Scripture is the crowning jewel of Tradition. Scripture is not something understood apart from Tradition; Scripture is something alive, something dynamically maintained by Tradition and something inspired not only in that the Spirit inspired ancient words but in that he speaks today to people who can listen to him. And Scripture is at its fullest, not read privately, but when proclaimed in Church.

One Orthodox priest tells people, “Reading Scripture privately is the second most spiritually dangerous thing you can do. All sorts of temptations will flare up, you’ll be assailed by doubts, and the Devil will whisper into your ear all these heretical ‘insights’ about the text. It is an extraordinarily dangerous thing to do.”

Some people are intimidated, wonder if they should really be reading the Bible privately, and ask timidly, “Well, I should reconsider reading the Bible privately. But one question. What’s the most dangerous thing you can do spiritually?”

“Not reading the Bible privately.”

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From experience, I get the sense that there are some Protestants who, if they read the Bible in a very literal way, are in a sense, Jewish. And there are others who, in neglecting the role of the Holy Spirit and community/Holy Tradition in understanding guidance from God, are essentially muslims. Scratch a teleological Protestant and you get a Jew; scratch a deontological Protestant and you get a Mohammedan.

The article offers some very compelling insights into how rationalism and treating the Faith almost as a system or algorithm (in both Catholicism and Protestantism: i.e. Western Thought) that can be perfected by rational systems, we’ve arrived at an evolved thing that bears very little resemblance to what our ancestors would recognize as Christianity.

I also found this talk about the hemisphere’s of the brain, and how they approach and attend to the world in very different ways quite helpful in considering the nature of the Faith. Like the left hemisphere, Protestantism is less concerned with mystery or context, but rather cuts off any part of a argument that doesn’t fit its rational model; this process self-referentially makes the system of proofs valid; you get trapped in a hall of mirrors (philosemitism being one of many, I’d assert): http://www.ted.com/talks/iain_mcgilchrist_the_divided_brain

Thoughts?

I think this movement away from divine mystery began when men decided they didn’t need to feed the god inside themselves. So, Protestants were still nominally pagan, as were all Catholics. However, protestantism unleashed iconoclasm and images were destroyed (very similar to ISIS today and many other periods in Islam). Cromwell, I believe, banned theater for a while.

To the iconoclast all art is a lie. God is outside. But, we need art to feed the god inside. The modernist, of course, believes in nothing at all.

You are right, in the sense that corruption amongst the priestly class made them lose respect of the faithful. The Council of Trent essentially justified many of charges of the Protestants. Indeed, the whole episode illustrates how “Catholic institutional inertia” fueled the Reformation. In many ways it was a case of history repeating, with an institution failing to reform when it needed to, allowing externalities to impose themselves on it. A similar thing is now occurring in the context of the institutional blind eye with regard to child sexual abuse.

With regard to the liberal contingent in the Church, that’s always going to be there in any large group of people. It’s my opinion that that liberalism is to a large degree influenced by genetics (with a learned component). Being Catholic doesn’t stop you from being stupid. However, until recently, there was a lot of respect for the authority of the priesthood and peopled toed the line but now that the Church is slowly pseudo-Protestantising, every man is “interpreting” doctrine for himself, with the predictable consequences. Religious liberty seems to be good for smart people of the faith, but its pretty bad for the proletariat. I reaffirm this again, smart and sincere Protestants have contributed mightily to Christian doctrine which seems to have been “osmosed” into the Church.

The faith interpretation mechanism in the Catholic Church has an “aristocratic” structure with regard to the interpretation of the faith, with the king and his vassals doing the leading with the plebs following. The Protestants, on the other hand, have a democratic one. This theological view of man translated into political action with Catholic apostates and Protestants being the prime movers of the democratic process. This is a structural weakness of cultural Protestantism.

As for the Enlightenment, I don’t see it as much of the enemy as I do Positivism, which is its militant interpretation. Rationalitiy is not the problem, knowing where its limits are is.

@Lazarus

From an epistemological perspective there is no real difference between the Radical and Magisterial Reformation. Each one claims to have the correct interpretation. A cynic could argue that the confessional Protestants are those who have made the same cognitive error. I’m not trying to be rude to the Protestants here, but even from the perspective of a Hindu, how do you determine which one is right? Each justifies itself by the same mechanism yet the answers are all different. Once again, how can the same mechanism produce different results, especially if the mechanism is meant to guarantee truth.

For the Catholic, on the other hand, you’re either in or your out. For Protestants, you can hold wildly contradictory positions and still be Protestant. Protestant culture thus ends up being more plural, in itself not a bad thing provided prudent limits are set. It would have been a whole lot better if there were a Protestant Pope who could “draw the line” somewhere, but that would, of course, have undermined Protestantism itself.

“The individualism intrinsic in the Protestant theory of private interpretation of Scripture was connected with another aspect of modern humanism: Rationalism. The single individual who got ride of the dogmatic tradition and the principle of spiritual authority, by claiming to have within himself the capability of right discernment gradually ended up promoting the cult of that which in him, as a human being, is the basis of all judgments, namely, the faculty of reason, thus turning it into the criterion of all certitudes, truths, and norms. […] Beginning with the Renaissance, however, Rationalism became differentiated and assumed, in one of its most important currents, a new character: from speculative in nature it became aggressive and generated the Enlightenment, Encyclopedism, and antireligious and revolutionary criticism”

– Revolt Against the Modern World

The story goes like this.

1. Roman Catholicism has corruption issues
2. Some Roman Catholics make moves to demand reformation
3. Politics get involved; some political leaders see this as an opportunity to get more power, split off.
4. Without the Magesterium, determination has to be made about interpreting the Bible
5. In this process, Luther et al seem to have chosen the Masoretic over the Vulgate.
6. This inadvertantly brings late Jewish influence into Protestantism, where Jewish authorities are trusted over Catholic ones. (Orthodox Authorities are contacted, but only to try to get them to confirm that the Lutherans are correct.)

If ‘Jewish influence’ is to be blamed, we must ask who brought the Jewish influence in? It was the Protestant Reformation. You don’t get one without the other. Therefore, a critique of Progressivism that considers the Reformation the major factor in the development of the Left rather than the Jews is the stronger and more systematic critique.

It is also worth noting that the Reform Jews, the most pernicious liberalizers and subversives, actually get the methods they arrive at their strange interpretation of Judaism FROM Protestants. Reform Judaism is the effect of Protestantism on Judaism, and it ain’t pretty.

The spectacle however requires a good scapegoat and the dying society is not going to oust its demons. As long as it can focus on the subversive outsider and ignore the systematic corruption that allows him to cause havoc, it will feel like it might be able to win.

It can’t.

In this regard, the critique presented by neoreaction is not for this society, but for whatever society follows it; the mistake is to think that the ‘Protestant Question’ gives you a list of heads to bust.

Both the Orthodox and the Roman Catholics in theory have a coherent way of understanding interpretation (as a tradition of a community going back, uninterrupted, to the apostles.) The magic necessary to make Protestantism not be just a blind rebellion from salvation itself, was done on history and it destroyed the West’s ability to understand it. Marx and Nietzsche are just footnotes to this willingness to create a fantasy history that the Protestants’ break necessitated. Nietzsche is the most honest practitioner of Lutheranism. Marx is a Millenarian whose new Jerusalem will Descend To Earth through dialectic.

The mind virus of philo/antisemitism is terminal, I have never seen anyone recover from it.

Note to Radical Right folks, America’s philosemitism is endemic and terminal, just like the antisemitism of some of your comrades. The Jew is what he is, a mere man. But the Idea Of The Jew is some kind of egregore; a long and hook-nosed shadow.

They still retained the idea of a religious establishment, and believed in a certain mutual interest of state and church, including the duty of the state to suppress heresy and idolatry.

Yes, they did jettison the doctrine of an infallible magisterium, but still held to the necessity of a Confessional standard for what could and must be believed within the Church.

As for tolerance as we now have it, in some places (historically) it can probably be chalked up to the eventual triumph of a more radical Protestantism, but in others I suspect it may have been more a failure of nerve. Also, don’t underestimate the influence of the secular Enlightenment on government policy, and that the liberal way of thinking it fostered has seeped into the church, subtly redefining doctrine by co-opting the language of “freedom”.

this kind of monocausalism is quite tiresome. it is entierly possible both for superficially distinct ideologies to be mere rationalizations of the same psychological vices and for jews to be opportunistic vituperative leeches who pathologically prey on such vices and whom we would certainly be better off without.