{"id":798,"date":"2009-04-27T17:05:32","date_gmt":"2009-04-28T00:05:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.tgdarkly.com\/blog\/?p=796"},"modified":"2009-04-27T17:05:32","modified_gmt":"2009-04-28T00:05:32","slug":"catholics-and-protestants-the-worship-service","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/2009\/04\/27\/catholics-and-protestants-the-worship-service\/","title":{"rendered":"Catholics and Protestants:  The Worship Service"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>This is the first post in what perhaps will become a series on comparisons between the Catholic and Protestant traditions.&nbsp; Perhaps I&#8217;ll add some thoughts on the Easter Orthodox tradition as well.&nbsp; The purpose here is reflective rather than polemical.<\/p>\n<p>For this post, I offer a quote from <a href=\"http:\/\/www.ignatiusinsight.com\/authors\/thomashoward.asp#howardbio\">Thomas Howard&#8217;s<\/a> book <a href=\"http:\/\/www.amazon.com\/Being-Catholic-Thomas-Howard\/dp\/0898706084\/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&amp;s=books&amp;qid=1240876347&amp;sr=8-1\">On Being Catholic<\/a>.&nbsp; Tom was my freshman English literature professor in college.&nbsp; He converted to Catholicism during my sophomore or junior year and had to leave our school because of its evangelical-Reformed confessional posture.&nbsp; What a shame &#8212; he was a brilliant and warm teacher.&nbsp; So here he is on the nature of the worship service:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>But we were speaking of the obvious differences between Protestant worship services and the Mass, the most immediately obvious one, to a casual glance, being the difference between a meeting, on the one hand, organized around the idea of people listening to a lecture and, on the other, an enactment.&nbsp; And enactment, of course, takes ritual and ceremonial form &#8212; a principle we see when we mortals come up to the great moments of human existence, namely, birth, marriage, and death, and attempt to &#8216;enter into&#8217; the mysteries at stake in these events.&nbsp; We do not settle for speaking to each other about these things.&nbsp; In some profound sense that belongs to our humanity itself, we know that we must &#8216;enter into&#8217; the significance of these events, and this entering into, inevitably, takes ritual and ceremonial form.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Enactment and entering into events that transcend language.&nbsp; Does that stir a longing in your soul?<\/p>\n<p><\/p>\n<div class=\"zemanta-pixie\"><img data-recalc-dims=\"1\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"zemanta-pixie-img\" src=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/img.zemanta.com\/pixy.gif?w=580\" \/><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>This is the first post in what perhaps will become a series on comparisons between the Catholic and Protestant traditions.&nbsp; Perhaps I&#8217;ll add some thoughts on the Easter Orthodox tradition as well.&nbsp; The purpose here is reflective rather than polemical. For this post, I offer a quote from Thomas Howard&#8217;s book On Being Catholic.&nbsp; Tom [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[15,4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-798","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-ecclesiology","category-spirituality"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p824rZ-cS","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/798","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=798"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/798\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=798"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=798"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=798"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}