I've been doing this Catholic v Protestant thing my whole life and I'm 56 now. I was raised Fundamentalist, and am now Catholic, and the journey from one to the other was one of incredible study of Bible, theology, and Church History, especially the Early Church. I know all about the issues of the Reformation like the back of my hand, from birth (my father was an ex-pastor). After my conversion, I worked to build bridges by participating in dialogue between Catholics and Protestants. My goal is the ultimate unity of the Church -- not the superficial unity when we pretend we don't have significant differences -- but true unity of the sort that the Church had in the time of the Apostles.
What was the Reformation? The Reformation began as a revolt against corruption in the Catholic Church. It was long overdue -- even we Catholics say so. Then, pride took a good idea and wrecked it -- both Luther and the Pope were terrible, nasty egotists, the "my way or the highway" types. No humility from either one. And Luther had a fowl, dirty mouth. And so what began as a legitimate reform degraded into a game of "quien es mas macho." And basically, the Pope was the bigger dog in the fight. It got to the point where he lost his patience with this priest calling him all sorts of names rather than give him an ounce of respect considering his office. History records that Luther was excommunicated for heresy, but I don't believe it for a second. I think he would have been tolerated if he had simply been humble. But he simply had to be a jerk to the wrong person.
Once excommunicated, Luther's response was "You can't fire me, I quit!" So he sets up his own shop, which immediately divides into scores of other shops. Why? Because sola scriptura can't provide unity.
The Body of Christ then goes through the bloodiest age in its history. Whether it's the 3000-5000 deaths of the Spanish Inquisition, or the 73,000 deaths under Henry VIII, Christian culture of that era simply believed it was best to kill the heretic, whether you were protestant or Catholic. Even Luther urged the slaughter of the Anabaptists.
Even when things "calmed down" everyone was still in a state of "trench mentality." We could not listen to each other. We considered each other dangerous heretics, not even real Christians. Protestants were even at odds with each other, deeply suspicious and even hostile. Yes, times were better, but certainly not good.
Here is my assessment of where things stand 500 years after the Reformation. Something happened after the Holocaust that made us take a second look at ourselves. The fact that we had the atomic power to destroy the world was alarming. The fact that a Christian country had exterminated a third of the Jews in the world was deeply shaking and humbling. We entered a new era with the idea that any day could be our last so make it count, and maybe seeing that we aren't the wonderful people we thought, that perhaps we should spend as much time and effort making peace as making war.
There are four great movements that have effected where we stand now.
- The mainline Churches were brought closer together by a common social gospel
- The rise of Evangelicalism spread across denominational lines.
- Vatican II prepared the Catholic Church for its great ecumenical thrust
- The Charismatic movement also spread across denominational lines
It is absolutely a certainty that we are much closer than 500 years ago. Catholics and Protestants live together, work together, raise children together, pray together, study the Bible together -- we come up short when it comes to communion. All in all, this is heaven compared to the 1600s.
Doctrinally? Progress has been made. The biggest doctrinal issue was about justification, and the World Lutheran Federation and the Catholic Church together produced the Joint Declaration on the Doctrine of Justification in 2000, which has now also been signed by the Methodists, and is expected to be signed by the Anglicans shortly.
But really, the doctrinal issues were always second on the list. Many of them aren't even real. For example, the Catholic church teaches us to only worship God, therefore it is not Catholic teaching to worship Mary. Many Protestant objections are misunderstandings. But even the ones that ARE legitimate objections (legitimate meaning they are objections to actual Catholic teachings) are still secondary. It's not what Luther was really all about.
What Luther rebelled against was CHURCH AUTHORITY. The primary thing dividing then, and still dividing us now, is sola scriptura verses the authority of the Church. (My pet peeve -- I can't get my protestant friends to agree on what sola scriptura means. Sometimes they come up with definitions that even the Catholic Church would agree with, and if sola scriptura doesn't rule out church authority, then really your Catholic again.) Remember, Luther was in a fight with the Pope. He didn't want the Church telling him what to think. He was his own Pope. So for all the progress we've made on other fronts, on this one we have made no progress at all: shall we have one pope, or shall we have billions?
The councils that did this only "stated for the record" what the true faith was. The framers of the Nicene Creed, for example, did not invent the doctrines involved.
