tell me where you think Catholicism constitutes a "dialectic system of rebellion"
Before I spend the week thinking about this, have you read Hislop? I don't want to waste both of our time if you have already read and rejected one of the more important pieces of literature I'd use as a reference.
I've not read Hislop. I've read the Church Fathers and the Saints and reject Protestantism per se.
Ok, that's good to know. I'd feel bad if I put together some thoughts and only ended up wasting your time.
I just read the Wiki page on Hislop; while I haven't read any of his works I am familiar with his line of argument - namely the association of the Catholic faith and practices with paganism. I do not find this line of argument compelling or threatening to what the Catholic Church actually is, but if you find it a compelling argument against Catholicism, then please present it as you understand it, and I will share my thoughts.
In brief, I will say that we have to understand that Christ is Truth, and that anything that is true belongs to Him. If we suppose that anything that existed in the world prior to Christ must be false, then, indeed, any connection between Catholicism and the pagan world would be just cause for criticism. But can we really suppose that there was nothing good or true in the world prior to the Incarnation? I know many Protestants have their belief in "total depravity" after the Fall, but frankly I find this view to be impossible unless one adopts a pagan understanding of evil. The pagans would say that evil has its own principle, its own being, its own representatives, etc. But this could only be so if there were some eternally existing Evil One, an "anti-God" like the Zoroastrians and Manichees believed. For it could not be that God could create a principle of evil, for God is all good and what He makes is only good. Therefore all being is good. And therefore evil can only be a privation of being. This is a necessary understanding of evil from the Christian perspective, as far as I'm concerned, based on the understanding of God that Christians have - unless we are talking about heretics who would deny God's omnipotence or omnibenevolence or His sole claim to being uncaused, but I don't think you deny these divine attributes.
And so if being is good, then any notion of total depravity is incoherent, for unless something good in man's created nature remained after the Fall, there would be no man at all!
And if even Fallen man has some good, insofar as he has being and is still called to God as his final end, then Fallen man is still capable of creating good things. And this applies to the pagans as to anyone else. And so if there are certain artworks, or technologies, or archetypes, or philosophies that pagans produced, that has some good, then it is totally allowable that Christians would incorporate these good elements into their lives and their communities. Plato and Aristotle, while pagan, both had many true ideas which helped shape Christianity. To claim that nothing pagan could be touched, on pain of delegitimizing the faith, would be to say that Christianity was not in fact a synthesis of Hebrew theology and Greek philosophy, but was rather merely a continuation of the Hebrew tradition - but this denies the very victory and mission of Christianity! Christ established a new and eternal covenant, a final covenant that brought all peoples into the fold, Jews and Gentiles. It was a victory over paganism, which is why the Cross (a Roman torture weapon) was made our symbol, and Rome was made our seat; not because we are pagan, but because we have triumphed over the pagan. What is the Resurrection if not a defiance of the Cross? By remembering the Passion, we don't celebrate the pagan, we celebrate our victory over the pagan (and death itself)!
Of course it incorporated what was good from all traditions - and discarded what was bad! You referenced people smarter than us who have discussed this - there are certainly many in that category. But I would argue that the number of years, and therefore the total selection of smart people to be thinking about these things, is much more expansive within the full Christian tradition, than is to be found in a relatively modern offshoot of that tradition.
Are we really to suppose that the real Christians slapped themselves on the foreheads 1500 years after Christ's resurrection and realized that all Christians always and everywhere had been doing everything wrong for 1500 years? Are we to imagine that there were no "smart people" within this span of 1500 years, more proximate to the historical events in question, and comfortable with the knowledge that the Church was conformed to the expectations of reason and the teachings of Scripture?
To suppose that the Protestant form of worship - typically, coming together and listening to one man with no connection to the Apostles give his opinions on Scripture - is superior to the liturgy of the Church, which has successfully directed the minds of all the faithful to things divine for centuries, is simply not a serious claim to me. But I am always open to arguments to the contrary.
I do think most Protestants are guiltless, insofar as they are born into traditions that are founded on the arguments of men smart enough to formulate such arguments, without having truly delved into the implications of such arguments. How could they? People have lives to live, families to support - we don't have the time to personally familiarize ourselves with every factoid of Church history, every detail of Christian dogma, every page of spilled ink of polemics and apologetics - all the more reason to suppose Christ would have established not just an abstract Church, but a hierarchical one with Apostolic succession and a solid doctrinal tradition, a Church that the faithful would have sufficient reason to believe in, so that they, like the eunuch, could rest assured knowing that Christ had chosen an Apostolate to clarify and teach.
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