Personal/Theological Notebook: Dave Nutting

[novak]

Saved by the bell! After sitting at my computer virtually uninterrupted through the entire day, sorting through files that needed to be recovered and files that did not, I was finally summoned away from my computer by an instant message from my undergraduate roommate demanding that I call on the instant. Or rather, repeating the demand that had

Comments

[bassmike]

"So, that conversation took up another four hours until now, and the day and the night, between file-rescuing and old friend-talking, are a complete wash out for continuing to read my constitutional law professor on religious speech in a liberal democracy."

What constitutional law professor on religious speech in a liberal democracy?

[novak]

I wondered as I typed that in passing if it was going to grab your attention! I've been readng a very readable book called Under God?: Religious Faith and Liberal Democracy
by Michael J. Perry, who holds the University Distinguished Chair in Law at Wake Forest University. Compared to my struggles to wade through the ultra-dense prose of Robert Audi in Religion in the Public Square, this has been like reading Jordan. His notes have been really interesting, too, for referencing and digging into particular cases with a depth that would have interrupted the main text, but without which the book would have been missing something crucial. I'm sure that you'd find it easy going after all your training in the legal direction, and it's comparatively brief enough that you might enjoy picking it up if you have a passing interest in the question.

[bassmike]

Sounds interesting, well worth a read.
I'll check it out when I get the chance.

Did you ever try out any of the Peter Irons books on constitutional law I recommended to you?

1. A People's History of the Supreme Court

2. Brennan Vs. Rehnquist: The Battle for the Constitution

3. May It Please The Court: Oral Arguments in 23 Landmark Cases

[novak]

Not a chance while I'm studying for exams, I'm afraid. The only fun reading I'm allowing myself is when I'm sitting in the tub for a 10-minute soak before showering, and slowly plodding through the Malory with that bathroom reading. Although King Arthur will get the boot when Harry Potter arrives at my door.

[kesil]

Bishop Seraphim has also made the point that the differences we who persist in our non-Catholicism cite aren't maybe that important. I'll confess to having trouble understanding how it's just those separating doctrines that are insisted upon for entry into the Church are the ones that are noted as not that crucial. But then again, you seem to have advocated a much more open entrance policy than other Catholics I've spoken to. The only solution is to elect you Pope now. Oh, I mean to kill the old Pope and make you the new one. Because two Popes would be bad.

[novak]

Eh, the things that separate tend to be more ecclesiological than credal, don't they? Or even if the ideas that bear the weight of separation are more doctrinally-related (justification by faith, inspiration of scripture), they seem to be more "how the thing works," rather than "that the thing works." Perhaps I'm not being critical enough: some of my considered responses to David could be at the level of "well, that's dumb," which is not a terribly reflective level of discourse on my part. In fact, the one thing that we really talked about at some length was my conversation with you (which he had Googled and read) about the very question of the legitimacy of a Protestant break from the Catholic Church. I guess I'm in a strange, in-between attitude about that: I don't deny that faith in Christ exists in the churches or anything like that: that salvation itself is found in Christ wherever he's known according to the creeds. But at the same time, it seems to be that the Protestant churches continue to protestantize themselves into

[kesil]

I agree with maybe everything in this excellent response except the first sentence.

Protestantism is a shambles, without any sort of meaningful orthodoxy really: if the denomination is large, it's almost necessarily too lax on the doctrine, viz. Episcopalianism. And if it's a tiny denomination, it's usually that way becuase it insists on organizing around some strange distortion or personal charisma.

All that notwithstanding. Maybe most individuals would explain their Protestantism as the result of ecclesiological differences, but fundamentally the differences, I'd say, are credal. I won't bother repeating those doctrines that keep me out; I know they keep others out as well. They are, like you say, not essential to salvation, but apparently essential to Catholicism.

And so these large groups of Protestants are left out in the cold, and is it any wonder that they fall apart and fragment? Catholics may very well be right when it's claimed that Catholicism is the Church, and Protestants occupy only Christianity's fragmented outposts

[novak]

Do you think that Catholicism could do something "reconciliation-friendly" like making a culturally-familiar "Anglo Catholic" or "German-Catholic" (to not say "Protestant-Catholic!") Rite in the Catholic Church? There are things, of course, one would be sorry to lose, like what I understand of The Book of Common Prayer for the Anglicans, or somesuch.

Waitasec. You see it more as Catholicism shutting the Protestants out, rather than Protestants leaving? I think we might be assuming very different dynamics here that might have a lot more bearing on what I was thinking than I realized....