Chili

Cute, protestants are looking for truth, as they should, and have not found it yet. :constern01:

Literalism is what the Latin was all about that so is against 'flipping pages' to find the truth that itself is not to be found in pages, but in our own mind, so that it may be transformed and see our daily bread as our equal to consume.

The real problem is that if the Church would say from the pulpit in every language known to the world that the reign of God is already in your head, it would be the last sermon they will make.

That must be true, of course it is, and so in the 'argument from opposites' the amount of exposure to the written word, by degree on the slippery slope, will yield the most for them.

That so places us right smack in the middle of the Lazarus parable where the rich man is trying to magnify the light in him that he will trace through the pages that he reads, and highlights his own favorites as they speak to him from time to time and actually so leads himself astray because it is the wrong light he is trying to magnify, that so all become like filthy rags to him.

Why? because this takes place inside the Cave where the rich man's table is in position so that the reader might believe, also called 'purifying flesh,' they say, by those who are not trying to built their own ark, but just put Humpty Dumpty back together again and be content with that. In essence then, he is denying the very infancy the Gospels as the starting point of "follow me" for him, and so a 'New Creation' he will never be.

Just go to gJohn 5:39-40 and read it for yourself . . . but that is one passage that protestants will never read to heed.

And yes, we are very much aware of the 'nay sayers' to transubstantiation as that word itself was created so that there would be those who could say no and walk away from it, which, from their point, this was done to keep the fire hot and exhaust the world for what it is and has to offer to the myth in charge for all.

Jaybees

I'm convinced that the printing press made the Reformation possible. As you point out,The prophets had long been available, well before the time of Luther. They just needed the proper lines of communication to reach the deluded oppressed.

Sadly, the end result wasn't much better than the superstition they left behind.

sotto voce

Because?

Chili

Because they keep running into brick walls inside the Cave.

wordy

Only a vague rumor? I've heard
that Greek Drama writers new already
hundreds of years BC that to make
a story believable one need to add in
such contradictions to show it is humans
that deal with things and not some perfect being?


Now I remember it is the science of rhetoric
that existed long before the New Test...

Jaybees

Because the seeds were there, all that was needed was moisture.

sotto voce

It's not quite as simple as that. The population of England estimated to have significant familiarity with Bible teaching not sourced to the Vatican is 60% in the late 14th century, well before Luther's famous cry of sola fide. Oral transmission was the rule for most people, even until quite recent times. Medieval jongleurs and troubadours, and Victorian schoolchildren, had memories that we today, with our computers, would not believe. So one has to ask how printing fitted into the Reformation process. It may to some extent have had the opposite effect to that which may be supposed. But it certainly exposed the Vatican's distortions for the educated public, and ended its all-consuming presence in northern Europe.

In addition, the fact that Christianity spread around the known world, without printing, in its first decades, is significant. One has to ask why this process was not repeated due to the Renaissance; and the answer is somewhat complex. More later.

mountainman

Religion is for the common people true, for the wise false and the rulers useful.

When books became more easily manufactured (scribal copies not required) nothing much changed with the wise people and the rulers, but the common people slowly started to become a little more educated and a little more wise. Get the drift?

Chili

And that is exactly why the Jews maintain the Torah of Tradition, as that is the only one that will ever bare fruit.

sotto voce

There may well be the perception from this that, after the demise of medieval religion, its replacement was pure biblical faith, even if was expressed in varying ways. While is it true that the Vatican was caught out by events that it never imagined possible— no-one doubted that the world would continue as it had done since time immemorial— it should not be supposed that the Vatican was caught out by genuine Christians. The Reformation is well named. The main immediate successors to medievalism were Lutheranism, Calvinism and Anglicanism, all of which bear important characteristics owed to Catholicism rather than to the Bible. Arguably, it is possible for biblical faith to be practised in only one of them, and then with some difficulty likely.

From the early Renaissance, the realisation gradually came upon Europe, upon educated and unschooled, that the Vatican represented counterfeit Christianity, not fit for purpose in a continent that was not only dragging itself out of appalling poverty, but was shedding its superstitions and ignorance, too. Catholicism had been fine for somewhat scruffy, somewhat brutish 'tin pot' monarchies, ruling sparsely populated lands where people were constantly fighting merely to survive. This was the Europe that had existed since the fall of Rome; but now, there were better expectations of life, there was money to be made, and a higher level of awareness and intelligence was required of the population. But that did not mean that Europe was going to adopt Christianity instead. What was deemed necessary was re-formation of the counterfeit church; essentially the same antichrist phenomenon, but far more nuanced, more subtle, far easier to recognise as response to the New Testament than the sacerdotal, hierarchical medieval church could have ever been. The Bible, now translated into vernacular languages, was to be printed, though not outside the context of the pagan, if re-formed structures into which people were mostly herded.

So it is quite true that printing of Bibles greatly assisted in ending papal hegemony over men's minds, but it was those same minds that necessitated continuation of that printing. And this was because the Bible had already become well known and part of popular culture, despite attempts at suppression, because ordinary people had copied out whole Bibles by hand, in English, one of the most remarkable facts of all history. And this popular phenomenon had spread to the continent, and was not going to just shrivel and die.

It was not as though the Vatican, its clerics and religious, were unaware of the new prosperity. They eagerly placed themselves right at the front of the queue for the feast, as if by right, but they were now merely purveyors of superstition, suppressors of useful knowledge, by-standers, in effect, destined to be elbowed out by the new creators of wealth. The successors of the new middle class would in time, while mostly professing the belief found in the Bible, simultaneously produce the Scientific Revolution and the Industrial Revolution, that would have been impossible without an end to medieval religion.