“Are more or fewer people in the west (on a percentage basis) among the faithful? Do more or fewer literate people read the bible? Is the Christian faith a greater or a lesser influence on our culture?”
I guess it depends on whether “faithful” means going through the motions of saying/listening to some stuff in a foreign language and eating a wafer(and having no clue what they mean), or actually receiving Christ. Wars have been fought over that over issue, so don’t presume to gloss over it on a message board. You give a list of questionable teachers from modern Protestantism, ignoring the recent and past dirty laundry of Roman Catholocism.
I don’t know your level of Latin scholarship, but I took five years, and I literally thank God for the King James Version.
Most Protestants don’t define themselves in terms of the Catholic church. Most don’t even think about it, which is a shame.
You might know less about Protestant theology than many Southern Baptists know about the Catholic church. It’s hard to tell.
I think that you misunderstood the post. I did not mention Billy Graham, Dietrich Bonhoffer, JC Ryle or Barth, just as I did not mention Mother Theresa, Pope John Paul II or Pope Benedict XVI. The point that I raised is not whether protestants are bad, but whether the reformation solved anything or simply divided the faithful.
Also, you insinuate that faithful Catholics had "no clue". Certainly there are and were clueless Catholics just as their are clueless Baptists, Methodists, Evangelicals and Presbyterians. However you may want to do a little homework on medieval theology prior to buying into the "dark ages" formulation. For a good overview, I would suggest that you read Dawson's "The Making of Europe".
Most Protestants don’t define themselves in terms of the Catholic church. Most don’t even think about it, which is a shame. You might know less about Protestant theology than many Southern Baptists know about the Catholic church. It’s hard to tell.
I am no expert on every variant of protestantism, but I do live in the South, and have attended a good variety of protestant services and open dish dinners, and am reasonably well read. I am simply referring to the term "protestant" which literally means protesting. If one protests, there is usually an object of the protest. If the term refers to a protest over something other than Catholicism, let me know.
Welll put.