There were always small groups here and there within and outside the Roman umbrella who had not bowed their knees to baal, so to speak. God has always had His own ways of protecting and preserving and nurturing a remnant.
"There were always small groups here and there within and outside the Roman umbrella who had not bowed their knees to baal, so to speak. God has always had His own ways of protecting and preserving and nurturing a remnant."
There have always been heretics, Q, espousing soul destroying theories. There is no doubt that Nestorianism survives here and there and has continuously since the days when it was anathemized, but I know of no Protestant group which traces its lineage to the Nestorianism of China or Iraq and Iran. I am very interested in the theory, which as I understand it arose in the 20th century, that many Protestant groups of today are in fact the spiritual descendants of these groups. Is there any real scholarship on this/ From what little I have seen, and virtually all of it has been here on FR, it appears that this theory embraces or claims a pedigree running back to some pretty awful groups, virtually all of which were at base Gnostic and whose beliefs seem at odds with 500 years of Protestant religious thought. I can't help but wonder if that newly discovered history doesn't lie at the base of the rise of unabashed Gnosticism in so called "mainline" Protestantism today.