Re: OT: When was it significantly different?
Posted by:
Dale Nelson (IP Logged)
Date: 23 August, 2021 10:18AM
Sawfish asked Knygatin and me: "Did either of you think that you'd be marginalized within the traditional doctrines of your church, as it "evolved" from beneath you?"
Circumstances differ as between the United States and Sweden, the latter having or having had a "state church" while the U. S. never did -- as I don't suppose I need to tell you, Sawfish.
I grew up with devout Evangelicals as parents, and one of the features of that subculture is that it has little or no trouble with people moving around among various denominations.
(Roman Catholic polemicists sometimes try to score a debating point about the Reformation, when they say that, once people turned from the papacy as the final arbiter of truth, Protestants went off in countless directions so that there are 22,000 different Protestant churches -- or whatever the number is that they cite. This is misleading because there's very little doctrinal difference between many of these administratively distinct bodies. If, for example, someone starts as a Free Methodist, moves to a new town and joins the Wesleyan church there, moves again and joins the Church of the Nazarene there, moves yet again and joins the Evangelical Free church there -- it'll be totally OK with everyone. No such person will have to renounce any doctrinal errors presumed to pervade the previous denomination, but will be received by a very simple profession of faith and a testimony of some kind of conversion experience. But for present purposes I'd say there are just a few truly distinct varieties of non-Roman Catholic, non-Eastern Orthodox Christianity known to me in the U. S. There are the mainline denominations such as the Methodists, ELCA Lutherans, the Congregationalists, etc. -- most or all of which are in fellowship with one another. This variety is where, I suppose, most of the U. S. presidents have come from, by the way. Then there are the doctrinally conservative bodies. There are the conservative Lutherans, with their catholic understanding of the sacraments. There are the Pentecostals. There are the more Calvinistic and the more Arminian evangelicals. And these would account for most of the non-RC, non-Orthodox U. S. Christians.)
From my own reading I became convinced that these churches in which I grew up were right about some things and in error about others, and after a period of exploration became an adult convert to the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod. It hasn't changed its doctrine and polity* in the better part of 200 years, I believe, i.e. someone from an early LCMS root-church who time-traveled to our time and visited one of our churches would not be nonplused by what he heard from the pulpit. Conversely, someone coming from an Episcopal church of 1840 to the typical Episcopal church today would be astonished and horrified by what the woman in liturgical vestments was saying from the pulpit. An obvious impostor! A great many Episcopalians of conservative convictions have left that denomination, which has suffered a hemorrhage of membership since the 1960s or so. These people who leave ECUSA become Roman Catholics, Orthodox, conservative Lutherans, etc. or join refugee Episcopal bodies such as ACNA, the Anglican Church in, or of, North America, the Reformed Episcopal Church, etc.
There's quite a menu of church bodies in the United States from which someone can choose. That isn't the case, as far as I know, in Sweden.
*That Lutheran visitor from the past would encounter one surprise in today's LCMS, namely that adult women members of the congregation as well as men may vote on church business, e.g. whether to buy a new water heater or get the old one fixed again, etc. Churches may send women delegates to synodical conventions to represent the local congregation. There there may be votes on various matters that are generally not, I would say, of doctrinal emphasis. The LCMS is pledged to the Bible and to the Book of Concord, which is a collection of early Lutheran confessions of faith, and this core isn't up for debate. But seeing women having this degree of participation would be surprising to our visitor, as for that matter would be so many women wearing dresses that expose the knees, or -- pants!!