(urth) Silk for calde blog: Wolfe thesis
James Wynn
crushtv at gmail.com
Sat Dec 19 02:18:49 PST 2009
>> It's not which way your doxy swings, it's about the message before that.
>> Protestants don't slice any material bits off of the Creed.
>
> No, but they've redefined terms (you know, like "I believe ... in the Holy
> Spirit, the Holy Catholic Church ...") to suit themselves.
I'm not sure "to suit themselves" is the right term. They were led to their
positions by a series of empirical observations of the Roman Catholic
religion in practice. In the end they chose to believe that God and his
Church were pure and the Pope and his bishops were damned rather than the
other way around.
>Too, they
> tossed out bits of Scripture that didn't suit them....
Now that this claim has been confirmed by a non-brunians, I'm curious as to
what those bits were.
>then set up the
> unprecedented principle of "Sola Scriptura."
Well, perhaps it only seemed unprecedented because the Church authorities
were burning at people at the stake for translating the Bible into the
vernacular (which is what St. Jerome did when he wrote the Vulgate). Was
burning the translators merely a bad practice? Or was it based on a bad
theology?
Look, Dan'l, the scandal of Indulgences was not just a bad "practice".
Luther's point was that it struck to the heart of the doctrine of Salvation.
If you think the Indulgences were wrong (as Luther did), you can either take
his position that the claim of papal infallibility is "a creation of men" or
you must presume the papal see was vacant at the time (as my Reformed
Catholic friends believe has been the case since some time before Vatican
II).
Otherwise, you have to accept that the Pope has the right to sell an escape
from Purgatory for cold hard cash (see Acts 8:20).
> No: the Protestant "reformation" was a series of heresies.
> Luther had a point. There were things that were wrong with the practice
> (NOT the theology) of the Roman church.
>Had [Luther] been patient enough
> to work within the Roman system, they might have been addressed
> much sooner
I think you need to check out a biography of Luther. What you are suggesting
seems to have been Luther's intention when he nailed his little tract to the
door. Unfortunately, the Pope really needed to pay for Saint Peter's
Basilica, so he wasn't inclined to listen. I'm pretty sure that before
Luther had successfully worked his way through the Roman system, he would
have ended up so many other reformers who had tried that over the previous
400 years (heard of John Huss?). That definitely seems to have been the plan
in Rome.
I really don't think you can put the long time it took the Vatican to "come
around" at Luther's doorstep. He tried just about every route until he
finally decided that "the Church" could not have ever been intended to be
something that could be subjugated from Rome, Italy.
Speaking of Huss, he was definitely a guy who planned to "work within the
Roman system". He accepted a promise that he would not be harmed if
presented him to explain why translating the Bible the common-tongue was not
heretical. They listened to his explanation and then burned him. When Pope
Benedict XVI recently when to the Czech Republic, there was a lot of talk
about how he might chose to admit that burning Huss was a bad thing (since
the RCC produces lots of vernacular Bibles now). He didn't. So maybe reform
would have taken at lot longer than Luther's lifetime even if some bishop
didn't manage to shorten it.
> -- some of them were not properly addressed until the
> second Vatican council, which might properly be seen as the Church's
> response to the legitimate complaints of the Deformers.
See above on Reformed Catholics.
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