This blog post presents a broader commentary to this MSNBC headline: Is liberal Christianity signing its own death warrant? I invite you to read that news piece.
I have said many times before that the decline among the US mainline Protestant churches (Episcopal, Lutheran, Methodist, etc.) is due to their embrace of secular values and pseudomorality.
In my opinion, their faithful departed are seeking a more vigorous or emotive faith and for that reason are leaving the so-called Mainline Churches and are joining Pentecostal or Evangelical communities. Or, they might become more interested in historical Christianity and therefore leave for the Roman Catholic, Orthodox, or independent Anglican churches. Or maybe they become agnostic or “spiritual” without belonging to any “organized religion” and the trappings that come with it.
I want to approach this matter from a different direction and look for the roots of the mainline Protestant drift to secularism and subjective morality. I find it in the Protestant foundational tenets themselves which I encapsulate in this: The problem with Protestantism is Protestantism itself.
In the following table, I'll analyze each of the foundational Protestant principles and detail their ultimate consequences:
In the following table, I'll analyze each of the foundational Protestant principles and detail their ultimate consequences:
Tenet | Explanation | Consequence |
Sola Scriptura | That the written Scripture only is the sole rule of belief, morals, and practice for believing Christians. | The absence of a proven, credentialed and authoritative hermeneutics that is external to the individual believer leads to interpretative anarchy – for a single believer or group of believers will always find a purportedly compelling reason to reinterpret the Bible to suit their own agenda |
Sola Fide | That faith alone is necessary for the salvation of individual Christian and that good works lack intrinsic salvific value. | The experience of faith was emptied of any objective contents and was made subjective, enabling the individual to determine his status as “saved” by the emotive contents of his or her salvation experience – the individual believer is now empower to approach Scripture individually, purportedly under the guidance of the Holy Spirit. |
Free Examen | That the individual alone exercises “priestly” power to approach Holy Scripture and to interpret it on the basis of his or her salvific experience alone, as permitted by sola scriptura and illuminated by sola fide. | Faith and belief having been emptied of objective contents and free from external hermeneutical authority. now depends on the subjective contents the individual believer deems fit to find. Dissent is built into this tenet for if the individual believer objects to what his pastor teaches and his community believes, he can leave to search for another community or found his own. |
Sola Gratia | That salvation is due to “grace alone” apart from individual efforts of sanctification and cooperation with grace. | The consequence is that there’s no Christian morality or orthopraxis that is ultimately binding. The “Grace vs. Works” conundrum being resolved in the favor of grace “through faith”, and faith having been subjectivized itself, they further built their morality on subjective principles such as “compassion, acceptance, understanding” defined apart from any objective grounds such as saving works. |
Brothers and sisters, all Protestant foundational tenets conspire to produce these consequences. Even the most conservative, “Bible-oriented” Christian communities are not free from these vices. Since they have no external authoritative hermeneutics, their only resort is to scream their beliefs in an increasingly louder fashion.
The cure for this malady is for all Protestant and Evangelical churches to discard their foundational tenets, or to reinterpret them within the true Catholic-Orthodox theologicalframework. The alternative - and this is not a false choice - is their continuing decline (for the Mainline Churches), intellectual suicide (for the Evangelical communities) and eventual death (for all).