This issue makes me remain very, very confused. We all agree that up until the reformation there was only one church teaching one thing. We then all agree that that Church became later known as the Catholic Church.
So when the bible speaks about denominations forming and speaking of false doctrines how is this placed upon the original church since that church was already there and were teaching only the doctrine that was taught by the Apostles? I may have a hard time seeing it in another way but if the Catholic Church remained unchanged for 2000 years and all of a sudden protestant churches spring up everywhere by the dozen, wouldn’t that be considered what the bible talked about a teaching of false doctrines? Some protestants tell me that what if it was them that were the original church and the catholics split off into their own sect, which seems kinda silly.
And also I don’t want to hear that God made it happen because nowhere in the bible did God say anything about Luther reforming the church, so I just won’t buy that.
The Reformation was a revolution, and not one revolution has ever happened in a vacuum. The American Revolution occurred because the colonialists had grievances. The French revolution happened because the peasants and the ordinary people had genuine grievanes. The Russian Revolution ditto; Mao’s China the same and so on.
The Reformation occurred for several reasons. The first was widespread corruption in the church, most probably above all. Then there was the issue of indulgences, used for fund raising. There was also the new spirit of inquiry engendered by the Renaissance, and the Nobility were jealous of the Church’s wealth, while at the same time the rising mercantile class were making inroads into the aristrocrats’ wealth.
There was a reason for it. Now I believe Martin Luther was the man chosen for the role of “reforming” the church, but I think God meant him to die a martyr as a result of the second trial, for which he was heading when he was “kidnapped” and taken to the Wartburg. From then on it became political, with violence and equally violent polemic to match. Of course when tempers are as frayed as they were then, in a religious context, the next thing that is going to happen is name-calling, such as the Pope being anti-Christ. Of course the Catholic side were saying the same thing about Luther.
And this has gone on to the present day.
Now, I have my own theory on Luther. I think he’s the False Prophet of Revelation fame, a man who was supposed to die a martyr, but refused, and instead called on millions of others to become martyrs instead, while he himself took political refuge with a couple of mercenary and quite ruthless German princes. He had no problem with calling for the slaughter of peasants and Catholic religious alike. As a result the population of Germany, according to the Protestant William Shirer, declined over the next century from 16 million to about 6 million.
Were there any positives? I think there were two - the first was the development of democracy, and the other was the de-mythologisatoin of the Bible. Whether we like it or not, the Protestants easily made the greatest inroads into Biblical scholarship, with the Caholic Church taking centuries to even take the step of encouraging lay people to read the Bible (one of the reasons I haven’t got much time for the “infallibility” doctrine).
Secondly, whether we like it or not, it was the English speaking Protestant peoples who most championed the development of democracy. Now I don’t know fully if this was due entirely to Protestant freedom to speak your own mind, or an outcome of British mentality, or a bit of both. It took a lot longer for the Latin, Catholic races to participate. Protestant North America, for all it’s faults, was a very long way ahead of it’s Southern Catholic cousins in Mexico and further south. As recently as the 1950’s and 1960’s,
Catholic Spain was a dictatorship.
Therefore the two positive developments which came out of the Reformation, for all its savage violence, were a more rapid development of democracy, and greater Biblical scholarship.
Russia had a delayed introduction into the modern world with it’s revolution in 1917. Russia never had a Reformation. It was therefore still feudal in outlook and practice in the early 20th century.
Those are the positives. The name calling and the idiotic polemic which still goes on today in some Protestant circles owes its origin to the violence and polemic of the Reformation, which in my old pastor’s words, was “easily the most violent event in the history of the church.” I would say the death toll in the wars of the Reformation well exceeded the total of the Crusades, waged against an external enemy.
Hence I think Luther is the “false prophet”, yet paradoxically his rebellion hastened both democracy and Biblical scholarship.
