Sunday, September 09, 2007

A little clarification on "magic touch" theology

In the essay reproduced below Dean Crenshaw rejects "magic touch" theology. One reader ignores the main point of the essay, that modern protestantism has ". . .gone to the other extreme—we don’t want church at all, or we’ll make up our own version."

The thesis of the whole essay is summed up in the concluding paragraph: "With Rome, you can only have access to the Cross through the Church, which promotes their legalism. With modern day Protestantism, you can have the Cross apart from the Church, which is license. With Anglicanism you have the Cross in the context of the Church, which is balance." Remember that Rome has allowed herself to introduce new doctrines as "necessary to salvation." How has she claimed to the "right" to do this? Because the authority of someone touched by someone touched by someone else who was touched by Saint Peter is presumed to give them the right to create new doctrines unheard of in the first thousand years of the Church (please see the Old Catholic theses for details).

A similar statement is made by Archbishop Haverland of the Anglican Catholic Church: "Mere maintenance of a mere outward or tactile line of succession does not by itself maintain catholicity: the faith and worship of the Church also must be maintained.” This sounds like a rejection of "magic touch" theology just as much as Dean Crenshaw's comments.

2 comments:

Ecgbert said...

You also find this truth in Orthodoxy.

If you find a strange website that claims to be for an Orthodox church or priest and it says something about 'valid lines of succession', you know they're not real Orthodox but Western vagantes pretending.

Rev. Dr. Hassert said...

The West has always placed a great emphasis on tracing physical lineage and equating that with spiritual lineage. Anglicans who feel the need to defend themselves against Roman claims that "their sucession is invalid" because it does not meet Roman criteria (which shifts depending on how the argument is going) intead of emphasizing the catholicity and orthodoxy of their Faith fall into this trap.