Why don't protestants convert more easily?

[MagiDragon]

[quote name='Sailahína' date='Mar 6 2006, 04:45 PM']I have a few protestant friends who always ask me why I "worship" Mary and the saints.
They don't understand the difference between Worship and Honor.
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I think this is mainly because they have nothing to "worship" as we Catholics have the Eucharist. We come to adoration and will truly worship. We'll literally bow down, go on bended knee, or lay face flat on the ground before what appears to be a piece of bread. Mary, though, is approached in much the same way as a Protestant would approach God. A Catholic understands the difference innately because we *really do* worship. We'd never do that with a statue of Mary. Nor, I think, with Mary herself . . . well . . . ok, i'd *definitely* go on bended knee, but i probably wouldn't lay flat on my face.

[zdog042]

Hello again all, I've been away for a while but have been brought back into the fray again.

First, I am disturbed by the absolute talk. "Protestants believe this - Catholics don't." There have been many points made that you can't say that about Protestants, and that is true. The several thousand denominations all have different stances on the bible. However, when using the term that way you are talking about individual believers participating within their respective worship traditions. Merely looking at this forum I can tell that all Catholics do not believe the same things, even where people view it as being foundational to doctrine. One that was brought up recently was Open Theism. I do not want to bring this into discussion (as I'm sure there are many other threads to do that in), but some Catholics embrace that concept whereas others view it as blasphemous. Humans want to categorize things into black and white. A quote from above (time strapped - can't find the post) says that "either dancing is right or not" (something like that). This is intended to go after Protestant multiplicity of doctrine. However, if I were to take the 1.1 billion Catholics in the world and ask them each individually if dancing were wrong, I would have lots of answers. Absolute statements about non-essentials make no progress. We can debate the cloud of pithy statements all we want and it will get us nowhere.

Now - to answer your question. "Why don't Protestants convert more easily?" The answer is the same as "Why don't Catholics convert more easily?" We view church differently. To a Catholic (from my understanding) the church is an eternal structure that the people participate in. The sacraments bestow grace upon the believers, who are all participating within the One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic Church. The majority of Protestants understand "Church" to be a construct created when believers come together. "Where two or more are gathered" becomes the rational for where a church is.

The issue is translation. How can we talk when we say a simple word, Church, and bring our preconcieved notions into it? When a Catholic says "Church," I am frequently confounded because I instantly assume that he is talking about what I understand to be Church. Vice versa, When I say "Church," Catholics become confused as I am talking about something fundamentally different than they understand me to be saying. It is like we speak two different languages even though we are talking English.

A Protestant is following their Christian tradition, much like a Catholic is. Their traditions have tragically split, and much false propoganda has been administered by both Catholics and Protestants to the other. But we can't know that as we can't talk. Protestants view prayer as an act of worship to God. When we get down on our knees to pray, that is a sacred act devoted directly to God Most High. This is why many Protestants find "praying" to saints repugnant. They don't understand what is really going on. The action mimics what a Protestant does, and then the prayer is addressed to Mary. They take offense and claim that they are worshipping Mary. Conversely, the Bible is held up during Mass, and honored. There is a tradition on how to interpret the Bible. When Catholics see Protestants interpreting the Bible without the plumbline that they know, they see it as horrible (possibly blasphemous, I don't know that for sure). What they don't know is that we take effort to prevent people from going off into wrong interpretation. That's why we have Pastors to watch the people, bible studies where the collective can get together and talk it out. The drive is not to create a tradition to look at the bible through, but to train each person to interpret it within boundaries. Each person needs to know what is heresy and what isn't, and if they don't know, then either they ask someone who knows (the pastor) or they are told they are wrong by somebody who knows. It isn't that we allow heresy to continue, but that people are so sure that they are correct that they refuse to turn away from their beliefs. I am going to a Protestant school. Would we have created schools to train our Clergy if we valued everybody doing their own thing?

Translation is the problem. I don't understand what Catholics say, Catholics don't understand what I say. I have tried to be clear, but I am sure that despite my best efforts, that hasn't happened. This is why we are so difficult to "convert" (pet peeve word, but that's for another time), we just don't know what you are saying. When I went to Germany in High School (before my Christian days), my friends and I would give each other the middle finger continually. Many people in the USA do that, it means something, but it isn't really bad. It's even called the "bird". In Germany, this was something horrible, that the people there actually gasped when we did it. They couldn't believe that we were doing something so utterly offensive. To them, it was a big thing, to us it wasn't. It was the same action, with dramatically different meaning behind it. That's Protestants don't convert. That's why Catholics think we are all heretics. That's why we still hate each other after 500 years. We don't talk the same language and are just beginning to learn how to talk with each other.

If there is something in this that you don't understand or that you find offensive, reply. Lets open a dialogue and find out exactly what each of us mean by terms like "Church" "Communion" "Saint" "Christian" "Believer" etc. Lets start learning how to speak each other's language.