Strictly speaking, “Roman Catholic” is a contradiction of terms. Catholic means universal, Roman denotes a particular place. It is the Protestant and not the Romanist who believes in the catholic church. Protestants believe the church is universal, or catholic; Rome cannot discover it beyond her own communion.
John Gerstner – ‘The Gospel According to Rome’
1914-1996
This goes along the same line of thinking in another discussion we’ve had here recently; not knowing or understanding what terms mean. Recognizing that Roman Catholic is a contradiction in terms is a good observation. I read the article (Everybody was Catholic before the Reformation) here in the Answering Common Errors” section and it did a wonderful job of describing how the RCC hijacks terms and change the meaning of them so that they meet RCC prescribed conditions. I’ve been learning recently while looking at what Mormons believe, what Jehovah Witnesses believe, etc. that this is a common practice with any false teaching. The Mormon, for example, will say they believe in Jesus and when they say that you think that the two of you are believing in the same Jesus; but you’re not. His Jesus is different than your Jesus because they have corrupted his identity. Catholics talk of grace but their grace isn’t the same grace we proclaim. Their grace isn’t all sufficient and require works, etc.
In Romanism, one’s relationship to Christ depends on one’s relationship to the Catholic Church.
In Protestantism, it is the opposite.
One’s relationship to the Church depends on one’s relationship to Christ.
Has there been any discussion on this blog about the Anabaptists. I have been studying more on this and there interaction with “Protestants”. Here is a post I came across.
http://blackandreformedministries.wordpress.com/2008/12/14/whats-a-couple-of-slaves-when-you-have-good-theology/
In my studies and research regarding the Anabaptists and their vicious persecution at the hands of the ‘Reformed” and the Romanist alike. I have found this idea of living a hypocritical Christainity where ones faith and practice do not match to be fairly common.
The Reformers seemed to tecah a form of extreme easy believism!
They actually mocked the Anabaptists for attempting to follow Christ’s commands.
Note the last quote it is priceless:
From The Secret of the Strength:
Reformed preachers from the canton of Bern informed the Swiss court in 1532: The Anabaptists have the semblance of outward piety to a far greater degree than we and all the churches that unitedly confess Christ with us. They avoid offensive sins that are very commonamong us.19
These facts disturbed Heinrich Bullinger, a leader of the Swiss Reformed church, very much. He wrote several books against the “shameless rabble” (the Anabaptists) in which he said: Those who unite with them will be received into their church by rebaptism for repentance and newness of life. Then they lead their lives under a semblance of a quite spiritual conduct. They denounce covetousness, pride, profanity, the lewd conversation, and immorality of the world. They shun drinking and gluttony. In short, their hypocrisy is great and manifold.20
The Jesuit priest, Christoph Andreas Fischer, leader of the counter-reformation in Austria spoke of the Anabaptists:
They call each other brothers and sisters. They use no profanity nor harsh speech. They do not swear nor carry weapons. In the beginning they would not even carry knives. They are modest in eating and drinking. They do not wear stylish clothes. They do not go to law before the magistrates, but they suffer everything in makebelieve
patience.21
In 1582, Franz Agricola, Roman Catholic theologian of the Dutch province of Limburg, wrote in his book Against the terrible errors of the Anabaptists: Among the existing heretical sects there is none which in appearance leads a more modest or pious life than the Anabaptists. They are irreproachable in their outward public life. They do not say
lies. They do not deceive, swear, fight nor speak harshly. They avoid intemperate eating and drinking. No personal outward display is found among them, but humility, patience, uprightness, neatness, honesty, temperance and straightforwardness in such measure that one would suppose they had the Holy Spirit of God!22
The problem with the magisterial Reformers was not Reformed theology. Witness the Puritans, Moravians, the Calvinist Methodists, Reformed Baptists and other pietists. (As a matter of fact, the Reformed Baptists and to some degree the Puritans were the successors of the Anabaptists in Great Britain.) The problem was their support for state-churches, Constantinism if not quite Romanism. Like their Catholic predecessors, the magisterial Reformers believed in only one church per political entity, one “state church” where everyone in that political entity was required to be a member of the church. Of course, they knew full well that everyone in that church was not regenerated. So, they came up with the “ecclesiola within the ecclesia”, the smaller invisible church within the larger church, doctrine. Initiation into these state churches were by infant baptism, and excommunication from said churches was also tantamount to having your citizenship stripped and being banished from the country by the state.
They did this not for theological reasons – at least not directly – but for political and social ones. The magisterial Reformers shared in the conviction, common for the time, that a common religion was needed in order to have a stable society. In their opinion, different religions led to social disorder. And that was the theological issue … social disorder is a sinful state of affairs to begin with, plus if there is social disorder it was felt that the church – or at least the “official institutional churches” that they wanted – to survive. It really is not that far removed from Constantine’s line of thought where he instituted state Christianity in order to politically unite the crumbling Roman Empire (and then switched to Arianism and began persecuting Christians when it didn’t work).
So naturally if you are going to have a church were people are born into and forced to be members of, then the clear majority of such bodies are not going to be born again. So, you are going to have to accommodate the unregenerate who are required to attend and to pay taxes (tithes) to the church-state. Of course, this made advocating or requiring piety and Christian living impossible. Even those who WANTED to be pious were very likely discouraged because it made the unsaved folks who made up the majority of the church uncomfortable. So, the folks who insisted on real Christianity were branded as fanatics and – you guessed it – legalists. And when the “legalist” Anabaptist movement started growing and putting the state churches to shame with their knowledge of scripture, good works, holy living, faith etc. they were repressed, although to be fair much more so in some Reformed states than in others. In Zwingli’s Switzerland it was REALLY bad. But Martin Luther, though he disagreed with the Anabaptists, actually at some points urged that they would be left alone.
The magisterial Reformers did a lot of great work and were used by God, but they were wrong on some points.