What thoughts occur to you when you least expect them! One can say, with the moderns, that you were subconsciously "thinking" about an issue involved over some period of time, and then, finally, it surfaces to conscious thought.
Maybe. Or maybe your Guardian Angel was able to finally get a thought into your thick skull. As for me, I'm betting the latter.
It's occurred to me that one of the pillars of "Modernism" -- that heresy gutting the Church today (and for the past 60+ years) -- specifically the pillar known as "Higher Biblical Criticism" or more vaguely "Historical Criticism", was really already going on in the Protestant Churches back in the 16th century. It would explain a lot.
- Higher Biblical Criticism trashes out the Bible, making it a potpourri of religious writings concocted over time and that bear no real, essential relationship to spiritual reality.
This has seeped into every Christian clann.
Like a modern Catholic, a modern Protestant is either a Progressive / Liberal, or a Fundamentalist / more conservative one, and the great dividing line is their view of the Bible. This is essential, for otherwise confusion reigns in trying to classify them.
- A modern Protestant might be an Anglican (Episcopalian) or Calvinist (Presbyterian -- here in Hungary they're called "Kalvinist" directly) or a Lutheran: those sorts are usually Progressives. Of course, conservative "break-away" versions exist of each of these. In the U.S., the Missouri Synod Lutherans would fit that bill.
- Like ancient Gaul, one can divide the rest of the Protestant tribe into three: the serious-style worshipers who -- whatever their liturgy or lack of it -- do not go into emotionalism. (These can be "on-line" Protestant Churches of a purely Progressive belief matrix, or Fundamentalist-style groups not Progressive.)
- The Evangelicals, which in American usage are the more emotional, feel-good-style worshipers, and who often belong to "non-denominational" bodies.
- And then the Pentecostals, who are hang-your-reason-on-the-coat-rack-when-you-come-in types. They go over into pure emotionalism and a sort of spiritual soup, and wouldn't know if they're worshiping God, Allah, the Devil, Brahma, Kali, or the Emperor of Japan.
Most of the Fundamentalists are strict "Bible Christians", meaning, in their own minds, they fully accept the inerrancy of Holy Writ; it is, to them, the Word of God and truly a case of Sola Scriptura. They're named Fundamentalists in the first place because they rebuked the 19th century Protestant Modernists, for instance, in Germany, of the Tübingen School. This rebuke was found in the English-language world in the Schofield Reference Bible (1909) and then The Fundamentals: A Testimony to the Truth.published between 1910 and 1915 and that would finally include 90 essays written by 64 authors from various denominations.
So, in theory. the various Baptists would be more of a Fundamentalist Christian in this sense. (Mainstream Media has hopelessly over-used and confused the word "Fundamentalist" with Muslims, for instance, and so on, people who in general do violence in the name of religion. And that is no accident: it is a feature, not a bug.) But you can find Progressive Baptists, just as you find Progressive Catholics. The Progressive/Fundamentalist divide crosses every denomination. And the way to tell is to ask questions about the Bible.
And thus we come back to Holy Writ. Just as the 19th century Modernists trashed out the Bible, so did the Reformers of the 16th century. Luther, for example, is widely known to have added "alone" in German to his German-language translation of Romans 3:28, and to have wanted to excise the Epistle of James from the New Testament. In fact, Luther put James, the letter to the Hebrews, the letters of John, and the book of Revelation (my favorite NT book) into an appendix.
Luther went on this rampage because 2 Maccabees 12:43-46 involves prayers for the dead and thus supports the doctrine of Purgatory, while Hebrews clearly embraces the existence of the priesthood, and of course James 2:24 clearly promotes the Catholic doctrine of merit -- in general, James is contra Luther in every aspect, and Luther called it "an epistle of straw".
What is less widely known is that he massively redacted the New Testament and to have re-interpreted various passages insanely badly, insisting that passages clearly supporting Faith and the necessity of Christian Charity as meaning just the opposite. People of all Christian stripes should know he left out the Apocrypha writing from the Old Testament -- but he did so because praying fore the dead appeared in 2 Maccabees, for instance.
But what dawned on me was that all that Protestant reinterpretation of the Bible to mean what no one in the previous millennium and a half of Christianity thought it meant was -- fundamentally (to coin a phrase) -- the first appearance of "Higher Biblical Criticism". What is Higher Criticism but an assertion that "We know what this means, YOU don't!" Isn't that what Luther said? And isn't that what the early Mondernists, such as Ferdinand Christian Baur (d. December 1860), founder and leader of the Tübingen School (i.e., University of Tübingen) down to Rudolf Bultmann (d. 1976) and his demythologizing" of the Bible.
(Other names of
"this ilk" include: Ernest Renan (d. 1892), Adolf von
Harnack (d. 1930), and in Catholicism: Alfred Loisy, and so on. You know, down
to Pope Francis.)
So, honestly, "trashing" out the Bible goes a long way back, and seems anchored -- by no means wholly. but in a large degree -- in the restless German soul.
But more basic than that, Protestantism is a manifestation in church internationalism of Modernism and Bible trashing.
Interesting.
An Préachán
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