Others On Justification: What Do You Think?

[Matthan]

I was "Forum Hopping" a while ago and came across the following, which I have quoted here verbatum.

"Why should I believe in justification by faith alone when it has only been around for 500 years? If it was true, then wouldn't other Christians before have believed in it? Why would God let people be blind for 1500 years about how to be saved? Why should I believe it when the people who supposedly rediscovered the doctrine, like Luther and Calvin, weren't very good Christians? Am I wrong?"

I found this question rather intriging, mainly because of its historical deficiencies. Did God let His people remain "blind" for 1,500 years? No, He would never permit that, mainly because Jesus promised that His Church would always survive, regardless of whatever adversaries it might face.

I guess this sort of question causes the frustration in me to boil over. Why can't people see that there WAS another, much smaller but completely apostalic, Church surviving during the same 1,500 year period dominated so brutally (as history clearly tells us) by the RCC? Why can't they understand that God would see to its survival, and not let any religious wars or persecutions eradicate it from the face of the earth?

Instead we have to deal with various mind-sets that THE ONLY CHURCH in existence during that entire period prior to the Reformation was the Roman church. Common sense should tell anyone that there were other smaller churches, but it apparently doesn't. Is there any way for us to correct this record? Can we change this mind-set?

Matthan <J><

 

[Gold Dragon]

I was "Forum Hopping" a while ago and came across the following, which I have quoted here verbatum.




I found this question rather intriging, mainly because of its historical deficiencies. Did God let His people remain "blind" for 1,500 years? No, He would never permit that, mainly because Jesus promised that His Church would always survive, regardless of whatever adversaries it might face.

I guess this sort of question causes the frustration in me to boil over. Why can't people see that there WAS another, much smaller but completely apostalic, Church surviving during the same 1,500 year period dominated so brutally (as history clearly tells us) by the RCC? Why can't they understand that God would see to its survival, and not let any religious wars or persecutions eradicate it from the face of the earth?

Instead we have to deal with various mind-sets that THE ONLY CHURCH in existence during that entire period prior to the Reformation was the Roman church. Common sense should tell anyone that there were other smaller churches, but it apparently doesn't. Is there any way for us to correct this record? Can we change this mind-set?

Matthan <J><

I don't think we need to appeal to succession (which I believe to be a historically dishonest position) or historical primacy for a doctrine to be true. Just because Christians in the past didn't express salvation in the same terms that we do now, does not mean that they believed differently.

 

[ZiSunka]

Matthan, a whole lot of people will NOT admit that there were Christians outside the catholic church before the 1500s. Even noncatholics will absolutely argue that every Christian was a catholic before the reformation. They just don't care about the Christians outside the bounds of catholicism, and they make themselves blind to these others, calling them heretics so they don't have to recognize them as true Christians. Of course the official definition of a heretic was anyone who refused to join the catholic church (st thomas aquinas), so it is convenient for folks to use that term to defame those other churches.

 

[Gold Dragon]

Matthan, a whole lot of people will NOT admit that there were Christians outside the catholic church before the 1500s.

I will readily admit there were many Christians outside the catholic church before 1500s. However besides the EOC, there wasn't a succession of them and most of them held theological views that many on this forum would not agree with.

 

[SumTinWong]

I agree with Gold Dragon

 

[ZiSunka]

I will readily admit there were many Christians outside the catholic church before 1500s. However besides the EOC, there wasn't a succession of them and most of them held theological views that many on this forum would not agree with.

Some of them did, but to say "most" of them is probably an overstatement. A lot of them still exist to this day and have orthodox theology. Many of them have churches right here in my own community, which is sort of a melting pot of eastern european and middle eastern churches, as well as the usual churches.

It's funny how we don't realize denoms exist unless we have congregations of them right under our noses. A friend of mine from Dayton never knew there was such a thing as Orthodox until he came to visit me here and we drove past a church with a "strange cross." It was a Russian Orthodox church. He's 45 years old but because there are no Orthodox churches where he lives, he had no idea such a denom existed.

It's like that for all of us though. We are just purely and innocently ignorant of these churches that were never part of the catholic tradition or communion, therefore we say they either never existed, they died out, or they were heretics.

 

[Matthan]

The little known but fairly well documented history clearly proves there were "religious" wars being fought almost continuously in one place or another from around 750 A.D. We are well aware of who was fighting on one side of those conflicts. Are we to blindly accept that the other side were all heretics, just because the one side won and the "heretics" lost?

Matthan <J><

 

[Lockheed]

The question stems from the fallacy that the "Roman Catholic Church" is the church catholic. (Roman Catholic is an oxymoron no less.) The church of Christ is made up of believers throughout the ages.

Sola fide was not an invention of Luther's... Catholics often forget about the other proto-protestants prior to Luther's appearance. Whether or not there was a lively church apart from the "Catholic" church is unimportant, (in my opinion.) I'm not one for Landmarkism. That said, Scripture tells us that even in Israel there were a remnant "chosen by grace" just as there are in this present time. In all of history and throughout the world, the true church of Christ has been made up of wheat and tares no matter what the name of the church was. Therefore, there have been believers in every age in many places and it is those who make up the church.