Catholicism versus Protestantism down the centuries

Tempe 12ft Chicken suggested we might want to continue this discussion that got started on the Links and Information forum, in a new forum where it more properly belongs. I'm fine with that, it will probably get me going on the research I've been wanting to do more of for some time.I regard my position to be classic Reformation Protestantism, that originally was truly a protest against the Roman Catholic Church that had dominated the world for some thousand years in the Holy Roman Empire. There had been objectors all along who got themselves burned at the stake for their opposition, and even whole populations of dissenters outside the Roman Church who were true Bible believers, who were persecuted and murdered by Rome for "heresy" long before the official Inquisition got started.God then raised up a number of men in one generation from within the ranks of Roman Catholicism who saw Rome's errors by the light of the Bible and finally saw it as in essence not merely rife with errors in need of moral reformation, but doctrinally opposed to the true gospel of Jesus Christ.But I don't want this to be just about the Protestant Reformation, but about the whole history of the conflict back to the beginning, between the man-made traditions of Rome and their persecutions of the true followers of the gospel of Jesus Christ. This is something I've known for a long time but only in the last year or so started learning about as an ongoing battle that is alive and well in our own time. There's lots of evidence but I haven't been good about keeping track of it so I'll have to re-collect a lot of it as we go.Note: Although such a topic is bound to get people riled up I want to emphasize that this is not about ordinary Catholics or Protestants, it's about an institutional war that is headed by the Vatican in the name of the papacy. There's been a lot of skulduggery, forgeries, plots and conspiracies I had no idea about until fairly recently, in the effort by the Counter Reformation, led mostly by the Jesuits, to defeat the Protestant Reformation, hidden doings that very few know anything about. The conventional histories are not to be trusted.What I've been learning has been eye opening for me, and I'll try to muster the evidence for it but my participation may be on the slow side as I do that.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

Thread copied here from the Catholicism versus Protestantism down the centuries thread in the Proposed New Topics forum.

Just out of curiosity, is there any reason why your sources are to be trusted?Jack Chick was notorious for his attacks on Catholicism through his comic books and Bible tracts. I see no evidence that he knew anything the rest of us didn't know, however.Edited by Phat, : added jack chick tidbit

Before you get rolling, perhaps you could define what you will consider evidence.

Tempe Chicken suggested continuing what we'd already started so I agreed to it and proposed this topic, but I realize I'm not up to arguing this case right now. If others want to continue the subject, fine, but otherwise I'd ask that the topic be cancelled. Sorry.Thanks for opening it.

I think that if one were to honestly examine both institutions, one would find things wrong and/or scandalous about both....also things commendable...the major point being that Protestantism would have a few different types of errors than Catholicism

And what might those different types of errors be?

And every generation thereafter has seen mini-reformations, each trying to correct the "errors" of the previous reformation. You can edit forever without every reaching absolute correctness - and of course many of the edits wind up needing to be un-edited.

Perfect correctness isn't the point, the ultimate point is the nature of salvation, the gospel itself, that's THE dividing line between Romanism and Protestantism. That's THE error the Reformers all independently discovered by the light of the Bible, and all Protestant denominations share that recognition despite other differences, though some have been compromising on this crucial point over the last few decades. Since it's an error that makes the difference in where a person spends eternity it's really an infinity-sized error.

How do you know that protestants actually go to heaven and catholics don't? Do you have any independently verifiable evidence that this is the case? Because I am pretty sure that catholics will disagree with you, so we need some independent evidence to verify this claim. What is it?Or is this another case where you just have to "have faith" or "know the Truth^(TM)"...?

Just to season that statement a little, the principal reason behind the founding of the Church of England (one of the world's largest protestant denominations) was that our king at the time wanted a divorce, so that he could bonk somebody else - so he wasn't quite one of the divinely inspired brigade.(Still, Martin Luther et al were probably of slightly greater integrity, so I won't make too much out of the quibble).

All I said was that the Protestant Reformers discovered from the Bible that the gospel of Jesus Christ, the gospel of how a person is saved, is different from what Roman Catholicism teaches, MEGA different, and I was answering Ringo who was getting lost in the thicket of small differences when this is THE one big glaring difference between Romanism and Protestantism, The Historic Difference, and since it's about how one gets saved it's huge.I made no claims beyond that. Now you can believe either one or the other or neither, but you can't believe both.

So are you saying here then that you actually don't know who gets saved and who doesn't?Edited by Dirk, : typo

Martin Luther was a rabid anti-semite - other than his Theses nailed to the cathedral, his most (in)famous literary work is "On the Jews and Their Lies."He was the prime inspiration for Hitler's "Mein Kampf."Yup. Divinely inspired.

No, Dirk, I'm not saying I don't know, I'm a Protestant, I believe in Salvation by Grace Alone Through Faith Alone In Christ Alone, but it's a matter of whom you believe, it's not a matter of some other kind of evidence. If you believe Rome, that's up to you, if you believe neither, that's up to you. The point of my post on the Giant Sized Error was to get across that there are HUGE theological differences between Protestantism and Catholicism, and that's true no matter which side of the issue you're on, or neither one.