I was also formally trained in biblical studies and can't help but note the disparities, historical inaccuracies, pre-modern approach to history, etc. - and I find that view lacking in modern Western Christianity
although it is still to be found in Byzantine Catholic and Eastern Orthodox churches - but even there it is becoming rarer
@LeeWoofenden The authors of the early creeds may have been allegorists, but that doesn't make the creeds summaries of only allegorical beliefs. The creeds tell historical truths which the early allegorists would have affirmed, and it is Swedenborgism's denial of those creeds which makes it heretical, not its allegorical exegesis
@curiousdannii "Heretical" is in the eyes of the beholder. Having said that, I didn't word that statement very carefully. I was really talking specifically about "historical Christian belief" in the Bible as carrying deeper metaphorical and spiritual meanings, not about creedal beliefs on issues such as the nature of God.
@LeeWoofenden I just want to point out that even the Chicago Statement of Biblical Inerrency allows for the legitimacy of the study of source criticism. What they deny is "We deny the legitimacy of any treatment of the text or quest for sources lying behind it that leads to relativizing, dehistoricizing, or discounting its teaching, or rejecting its claims to authorship."
@curiousdannii Still, the primary issue dealt with in the early creeds was the nature of God, specifically in relation to the nature of Christ, and that there was a process that led to the development of the doctrine of the Trinity of Persons. Although that doctrine arrived fairly early on the scene by present-day standards, it still wasn't developed until several centuries into the Christian era.
So to take the Trinity of Persons as "definitive" Christian doctrine, the rejection of which constitutes "heresy" is to say that Christianity is defined by beliefs that originated several centuries after Christ.
So inerrantists do not strictly have any problems with source criticism, even something like the documentary hypothesis. What they can't allow is for Deuteronomy to be entirely fictional, from the time of Josiah, rather than being sourced from the time of the Exodus and Moses
@LeeWoofenden Yeah, and this is what makes it tricky when you consider someone like Origen, who to some is just mistaken, but to others a heretic based on the creeds which came after him
@curiousdannii I'm not sure anyone believes that Deuteronomy is entirely fictional. Even the severest critics seem to think that it was based on some historical events, however different they may have been than what was eventually stated in the text of Deuteronomy.
There are a few books in the Bible, such as Jonah, that I do think were originally written as fiction, and were never intended to be taken as historical fact. But the historical books seem not to be fiction, but rather a "bigger fish" version of what took place historically.
@LeeWoofenden Well for example, many critical scholars say that Deuteronomy's emphasis on the monarchy was written to prop up the monarchy of late Judah, and was absent in early Israelite history. That's the kind of thing an inerrantist couldn't accept. Even if the text we know now was heavily edited, content like the rules for kings must be from the time of the covenant when Israel entered the land after the 40 years in the wilderness
By "historical books" I mean especially Genesis through 2 Chronicals. Ezra and Nehemiah also seem to fit into that category.
Though I do not put the first eleven chapters of Genesis into the "historical" category.
@curiousdannii Yes, I understand that inerrantists wouldn't want to accept such things. From my perspective, however, it makes no difference whatsoever whether those texts accurately reflect the history of the Hebrew people, and whether they were edited later for later purposes. To me, the important thing is the text that developed, and the message God is telling us through that text.
And I suspect that until modern evangelicalism and fundamentalism developed after the scientific revolution, very few Christian clergy or theologians would have gotten very exercised about such issues either. They, too, were focused primarily on the divine message delivered by the text rather than on its historical accuracy.
@curiousdannii In my view, creeds are not definitive for Christians. They are definitive only for people who belong to particular Christian denominations that assert them as definitive. If you belong to one of those denominations, you must accept what is taught in those creeds or be considered a heretic by your church.
But if you don't belong to a church that asserts a particular creed as authoritative, you are not a heretic. You simply aren't a member of a church that adheres to that particular creed.
@Dan Did you grow up Orthodox, or did you come to it later in life?
@curiousdannii Ironically, in some ways Swedenborg adhered to sola scriptura more strongly than most branches of Protestantism, in that he truly did not believe that any of the Christian creeds were a valid source of Christian doctrine, but asserted that doctrine must be drawn from the literal sense of the Bible.
He generally rejected the creeds because he believed that they conflicted with the teachings of the Bible in its plain, literal meaning.
@LeeWoofenden That reminds me that I really do need to write a question on the main site asking for the origin of the various meanings of sola scriptura. There are some Baptists who are anti-creedal, even though they would presumably actually affirm the early church creeds.
(I originally wrote "all doctrine must be drawn from the literal sense of the Bible," but he didn't actually say "all." He just said that "doctrine should be drawn from the literal sense of the Word [Bible] and confirmed by it.")
@Dan If you held a gun to my head and said, "You can't be a Swedenborgian anymore. You have to choose one of the main branches of traditional Christianity," I'd say "Orthodox." (And then probably go to hell for abandoning my faith under pressure . . . lol)
Though I still disagree with the Orthodox church on key issues such as the Trinity, I do believe that of the three major branches of Christianity, it has stayed closest to historical Christianity of the first millennium after Christ.
Specifically, the Orthodox church never adopted a post-Anselmian Satisfaction theory of atonement as both Catholicism and Protestantism did.
@Dan And incidentally, Swedenborg also grew up Lutheran--the son of a Lutheran clergyman who later became a bishop, no less. Then again, pretty much everyone born in Sweden at that time grew up Lutheran . . .
@Dan At any rate, when "Evangelical" occurs in the name of a Lutheran church, it may be from the historical use of the term "Evangelical" to describe the Lutheran branch of the Protestant Reformation rather than an identification of that church with the present-day evangelical movement in Protestantism.
Is it just me or do the vast majority of questions directed to the Cathoic Church get answered "The Catholic Church has no official position on this" followed by a "but" and quotes from Catholics theologians or apologists?
Which begs a few questions. Such as can there be a valid answer at all then, or are they not opinion? Do they just need a disclaimer? Do we have something I can't find that addresses this or would it be worth a meta question?
@Nathaniel Thats one of the questions it also raises. However, in none of those cases is a disclaimer expected. And more importantly, most Protestant denominations DO have official positions on a far wider range of detailed topics.
@PaulVargas I think it would be "Ber-oy-ay-ahs" but maybe its "Ber-oy-ai-ahs" I forget exactly what that i does.
@Nathaniel So is it not expected because we all just understand there is no one official Reformed standard (like Catholic catechism)? However, I think its valuable asking this because I think it's this kind of thing that leads to frustration by those who don't understand that. Those who do may be unaware others aren't.
But I would argue that even then, its a reversal. Catholic theologians are basing and expanding their theology based on the Church's official positions while protestant positions are based on the expanded theology of the Protestant theologians. So I can answer a Reformed theology question with Calvin and be confident all subscribing Reformed churches agree.
