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That's a very Protestant take on things, and one which many Catholics (and Eastern Orthodox too) would argue is deeply ahistorical – something which, from a Cat

That's a very Protestant take on things, and one which many Catholics (and Eastern Orthodox too) would argue is deeply ahistorical – something which, from a Catholic/Orthodox viewpoint, Protestants do a lot – there is that famous line by John Henry Newman, "To be deep in history is to cease to be Protestant"

TeMPOraL 4y ago
While I was raised in a protestant-derivative religion, I also grew up in a deeply Catholic country, and most of my understanding of those aspects of history comes from the public education system - so I may be biased towards the "Protestant take on things", but I don't think it's that ahistorical or inaccurate - otherwise the schools I went to wouldn't be talking about this.
- skissane 4y ago
  In many countries, the public school history curriculum is of dubious quality and prone to bias–a moment's searching will discover numerous of examples of this. The fact that the country has a Catholic supermajority doesn't necessarily mean its school curriculum could not have anti-Catholic bias, since some traditionally Catholic countries have a significant history of anti-clericalism, such as France and Mexico. Your position could be summarised as "the New Testament came first and then Catholicism/Orthodoxy added all these other traditions on top of it". From the Catholic/Orthodox viewpoint, that's got things back to front: the Church and her Traditions came first, and then the Church decided to write some of those Traditions down, which became the books of the New Testament, and then the Church collectively decided which books to canonise as Scripture, and which to leave out. Then, well over 1000 years later, along comes Protestantism, claiming it is dropping the Traditions "added to" Scripture, and “going back” to "Scripture alone" (sola scriptura). However, from the Catholic/Orthodox viewpoint, this whole idea of sola scriptura, or Scripture and Tradition as a clash rather than a harmony, was a historical novelty; and what the Protestant Reformers were actually doing, was just reading their own ideas into Scripture. Indeed, over the last few decades, some Protestant scholars have come around to acknowledge there is some truth in that allegation – witness the "New Perspective on Paul", supported by Protestant scholars such as N. T. Wright, which argues that Luther fundamentally misread Paul, by interpreting his ideas through the lens of late mediaeval controversies over indulgences/etc, rather than appreciating their (very different) original Jewish context – which is basically what Catholic and Orthodox scholars had been saying all along.
  - TeMPOraL 4y ago
    Thanks for elaborating. That's an interesting and somewhat new perspective to me (particularly about Luther being too strongly biased by the social/political controversies of his time), so I'm reducing my confidence in what I wrote in earlier comments, and I'll remember to dig deeper into the viewpoint of Catholic scholars at some point.

TeMPOraL 4y ago

While I was raised in a protestant-derivative religion, I also grew up in a deeply Catholic country, and most of my understanding of those aspects of history comes from the public education system - so I may be biased towards the "Protestant take on things", but I don't think it's that ahistorical or inaccurate - otherwise the schools I went to wouldn't be talking about this.

skissane 4y ago
In many countries, the public school history curriculum is of dubious quality and prone to bias–a moment's searching will discover numerous of examples of this. The fact that the country has a Catholic supermajority doesn't necessarily mean its school curriculum could not have anti-Catholic bias, since some traditionally Catholic countries have a significant history of anti-clericalism, such as France and Mexico. Your position could be summarised as "the New Testament came first and then Catholicism/Orthodoxy added all these other traditions on top of it". From the Catholic/Orthodox viewpoint, that's got things back to front: the Church and her Traditions came first, and then the Church decided to write some of those Traditions down, which became the books of the New Testament, and then the Church collectively decided which books to canonise as Scripture, and which to leave out. Then, well over 1000 years later, along comes Protestantism, claiming it is dropping the Traditions "added to" Scripture, and “going back” to "Scripture alone" (sola scriptura). However, from the Catholic/Orthodox viewpoint, this whole idea of sola scriptura, or Scripture and Tradition as a clash rather than a harmony, was a historical novelty; and what the Protestant Reformers were actually doing, was just reading their own ideas into Scripture. Indeed, over the last few decades, some Protestant scholars have come around to acknowledge there is some truth in that allegation – witness the "New Perspective on Paul", supported by Protestant scholars such as N. T. Wright, which argues that Luther fundamentally misread Paul, by interpreting his ideas through the lens of late mediaeval controversies over indulgences/etc, rather than appreciating their (very different) original Jewish context – which is basically what Catholic and Orthodox scholars had been saying all along.
- TeMPOraL 4y ago
  Thanks for elaborating. That's an interesting and somewhat new perspective to me (particularly about Luther being too strongly biased by the social/political controversies of his time), so I'm reducing my confidence in what I wrote in earlier comments, and I'll remember to dig deeper into the viewpoint of Catholic scholars at some point.