Mediated religion

Jump to Comments

Although Protestantism rejected contemporary medieval spirituality’s emotionalism, superstition, and inordinate reverence for such material objects as relics, it did not at the same time reject its individualism. Martin Luther (d. 1546) stressed the uniqueness of the Christian believer’s relationship with God and the realm of personal conscience (sola fides, “faith alone”). His recourse to the Word of God in Sacred Scripture (sola Scriptura, “Scripture alone”) only underlined his concern for finding a direct approach to Christ, one in which the individual is illumined by the interior witness of the Holy Spirit (sola gratia, “grace alone”). Although it was not always obvious in the midst of the medieval excesses, it is a matter of Catholic principle that the believer’s relationship with God is a mediated relationship; mediated not only, nor even primarily, through the biblical Word, but in and through the community of faith in which that Word is proclaimed. “Thus Protestantism tends to produce a spirituality which springs entirely from the co-presence and mutual relationship between the Person of God revealed in the Christ of the Gospels and the individual person of the believer. But, for Catholicism, there is no fully authentic Christian spirituality without the realization of an equal co-presence of our fellow believers with Christ and ourselves, the Church” (Louis Bouyer, Introduction to Spirituality, New York: Desclee Co., 1961, p. 11)

Catholicism by Richard P. Mcbrien, 1029)

0 Comments

Filed under Personal