KC Podcast - Episode 117: Passing the Baton

The Liturgy Wars

"I think I warned you before that if your patient can't be kept out of the Church, he ought at least to be violently attached to some party within it. I don't mean on really doctrinal issues; about those, the more lukewarm he is, the better. And it isn't the doctrines on which we chiefly depend for producing malice. The real fun is working up hatred between those who say "mass" and those who say "holy communion" when neither party could possibly state the difference between, say, Hooker's doctrine and Thomas Aquinas', in any form which would hold water for five minutes. And all the purely indifferent things--candles and clothes and what not--are an admirable ground for our activities. We have quite removed from men's minds what that pestilent fellow Paul used to teach about food and other unessentials--namely, that the human without scruples should always give way to the human with scruples. You would think they could not fail to see the application. You would expect to find the "low" churchman genuflecting and crossing himself lest the weak conscience of his "high" brother should be moved to irreverence, and the "high" one refraining from these exercises lest he should betray his "low" brother into idolatry." From The Screwtape Letters by C.S. Lewis

Comments

Dale Melchin said…
I agree with Lewis that we should not hate our fellow Christians. I personally love everyone from my Protestant background including the one that I was most immediately estranged from.

I must say however that things in the "high church" such as vesting, making the Sign of the Cross, censing, lighting candles etc are all part of the Church Tradition and should be reintegrated into the Protestantism so that Protestantism is no longer Protestantism, but Orthodoxy.

I will gladly concede that love is the most important, but I will not hesitate to act out of love in defence of Church Tradition.

-Dale