Posted on 12/04/2007 9:40:27 AM PST by pby
Admittedly there were abuses and wrong practices.
But the Church is, and remains, the instrument of Jesus the Christ. If you examine the authority that the Church has been granted, it, and not Luther, nor Calvin, nor Zwingli, nor their descendents have any authority whatsoever to pronounce, advance, or otherwise counsel anything related to the theology of Christianity.
The article points out that this trend away from Christian belief is not based on a biblical foundation.
Explains all the lawsuits against RC priests.
http://www.csmonitor.com/2002/0405/p01s01-ussc.html says that: Despite headlines focusing on the priest pedophile problem in the Roman Catholic Church, most American churches being hit with child sexual-abuse allegations are Protestant...
Better targets. Now, the abuse groups are focusing on the Baptists.
• Volunteers are more likely than clergy or paid staff to be abusers. Perhaps more startling, children at churches are accused of sexual abuse as often as are clergy and staff. In 1999, for example, 42 percent of alleged child abusers were volunteers – about 25 percent were paid staff members (including clergy) and 25 percent were other children.
Sadly, volunteers and other children are more likely, or just as likely, to abuse.
What are the stats in the Catholic Church cases?
I couldn’t find much to answer that question definitively.
http://www.catholicleague.org/specialreports.php?id=1 has some interesting information; but points back to the CSMonitor article for some of its information.
I don’t remember reading much about Catholic non-clergy in my experience; but from the estimates in this article, about 1 to 1-1/2 % of Catholic priests have abused, about 2 to 3 % of Protestant ministers have abused, with a much higher rate amongst public school teachers.
Ameriocans have been reformulating Christianity since the 18th Century. The evangelical Christianity of the Jacksonian period was very different from the Protestantism of the colonial period.
I've never heard that phrase before -- "the instrument of Jesus."
Christ is the head of the church on earth which is not the church in Rome, but instead is made up of all the elect ordained to salvation by God from before the foundation of the world.
If you were to speak of the "instrument of our sanctification" it would be more appropriate to define that not as the church, but as the Holy Spirit, given by God to whom He wills who in turn make up the church of God on earth.
And Mark, you speak of the Reformation and the Restoration in the same breath, when they were very different moments in time.
Very true.
The Restoration movement came out of dissatisfaction with the results of the Reformation. The Stone-Campbell movement (both Campbell pere and Barton Stone were Presbyterian ministers, interesting to note) came out of dissatisfaction with the existing Reformation theologies. They rejected the outcome of the Lutheran and Calvinist Reform and decided on their own course.
My often-used inclusion of the Reformation and Restoration movements as a unit are because I see the Restoration as continuing what the Reformation started - the dissatisfaction of man-made religions leading to the creation of more man-made religions and so on.
The 20th Century saw the formation of many thousands of evangelical and non denominational splinter groups and the process continues today. If I recall correctly, the religion that you profess to follow was created in 1936, for example. Look at the thousands of television ministries, many of which don’t really follow anything except their own formulated theologies. Dr. Schuller and his son, of Crystal Cathedral fame, are both ordained Reformed and look at what they present, compared to Calvin’s beliefs, or yours, as you have posted them, for that matter.
My point is that, and I think that you have called for continuing Reform, we have religions changing and more and more being created all the time. And that process started with the Reformation and continues to this day.
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