Between Scylla and Charybdis

One of the weird things theologically about America is that while Catholics are by far the largest religious group in America, the religious context of the country is still Protestant. Disagreements amongst Christians is nothing new. That’s why we have Councils. Today it is between two groups I’ll call the Old School and the New School for lack of better terms. While they are mostly Protestant both schools can be found very tangentially among Catholics and other Christian groups.

Recently I ran across several articles that highlighted the struggle between these two groups and tangentially a third that I would call the Fundamentalist Scientists. The first article is in the National Catholic Register called “Herding Cats“. The Old School types are represented by “Truly Reformed Christianity” a.k.a. Calvinists as opposed to the New School types like Rick Warren. As with most of our separated brothers they both have some things right and yet manage to veer off the road theologically.

The Old School can be simply characterized by an adherence to Sola Scriptura and because of this belief they do maintain a Biblical understanding sexual morality for the most part in the face of modern culture. Just don’t ask them about maintaining a lifelong virginity as St. Paul advised. However by defending the man made doctrine of Sola Scriptura they sacrifice an incarnational understanding of reality.

Second is a post by a blogger called the Mackerel Snapper “The State of Protestantism Today” about how Sola Scriptura leads some denominations to transition from Old School to New School. As the article says ‘However, since the latter part of the 20th century, the charges that “Jesus never said (x)” or “That’s not in the Bible” have turned on themselves and have now become, “Jesus never said (x) was wrong, so that means (x) must be okay.”’ Jesus founded a Church, not a book. And because our separated brothers are no longer anchored to the pillar and bulwark of the truth they are left to their individual interpretations and can be buffeted by the winds of the culture.

As an aside I would also point out an article at Catholic Answers called ‘We are not losing “The Battle for the Bible”‘ about how Americans understanding of the Bible is changing. In short while there is a small uptick in what would be the closest to the Catholic understanding of Scripture it seems to show that when Old School types have problems that they can not overcome with their understanding of Scripture they skip to New School understanding.