A Professed Christian Faith

To the extent that a Catholic background informed that project, one could say that the institutions and commandments of the Church dwell large against the prospect of truly engaging with a non-Catholic faith. However, in this period of American history--when much personal and cultural identity element seems to be bound up with religion and when the strict chaste traditions of institutional Catholicism seem nothing if not unreasonably rigid in the face of the varieties of morbid sympathetic ascertain that have their source in the institution (e.g., Dowd)--it seems incumbent on any serious student of religion to at least begin to sight the limits of ecclesiastical authority while at the same time examining the varieties of religious identity.

In that regard, consider the opening night sentence of Systematic Theology, wherein Paul Tillich assigns the term theology to the soil of Christian thought, adding that it "must serve the needs of the church" (Tillich, ST 3). apparently Tillich's church is not the Roman Catholic Church; his straightforward point of departure is what he calls the Protestant principle, the name tending(p) to the religious concept that originated in the doctrine of justification by faith, "the idea that separated Protestantism from Catholicism and that became the so-called 'material' principle of the Protestant churches" (Tillich, PE x). The Protestant principle was ab initio formulated a

Contemporary Methodism is organized and understood to be in the mainstream of liberal Protestant Christianity. It is to be distinguished from fundamentalist Christianity, which reflects a more socially conservative view of religion, and which "incorporate[s] revivalism, scriptural adamancy, and urgent prophecy" (Flake 22). It has been reported that in the recent past, the administrative utensil of the United Methodist Church has been increasingly populated with socially conservative personnel (Lyles 590). Flake's view of fundamentalist sectarianism is that it "became a stress factor at bottom the [Protestant] mosaic, causing new fractures and realignments within the pattern" (Flake 22).

The UMC service that was attended in conjunction with this research took stern on 10 March 2002, the fourth sunlight of Lent. By and large, the service seemed to follow the recommendations set forth by the UMC's General Board of Discipleship, except that there was no Lord's Supper include in this service. However, an interesting feature of the service took place sooner it began. In Catholic practice, the church is a quiet place at all times, broken only by the voices of the consort and the liturgy. The time before mass begins is spent in silence, initially on the kneelers and the in the pew. But pass into this church was walking into a social event, with people in the congregation having unremarkable conversation; there were padded kneelers but no human ones.

Spiritual and ritual tolerance can be attributed to Methodism as a matter of doctrine, although doctrinal rigidity is not a mark of the faith. This would appear to owe something to its origins in the British spunk classes of the eighteenth century. Methodism emerged in 1739 out of reformist sentiment in the Anglican Church, which was itself at the center of the Protestant Reformation. The official Catholic view of Methodism is that its founder, an "evangelical Anglican" (Tucker 8) named John Wesley, "considered religion primari
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