One of my Protestant friends commented yesterday, saying, "what other adjectives do you have for Christians?"
It makes me realize the importance of definitions. People can give "god", "religion", and "Christian" thousands of meanings. Now, I will try to define different types of Christians that I will talk about or even attack.
Fundamentalist Christian - a person who believes in Jesus Christ and the inerrancy of the Bible, i.e. the Bible is literally and totally correct.
Protestant - a person who believes in Jesus Christ but does not recognize the authority of the Roman Catholic Church.
Catholic - a person who believes in Jesus Christ and recognizes the authority of the Roman Catholic Church.
These are the Christians I will talk about in the future. There are numerous types of people who declare they believe in Jesus. The number is uncountable. Since Martin Luther broke away from the Catholic Church, more and more Protestants started to pop out. Luther and other Protestant reformers broke the religious unity in Europe and thus many religious wars started. And now, those unorganized Christ-believers have various interpretations for the Bible, which makes Christianity unclear and even unchristian. The unity of Christianity is severely needed since we should not let people interpret as they wish. We need some authority to control and manage the teachings. If Christianity is a country, then it is an anarchy. The people, or Christians, in this country are a mess.
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First, Can you believe there are Protestants who are non-fundamentalists and yet they believe in the inerrancy of the Bible? I can tell you there are plenty of this kind of Christians around. Do you know them?
ReplyDeleteSecond, I think you need to check the facts. I don't believe Martin Luther intentionally broke away from the Roman Catholic Church. He considered himself to be a teacher of the Roman Catholic Church when he posted the 95-theses on the door of the Wittenberg Church. He was inviting discussion and debates from the professors as a practice during that time. He was kicked out, i.e. excommunicated by Pope in 1521. The Roman Catholics always perpetuates this myth that Luther was the culprit of all their troubles during the 16th Century Reformation. (Are you bought into their myths?) In fact, questions about the teachings of the Roman Catholic Church were raised long before Luther was born. Also, outside Germany, there were other Reformers and Luther was just one of them, e.g. Zwingli in Switzerland. Protestants did not start to pop out after Luther but many people have been in tune with Luther's long before he appeared. If you blame the Reformation for the religious wars, please also check if the Catholics are part of that...mm..check ALSO if there are alliance between the Protestants and the Catholics during that messy period. Check also what the Roman Catholic Church has done in AD 1054 and what they have done to aggravate the split with the Eastern Church during the Crusades in the following centuries.
Third, you seem to love science and reason a lot and you will label the Fundamentalists as literalists and irrational. However, you do not seem to understand how Fundamentalists are actually rationalists and in may ways, like yourself. Have you checked how rationalistic they are when they are trying to read the Bible literally? You need to look into the history of biblical interpretation and how the Enlightenment casts a long shadow of rationalism/empiricism upon these fundamentalists and people like ourselves.