Quote:
But the reason this is a funny thread: Protestants and Catholics aren't all of the churches in Christianity..there is a line of independent christian churches that has been around before both of them that believed in scripture only..
They have the nick name of ana-baptists... they were not a branch off or brake off from the Catholic church.. like the Protestant churches were.
They helped the Protestant churches at times.. but were never part of them. They were never part of the Catholic church, because they were around before them.. recorded in their own records.
Course, most of their records have been destroyed.. but their teaching is what counts.. and you can find the same teaching amongst alot of these independent churches coming right from New Testament times to today.
|
Yeah, if you read the article, there's a little shout-out to our ana-baptists...
Even from the very earliest days of the Reformation, Protestants have been forced to deal with the fact that, given the Bible and the reason of the individual alone, people could not agree upon the meaning of many of the most basic questions of doctrine. Within Martin Luthers own life dozens of competing groups had arisen, all claiming to "just believe the Bible," but none agreeing on what the Bible said. Though Luther had courageously stood before the Diet of Worms and said that unless he were persuaded by Scripture, or by plain reason, he would not retract anything that he had been teaching; later, when Anabaptists, who disagreed with the Lutherans on a number of points, simply asked for the same indulgence, the Lutherans butchered them by the thousands — so much for the rhetoric about the "right of an individual to read the Scriptures for himself." Despite the obvious problems that the rapid splintering of Protestantism presented to the doctrine of Sola Scriptura, not willing to concede defeat to the Pope, Protestants instead concluded that the real problem must be that those with whom they disagree, in other words every other sect but their own, must not be reading the Bible correctly. Thus a number of approaches have been set forth as solutions to this problem. Of course there has yet to be the approach that could reverse the endless multiplications of schisms, and yet Protestants still search for the elusive methodological "key" that will solve their problem. Let us examine the most popular approaches that have been tried thus far, each of which are still set forth by one group or another.
In regards to your comment that the ana-baptists were around prior to protestants and even preceded Catholics I am not quite sure what to say to you. Again, there is a shout-out in the article to the folks that believe in the Waldensians 7 (the folks that a few Anabaptists believe they are descendants of).
As to those who would posit that there was some group of true-believing Protestants living in caves somewhere for a thousand years, where is the evidence? The Waldensians 7 that are claimed as forebearers by every sect from the Pentecostals to the Jehovahs Witnesses, did not exist prior to the 12th Century. It is, to say the least, a bit of a stretch to believe that these true-believers suffered courageously under the fierce persecutions of the Romans, and yet would have headed for the hills as soon as Christianity became a legal religion. And yet even this seems possible when compared with the notion that such a group could have survived for a thousand years without leaving a trace of historical evidence to substantiate that it had ever existed.
However, if this is what you believe I would be curious as to how you deal with the likes of St. Polycarp, St. Ignatius, St. Justin Martyr etc.? When do you date the Catholics as first showing up on the map?
Interesting! and thank you for the reply. God bless you
