Attitudes Towards The Roman Catholic Church
The declaration reflects traditional conservative Protestantism in its rejection of the Roman Catholic Church as a legitimate church. This is mainly due to the differences expressed over the issue of Justification. These rejections of the Roman Catholic Church are found implicitly and explicitly in the text of the Declaration:
- In Thesis one (Sola Scriptura), the text asserts We deny that any creed, council or individual may bind a Christian's conscience. While this has a universal application, it is specifically aimed at the Roman Catholic Church and its insistence that Scripture is to be interpreted by the church's institutions and historical councils, and of the Pope's authority.
- In Thesis four (Sola Fide), the text asserts We deny that justification rests on any merit to be found in us, or upon the grounds of an infusion of Christ's righteousness in us, or that an institution claiming to be a church that denies or condemns sola fide can be recognized as a legitimate church. It is this last phrase that indicates a rejection of the Roman Catholic Church, since it is clearly an "institution" that "denies or condemns" the Reformation understanding of Sola Fide.
- In the section Call To Repentance And Reformation, the following point is made: We also earnestly call back erring professing evangelicals who have deviated from God's Word in the matters discussed in this Declaration. This includes those... who claim that evangelicals and Roman Catholics are one in Jesus Christ even where the biblical doctrine of justification is not believed. This is an explicit reference to the issue discussed in Thesis four.
Read more about this topic: Cambridge Declaration
Famous quotes containing the words catholic church, attitudes, roman, catholic and/or church:
“It is time that the Protestant Church, the Church of the Son, should be one again with the Roman Catholic Church, the Church of the Father. It is time that man shall cease, first to live in the flesh, with joy, and then, unsatisfied, to renounce and to mortify the flesh.”
—D.H. (David Herbert)
“... he held it one of the prettiest attitudes of the feminine mind to adore a man’s pre- eminence without too precise a knowledge of what it consisted in.”
—George Eliot [Mary Ann (or Marian)
“Semantically, taste is rich and confusing, its etymology as odd and interesting as that of “style.” But while style—deriving from the stylus or pointed rod which Roman scribes used to make marks on wax tablets—suggests activity, taste is more passive.... Etymologically, the word we use derives from the Old French, meaning touch or feel, a sense that is preserved in the current Italian word for a keyboard, tastiera.”
—Stephen Bayley, British historian, art critic. “Taste: The Story of an Idea,” Taste: The Secret Meaning of Things, Random House (1991)
“Go, you are dismissed.
[Ite missa est.]”
—Missal, The. The Ordinary of the Mass.
Missal is book of prayers and rites used to celebrate the Roman Catholic mass during the year.
“This is what the Church is said to want, not party men, but sensible, temperate, sober, well-judging persons, to guide it through the channel of no-meaning, between the Scylla and Charybdis of Aye and No.”
—Cardinal John Henry Newman (1801–1890)