Illithid

Ahem.... a couple of points. Someone please point out any factual errors: I am not a scholar of European history.

Regarding the multiplicity of Protestant sects, didn't the RCC used to just kill people who disagreed with Church canon? The Gnostics, the Arians, the Hugeonauts (sp?), various others I can't name. Protestantism never had a single, monolithic authority with the power to suppress schisms entirely on a multinational scope; people had a whole new couple of continents to go to, for one thing.

A Protestant (of any stripe) could just say that the RCC had been wrong all along, but was able to suppress the truth, but now the True Faith (their own) is free to exist, though there also sadly exist those promulgating different beliefs, more or less in error as they more or less disagree with the aforementioned True Faith. I have had lengthy debates with proponents of just this view.

Also, wasn't the Reformation contemporaneous with the printing press and widespread translation and dissemination of the Bible? Not to mention a bit more widespread literacy and education in the general populace. Illiterate peasants didn't have the mental equipment to buck the Church in any organized way. More people reading and thinking means more people getting their own ideas, including the idea that it's all a lot of BS that should be discarded.

Granted, this does not address the problem of the origin of the "scripture", but if you argue that the early Church was correct, while it later fell away from the Truth, you could get around this. There was a time in Italy, if I recall, when the succession of Popes was quite... vague, with three Papal claimants existing at one time. If you don't agree that God must be on the side of the one who won, you might have a problem with Papal legitimacy after that.

the_cave

You're quite simply wrong about this, as Charismatic Catholics have been speaking in tongues since the 60s. Though it's true that snake-handling is generally not a part of their practice.

mike_decock

I'm trying to be unbiased in my assessment of the situation. I used to be a Protestant, Pentecostal to be exact.

That's a given. If the Protestants didn't believe Luther was firmly in the right, they would have remained Catholics. Still, I have to stand by my assertion of Luther's hubris in breaking with the apostolic tradition of the founding fathers and editing what had been accepted for over 1,000 years as the "Word of God".

-Mike...

Appius

Ok, I got a bit of information on the editing of the Old Testament by Protestants. First of all I was wrong about the Popes writing it, sorry. The reason is that the books removed were additions made to the original Hebrew Old Testament when it was translated to Greek by Greek speaking Hebrews. The additions were popular stories within the Hebrew community. As this baseness Protestants later thought that they should not hold power over the original books, although they were a fine reading. Apparently St. Jerome, correct man?, when he translated the Greek to Latin made a commentary about this. I am looking for that commentary.

Sorry for the earlier confusion.

ManM

Entropic_Gnosis,
Check out this site [orthodoxinfo.com].

spurly

I'm one of those Christians who is hard to categorize. I don't consider myself Protestant or Catholic. I just consider myself a follower of Jesus Christ. As far as "catholic" meaning universal, I could consider myself part of the universal church of Christ. But I don't really get into all of the religous heritage stuff. I'll just follow Jesus.

Kevin