An excerpt from the report:
Nothing in Schuller’s talk indicated that he would disagree with
anything found in liberal Protestantism, and in Austria he has advocated
freely giving Communion to Protestants. Liberal Protestantism began,
in Reinhold Niebuhr’s famous words, with the belief that “A God without
wrath brought men without sin into a kingdom without judgment through
the ministrations of a Christ without a cross.” Its logical culmination
is found in the likes of Gary Hall, the Dean of Washington’s National
Cathedral, who just told The Washington Post that “I describe
myself as a non-theistic Christian.” Since there is no sin in the world
of liberal Protestantism, except maybe holding unfashionable political
opinions, and no beliefs that are necessary for salvation, except maybe
the current editorial position of The New York Times,
denominations that embrace liberalism have a hard time convincing people
to get up early on Sundays and go to church, even though they have done
everything Helmut Schuller wants the Catholic Church to do. The United
Church of Christ has lost half its members since the early 1960s, even
though the overall US population has doubled during the same period of
time, the Episcopal Church has lost nearly a quarter of its Sunday
communicants in the last decade, and the established Protestant churches
in Europe have fared even worse. As measured by demography, liberal
Christianity is a clear failure.
It cannot be repeated often enough: there is no future for the Catholic Church in the U.S. if we become indistinguishable from the zeitgeist. The liberal Prot mainline has proven this over and over again.
Back in my Episcopagan days (1982-1996), I gleefully joined in every effort to undermine the apostolic tradition of the church. Nothing was sacred. Nothing was off-limits. Nothing was to be untouched. I even rewrote the Nicene Creed (in my hubris) to better fit my own ideological views.
Had I stayed in the Episcopal Church, I'd probably be a bishop by now!
________________Follow HancAquam or Subscribe ----->
No comments:
Post a Comment