angelic.org/originalsite/whydenominationsexist.html
The First Century Church was walking in a tremendous dimension of God’s truth and power. However, this was lost to us, almost completely, by the time the Dark Ages were upon us. Thus, in Acts 3:20-21 we see that it is God’s heart to restore it all to His Church. Thus, over the last several centuries, God had begun a restoration of revelation of His Truth. What we know today, and our intimate relationship with the person of the Lord Jesus Christ, and how we have the Holy Spirit indwelling us born-again believers are things that the prophets of old had so longed for. We are very privileged!
Understand that restoration often takes place across a long period of time. How much God can restore and reveal to us depends on the degree of our receptivity.
The entire basis of thinking is absolutely wrong headed and steeped in a romantic naivety about the early church. It is heavily biased by a Protestant perspective. That is its a romantic illusion that attempts to assert that Protestantism’s heretical actions were ordained by God to refocus and rediscover God’s truth stepwise with each new discovered sola or scriptural focus.
Nonsense.
Christianity has always been holistic and The Catholic Church has always taught a Christ centric Word of God - not a narrow focus on single topic salvation slogans. This is an artifact coming out of the error of sola scriptura when Luther was forced into the corner to when Eck humiliated him in public debate and Luther had no other recourse than to play rope-a-dope with a right to claim private interpretation of the Bible (a notion that is itself unbiblical).
There is no way that one can point to Luther and say “aha - see Luther refocused the Church on the truth of Faith Alone and got Christians away from the errors of popes”. Bologna. The truth is Luther was wrong and invented the entire thing by inventing the word “alone” out of thin air as if my magic and tacking it onto the word “faith”. The word does not exist in the original manuscripts.
Christians tend to romanticize the times of early church. Frankly, though their faith was pure and simple it was not all that developed theologically - it took centuries for Christians to mature enough to understand and put together an orthodox religion - including the first Catholic Bible. Yes, we can idealistically look back at the innocence and naievity of early church with pride and wonderment that very simply men and women who largely could not read or write and admire them for their perseverance. They died for what they believed in the midst of severe persecution. Back then life was less about options - and more about just living and surviving day to day. Of course they also believed in an imminent return of Christ - yet ironically no one refers to this transitional pagan period of time as “the dark ages” where Christians were fed to lions and burned in cages for entertainment.
The Roman Empire had order and law - but we certainly can not say that the small Christian sect at the time was representative of the world. No, ironically the term “dark ages” comes centuries later at a time when humanists basking in the benefits and blessings of Christianity have the luxury to look back romantically with smug pride to a pre-Christian era where they idealize pagan Greece. They want society to rediscover and revere the ancient Greek philosophies and reshape European thinking to a more ancient way of life that they considered the pinnacle of human achievement. The glamour of the Greek Philosophies was considered the ideal. Basically we have a bunch of liberal men and elite intellectuals who consider themselves a sort of ruling elite (Renaissance Men) who want to pass judgement on all of history and re-architect society and define what is light and dark for the rest of us.
The Protestant revolution comes directly out of a segment of this liberal-secular mindset. This was the spirit of the age (zeitgeist) that leads to rejecting ecclesial authority in favor of unlimited personal authority and achievement. This is what leads to humanism, liberalism, secularism and the so called secular “enlightenment” that we have today in “the age of enlightenment”. hohum…
Someone looking back in a few hundred more years, might well call this age “the age of insanity” - an age where we proclaim individual liberty for everyone except unborn babies and are free to choose to have fun now and go to hell later (if you don’t belive you have a get out of hell card by “believing you are saved”).
I think if one looks at the current situation holistically one will see that Protestantism is not being used to teach any lessons to God’s Church (The Catholic Church) except with respect to the lessons of a general chaos and splintering that follows when society rejects apostolic teaching and authority. Take a look around. Protestantism is being shattered into 10’s of thousands of fragments (sects) and it destined for obscurity since each sect is is only a fragmentary truth - not a holistic truth. That is the lesson - irrespective of the attempts of the mega-bible-church aggregators opportunistically trying to sweep up all the pieces and pay for the huge buildings expenses and the professional for hire “motivational speaker” “pastor” with tax exempt tithe collections (it don’t scale during economic slowdowns). But no new spiritual truths have been revealed by that deconstructive model - though we do have some new anathemas now defining good examples of religious error.
But here again, not withstanding arbitrary humanistic titles of “dark ages” or self proclaimed “enlightenment” God has always permitted heresies to come from those vain men who stumble around in the darkness of their own ideas so that The Catholic Church can define through the shadows of their errors what Christianity is not.
James
