Which is more RC desperate deception. For not only do you have your eschatology dramatically wrong - unless you believe that the Lord returned, and devil was bound till the 15th c., and released - but Luther is hardly some pope which bound souls to obey him as an infallible autocratic entity, which unScriptural presumption belong to Rome.
Instead, it is Rome which has become as the gates of Hell for multitudes.
First, The Catholic Church ruled the spiritual kingdom of Christendom for a thousand years between the Fall of Rome and Martin Luther’s fragmenting of The Only Church Jesus Founded. That is the “Thousand Year Reign” than many of us can recall.
Thus you concur with those how hold that Catholic Church really began around the time of Fall of Rome, not Pentecost, and thus indict Rome as Babylon! And
Secondly, the disturbing reality for RCs who see their past with Rome-colored glasses is that she was not unified, by saw division long before Luther.
Going as far back as the 5th c., Samuel Hugh Moffett in "A History of Christianity in Asia," writes,
What finally divided the early church, East from West, Asia from Europe, was neither war nor persecution, but the blight of a violent theological controversy, that raged through the Mediterranean world in the second quarter of the fifth century. It came to be called the Nestorian controversy, and how much of it was theological and how much political is still being debated, but it irreversibly split the church not only east and west but also north and south and cracked it into so many pieces that it was never the same again. Out of it came an ill-fitting name for the church in non-Roman Asia, "Nestorian."
And here is a video of the Eastern Orthodox bishop Kallistos Ware flatly stating that the Churches of the East never held to "Nestorianism", and that "Nestorius himself did not hold the Nestorian heresy": http://www.oltv.tv/id518.html
Then you had the big split between East and West, which see significant differences today that refuse to go away. Which is a real split with 2 competitors for the title of "one true church," regardless of their common worship of wafer and effectively of their Mary .
And then further one, rather than unity, leading up to the Reformation you had this mess. As Cardinal Ratzinger found:
"For nearly half a century, the Church was split into two or three obediences that excommunicated one another, so that every Catholic lived under excommunication by one pope or another, and, in the last analysis, no one could say with certainty which of the contenders had right on his side. The Church no longer offered certainty of salvation; she had become questionable in her whole objective form--the true Church, the true pledge of salvation, had to be sought outside the institution. "It is against this background of a profoundly shaken ecclesial consciousness that we are to understand that Luther, in the conflict between his search for salvation and the tradition of the Church, ultimately came to experience the Church, not as the guarantor, but as the adversary of salvation. (Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, head of the Sacred Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith for the Church of Rome, “Principles of Catholic Theology,” trans. by Sister Mary Frances McCarthy, S.N.D. (San Francisco: Ignatius, 1989) p.196). http://www.whitehorseinn.org/blog/2012/06/13/whos-in-charge-here-the-illusions-of-church-infallibility/) Cardinal Bellarmine: "Some years before the rise of the Lutheran and Calvinistic heresy, according to the testimony of those who were then alive, there was almost an entire abandonment of equity in ecclesiastical judgments; in morals, no discipline; in sacred literature, no erudition; in divine things, no reverence; religion was almost extinct. (Concio XXVIII. Opp. Vi. 296- Colon 1617, in “A History of the Articles of Religion,” by Charles Hardwick, Cp. 1, p. 10,)
• Catholic historian Paul Johnson additionally described the existing social situation among the clergy at the time of the Reformation:
“Probably as many as half the men in orders had ‘wives’ and families. Behind all the New Learning and the theological debates, clerical celibacy was, in its own way, the biggest single issue at the Reformation. It was a great social problem and, other factors being equal, it tended to tip the balance in favour of reform. As a rule, the only hope for a child of a priest was to go into the Church himself, thus unwillingly or with no great enthusiasm, taking vows which he might subsequently regret: the evil tended to perpetuate itself.” (History of Christianity, pgs 269-270)
• In the summer of 1536 [10 years before Luther died], Pope Paul III appointed Cardinals Contarini and Cafara and a commission to study church Reform. The report of this commission, the Consilium de emendanda ecclesiae, was completed in March 1537. The final paragraphs deal with the corruptions of Renaissance Rome itself:
“the swarm of sordid and ignorant priests in the city, the harlots who are followed around by clerics and by the noble members of the cardinals’ households …”
“The immediate effects of the Consilium fell far below the hopes of its authors and its very frankness hampered its public use. … the more noticeably pious prelates [note: this the “noticeably pious” clergy] had no longer to tolerate the open cynicism of the Medicean period, and when moral lapses by clerics came to light, pains were now taken to hush them up as matters of grievous scandal.” (G. Dickens, “The Counter Reformation,” pp. 100,102)
Something here about fair and balanced reporting.
Secondly, the fragmentation that Martin Luther began did result in the metastasizing of One Church into 43,000 Somewhat Christian denominations.
Which is an invalid argument, for,
1. Using the same source from which even the lower often posted and refuted exaggerated figure of 33k is obtained, then over 1,000 Catholic denominations can be obtained. See here .
2. The RC definition of Protestant here is so wide as to be largely meaningless, and in some cases is more unwarranted than calling the Santeria religion Catholic.
3. RCs cannot claim their church to be more unified than certain particular denominations she calls Protestants.
4 . Nor can unity itself be the criteria for validity. And Scripture affirms division is necessary, and the church itself began with division from the historical magisterium.
5. What what one professes does not constitute the evidence of what they really believe, but what they do and effect. (Mt. 7:20; Ja. 2:18) And the doctrinal unity of Rome is very limited in much of any detail and largely on paper.
6. If you separated RCs according to what they believed then you would multitudes of different kinds of Caths, which their church implicitly sanctions, effectually conveying what she really believes.
7. Rome owed her unity largely to the unScriptural use of the sword of men, which Damasus 1 began to employ way back in the 4th c. for ecclesiastical discipline. The divisions following the dissent of the Reformation were largely due to Rome having lost that power, and the move away from church-states, and as seen today, she cannot keep her flock in unity by Scriptural means.
Thus you cannot argue that the Catholic model for unity solves the problem of division, as both Catholics and Prots see division, nor can you define the latter as Protestant merely because they are not Catholic.
Instead, a valid comparison would be between churches based upon their fundamental basis for determination of Truth. In which you have two models, that of Scripture being supreme as literally being the wholly inspired infallible word of God, versus the magisterium of the church being supreme, as possessing ensured veracity, otherwise known.
And with unity being based not on official paper professions, but what those she counts as members believe and manifest.
Under the later model you do have the easiest means of unity, as seen in cults in which strict conformity to the supreme leader(s) is enforced, while in Rome it no longer is, and instead Caths testify to a greater variance than most with official teaching, and each other, as well as in things not infallibly defined. All of which is effectually sanctioned. Every time a liberal proabortion/sodomite/Muslim pol is honored in a church funeral as a Catholic and child of God, that alone interprets church teaching for the people, and teaches that no matter what you profess and so, Rome will get to to glory eventually thru her professed merits.
But in either case that is not the basis for Scriptural unity, as the NT church did not begin nor see its unity under the premise of ensured magisterial veracity, though it did begin under manifest apostles of God, (the qualifications and credentials of which Rome fails of. (Acts 1:21,22; 1Cor. 9:1; Gal. 1:11,12; 2Cor. 6:1-0; 12:12)
But both their own reputation and their Truth claims were established upon Scriptural substantiation in word and in power.
And it is those people which testify to the strongest belief in the fundamental distinctive of the Reformation, that of strongly holding Scripture as literally being the supreme wholly inspired word of God that are the most conservative and unified in core beliefs overall.
Because there is no longer one voice speaking for Christ, doers of evil have “deceived the nations” into accepting abortion and other mortal sins.
Nonsense. Catholics have as many or more abortions than Prots, and esp. more than evangelicals. While by placing the voice of a man, whose decrees are not wholly inspired of God, above Scripture then they are led astray for it.
As a result of the divisiveness begun by Luther, a billion unborn children have been killed by abortion.
More non-sense. He did not sanction abortion, and you cannot blame a liberator for what people do with freedom obtained for them. You might as well blame American Founders for crime, contrary to what they held to, due to liberating a people from a tyrant. Meanwhile the dissent of Luther is akin to not following the liberal Rome today.
It is impossible to deny that if it had not been for Martin Luther and the political disempowering of The Catholic Church that followed the Luther-inspired schisms, abortion would still be an illegal, unspeakable crime.
Which means that NKP_Vet affirms the unScriptural use of the sword of men, while the church ruling over those without, which is unseen and another part of Romanism which is clearly contrary to the NT church. You simply advocate for institution that is foreign to Scripture.
And as you require political empowering The Catholic Church as before in order to make abortion an illegal, unspeakable crime,, which it is in God's sight, then you confess that Rome is unable to bring her own people to do so by Scriptural means.
Meanwhile, if you want to see that and sodomy outlawed, then your strongest group of supporters will be evangelicals, not those your church counts as members.
Whoops! LOL.