I was raised in still another Presbyterian church – Cumberland Presbyterian. It is a very warm and intelligent group. No hellfire and damnation sermons.
One tenant that interests me is the concept of the priesthood of all believers. During Communion, each person presents the Eucharist to the person sitting next to him.
Members are also not required to take the Bible literally. In fact, it was a young Cumberland Presbyterian minister who introduced me to the idea that early stories from the Bible aren’t necessarily historically accurate. It is part of the teachings of the church that the Bible is a guide to faith and practice.
My father was both a C.P. Sunday School teacher and an elder in the church. Yet he believed that the teachings of the world’s great relgions are essentially about the same God or the same values. He was also open to the idea of reincarnation.
You’re saved through the grace of God. Good works won’t do it; faith is important; but it’s only God’s grace that will redeem you. (At least that’s the way I remember it. It’s been a number of years since I’ve been to church.)
Zoe, are Cumberland Presbyterians the ones who sided with the Union in the Civil War?
That’s sort of up to God, isn’t it. The point is that none of us is worthy of salvation or earns salvation through our own merit. Salvation is received, if received is the proper word, as a act of grace. If the Lord God Almighty wishes to extend grace to Adolf Hitler that’s God’s business. If he wishes to deny grace to me, no matter how blameless and devout a life I have tried to lead, that’s God’s call, too. It is through Faith, I am told, that I have my best shot at salvation–Jesus told us that didn’t he? The real question of course is faith in what.
So, to a Presbyterian no matter what you do, you end up in heaven or hell based only on God’s choice? With the caveat that faith can help get you in heaven.
As I learned it in Presbyterian sunday school, faith is the effect of being elect rather than vice-versa. You have faith because you are elect , not you are elect because you have faith. It makes a lot more sense when you take into account that god is omnipotent and omniscient and can’t help but not control everything in the universe.
well, I have zero faith, so I’m probably not the one to answer this.
One has to do a combination. You have to do good things, be a christian in your heart, and God can do whatever the fuck she wants for her own reasons that are unfathomable to mortal man. Go back to Saul/Paul on the road to Damascus. And the above is not a sanitized version of what my father the Presbyterian minister would have said in private, he would however have not used the f word during service.
I do remember his swan song retirement sermon. Probably the only sermon I vaguely remember as i tend to tune out any minister. He said that you’ve never heard him publicly come out for or against abortion. It’s a personally charged issue and he wasn’t sure himself how God would view it. That said, he definately knew that God would be against murdering doctors and bombing clinics in God’s name.
Most of the Pope-as-Antichrist, Calvinist elect stuff doesn’t really apply to the average Presbyterian, more to the Free Ps and the Wee Frees…who are considered something of a lunatic fringe.
I know that my parent’s church tends to focus a lot on the “Dear Lord, we come before you as miserable sinners, lowly worms who deserve none of your grace yada yada” schtick.
Presbyterians here tend to be teetotallers in public and drinkers at home. Ditto with the smoking and fornication.
But good people, mostly.
I propose [symbol]PresbuV[/symbol].
[symbol]s[/symbol] is used in the middle of a word, while [symbol]s[/symbol] at the end.
About whether the [symbol]u[/symbol] corresponds to a Y or a U: it depends. When the [symbol]u[/symbol] is part of a diphthong (eu, au, ou), (among other rules) it always becomes a U, although the default equivalent in most schools it the Y.
Presbys also means someone who utters something he deems true and/or important. Somehing between a preacher, a herald and an ambassador (it actually means ambassador in modern greek btw). Sorry, I don’t know the exact english word for such a person.
Ask me after I’m dead, when I might know the answer.
As a practical matter the appeal of the denomination for those who have been raised in it is, as the Great Master, Cecil, once said, a practical and workable code of ethics. To that you ad what seem to me to be a reasonable approach to the unknowable that invites the individual not to thing that he is the center of all things. This is true of the mainline church. I can’t speak for the Brand X Presbyterians. I suppose that any thinking Catholic, Greek Orthodox, Muslim, Methodist or Unitarian would say something close to this.
Of course, once we find out the truth it’s going to be too late to do much about it.
Um…you used the middle sigma twice, there, but i know what you mean. I didn’t know how to code the ending sigma so I just used the middle one. Hmm…I guess it’s [symbol]V[/symbol]. Ok
There’s something about the various take-offs on Calvinism that I just can’t quite wrap my mind around and accept as a personal belief: the whole predestination thing and how its worked around. Correct me if I’m wrong here, but this is how it was explained to me…
God is all-knowing. Thus he must know all of what is to come. Thus he must know whether every single person born into this world is saved or doomed by his ineffable judgement.
We are born without that knowledge. We can only hope that a compassionate God extends his omnipotent grace to save our souls from damnation.
However, we can hope to derive from the Bible what judgement standards the Lord has, since the beginning of time, judged us by. Thus, by fitting our lives to the example of the Bible, we may meet the standards for the elect.
What confuses me about the above train of thought is that it ultimately leads to pretty much the same actions as the Catholic train of thought. All it removes is the certainty that our actions will absolutely get us into Heaven.
Consider it for a second…
We start with faith in the God described by the Bible, and more specifically the New Testament. We understand that this God is the only one, all-knowing, all-powerful, and all-compassionate. We understand that this God judges our soul after our demise, raising one into heaven or damning one to hell. Omniscient God means He must have known our destination for all the ages until this point. Omnipotent means He has power to create and destroy everything in the universe, bound by nothing but His whim and judgement of what is good and what is bad.
However, the Bible also lays out ground rules for behavior. Since God has been described has been described as many things, but never a trickster towards His people, we must assume that these divinely-inspired commandments are at least semi-accurate representations of God’s judgement of good/evil. Thus, those who are already saved must be acting correctly in God’s eyes. Therefore, those who hope to be saved (though they do not know for certain) should act in the way most likely to have pleased God an infinity ago when they were first judged.
Someone please point out my error here, because right now I’m wallowing in annoyance over the fact that thousands were killed through conflict of semantics.
Cumberland Presbyterians are not required to take the Bible literally. I’m sure that many of them do – maybe even most of them. And I can speak only for the Cumberland Presbyterians – not other Presbyterians.
burundi:
The C.P. churches in Northern states did ;), but not the denomination as a whole, to the best of my knowledge. (And the C.P. Church is mostly Southern.)
Major Kong:
I am certainly of that opinion. I can’t speak for other members. I do know that the C.P. Church believes that the Christ died for all of mankind.
Cumberland Presbyterians generally believe in “once saved, always saved.” All of us mess up from time to time and most C.P. members follow the Bible’s reminder not to judge others in their relationship to God or about how “horrible” they are. When they mess up, they call it “back-sliding.” No one is perfect; believers just keep trying to do the right thing and ask forgiveness when they don’t.
It’s a fine denomination, I think. I did not leave it because of my beliefs. I just preferred the rituals of the Episcopal Church.
Well that clarified some points, I suppose, but still my assertion stands. I’ve yet to hear of a mainline Protestant branch advocating hedonism because you never know what rules God is playing under today. For whatever reason, you’re supposed to follow Biblical morals and teachings even though your acting upon them doesn’t guarantee you a spot with the Head Honcho. In everyday matters, it strikes me as a quibble. A Catholic gives to the poor because the action gives them grace. A Protestant gives to the poor to… show that they are already saved by the grace of God?