What really prompted me to start this blog was reading John D. Zizioulas’s Eucharist, Bishop, Church: The Unity of the Church in the Divine Eucharist and the Bishop During the First Three Centuries. This book was originally Zizioulas’s doctoral dissertation, done in the sixties, but recently translated and published. In order to give some structure to my meanderings, I want to go through this book slowly, posting relevant portions and asking questions of the book. I’m also reading through the Church Fathers, and hope to post sections from the Fathers which challenge my Protestant worldview.
For the past decade, I’ve been working, worshipping, and thinking through what various people label “Reformed Catholicism,” “Protesting Catholicism,” or “High Church Calvinism.” I love this world, and have almost joined the Anglican Church on a few occasions. Eastern Orthodoxy holds quite a bit of attraction, but I can’t get over the icons and veneration of the saints. I’m too much of a Protestant to even think about joining the Roman Catholic church, though I read Roman Catholic authors without discrimination.
As Thomas Kuhn noted in his Structure of Scientific Revolutions, every piece of information that challenges a paradigm must either be integrated into the current paradigm. Alternatively, if enough pieces accumulate which don’t fit into the paradigm, it collapses. It seems to me that this is intuitively true about human thinking in general. At the least, it describes how my mind works. So, this blog is a record of the information that is accumulating in my “Reformed Catholic” worldview. I don’t really have an agenda other than to learn as much as I can, and to worship God as faithfully as I can. It would be wonderful if I could fit everything into my current paradigm. Maybe others can help me do that.
Please feel free to answer my questions or suggest other sources. But, please go elsewhere to heckle and proselytize.
The Catholicity Question 