Aren't you Christian too?

By -
I am supposed to be working on a piece of paper right now, but I think I want to take a mental break and engage a bit in polemic. I believe that I have talked about this before. It increasingly bothers me to see believers beginning to take on certain line towards the Roman Catholic Church and its followers as a whole. Essentially, what I have always heard is that they see Roman Catholics, and they talk about God and they dun know God and not considered believers (!?!?). The argument is somewhere along that line.

My response (in brief) is multi-faceted. Firstly, nowhere in my study in theology has I come across any writers or theologians who classify Roman Catholics outside of Christiandom. It's not Christianity and Roman Catholicism, but it's just Christianity. Based on what I have heard from people (yes, even in Hope Church and among some of the more matured believers), they need to think about this, why.

Secondly, the fact that Catholics practices are different from the mainstream protestant denominations today does not mean that they cannot be considered as a denomination of Christianity as a whole. I seriously think that the people whom I have heard from will need to re-examine their assumptions.

Thirdly, one needs to take into account of nominal Christianity. What does it mean? It means that someone can claim to be a Christian who attends church but only see it as a cultural obligation. This is what's happening in a lot of Latin American countries and a lot of countries with Catholic heritage. But wait a minute, doesn't that happen all the time to other Christian denominations? Someone claims to be Christian (Methodist, Presbyterian, Lutheran etc) but sees himself as a Christian only because he is born into a Christian family? I wonder does the people whom I am thinking of ever think of these questions, or they just assume that as long as you see a Catholic, he/she must not have had a relationship with God through Jesus, etc. I think we need to be more critical than that.

In short, intellectually, we need to ponder if there is any reason for us to segregate out Catholicism as a non-Christian religion. Existentially, we need to figure out if the Catholic down the road is as much 'saved' as the common so-called Christian who claims himself as a Christian. Theologically, we need to establish what makes us a Christian or not a Christian.

This post has nothing against any denominations, but my thoughts on how we should view ourselves and others.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Parable of the 'Good Samaritan'

By -
Once there was this man traveling from Jerusalem to Jericho, and he fell among thorns, and the thorns spring up and choked him. And as he went on, he didn’t have money, and he met the Queen of Sheba, and she gave him 1,000 talents of gold and 100 changes of raiment. And he got into a chariot and drove furiously, and when he was driving under a big juniper tree, his hair caught on a limb of that tree, and he hung there many days, and the ravens brought him food to eat and water to drink, and he ate 5,000 loaves of bread and two fishes. One night when he was hanging there asleep, his wife Delilah came along and cut off his hair, and he dropped, and fell on stony ground. But he got up and went on, and it began to rain, and it rained forty days and forty nights, and he hid himself in a cave, and he lived on locust and wild honey. Then he went on ‘til he met a servant who said, “Come, take supper at my house.” And he made an excuse and said, “No, I won’t. I have married a wife, and I c...
Read more

Of Teaching and Learning

By -
Image
Over the past two weeks, I was invited to attend a block class on "Learning to Teach." After two weeks of class, here are some reflections that I have. We thank God Bro Casey is a pretty humane teacher... :P  Firstly, teaching needs to meet the changing challenges of the 21st century. This is especially pertinent with all the advancements in technology as well as the worldview changes with the generation today. There is simply no room for the teacher to remain stagnant and not be able to keep up with times so as to engage their students and to facilitate learning. Applying to theological education and Bible school, we have to consider what kind of ministers we are training for the churches in the 21st century. If we are training ministers who are able to engage today’s generation, then we need to review the current methods of teaching and train ministers to be savvy in social media and technology and be able to make use of them in their ministries. Reflecting back on...
Read more

Of Exegesis, Wedding Preparation and the Whole Lot of Things: Another Reflection

By -
Image
To those who know what happened, the past months since the start of 2016 had been very stressful to me. In the preparation to my impending wedding this coming October, my future father-in-law decided to throw a few spanners into the wedding preparation by declaring that he was not comfortable with me as a life partner to his daughter because I am a full time Christian worker and more importantly because I come from a different family background from her.  The latter means that there are certain practices in my own family which are unthinkable in his worldview on how a family should function. This led to intense tensions between Angelina and myself. To compound the stress, NT Exegesis class was not that easy also and the stress of meeting the deadlines mean that I sometimes did not have the time to reflect deeper into the situations I was facing in my relationship.  However, studying the text of Philemon 15-20 reminded me of the way we should conduct our relationship ...
Read more