With some people, you can move the furniture around and even change the wallpaper, but when they go from Protestant to Catholic/Orthodox/whatever, the predominant theological premise remains the same: 99% of people go to Hell and are therefore WRONG whereas I am part of the elect and hence I am right. Since everyone else is wrong, everything they do is wrong, and it should be condemned as wrong.
I for one prefer to have mercy as I would wish to receive it. In other words, I may think that that guy who just graduated high school and is bagging groceries, smokes pot, listens to rap, and needs to pull his pants up, is on the wrong path, but I would like to think that he is trying his best with what he has been given. If he isn’t, then what excuse do I have? I don’t think that God is just hanging over us, ready to condemn us because of XYZ, as if He were standing over us with a clipboard ready to reject us as defective as in the old style factories. If this were the case, then I would definitely be rejected precisely because I do know better.
And that is why I am reading the Renaissance Neoplatonists: they viewed the world through the prism of what is being done right rather than what is being done wrong. It is an attempt to trace truth even in the least likely of sources.
I never realized how backward much of Calvin’s thought was until I read St. Augustine for myself.
The self-loathing that follows defining man primarily as sinner, rather than created in the image of God, becomes a loathing for all.
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