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4. I'm confused by conflicting claims to truth from different faith communities. Who is right? Your confusion is understandable. Within the Christian Church there have always been those who claimed to possess a "superior" truth to other Christians. This was true even in the very early faith communities, and we can read about some of these conflicts in the Bible. In the early history of the church, the great church councils were called to settle disputes about "correct" teachings. Since the time of the Reformation, there has been a proliferation of different Christian Protestant denominations, many claiming to have a "superior" understanding of the faith. Conflict about the "truth" is not limited to Christian denominations. In fact, when we study the world religions, we find that there is no such thing as a single understanding of Judaism, Buddhism, Hinduism, or the Muslim faith. In fact, in all religions we find that sects, denominations, and schools and orders abound. One of the important movements of our century has been that many people from different faith communities are discovering that no one group has a monopoly on "truth", but that there is much we can learn from each other. When I was working as a Protestant chaplain in a Catholic hospital, our chaplaincy group was composed of both Catholics and Protestants. Our supervisor, who was a United Methodist clergyman, said one of the ways he had helped the Catholic chaplains to understand about the many different Protestant denominations was to compare them to the different monastic orders within the Catholic faith. there are Benedictines, Cistercians, Dominicans, Jesuits, etc. Each order follows a different rule; each one has a different kind of structure; each one has a different emphasis on ministry. But they all are Catholic Christians. |
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