In a thread on recollection, M. Jackson Osborn wrote:

"I ask of Kathy to elaborate on just how she perceives the Protestant and Catholic worlds to be two sides of the same coin. I continue to maintain that they are for the most part irreconcilably different. There is unimaginably more common ground between Catholicism and Orthodoxy (with Anglo-Catholics somewhere in between) than between either of them and Protestantism, which repudiates both."

Although it was Jam and not me who said that the Protestant and Catholic worlds are two sides of the same coin, I would like to take Jackson's invitation to discuss the Protestant-Catholic divide as such.

My Orthodox friends in college tend to place the blame for the Orthodox-Catholic schism, which rent the bonds of unity with incredible force, on St. Augustine. And since Augustine has been the most influential theologian for the entire Western theological tradition except for St. Thomas, who drew heavily from Augustine (though not without critique), and since St. Augustine also had a special influence on Protestant theology, the Orthodox tend to see all of "the West" as different branchings from this corrupt root. My friends thought there were cultural reasons for "the West's" religious errors as well, but most of the blame was St. Augustine's.

Suffice it to say that a divided Christendom is scandalous and it leaves the members of the Orthodox Churches without the papacy and the fullness of unity, which are great helps to salvation.

Like Jackson, I believe that the difference between Protestants and Catholics is greater and, as things stand, somewhat difficult to overcome. The difference as I see it has something to do with the intuitions of an influential theologian named Freidrich Schleiermacher. Schleiermacher followed the philosophical schools of his day in conceiving of a system of the world in which God cannot be known with any certainty. For Schleiermacher, faith is precisely a human feeling of complete dependence, and "All attributes which we ascribe to God are to be taken as denoting not something special in God, but only something special in the manner in which the feeling of absolute dependence is to be related to Him."

This kind of system is completely incompatible with the religious sensibilities of Catholics and Orthodox alike. For us, God can be known, not as He is exactly, but by a religious knowing. We can "taste" God; God is present for us. The firmament is permeable: God can reach us and we can contact God.

God is particularly present in the Liturgy.

The question for Catholics is whether Catholic Liturgies are true to Catholic sensibilities. Sometimes one attends Mass in a Catholic church and there seems to be no entryway left for God. In fact it seems that liturgists have gone out of their way to provide us with a Schleiermachian universe, in which every circle is neatly closed against the divine invasion.

-Attention: the priest attends to the people and the people to the priest. Closed system.
-Position: the people face one another “in the round” and the priest eye to eye. Closed system.
-Prayer: didactic. Closed system.
-Music: self-referential, self-congratulatory. Closed system.

Aside from the serious theological problems, may I say on a personal note that I find such liturgies incredibly boring, which is something one could not reasonably say about an Orthodox liturgy or about a Colloquium week liturgy.

The question for Protestants, it seems to me, is whether the liturgy is in fact a place where human beings can meet God. If so, do Protestant views of liturgical actions attest to this meaning of liturgy? If not, should one be worshipping in a different way?