Posted on 06/12/2009 5:58:20 AM PDT by Alex Murphy
In just a few days I’m going to be walking in the footsteps of Martin Luther. I’ll explore the halls of the church in Zurich. I’ll be in Geneva when the Protestant world celebrates the 500th anniversary of Calvin’s death. And, I’m afraid the Reformers would hardly recognize the Protestant church they struggled to birth.
In fact, I think Luther, Zwingli, and Calvin might think most Protestant churches are really just inconsistent Catholic churches. Five hundred years after these men and others risked their life to bring reform to the church and the Bible to the people, we’ve not only forgotten the lessons learned, we’ve surrendered the gains gotten.
Consider just a few of the ways in which the modern Protestant church resembles the Catholic Church of the 16th century:
Our pastors act like priests. Oh, it’s not that they’ve usurped the priesthood of all believers. We’ve given it to them wholesale. If we have a biblical question, we don’t struggle to find the answer. We twitter the pastor. He’s the spiritual expert. If we need prayer, we don’t call the deacons. We hold out for the pastor because we think there’s some magic left in his words. Last, and certainly the worst, the public exposure of the raucous sexual sins of so many pastors would surely remind Luther of what he saw in Rome during his infamous visit to the so-called Holy City.
Our people have given up the Bible. Sure, we all have plenty. Some of us have handfuls of Bibles at home in every translation imaginable. We have Luther and others of that generation to thank for that great blessing. Yet, most of us don’t actually read our Bibles. Statistics suggest that only a woefully small segment of the evangelical world reads the Bible with any regularity at all. Instead, we let the experts tell us what it says (see above). And to think, Wycliffe and others were willing to die so we could ignore the Bible in our own language.
Our churches are full of people who are not Christians. In the days of the Reformation, the Catholic Church was full of nominal Catholics, those who rarely darkened the church doors but who assumed their salvation was secure because of that loose association. Protestants today have confused church membership with salvation as well.
Compare your church rolls with active attendance and see how many “members” never come to church. Now go share the Gospel with them and see how many say, “I’m okay. I’m a member of such and such church.” Membership, not active faith, has become the basis of their assurance. That sounds an awful lot like what Luther confronted.
A group of Catholic and evangelical scholars and leaders got together to seek common ground between the two movements in the 1990s. Surprisingly, they found what they believed were points of commonality and issued a lengthy statement detailing their finds. The document, referred to as Evangelicals and Catholics Together (ECT), was lambasted by evangelicals and Catholics alike. In the end, their desire for rapprochement was met with antipathy and suspicion.
Ironically, ECT failed, I’m afraid, because they looked at the written theology of the church rather than its practiced theology. We say we believe one thing but all too often our actions belie another set of beliefs. If you look closely, you’ll find that many Protestants are far more Catholic than they’re willing to admit.
Perhaps then the Pope should rescind Luther’s excommunication.
If Luther were alive today, he would be married.
Sorry, this entire piece is so full of Straw Men that it’s not worth pondering. In my church, a “normal” contemporary Evangelical church with expositional preaching and contemporary music, it’s understood that the gospel is Christ, not attendance. Our senior pastor does not act like a priest, but is a fellow sinner simply unpacking Scripture and guiding the conversation.
Is my church so unusual?
Oh, I must add: Thank God for His Reformation of His Church. May He increase and may Rome decrease.
You make clear what most Roman Catholics arrogantly quietly believe, that Christ is insufficient for salvation. If you believed that Christ was sufficient, you wouldn’t dismiss non-Roman Christians as belonging to a heretical sect saturated with false doctrine.
Man, I hate what Rome became. And I love what Christ has done with His Church, the body of Christ on earth which includes all who’ve placed their faith in Him.
You go worship the Co-Mediatrix; I’ll worship Mary’s Son instead. He, not she, is the Savior of my soul.
You wrote:
“Perhaps then the Pope should rescind Luther’s excommunication.”
If Luther had just been an honest man there would have been no excommunication. Remember, Luther wrote to Pope Leo X on May 30, 1518, Luther, “Wherefore, most blessed Father, I offer myself prostrate at the feet of your Holiness and give myself up to you with all that I am or have: quicken, slay, call, recall, approve, reprove, as shall please Thee. It rests with your Holiness to promote or prevent my undertaking, to declare it right or wrong. Whatever happens, I recognize the voice of your Holiness as that of Christ abiding and speaking in Thee. If I deserve death, I do not refuse to die.” [The English language translation here is in, The facts about Luther, by Patrick F. O’Hare, p. 89. The text in the original language, which I am assuming is Latin, is in Knaake, in “Werke, Weim, ed., I, p. 522.
Two years later, NOTICE: TWO YEARS LATER, on June 15, 1520, in Exsurge Domine the Pope warned Luther that he risked excommunication unless he recanted nearly four dozen of his ideas within 60 days.
Luther burned Exsurge Domine in public on December 10, 1520.
Luther then was excommunicated by Leo X on January 3, 1521, as laid out in Decet Romanum Pontificem.
In other words, Luther was a liar, while Pope Leo only very slowly got around to excommunication him - after giving warnings and plenty of time to shape up.
Correct!
The following was written in 1853....
“Once they abolished the supernatural realm and returned to pagan rationalism, the modernizers of society found that they could not stop. They had to continue their demolition, beginning with the moral truths that serve as a foundation for the existence and order of society, and then society’s whole natural organic structure….All that remains to do now is to have the individual unlearn all the essences of things, deny all the laws of logic, and burrow into the Night of complete ignorance in order that he be said to reach the apex of perfect liberty.” (La Civiltà Cattolica, I, vii, 1851, 45; II, i, 1853, 31.)
You love a splintered, divided cacophony of competing voices? You love the great American tradition of custom-made churches where if nothing currently available suits your taste, you simply start your own? You love souls left to their own devices to try and figure out what Holy Scripture is saying when God, in His Divine Providence, left us with an infallible apostolic body to explain it, guard it and transmit it untainted to future generations? You love to listen to some guy in a suit whose done a "course" on Scripture when you could have the 2,000 year tradition of holy apostles, saints, theologians and doctors of the Church?
What's the good of having an "infallible" Bible if you don't have an "infallible" guardian and interpreter of same?
Rome is not an ogre trying to push you off the rails and damn you to hell. It's a father. A mother. A parent put in place by God to provide you with stability, continuity and guidance. More importantly, it has what no self-appointed biblical expert has; authority. That's the real problem inherent in Protestantism. It's the elephant in the living room about which nobody wants to speak.
When you strip away all fluff, it all comes down to one basic thing. The fundamental problem which Protestants have with Rome is authority. The won't accept what Rome says about Scripture or anything. They prefer their own opinions.
You go listen to the latest take on the Redemption. Embrace the latest half-baked biblical exegesis about the importance of the Mother of God. I'll take the words of Holy Mother Church founded by Jesus Christ and built on the rock, Petrus Romanus.
You wrote:
“If Luther were alive today, he would be married.”
If Luther were alive today, he would be shacked up. He may have shacked up with Katherine von Bora before they were married after all, and he saw nothing wrong with polygamy. If he were alive today, he would give full license to his libido. Even his reasons for marrying his wife show that he was not very principled in this area. He wrote to Spalatin that he married von Bora because he wanted to put an end to rumors about the two of them (i.e. they were accused by many of having an affair). Even some of his own followers apparently denied the marriage was even valid according to the civil law.
Wow! That was prophetic.
Good find, stfassisi!
Just about everything you wrote is wrong, a simplistic caricature of the Church that our Lord established (which includes all those who trust in Him, not just those whose center is Rome).
Want to talk about “competing voices”? Let me bring up your pedophile PRIESTS. Yeah, they’re part of that infallible apostolic body, right? I should trust in that pedophile to interpret Scripture for me, right? That pedophile has, as you say, “authority,” right?
Then you paint non-Roman Christian pastors as merely suit-wearing guys who’ve “done a ‘course’ on Scripture.” You really are either ignorant of the years of training that most Christian pastors go through or are malicious in your attempts to mischaracterize them.
Your commitment to your denomination, marshmallow, has caused you to cling more to it than to Christ.
You’re a hateful man, Vladimir.
Luther was a course man, in many ways “uncivilized.” But he was no fornicator. To say that he was is a classic approach that Libs take — if you can’t effectively trash the message, then trash the person who delivers it.
God was not its author.
And you bear false witness.
You go worship the Co-Mediatrix; I’ll worship Mary’s Son instead. He, not she, is the Savior of my soul.
There's no such thing as a "Co-Mediatrix," nor do Catholics pay worship to such a person. We adore the Most Holy Trinity.
No, actually the first “Libs” of the modern era were the first Protestants.
Thank goodness the Bible is still the same...
______________________________________
LOL
I meant the Words within...
Not that particular copy
:)
If Luther were alive today, he would be married.
_____________________________
He was at that time...
Plus had children
Would he still be an antisemite?
You wrote:
“You’re a hateful man, Vladimir.”
No, I’m not. Wanting the truth of a thing said, does not make me hateful.
“Luther was a course man, in many ways “uncivilized.””
He was coarse, not course. And yes, he was in some ways uncivilized, and brutal.
“But he was no fornicator.”
He was many things. He violated his vows and encouraged others of doing so. He was a liar. He was something of a thief (he and his family moved into the local convent that had been seized by the government, for instance). He talked rather openly about his drinking and libidinous thoughts. Does that make him a fornicator? No. It does, however, make me think that those who lived in his own day and accused him of being a fornicator, may have been on to something.
“To say that he was is a classic approach that Libs take — if you can’t effectively trash the message, then trash the person who delivers it.”
No, what the liberals would have done is accuse someone (me) of having said something (Luther is a fornicator) when it was not actually said. I said the following: “If Luther were alive today, he would be shacked up. He may have shacked up with Katherine von Bora before they were married after all, and he saw nothing wrong with polygamy. If he were alive today, he would give full license to his libido.”
I never said he was a fornicator. I said he would be one today because that’s where his temperment and our culture has gone. The simple fact is that he himself talked about his lust and he was a hypocritical supporter of polygamy as his letter to the Duke of Hesse clearly shows.
And, if I am supposedly hateful for telling the truth about Luther, then how horrible must have Luther himself been to lie as he did and to spew venom on all those who dared to disagree with him? Did that thought even occur to you?
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.