Reformation - positive or negative?

[tanzanos]

You found something bad that took place in Tsarist Russia. I never claimed it was heaven on earth or that all the Tsars lived up to their high calling. Do you really want to compare the atrocities of Tsarist Russia with those of even the United States (with its relatively short but bloody history) or the Communists? Heck you can even throw in the whole 1,000 plus year history of Byzantium into the mix too and you still couldn't overshadow the atrocities of modern democracys and the communists. We are currently living in a dark age like no other in history.

Is there something about sharing and equality that you disagree with? Is there something about "he who has two cloaks shall give the one" or it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than it is for a rich man to enter heaven" that you disagree with? Communism and what Jesus preached are closer in meaning than having a filthy rich autocrat living in splendour while his subjects live in filth!

 

[Hairy Tic]

Implies 'coming out of a dark place', i.e. the Dark Ages, of, among other things, religion. The Reformation allowed true 'biblical' Christianity to emerge for the first time since the Apostalic age.

Is that the kind that favours the baptism of children (as Calvinists do) - or the kind that regards baptism of anyone but believers as to be rejected (the Baptist POV) ? Seems to me the Holy Spirit must be in two minds. This is the idea of Church history that says: after 14 centuries of worse than Cimmerian darkness, during which Christ had a serious memory malfunction, and the Holy Spirit did a runner, Luther was raised up, & all (or almost all) was light.

LOL

Trouble with that view is, that if Christ was absent from the Church from (say) 100 to 1517, but was not known to be absent, there is no reason whatever why He should not be equally absent from the Churches since (say) the death of Luther in 1546; or even 1517. If He can break His promise to be with His Church once - He can do so a million times, or a centillion times. IOW, the "darkness" theory leaves us with Christ the Perjurer, Christ the Deceiver - I'm not sure that is a gain for Christian theology. So He could be totally absent from all Churches in the world, now.

After some thought, I voted negative: once I would have voted that the Reformation was positive, but if the Reformers were trying to get rid of some of the worst features of the Late Mediaeval Church, their success was very incomplete. They merely replaced the authority of Rome with that of the "godly prince", or the Church consistory; one possible source of corruption with several. Calvin was understandably much troubled by the burning & massacre of French Protestants & French Waldenses: it's a shame that his grief at their sufferings did not teach him - or a great many other Protestants - that persecution does not become any less loathsome when Protestants carry it out.

 

[Hairy Tic]

Or, I just described exactly the type of theocracy that existed prior to the reformation.

The protestants and catholic countries of Europe didn't fight wars for nothing.

It MEANT something when a country decreed what sort of Christianity it's followers would be adhering to.

## That's not theocracy -that's the principle cuius regio, eius religio. It means the nationalisation of the Church, the splitting of the seamless robe into a pile of shreds by the subjugation of the Church so that it becomes something to be dealt with as a department of state, something subject to the none-too-godly prince - but it is certainly not theocracy; it's more like its opposite.

 

[Hairy Tic]

You found something bad that took place in Tsarist Russia. I never claimed it was heaven on earth or that all the Tsars lived up to their high calling. Do you really want to compare the atrocities of Tsarist Russia with those of even the United States (with its relatively short but bloody history) or the Communists? Heck you can even throw in the whole 1,000 plus year history of Byzantium into the mix too and you still couldn't overshadow the atrocities of modern democracys and the communists. We are currently living in a dark age like no other in history.

## Stalin alone managed to "liquidate" 60 million people in under 30 years. This is a bit more than the Romanovs managed in 300. The Communists, being civilised, restored torture, which Catherine the Great had abolished.

Mao surpassed Stalin - he got rid of 90 million people. And everyone knows how well N.Korea, which is unencumbered by a religion, is doing.

 

[Chesterton]

Is there something about sharing and equality that you disagree with? Is there something about "he who has two cloaks shall give the one" or it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than it is for a rich man to enter heaven" that you disagree with? Communism and what Jesus preached are closer in meaning than having a filthy rich autocrat living in splendour while his subjects live in filth!

So you think the State should enforce Jesus Christ by law? Well there's at least one supporter of theocracy here.

 

[tanzanos]

So you think the State should enforce Jesus Christ by law? Well there's at least one supporter of theocracy here.

Care to reread my post before making such outlandish remarks? My post was referring to the anti communist propaganda of another poster. Communism and the teachings of Jesus have more in common than most churches do today! Communism is an ideology! Yes bad people will use any ideology in order to gain the power and wealth they seek. Some have even used religions like Christianity.

I rest my case here since it is a proven impossibility to try to persuade anyone who is vehemently anti something to the contrary!

 

[Kalevalatar]

Re: the comment that the Reformation traded one greedy body, the Catholic Church of the time, with another, the Monarch/"your favorite term here", no argument there. Little doubt the Swedish King favored the Reformation because it gave him the access to the riches formerly held by the Catholic Church in the lands he, Gustav (I of Sweden) Vasa, considered his. Nevertheless, the reformation did succeed in that it replaced the language of the Gospel with vernacular, not just in Northern Europe but also, as a counter-reformation, in the trad. Catholic countries.

This, maybe even somewhat against the interests of the Christian catholic Church, introduced the concepts of "ecucation" and "understanding". People no longer depended on the Catholic priest to "interpret" the Bible, the Gospel, but they (ok, slowly but still) could read & judge for themselves. To cut some corners, it lead to education. It lead to written (vernacular) languages, Bible translations. In Finland, for decades, one could not get married unless one could read Luther's Small Catechism. That is a pretty powerful incentive! If the license to marry = license to have sex --> to be able to read/literacy = to be able to enjoy free sex.

Re: the Tsar vs. Lenin/Stalin. When it came to forced deportations, labour camps, political prisoners, the "Soviets" certainly merely copied & pasted the Tsars' old notebooks, although the global mechanic industrialization made it more "effective," if you will. Interestingly, though, when the former Swedish province of Finland exchanged hands and became the (Russian) autonomous Grand Duchy of Finland in 1809, it was the time Finland finally made grand strides in political and infrastructural terms in the road to become the world's most democratic & efficient democracies, culminating in the Finnish parliamentary election in 1907 with the world's first universal sufferage. Finnish women not only did get the right to vote (as in New Zealand in 1893) but were in fact the first women in the world to get the right to stand as actual candidates in the election. In total, 19/200 Finnish female MPs were elected. This happened under Tsar Nicholas II (Nikolay Alexandrovich Romanov).

Then again, on 15 November 1917, the Bolsheviks declared a general right of self-determination, including the right of complete secession, and Finland followed suit. The same day the Finnish Parliament issued a declaration of independence. It was Lenin's Soviet government who first hurried to recognize the Finnish independence.

So, comparing the Tsarist Russia to the USSR is like comparing the two sides of the coins to each other. So maybe the communist Soviets actually managed to kill more lives than the Tsarist Russia, but it wasn't because of the lack of effort on the Russian Tsar's side; rather; it was that the mass killing machinery itself had advanced in great leaps during Lenin's/Stalin's years. On the other hand, both the Tsar and the politburo recognized realpolitik when they saw it: if it was much easier to give the taciturn Finns as much independence as possible to keep them manageable lest they became real pests and thorns-in-the side of the great motherland, then neither were above of granting just that. And PM Putin, on his part, resembles more of the authoritarian Tsar than the totalitarian USSR/CCCP.

 

[Julian of York]

How about the Modern Reformation Movement amongst Reformed Baptists and like practicing groups?