[B-Chan]

To paraphrase Old North State (above), "Wow, everybody was wrong for fifteen hundred years? Are we ever lucky this Calvin guy came along to straighten us out!" Calvin and Luther made popes of themselves — and the tradition continues right down to Cowan and all the rest. When you're your own pope the Bible means whatever you say it does.

As for Galiileo, he went to his grave a Catholic. Sorry!

[Mr. Lucky]

You don’t appear to know a whole lot about the theology of confessional Protestant churches, so it might be a good idea to post on other subjects.

[AnalogReigns]

I won’t defend Williams, but neither Luther nor Calvin supported “private interpretation” or else the various (incredibly similar) creeds of magisterial reformation make no sense at all. Both these men, and all the non-Anabaptist reformers were extremely well educated doctors of the church—who, took up streams of Roman Catholic thinking from generations before—they weren’t crazies barking up a tree. All these men, of the magisterial Protestants (Lutheran, Reformed, Anglican) honored the early Fathers and the traditions of the Church—they merely sought to make scripture the final and unquestionable authority, NOT the only one....wanting to take away the arbitrary authority of the present curia to tell folk what to believe—scriptures be d*mned.

It was the Anabaptist groups that pushed for (and won—in modern Protestant America, largely) private interpretation, and a neglect, if not a demonization of tradition and earlier corporate intepretations of Holy Scripture.

It was finally religious freedom itself that allowed for the development of multitudes of sects—based on private interpretation. This is why most modern cults originated in the USA—where we’ve had full freedom of religion for over 225 years...more than anywhere else on earth. So unless you want to re-establish Roman Catholic political/religious authority by abolishing the 1st Ammendment, enough with blaming Luther for “private interpretation.” If you blame him for that, you logically need to also “blame” him for starting civilization on the road to religious freedom too.

The Council of Trent did more to rend and divide Christendom than any Protestant Reformer, who, with the exception of the Anabaptists, sought to establish corporate counciliar interpretations—having been rejected out of hand by an extremely corrupted renaissance-era Roman Catholic Church.