Silk for calde blog: Wolfe thesis

James Wynn · 19 Dec 2009, 10:18 · from 2009-December.txt.gz

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From: crushtv at gmail.com (James Wynn)
Date: Sat, 19 Dec 2009 04:18:49 -0600
Subject: (urth) Silk for calde blog: Wolfe thesis
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>> 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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