Re: Conflicts, contrasts or differences between Catholics and Protestants in Great Britain

Alec Brady wrote:

[Me, on "one holy *catholic* and apostolic church"...]
What it's doing is saying something that's no longer
*meaningful* unless we generalize the term "Catholic Church"
somehow -- which applies whether we generalize it the way
you'd prefer, or in some different way.

[Alec:]
OK, there's a danger of circularity here. I disagree that it's not
meaningful, *because* I think the RCC is the church of the Creed.

Sure.

(Perhaps it wasn't clear, but I think the fact that there's
a body today that makes similar claims is a hopeless basis
for identifying it with the 4th-century one.)

Of course. I'm sorry, I was skipping a step. I meant "if you're wrong,
and that church does still exist, then it will indeed make the same
claims as it did in the fourth century, and be continuous with it. And
there's a church that fulfils both those criteria, so if that church
still exists, it must be this one". As you deny the antecedent, you
naturally deny the consequent.

The logic still isn't quite right; there might be more
than one church that fulfils both criteria. But yes,
the main reason why I disagree is that I don't see any
good reason to think that any entity still exists that
*is* the same thing as the 4th-century "Catholic Church".

I am not convinced that today's RCC *does* have the right
sort of relationship with today's Christendom as a whole.

How does it differ?

The 4th-century "Catholic Church" consisted, at least
according to the standard story today, of more or less
all Christians who weren't seriously heretical. That
is not true today.

Perhaps a case could be made that the Donatists weren't
seriously heretical. If so, then I think their exclusion
back in the 4th century was a mistake. Of course, in
assuming that not being seriously heretical is the key
criterion I'm making an assumption that you may very well
not share...

If applied to the whole Creed, it would mean that *if* Arians
wish to say and mean the Creed *then* they'd better find some
interpretation of the material in it about the Son and about
the Catholic Church that renders it true-by-their-lights. That
doesn't seem an outrageous idea to me.

It seems utterly potty to me! The purpose of the Creed was to bind the
church to one theology and exclude another.

The purpose of the Creed was to set limits to theological
variation, not to nail *everything* down.

If we take the Creed
seriously, surely it has to be on its own terms? Otherwise it would be
like reciting the American Pledge of Allegiance while intending your
words to refer to the Soviet Union, or making marriage vows while
saying to yourself "of course, by 'you' I mean all (wo)mankind"

Of course there are limits to what could count as
a reasonable interpretation of the Creed, or of any
document. The question is where those limits are.
Ideally, we'd understand everything in the document
*just the same way* as its authors did. But we can't.

I suspect the people who originally wrote the Creed
might have been horrified at what we evolutionists
make of calling God "creator of heaven and earth".
But, well, we can't believe what they believed because
it's been shown to be wrong, and it turns out that --
so we think -- we can still hold to what actually
matters in their belief, to the point they were
really making. And, after all, they didn't *say*
"who created heaven and earth in six 24-hour days".

That's one kind of situation in which our meaning
and the original meaning might have to diverge.
I think the "one holy catholic and apostolic church"
clause is another kind: as I've said before in this
thread, I don't think there *is* any institution now
that exactly corresponds to what the authors of the
Creed meant by that phrase. So we have a choice:
we can stop saying the Creed, or take that bit out;
we can say that bit and *mean* the 4th-century
"Catholic Church"; or we can do our best to identify
what now corresponds most closely to the 4th-century
"Catholic Church".

Of course, it might turn out that there's nothing
close enough to make it possible to say the Creed
honestly. (That might be the situation of someone
wanting to recite the "Pledge of Allegiance" in an
imaginary future in which the US has been taken over
by, let's say, China.) Apparently it seems to you
that any understanding of that phrase that doesn't
pick out a single human institution with an identifiable
structure is necessarily dishonest. It doesn't seem so
to me. I'm not sure what either of us can do to convince
the other.

Of course you can then ask (1) whether an Arian would want to
do that and (2) whether any such interpretation exists that
isn't intolerably strained. The answers might well be "no".
And you can ask the same thing about what present-day Christians
(RC or other) mean when they say the Creed; for at least some
present-day Christian groups the answer to #1 is clearly "yes",
and it seems to me that the answer to #2 is "yes" as well.

I don't think the "invisible universal church of all true Christians"
interpretation is "intolerably strained". I think it's just not what
the Council intended. Using the Creed for one's own purposes in that
way would be dishonest. Why not just write one's own statement of
faith?

Once again you unfairly impugn the motivations of those who
say the Creed with an interpretation along those lines. How,
pray, does doing so serve "my own purposes"?

It seems to me -- and presumably to the leaders of those
non-RC churches in which the Creed is used, so however
dishonest or crazy this is it's something that many people
find reasonable -- that it's about as near as one can get
to what the Council intended in the modern world. The
entity that used to be picked out by the phrase "one
holy catholic and apostolic church" no longer exists.
It has split, and split again, and each of its progeny
is something different to what it once was.

So yes, we could abandon the Creed, or we could leave
that bit out. Maybe we should. But it's not obvious that
we should. And that's just about all I'm saying.

But go ahead and believe that non-RCs are dishonest
when they say the Creed if you prefer.

No, when I was in the sixth form I was a member of a particularly smug
and self-admiring clique. We thought we were being clever. The
Tractatus was useful because it was short, full of quotable quotes and
we could fool ourselves into believing we knew what it meant.

A bit like the Creed, then? :-)

(Anyway, even if you used the Tractatus solely as a means
of posing and being smug then I think that puts you well ahead
of the people I hung out with.)

--
Gareth McCaughan
..sig under construc
.

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