I don’t know–Gnostics?
Wow, there is an amazing amount of misinformation going around in this thread. I am a Protestant, and I believe that many (and some would say most) Catholics are not Christians.
There are several aspects of this.
Some of this goes back to problems in self identification. There are many Baptist/Methodist/Catholics/whatever that say “I’m Baptist/Methodist/Catholic/whatever.” What they really mean is that their parents or grandparents are that, they were baptized as a baby, and one day they might get married in a church.
I’m sorry, but if you don’t really believe in the majority of their beliefs, and you don’t really live it out in your everyday life, I sincerely question your heart as a Christian. “Christian” means “follower of Christ”, and I see little evidence that you and Christ have even had a passing acquaintance.
Ultimately, that decision is up to God, not me, to judge and decide, but if I am asked to make a decision, I think I know what I am going to go with.
Do I think that there are Catholic Christians? Yes, I know of some. There are a lot of people in other denominations that I do not feel are Christians either.
The other point of this is that many Protestants see certain truths to go along with Christianity. One of the basic unmovable ideas of Protestantism is that salvation comes by faith alone in Jesus as the Christ, rather than through good works. If you think you have to do something works-based to get to Heaven, we don’t know what religion you are practicing, but as far as we are concerned, it isn’t Christianity.
Many Protestants feel that Catholics have abandoned this basic tenant of the faith. We get the impression that many Catholics think that baptism, confessing to priests, getting last rites, etc are what assist/help/allow them to get into heaven. If that is so, then we consider that a smack in the faith of what Christ teaches.
I do not want to get into a theological discussion and take this into GD territory. I am just letting you know why many Protestants consider many Catholics not Christians.
Edited to add: I also agree with what FriarTed said. I know many people who are former Catholics and who flat out say that they were not Christians before. Their belief system completely changed and they do not feel that the Catholic church is preaching the appropriate gospel. I realize all this is about perspective. I am not trying to convince you of this idea. I am just trying to explain it to you. No flames please.
Balance, your post reeks of paranoia.
But then I remembered that a friend’s grandfather believed that Catholic priests and nuns walled up their babies in church walls.
Yeah, there’s some world-class crazy out there. :eek:
I think your friend was just unlucky. After all, if he’d picked practically any other group, such as Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Sioux, Atheisms, Martians, Beagles or Cenobites he’d have been correct, and his comment would have appeared wise rather than foolish.
Manicheans?
Cathars?
ETA:
Many Catholics don’t recognise the Solas, which are a part of the Protestant Reformation. They’re basic to Reformational faith, but not to Catholic or Orthodox Christianity.
Yeah, well, I’m not too welcome at Klan meetings either. If there ever was a Jesus, I’m sure he was well known for his down-the-nose looking ways. :rolleyes:
Ian & Gerry
Fightin o’er Derry
Thugs or a Boom?
Pray My Way or Doom
(Go Get A Room!)
World’d be less scary…
Ha! I had a student a few years back (in a Community College) who was a Catholic (or so he thought), but who assured me, in an essay, that Catholics are not Christians, and do not believe in God. Christians, he said, do believe in God, but Catholics believe in Jesus instead. (I do not think it was explicitly said, but the implication seemed to be that Christians, as he understood the word, do not believe in Jesus. I guess he had not noticed that ‘Christ’ bit in the word.)
I do not think he was a bigot, as the Protestants who say that Catholics are not Christians tend to be, just a moron.
It occurred to me too late that I should have told him to go and talk to his priest about this. The result could have been very educational for him (maybe even get him thinking for the first time in his life), and, quite possibly, hilarious.
I realize that. But we are sort of getting into circular reasoning. Protestants consider it to be the bedrock of “true Christianity” not just of Protestantism - otherwise they would not have broken off from the Catholic Chruch if they thought their the Catholic chruch’s doctrine was acceptable.
It’s not really that circular when you consider that one group’s beliefs originated organically starting with the Apostolic Age and the other’s was an innovation that came around about a millennium later. Funny how the Baptists seem so loathe to confront this inconvenient fact.
I’m a Catholic who has heard this sort of thing before.
You’ll almost NEVER hear it from a Lutheran, Episcopalian, Presbyterian or Methodist, but among some fundementalist Christians, Catholicism is perceived as hopelessly tainted by paganism. To a Southern fundamnentalist, statues of saints or of the Virgin Mary may as well be idols.
Reading this thread I’ve become really confused. A number of posters have said that the difference between Catholics and Protestants is that Catholics believe salvation comes from faith and good works whereas Protestants think that it comes from faith alone. This is pretty much opposite to what I’ve always thought. I was brought up Anglican – which is Protestant – and I remember from Sunday School on being taught that to live as a Christian was to live a good life. To love thy neighbour as thyself as the Bilble puts it. Later my mum, alarmed that my athiesm was going to land me in hell, talked to our local priest about it and he said that if I was a good person God would know that and it would turn out ok. On the other hand the Catholics I have known have always seemed very big on faith. What I heard – and believed – was that, no matter how sinful a life a Catholic had lived, a deathbed repentance would see them in heaven. In fact it didn’t even take that much, if a Catholic were to have sinned and shunned the church and not been to confession or taken communion they could still be saved if they died with the first syllable of Mary’s name on their lips. That looks like reliance on faith to me.
Anglicanism is kind of a special duck. It’s not really a product of the protestant reformation. So it’s protestant in the sense that it broke off from the Roman Catholic church, but it’s doctrine is all over the map. You can have Anglicans who are Anglo-Catholic and nearly indistinguishable from the RCs except without fealty to Rome; and you have low-church reformed charismatic Anglicans on the other end. There is no agreed-upon Anglican understanding of solo fides or transubstantiation or most of the other doctrines that separate Catholics from Protestants.
Yep, and you get to see more than your share if you grow up non-Christian (genuinely, not just Catholic) in a very rural, very Evangelical area. My post was based on things I actually saw and claims I actually heard when I was growing up out in the backwoods during the 70s and 80s, and the conclusions I drew. Oddly enough, I never really came in for much persecution myself–I think I mostly confused people–but I saw plenty of fear and distrust tossed around.
Not all, or even most, Evangelical Christians are like that, even in the most backward places. Most of the people I grew up around were basically decent people who didn’t pay too much attention to religious differences. When the crazies went on a tear, though, the decent folks often got dragged along. It was easier for them to nod and do nothing than to cause dissension within the congregation themselves.
LOL, My husband is Episcopalian and self refers as either Catholic Lite or Scots Heretic =)
[I do the Maine Fisherman, I sit in the back and rise and fall with the tide. That way I don’t have to follow along in the missalette =)]
I guess I was lucky in that regard. I grew up Protestant, but very nominally so, and by the time I’d reached high school, I was effectively an atheist. And it was not a very evangelical area of the country. I had to move to the Big City to encounter the real crazies, and most of them were Krshnas and Scientologists.
The weirdest thing I ever heard in person was from a drummer at my (music) school. He had written an arrangement of Dave Brubeck’s Take 5. Except he rewrote in 4/4, because 5/4 was the Devil’s time signature. Man, it sounded WEIRD.
I’m 45, grew up in Virginia and remember hearing this my whole childhood from my religious relatives. When I was little, I remember saying it to my Catholic neighbors, not as an insult, but as a fact I knew about Catholicism.
The acceptance of Catholics by the evangelical right is a fairly new movement in American politics and seems to have really gathered steam in the 90s.
WTF? This is New Jersey, Italo-Catholic Ground Zero!? (Well technically, I think that’s Rhode Island, but close enough…) Isn’t that a bit like complaining about all those damn Shiite neighbors after you move to Iran?
Dammit, I don’t read any of that New American Bible crap! I only read KJV, in the language that God wrote it in!
It’s quite interesting thought that Methodism is considered Protestant, when they directly descended from Anglicanism.
When going to breakfast after church, the High Church down the street was pointed out, for the moneyed Anglo-Catholics (and Episcopalians are often referred to as “catholic with a lower case c.”
Somewhat facetiously but still true, they trade fealty to the Pope for fealty to the Queen/King.
Things like this are difficult to catagorize, but I think Anglicanism would fit into the Orthodox mold. A lot of religious scholars seperate Christianity into three basic catagories - Catholic, Orthodox and Protestant (and sometimes “Other” to deal with such things as Adventistism, Quakerism, Unitarianism, etc.) There is some overlap, of course, but Protestantism is usually thought to stem from the Lutheran and Calvinist reformers. Of course this line of thinking gets into trouble with Methodism, which grew out of the Anglican church but today is almost always considered a protestant movement.
SS
That’s just wrong in any religion.
Ahhh, geez.
No, no flames.
The heart of the problem is when Protestants “protest” against what they THINK the Catholic Church teaches.
Add to that, many cradle Catholics were sleeping during Mass and Catechism, and they really can’t answer the difficult questions put to them. Their snoozing certainly isn’t the fault of the Church.
I’m a Catholic convert. Hubster is a cradle Catholic, and I had to give up trying to get him to answer my questions!
ALL Christian faiths subscribe to the Nicene Creed. That was put together by the Christian Church leaders around 500 AD, to settle some of the controversies floating around.
From that, Protestant faiths have adopted ADDITIONAL Creeds. And some go so far as to state certain teachings of Catholicism to be abominations.
Ouch!
(Reference: Creeds of the Churches, Third Edition: A Reader in Christian Doctrine from the Bible to the Present [Paperback]
John H. Leith (Editor)–EXCELLENT BOOK!)
The Catholic Church traces its origin to the Apostles. So the “Sola Scriptura” touted by Protestants can thank the Catholic Church for assembling the Canon of the New Testament.
And it’s interesting to note that the Catholic Church believes that ALL CHRISTIANS are united together as part of the “Body of Christ.”
Many Protestant denominations specifically exclude Catholics from that designation, and some exclude other Protestant Churches as well.
If you have been baptized with a Christian baptism and wish to become a Catholic, the Catholic Church recognizes your prior baptism as valid.
However, if you’ve been baptized as a Catholic, some Protestant Churches do not accept your baptism as a valid Christian baptism.
A study of the history of the Christian faith is quite interesting.
~VOW