In a thread in the General Theology forum, I offered to explain to one individual the context of a quote by Martin Luther that he had in his signature. Since several people e-mailed me asking what I had to say, I figured I'd just respond publicly.
The quote is one that's very popular among Roman Catholics, and it reads, "We are compelled to concede to the Papists that they have the Word of God, that we received it from them, and that without them we should have no knowledge of it at all."
And on the poster's signature, apparently for the purpose of "clarification," he put the word catholics in brackets after the word Papists.
Roman Catholics seem to interpret that quote to mean that Luther was conceding the entirety of church history to them, and that he equated the "Papists" with the entire church (or at least the entire Western church) from its inception to the Reformation. Nothing could have been further from his mind. Before the events that followed his nailing of the 95 theses to the Wittenberg door finally culminated in his excommunication, Luther himself was a "Papist" according to his definition of the word. In other words, Luther had at one time shared a papal ecclesiology--understanding the church as an entity under the supreme power of the Roman bishop. The important thing to keep in mind, though, is that this was a conception of the church that had evolved over time.
It was only when he recognized the complete corruption in the church that had resulted from papal tyranny that he came to reject it. The understanding of papal power that Luther and his Western contemporaries inherited had only been in place for a few hundred years prior to the Reformation whereby the Roman bishop had absolute power--he was not accountable to any governing body. For a very thorough treatment of the historical events that led to the defining of papal power that way, check this out: ttp://www.graceunknown.com/Thesis.doc. It's very long and a little dry for non-history buffs, but it's well worth it. It's a college thesis written by a student of church history.
So now that it's clear that Luther didn't equate "Papists" with catholics (which Luther would have rightly understood as all baptized Christians) since "Papists" were a class of people who held to a later medeival ecclesiology and could not have existed prior to the time the papacy had become what it was in his time, here's what Luther did mean by saying that the non-papal Western church had received the Scriptures from the Papists. Simply this. The Scriptures were transmitted through means, and the means by which they were transmitted to the 16th century church was through a succession of scribes who hand-copied them. And the scribes who hand copied the Scriptures in the West for the past few hundred years prior to Luther were Papists. That's it.
The quote is one that's very popular among Roman Catholics, and it reads, "We are compelled to concede to the Papists that they have the Word of God, that we received it from them, and that without them we should have no knowledge of it at all."
And on the poster's signature, apparently for the purpose of "clarification," he put the word catholics in brackets after the word Papists.
Roman Catholics seem to interpret that quote to mean that Luther was conceding the entirety of church history to them, and that he equated the "Papists" with the entire church (or at least the entire Western church) from its inception to the Reformation. Nothing could have been further from his mind. Before the events that followed his nailing of the 95 theses to the Wittenberg door finally culminated in his excommunication, Luther himself was a "Papist" according to his definition of the word. In other words, Luther had at one time shared a papal ecclesiology--understanding the church as an entity under the supreme power of the Roman bishop. The important thing to keep in mind, though, is that this was a conception of the church that had evolved over time.
It was only when he recognized the complete corruption in the church that had resulted from papal tyranny that he came to reject it. The understanding of papal power that Luther and his Western contemporaries inherited had only been in place for a few hundred years prior to the Reformation whereby the Roman bishop had absolute power--he was not accountable to any governing body. For a very thorough treatment of the historical events that led to the defining of papal power that way, check this out: ttp://www.graceunknown.com/Thesis.doc. It's very long and a little dry for non-history buffs, but it's well worth it. It's a college thesis written by a student of church history.
So now that it's clear that Luther didn't equate "Papists" with catholics (which Luther would have rightly understood as all baptized Christians) since "Papists" were a class of people who held to a later medeival ecclesiology and could not have existed prior to the time the papacy had become what it was in his time, here's what Luther did mean by saying that the non-papal Western church had received the Scriptures from the Papists. Simply this. The Scriptures were transmitted through means, and the means by which they were transmitted to the 16th century church was through a succession of scribes who hand-copied them. And the scribes who hand copied the Scriptures in the West for the past few hundred years prior to Luther were Papists. That's it.
yup that document is long and dry lol 
