Irenaeus, over at Catholidoxy, has posted insightful thoughts about the way the Catholic and Orthodox Churches work to deal with false belief and practice. He writes (in response to a Presbyterian ruling that in essence says one of their ministers couldn’t have practiced a “same-sex marriage,” even though she did, because the Presbyterian constitution doesn’t recognize the practice):
Friends, the Catholic church has problems, the Orthodox churches have problems — goodness knows, they have problems — but not like this. You know who the heretics are, and although the wheels grind slow — decades, centuries, sometimes — the wheels grind, as the church never gets fundamentally off track. But in mainline “ecclesial bodies” there’s no hope, methinks. The hierarchy, judicial commissions, many, if not a majority, of ministers, are all sold out to some form of theological modernist/postmodernist chimera. Those who are fundamentally faithful to the Gospel in their Protestant way usually end up leaving and joining smaller denominations or independent churches or, often, after some heavy thought and seeking, Rome or New Rome.
The great German theologian Wolfhart Pannenberg predicted about a dozen years ago or so that in this twenty-first century mainline Protestantism would die, leaving us with worldwide Catholicism, Orthodoxy, and pentecostalism. The great American theologian Stanley Hauerwas once stated, “God is killing Protestantism — and we deserve it.”
Yes, we do, methinks.
Sometimes the Church moves a little too slowly in cleaning house, but the key point is that is does move.
David Bennett
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