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Post by loughcrew on Aug 20, 2012 11:30:58 GMT
There has been a recent mushrooming in the number of so called non denominational Christian churches throughout the country.You read about them in the papers and I just wonder whether the appellation 'non denominational' is merely a sop to win Catholics over to Protestantism without them having to accept the historical and political ramifications of such a conversion. After all I figure that when these churches exist across the border in Northern Ireland people have no problem identifying them as thoroughly Protestant organizations.
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Post by hibernicus on Aug 20, 2012 19:33:24 GMT
Similar churches in America describe themselves as "non-denominational" so I wouldn't say it represents deliberate deception. (The contrast would also be with historic Protestant denominations such as Anglicans, Methodists, Presbyterians etc - the big development in the US has been the growth of this sort of congregation at the expense of "mainline" Protestantism. This is a working-out of tendencies within Protestantism that go back to the Evangelical/Pietist revival in the eighteenth century). Of course such churches have so thoroughly internalised the beliefs and assumptions of evangelical Protestantism that they generally equate them with Christianity and don't believe any other sort of Christianity is possible. (This also reflects the historic dominance of Protestantism in the Anglophone world, where Catholicism was historically seen - by Protestants - as an immigrant oddity. The spread of Anglo-American popular culture in Ireland, and the confusion and dimming of the Church's witness, seems to have led to Irish people increasingly internalising this view - I would be rich if I had £1 for every time I have heard someone say on TV/radio or seen them write to a letters page that if something isn't in the Bible it can't be Christian, as if they had never heard the ecclesial view that the Bible can't be interpreted without the Church as guide - and they probably haven't heard it.) Other differences from historic Protestantism would include almost total indifference to church history in between the Apostles and the present day (whereas Luther and Calvin knew perfectly well that some of the major Christological doctrines are not unambiguously stated in Scripture and were not clarified until the fourth and fifth centuries - this is why the precise date of the supposed Great Apostasy was such a major issue for Reformation-era Catholics and Protestants - from the Protestant point of view if you make it early you risk letting the Unitarians etc back into the Church, but the later you make it the more clearly the early Church can be shown to have had some very unProtestant beliefs and practices; which is why Newman said "to study history is to cease to be Protestant"). This sort of evangelicalism/pentecostalism is very strong on popular appeal but very weak intellectually. The American experience is that people from that milieu who seek any sort of theological education usually end up becoming Calvinist, Orthodox or Catholic.
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Post by loughcrew on Aug 22, 2012 14:40:59 GMT
Should these churches then refer to themselves as non-conformist? On this point I have met members of such evangelical\baptist\pentacostalist churches who were Catholics but who get very shirty if I refer to them as Protestants now, they are in denial.
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Post by hibernicus on Aug 22, 2012 18:50:53 GMT
Nonconformist means "not in communion with the state church" so it's not really applicable in this context. (American non-episcopal Protestants never called themselves nonconformists, and from the late C19 the English variety called themselves "Free Church" rather than "nonconformist" as the latter was what the Anglicans called them and they wished to present their independence from the state as a positive benefit.) This type of evangelical/pentecostalist does not think of themselves as Protestant because they believe they draw their inspiration directly from the Holy Spirit rather than from historical Protestantism; they have a radically anti-historical mindset and assume the early Christians were exactly the same as they are - they don't realise how much their beliefs and practices are based on Protestant assumptions about the nature of the Church and Scripture etc, so they just think of themselves as "Christian". (The latter term may also be used to express belief that the Catholic Church, and to some extent the Co of I and other non-evangelical Christians, are not really "Christian" at all but a form of revived paganism.) It may also be relevant that outside Ulster "protestant" is often equated with "Church of Ireland" as that is the main/only Protestant denomination to be found locally, so they may simply think you are calling them Church of IReland which they clearly are not.
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