I'd like to make a brief observation about the "thousands" of Protestant denominations. According to Catholic apologists, that's a defeater for the Protestant faith.
As we know, Jesus often uses agriculture metaphors for the growth of God's kingdom. Consider different natural strategies for seed dispersal. Because plants are immobile, some of them reproduce through mobile seed. For instance, dandelion puffs and maple leaves (samaras) are designed to exploit wind dispersal.
Now, which is better–one immobile tree or thousands of wind-blown seeds? A single tree is vulnerable in a way that thousands of seeds and saplings are not. A single tree can die from lightning, wildfire, drought, infestation, &c. But nature uses the principle of redundancy.
Why not view the "thousands" of Protestant denominations as divine anemochory? God's samaras or dandelion puffs? These aren't schisms but saplings. God disseminates the church, not through a single denomination, but by anemochory.
What a great thought
ReplyDeleteThat's brilliant.
ReplyDeleteI never thought of it like this. Definitely will use with RC's that mock Protestant denominations.
ReplyDeleteI commented the last time you used an analogy like this and I think that this one suffers from the same problems.
ReplyDeleteYou are relying on some kind of emotional appeal from the dandelion puff and helicopter seed to do all your work for you. As I said before, if you want to use an analogy, you need to connect the parts of the analogy to the thing you are saying it is analogous to.
Plants produce seeds that develop into the same species of plant, so, in this case, the RCC fits your analogy a lot better than Protestantism, and I'm no RCC advocate. The RCC is the tree and it has produced many helicopter seeds that have been spread throughout the world and sprouted into sapling RCC parishes and diocese.
The Protestant Reformation, if it produced seeds, was like some strange chimera whose seeds each produced a different species of plant. Lutheranism, Zwinglianism, Anabaptism, Calvinism, and all the myriad intermediate forms. For example, within just the Anabaptist category, every Amish community is different, with many so different that the members aren't comfortable intermarrying and so are suffering from population founder effects (inbreeding, skewed allele frequencies, etc). This really doesn't fit with the wind-dispersed seed analogy at all, especially since I'm free to assign whatever values to the analogy that I want, since Steve left them wide open.
You can find analogous (see what I did there?) situations within the Calvinist camp, the Lutheran camp, the non-denom world, and on and on.
I've been reading this blog for nearly 15 years and I think this is a weak argument. Try using this with any RCC who is above a 5th grade level and it won't be hard for them to flip it.
“And he told them many things in parables, saying: ‘a sower went out to sow....’”
DeleteThis isn’t necessarily a simple analogy.
Nor does the RCC use the “many saplings” argument (that I have heard). The idea is that there is “one church” that “developed” from being an acorn (the early church) into a tall straight oak, with its current doctrine.
Of course, even that falls apart with Pope Bergoglio a the helm.
Mr. Fosi--
ReplyDeleteYes, perhaps the analogy wasn't drawn as tightly as it ought to have been drawn. But you just need to use your imagination a bit.
Think of Rome as a singular, sterile, seedless tree in the middle of a meadow. Its advantage lies in its size and strength. A tall, monolithic hierarchical structure without offspring (in other words, without schism).
Then think of Protestantism as a seeded tree: a maple with helicopters or a cottonwood with "puffs" borne on the breeze. Saplings spring up all over the place, however far the wind can take those samara. Yes, individual saplings ARE individuals and have individual characteristics (Lutheran, Anglican, Presbyterian, etc), but they are all PROTESTANT like the mother "tree."
With each sapling comes an autonomous hierarchical structure. This then has something akin to an "evolutionary" advantage over the single tree model. A single tree can be felled by an ax or a thunderstorm or burrowing bugs or root rot (or the party of Bergoglio). On the other hand, one can lose a bunch of saplings and still have a bunch left over. Survival of the fittest.