Saturday, June 2, 2012

0 for 2

"papal infallibility ex cathedra has only been invoked twice, and both times it erred."

     "As one wit has put the matter", according to Paul R. Hinlicky, in "Afterward:  Staying Lutheran in the changing church(es):  why we all need Lutheran theology," in Mickey L. Mattox and A. G. Roeber, Changing churches:  an Orthodox, Catholic, and Lutheran theological conversation (Grand Rapids, MI:  William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2012), 310 (281-314).
     The paragraph that follows draws the whole argumentpredicated upon a rejection of [1] "Lutheranism as church for the sake of [2] Lutheranism as theology" and the development of doctrinetogether:  neither Orthodoxy nor Roman Catholicism takes "sin seriously enough", Orthodoxy, by claiming that "death and the devil's tyranny, rather than human sinfulness and God's judgment against it, . . . form the question to which the gospel is an answer" (298) and thus "fall[ing] captive repeatedly to ethnocentric nationalisms, even racism"; and Roman Catholicism (which, unlike Orthodoxy, does inherit "from Augustine an arguably more profound sense of the universal web of sinful abuse of God"), by "invok[ing] that arbitrary miracle of Mary's immaculate conception" and thus exempting the Catholic Church from its effects in the paradigmatic case of Mary at the very least (310-311).

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