A Catholic Church

Hey, turn italics off.

Hey Josiah I'm with you on all of this, obviously, as a Catholic myself (and a convert- so it's not just wallpaper from my childhood). The big thing for me about Protestantism is that it presupposes so much of Enlightenment philosophy. "Enlightenment Colored Glasses" was a good phrase for it.

I think my own philosophical basis is something more like Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations. The meaning is the use and words have meaning as they are used, so in practice Catholicism is much more object-oriented, to lift a term from programming, and takes the meaning of words (such as those in the Scriptures) primarily from how they are used (such as in Liturgy). As a result, Catholics tend to have an understanding of the Bible that absolutely confounds Protestants, but an arch-Calvinist doesn't has a set of assumptions that make it nearly impossible to speak the same language, because Catholics experience language differently. Okay, stepping down from soap box...

Not that it matters much for your argument, but you're fairly vague in that last paragraph re: the criteria for 'believer' status in the Protestant Church. I know of plenty of Protestants who would reject the inerrancy of the Bible (due to the influence of Neo-Orthodoxy in the 20th century), and I know plenty of Protestants who would quibble with your soteriological definition (quibbling over soteriology being one of the hallmarks of Protestantism). What you're really offering in this paragraph is a back-of-the-napkin definition of evangelical Protestantism, aren't you?

Kreeft visited Covenant College in 1992/93. Very warm fellow, whose apologetical writings are useful to Christians of all stripes, and a very interesting person. Also interesting is the fact that many Reformed Protestant folks wouldn't disagree with most of his propositions. They would argue that Christ did found the catholic church, and that there is historical continuity. The point of conflict in these statements lies in the definition of the terms. Protos (as one of my good RC buddies in Chicago calls them) don't deny that Christ founded the catholic church, but they want to know why that has to be equated with the Roman church. Likewise, they want to know why historical continuity can only be that continuity that Rome recognizes (and not the continuity with the early church, as testified to in the Bible and in the writings of the early church fathers, that the Protestant reformers recognized). The debate gets a lot more complex when these questions are introduced.

I remember that visit and it left a pretty deep impressionon me. Kreeft debated Krabbendam in the evening and though Krabbendam presuppositions seemed to ring of truth, Kreeft was the better wordsmith and rattled Krabbendam early... winning the overall debate and leaving Krabbendam a bit humbled and us Apologetics students a bit wiser.

Derek, I'm a "stick with the ecumenical creeds" guy when it comes to defining who falls within the boundaries of "the Faith". That's what they're there for, right? And if we're going to start adding stuff, we need to have another ecumenical council.

I know that sounds nuts, even impossible, but the alternative is well, wrong.

and yes, evangelical protestants. My bad.

Derek...6:15 AM? You should be translating Latin then. I'm telling Troy.

Just to play devil's advocate, why do you stick with just the ecumenical creeds? Why not keep going? And isn't this merely the lowest-common-denominator approach to Christianity? I'm not sure that was what the creeds were designed to be.

Scott, you say that like its a bad thing. But seriously, if we assume that what makes a Christian a Christian is a certain thing about one's relationship to Jesus Christ (a certain things related to that relationship) then it makes sense to me that the Creeds are a great way to go (being that most of them are talking about WHO Christ is, and our unity is found in Him).

I'm all for more creeds, but I think the entire Church needs to be in on that discussion, not some guy reading a little theology in his spare time.

This post echoes something I have been thinking a fair bit about lately, not very systematically, to be sure, and possibily quite inaccurate historically. But it has to do with "Protestant" vs. "Catholic/Orthodox" conceptions of and relations to "meaning" (terms in quotations broadly conceived.) I get the impression that "Catholic" conceptions see meaning/truth as available but ultimately mysterious, slipping outside of and spilling beyond our ability to name and know it. This is different from "Protestant" meaning which is a) fully accessible (usually in propositions) and b) either accepted or rejected by rational agents, albeit through faith. (I guess an exception would be something like Van Til. But even then, once the presuppositions are set straight, reality falls into place.)

Again, these are senses or tendencies I get, and it's very likely I don't know what I am talking about. Obviously, propositions, true and false claims, reason etc. are operative in both strains. I just think there are different approaches and the difference sounds like it is at play in Kreeft's statements.