Drab as a fool, aloof as a bard

I have recently been looking over some interesting Wikipedia articles which deal with questions such as “When did certain wars actually end?” and “Who is the real monarch of England?” They seem to present what I call “Revisionist Present Realities” or RPRs, where the events of the past are reinterpreted in a revisionist light, and lead to unorthodox views of the present reality. I have thus been inspired to document my own RPR dealing with the history of the Christian Church. Despite the fact that the very term “protestant Pope” is contradictory to some (and unthinkable to others), I go in search of the identity of this mythical character, and, in a dramatic break with tradition, actually succeed in finding him. I’ll give you a clue: it’s probably not who you think it is, as I don’t suppose he even realises himself that he fits this description.

Since my liturgical one-liner 2 years ago, I have not read much discussion of the connections between the worlds of Free software and religion. For instance, both these worlds have a concept of a chain of trust and the concept of forking / schism. A chain of trust in the software world is based on public key cryptography, allowing one developer to sign the public key of another developer, who can then sign a piece of software, whereas in the religious world there are chains of reincarnation or succession. Similarly, forks can arise in software projects when there are two or more groups with differing visions for the future of a project, and schisms can happen within religions when groups disagree on matters of doctrine. The purpose of this blog post, though, is to prove (or at least put forward some interesting reasoning in support of) a lemma, which is that the “true” Christian Church is continuous with regards to two chains, starting from Christ: a chain of apostolic succession and a chain of communion (which follows the line of doctrinal accuracy in the event of schism).