After the apostles died, was the gospel hopelessly lost until the Reformation?
Your answer did not address the comment.
Show us where any Protestants taught that the gospel was hopelessly lost until the Reformation.
“The comment was.....
After the apostles died, was the gospel hopelessly lost until the Reformation? Your answer did not address the comment.”
I didn’t post an answer at all. I made a comment. An answer would have been in response to a question not in response to a comment.
“Show us where any Protestants taught that the gospel was hopelessly lost until the Reformation.”
Look it up yourself. Anti-Catholics here have made the claim themselves. That view is part and parcel of the 19th century restoration movement - which was entirely Protestant. Mormons didn’t invent that view either. They adopted it from Protestants. It was - and is - common. Look it up yourself. I’m sure you can do it.
I believe the reference here is to the gospel truth, not the the written canonical Gospels.
I have been a Protestant since 1970, and this is the first time I have EVER heard this, so I doubt it is widespread among Protestants. I doubt it will cause many to swim the Tiber.
That is not what i see Reformers teaching, and thus the classic quote of what no less a RC than Manning resorted to:
It was the charge of the Reformers that the Catholic doctrines were not primitive, and their pretension was to revert to antiquity. But the appeal to antiquity is both a treason and a heresy. It is a treason because it rejects the Divine voice of the Church at this hour, and a heresy because it denies that voice to be Divine... I may say in strict truth that the Church has no antiquity....Primitive and modern are predicates, not of truth, but of ourselves...The only Divine evidence to us of what was primitive is the witness and voice of the Church at this hour. . — Most Rev. Dr. Henry Edward Cardinal Manning, Lord Archbishop of Westminster, The Temporal Mission of the Holy Ghost: Or Reason and Revelation (New York: J.P. Kenedy & Sons, originally written 1865, reprinted with no date), pp. 227-228.
For as also said, Rome has presumed to infallibly declare she is and will be perpetually infallible whenever she speaks in accordance with her infallibly defined (scope and subject-based) formula, which renders her declaration that she is infallible, to be infallible, as well as all else she accordingly declares.
Also, as Pelikan found ,
"Recent research on the Reformation entitles us to sharpen it and say that the Reformation began because the reformers were too catholic in the midst of a church that had forgotten its catholicity.. ."
“The reformers were catholic because they were spokesmen for an evangelical tradition in medieval catholicism, what Luther called "the succession of the faithful." The fountainhead of that tradition was Augustine (d. 430). His complex and far-reaching system of thought incorporated the catholic ideal of identity plus universality, and by its emphasis upon sin and grace it became the ancestor of Reformation theology...
… All the reformers relied heavily upon Augustine. They pitted his evangelical theology against the authority of later church fathers and scholastics, and they used him to prove that they were not introducing novelties into the church, but defending the true faith of the church.”
“...To prepare books like the Magdeburg Centuries they combed the libraries and came up with a remarkable catalogue of protesting catholics and evangelical catholics, all to lend support to the insistence that the Protestant position was, in the best sense, a catholic position.
Additional support for this insistence comes from the attitude of the reformers toward the creeds and dogmas of the ancient catholic church. The reformers retained and cherished the doctrine of the Trinity and the doctrine of the two natures in Christ which had developed in the first five centuries of the church….”
“If we keep in mind how variegated medieval catholicism was, the legitimacy of the reformers' claim to catholicity becomes clear. — Jaroslav Pelikan [Lutheran, later Orthodox] , The Riddle of Roman Catholicism (New York: Abingdon Press, 1959, p. 46),the Reformers looks to history is that Jaroslav Pelikan, The Riddle of Roman Catholicism (New York: Abingdon Press, 1959, pp. 46,47)