One major objection to the Protestant faith goes like this: "Where are the Protestants in early church history?" Catholic apologists complain that they can't find any Protestants in early church history. That's also one reason why some evangelicals convert to Catholicism.
The short answer is that you find them in the 1C. You find the Protestants in NT church history.
A problem with the Catholic objection is that it cuts both ways. Unitarians ask where are post-Nicene Christians in the ante-Nicene church?
Likewise, Jews ask, where are Christians in the Tanakh? Most Jews reject Christianity because they don't see Christianity in the OT.
By the same token, take the Jewish objection that if Jesus is the messiah, why did his own people disown him? And that question is tackled in John, Acts, and Romans.
So there's an ironic parallel between the Catholic objection to the Protestant faith and the Jewish objection to the Christian faith. The argument is structurally identical, based on historical discontinuity.
Although there's a sprinkling of messianic Jews in church history, the revival of messianic Judaism is a 20C phenomenon. In that respect it's a "novelty" in the way the Protestant Reformation is a novelty. Although there are some precursors to Protestant theology in pre-Reformation church history, the movement as a whole arose in the 16C. But if that discredits the Protestant faith, then the recent emergence of messianic Jews discredits messianic Judaism. But from a Christian perspective, or even a Catholic perspective, that argument either proves too little or too much.
In the NT era, you find both Protestants and messianic Jews. But both largely disappear until they resurface centuries later. And it's interrelated. The separation of church and synagogue led to gentile interpretations and traditions that are alien to the Jewish context of the Bible. The Protestant faith began to recover a more authentically Jewish reading of the Bible, and modern Catholic Bible scholars follow suit, but official Catholic theology locked in a gentile perspective that decontextualized the Bible and sometimes replaced that with an extraneous theological paradigm. And it's not coincidental that modern messianic Jews typically have an evangelical orientation.
Augustine?
ReplyDeleteIn Warfield's classic quip, "The Reformation was just the ultimate triumph of Augustine's doctrine of grace over Augustine's doctrine of the Church"
DeleteRoman Catholic Church is semi-pelagian
ReplyDeleteIt’s more complicated than that.
DeleteSlightly unrelated but John are you still writing at Reformation 500?
DeleteSwrath I am not.
DeleteI give a slightly different answer. Asking where the Protestants were in the first century or 5th or 8th is thinking anachronistically. It's like asking where the Americans were in 1650. In a certain sense they were all British and then things changed after that and then we eventually got Americans.
ReplyDeleteIt's assuming the whole church was Roman Catholic and that Roman Catholicism today is the same as the past. That's a huge assumption.
I always turn this question back on the Catholics:
ReplyDeleteIn the first three centuries (approximately), where is Romanism?
There is no penance, no purgatory, no papacy, no transubstantiation, no infant baptism, no Marian devotion, no invocation of the saints.
In other words, nothing recognizable as Catholicism.
I also ask them where was OT Yahwism before being restored by Abraham, by Moses, by Josiah, by Zerubbabel, and by the Maccabees?
ReplyDeleteGod's people have never been an unbroken line of succession.