Interesting article about Protestantism in America

[Melethiel]

http://www.firstthings.com/article.php3?id_article=6254

[GratiaCorpusChristi]

Read it, people!! I don't care if it's long! :wave:

[filosofer]

Interesting read. Just a couple of comments here. Note Carl Braaten's lament (section IV) in his letter to Bishop Hanson in 2005.

Also, the explanations for the decline provide valuable discussion topics. Consider Machen's insightful analysis from 1923:


Against the Catholic claim that Protestantism was always bound to end in something like the modern situation, Machen insists that liberalism is not the necessary result of Protestant theology and practice. It comes, rather, from the changes of the modern age and the fearful notion of some Protestants that they must warp their religion to match their times.


Then another approach called "Mere Religion" offers some fodder for thought:


To these three standard explanations, others could be added. There has emerged, for instance, something we might call “Mere [wash my mouth]Religion.” A curious pattern grew in the Modernist-Fundamentalist controversies of the 1920s—a cross-denominational sympathy: the fellow feeling of people who, though their churches differ, nonetheless share a view of the world and a sense that they are all under attack from similar enemies. The pattern is worth marking, for it appeared not only in the 1920s but over and over again in the ensuing decades.

Indeed, it returned with a vengeance in our own post-Mainline age since the 1970s. You can see it today among the liberal managers of the old churches, and you can see it as well among conservative churchgoers, where the horizontal unity of Mere Religion cuts across denominations. Serious, believing Presbyterians, for example, now typically feel that they have more in common with serious, believing Catholics and evangelicals—with serious, believing Jews, for that matter—than they do, vertically, with the [wash my mouth]unserious, unorthodox members of their own [wash my mouth]denomination.


Overall worth reading, even you might not agree with all points.

Of course, for further discussion here, it might be helpful to consider how would we approach this situation from a Lutheran perspective, aside from Braaten's lament?

[IowaLutheran]

The secular media has largely focused on homosexuality and other moral issues, but those debates are symptoms of the problem, not the heart of the problem.

The much bigger problem IMHO, which this article rightly focuses on and the media does not give much attention to, is that the debate within Christianity is no longer only about which laws apply to Christians, but about the gospel itself. The heart of the gospel - the incarnation, death, and resurrection of Christ which reconciled humanity with God - is believed by some as being one of many pathways to God. When Jesus is no longer unique, he is no longer the Christ.

[RadMan]

I haven't read the article but in response to what you quoted filo I have to agree that that is probably what influences the division in not only LCMS but ELCA and other denoms. The prevalent feelings with the churches has been "us" against "them". Us Christians against them (secular liberals). I think this also influences the polarization between factions like conservative/confessional and liberals in the LCMS and as I said other denoms. It's an over reaction to being "relevant" which in the conservatives eyes has the connotations of being liberal. Keeping the purity of the Gospel and tradition.