Ignatius the Kiwi
Dissident
- Mar 2, 2013
- 7,029
- 3,750
- Country
- New Zealand
- Faith
- Eastern Orthodox
- Marital Status
- Single
Whatever their beliefs were, right or wrong, on what right does the Catholic church reserve the right to massacre thousands and thousands of people?
What did Jesus teach?
"Then came Peter to him, and said, Lord, how oft shall my brother sin against me, and I forgive him? till seven times? Jesus saith unto him, I say not unto thee, Until seven times: but, Until seventy times seven." -Mt. 18:21-22 (KJV)
And as a last resort, Jesus said:
"And whosoever shall not receive you, nor hear you, when ye depart thence, shake off the dust under your feet for a testimony against them. Verily I say unto you, It shall be more tolerable for Sodom and Gomorrha in the day of judgment, than for that city." -Mk. 6:11 (KJV)
Did they do that? No, instead they SLAUGHTERED thousands.
Does not matter, and it still proves my point.
Disagree with the "Catholic" church, persecution, torture, and death followed.
There is historical fact that when the Donatists rebelled, as its been said, that if they surrendered their scriptures, they could come back or if they didn't sure persecutioin:
"The church was horrified by stories of their fellow believers being handed over, along with many of their holiest scriptures, to be destroyed, often not by their enemies, but by traitorous Christian leaders within their own church. The church in North Africa was then faced with the decision “between the Church of traditores (traitors) and persecutors, or the unsullied Church of the martyrs.” A vast majority of North African Christians began seeing themselves as “a church of martyrs.”
Source
"During the persecutions, any Christian who renounced Christianity, made offerings to the Roman state gods and/or the Imperial divine cult, and who burned any sacred Christian texts they may have had, were spared. Those who refused — especially those caught with Christian texts that they refused to hand over or destroy — were usually killed. That texts were often used to determine who was Christian and who wasn’t, meant that the clergy — those Christians most likely to have such things — were particularly vulnerable to the persecution."
Source
Thus set the pattern up until the late 1300's.
Remember John Wycliffe, and John Huss, and how many others?
What else did Martin Luther do that earned the churches wrath?
He put the scriptures in the language of the German people.
And that is one of the principle dividing points between Catholicism and Protestantism today.
We do not revere a man sitting on a throne in Rome.
We do not revere the ECF's.
We do not revere the tradition of the mother church.
And even today, it still continues to a point.
And here is a fact that is undisputable.
If the Reformation wasn't a good thing, if God wasn't behind it, it would have died 600 years ago.
Tank God that many people had the guts and nerve, and the will to stand up to the mother church.
And no matter how you try to "whitewash" it (your term), the Catholic church has a very long history of persecuting, torturing, and even killing those who dare to stand up to its "corruption" as Martin Luther put it.
And that, no amount of whitewash can blot out.
Happy Reformation Day!
God Bless
Till all are one.
You realise that the persecution the Donatists faced was of Pagan and not Catholic origin right? That the whole contention between the Donatists and the Catholics was that Donatists believed that those who had sacrificed under the pressure of persecution to Caeser could not be re-admitted into the Church even if they were to repent? The Donatists were not murdered by the Catholic clergy as much as they were by Roman civil authorities (which was not uncommon for the government to do back then) and there's an important distinction there so we don't conflate the two institutions of Church and state which have always remained formally separated. You might criticise the policies of the empire and perhaps the Church's support of such repression yet that doesn't invalidate the theology of the Catholic side whom were clearly in the right here.
If the standard is persecution and you identify those whom were persecuted as teh true Christians, do you identifies the Arians as true Christians? They were repressed when Theodosius made Nicene Christianity the religion of state. Would you say the Gnostic Cathars are true Christians because they were persecuted?
I think you've claimed to deny Donatism in it's theology yet you insist that they are a proto-protestant movement. Where exactly do you stand? Do you demand perfection of your sacerdotally elected clergy and that in order for their Eucharist or baptisms to be valid they must be utterly pure? Because that's what the Donatists believed and what chiefly divided them from a man like Augustine who admitted his own sins in his Confession.
I would also point out that the age of an ideology does not validate it, it only allows the possibility of it being correct. Islam hasn't fallen yet but none of us believe God preserved it and allowed it to thrive today. Same with Buddhism and other non Christian ideas.
Upvote
0