Did you ever wonder that perhaps the reformation may have been a result of arrogance and anger geared at the Western Church, but completely ignored the stance of the Eastern Church many years before? I mean, Luther perhaps didn’t say anything Athanasius hadn’t said 1200 years before. My point is that if you move up to the present time, we have the United States which came into existence with some forms of Protestant ideologies that perhaps are really ignorant of history. I just wonder about these kinds of things, and maybe in retrospect we should revisit why certain ideas are present today, and if they should or should not have validity. Maybe we should try to understand tradition more in depth.
The following quote from Rev. Dorraine S. Snogren perhaps gives a better understanding of what I am trying to say:
ReplyDelete"We might recall that there were Church Fathers, but we are completely ignorant of what they said. Our recollection of the Church’s Seven Ecumenical Councils dims even more, even though the Councils’ decisions, definitions, and directions were understood to be the irrevocable mind of the Spirit upon which the entire Church was forever to be secured and defined.
In other words, vast segments of Christendom are not benefiting from what the Church has been, said, or done. We are not building on the mind of the Spirit, which was pursued so faithfully and defended with such meticulous care by our spiritual forefathers. We are living and thinking as though the Church did not exist until we got on board or that the Church of the past is irrelevant and inconsequential. For many it is as though the Church ended in Acts 28 and did not reappear until the sixteenth century Reformation, or for a few, not until the twentieth century."
Reference:
Rev. Dorraine S. Snogren, Holy Tradition—The Road That Leads Home
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ReplyDeleteI am not trying to pick on Luther, but he was sort of also saying things John Hus said way before he did, so maybe many of us need to clarify Church history and learn from it. After all, the Church was around way before any of us today, and it did not get more spiritual just because you or I decided to get on board. In fact, maybe our joining perhaps made it less spiritual.
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