How does one go about restoring and recontructing a Church that was started over a thousand years earlier? That would be like someone who is fed up with our government (USA) breaking away and starting a new country (called reformed USA) based on the writings of John Adams and Thomas Jefferson. I can understand their reasons and sincerity, but it couldn’t be done. It would be like me waking up tomorrow and deciding that, since I had totally screwed up my Iife, I would start over and become a baby again. Churches still continue to do this today though, and that’s probably why we have non-denominationalism. There seems to be a tendency among Christians to want to break away, reconstruct, and purify the Church back to it’s original state. This would be impossible to do, and so far it has led only to division in the Church.
As far as the reasons for the Reformation, there were other forces at work other than heroic men (reformers) going up against the big, bad, corrupted Church. Politics, pride, money, and original sin are reasons you can throw in as well.
One of the reasons behind the Reformation which you rarely hear about (but which Fr Benedict Groeschel mentioned in a talk I heard) is disease–particularly the plague. Priests, monks, and nuns took care of the sick and therefore died from the plague at alarming rates. Sometimes whole communities of religious would be wiped out. This problem contributed a lot to the sometimes poor training of the religious around the time of the Reformation.
The authority is in and from Christ acting through men. If you are worried about the laying on of hands, Farel was a Catholic priest, as was Knox, not that this is the emphasis in Reformed theology. The laying on of hands goes back to the apostles. But more importantly, the Reformers sought to restore church teaching, to be faithful to the actual teaching of the apostles as opposed to centuries of scholastic speculations and inferences that were being passed as inspired tradition, at a time when the official teaching apparatus of the Catholic church had been silent for centuries on issues that, had it not been asleep at the switch, they would have ruled on. Protestants argue that their teaching was, before Trent, at least as valid as what Trent accepted. Paul commanded that Timothy appoint faithful men. When the Catholic church became a political organization, that certainly wasn’t done. Popes such as John XII, Leo X, among a host of others, exemplified a church that, in the eyes of the reformers, required a “root and branch” reformation.
There is only one Church: the universal church. Some have seized power in part of that church, demanded allegiance to that part from all Christians and insisted that the rest of the church is invalid. Arrogant ahistorical power plays like an insistence on infallibility don’t help the cause of unity. They threw us out and then condemn us for being outside. Really.
Dear truthstalker, Hello. The more I read these posts, the more I am beginning to realize and learn the history of the Catholic Church and the UNBROKEN line from its historical beginning and the present day. UNBROKEN means NOT BROKEN. Logically, one would assume that the teachings of that church have also been given as an unbroken repository of teachings. I have read that the Church Fathers have gone as far as humanly possible to make sure that what they wrote coincided and agreed with the beliefs written and held by the Catholic Church in previous generations and times. Given that concept, isn’t it a part of history that the Reformation occured in the 1500s lead by the Monk Martin Luther? I found the following statements to be of interest:
Martin Luther (1483-1546) stands in history as one of those unique forces, an individual who by force of will and by his ideas changed the world fundamentally. There are several ironies incumbent on Luther’s pivotal role in history: 1) he doesn’t really represent a break with the past, but rather a flash point where ideas and trends which had been smoldering in Europe for several centuries suddenly blazed aflame; 2) Luther initially saw himself as a great reformer of the Catholic church, a simple monk who thought the force of his ideas would single-handedly redirect the Leviathan of the church; in the end, however, he DIVIDED Christianity INTO TWO SEPARATE CHURCHES and that second division, Protestantism, would divide over the next four centuries into a near infinity of separate churches; 3) finally, Luther (and all the other reformers) saw themselves as returning Christianity to its roots, they believed that they were setting the clock back; in reality, their ideas irreparably changed the world and pushed it kicking and screaming, not into some ideal past, but into the modern era.
What had started as a furious attempt to reform the church overnight turned into a project of building a NEW church INDEPENDENT of the Catholic church. Nevertheless, this small work, “The Freedom of the Christian,” is the theological and ideological core of Luther’s thinking; the fundamental term of value, that center around which every other aspect of his thought rotates, is the concept of Freiheit, “freedom,” or “liberty.” This is not our concept of freedom, but in the eventual turn of time it will give rise to the notion of “individual freedom,” and later “political freedom,” and later “economic freedom.”
And these latter occurances were good things.
This site
wsu.edu/~dee/REFORM/LUTHER.HTM also discusses indulgences, which I find to be very interesting. Still researching that. Peace
