Thread by @PresbyInn

I'm reading about Reformed Orthodoxy in Scotland. You know what I've learned?

Our Protestant-Catholic-Orthodox debates on X are exactly the same as the ones 400 years ago, only dumber. Come learn with me about 17th century polemics. 🧵👇

In the book "Reformed Orthodoxy in Scotland" by Aaron Clay Denlinger, there is a chapter by Nicholas Thompson on the Catholicity of Aberdeen theology in the 17th century. According to Thompson, there was a common song sung by recusant Roman Catholics in the Highlands, as follows:

"Where have you beene so long a tyme?
To whom did your Light shyne?
Where did your principall Pastor sit?
Who kept your Keyes? Who fed your Sheepe?
Show mee some Church, that you haue built.
I can shew manie that you haue spilt.
Were all damned eternallie...

...How might a man have found you out;
To haue tryall in matters of doubt;
When no such Companie did appeare,
for so manie hundreth Yeare?
Till LUTHER, a lying Frier
On whom the Devill had desire,
Brake his vow and married a Nun:
And then your Haeresie first begun.

The song makes the following claims, in a mocking fashion:

(1) Where was your church before the Reformation? Who led it?

(2) You haven't built your own church, you've just split and stolen ours

(3) Your church started with Luther wanting to get married.

Sound familiar?

Patrick Forbes, then Bishop of Aberdeen, noted that these Highlanders had this song "continually in their mouthes, who never had eyther read, or gotten by heart, anie one Psalme of David."

The only reason we know of this ballad is that Forbes recorded it in his own work.

The ballad is discussed in Forbes's work Eubulus, published in 1627, as an abridged version of his Commentary on Revelation. Forbes points out in the commentary that just as there are members of the visible church united to it by baptism who will not finally persevere...

...and thus are not members of the "true church", so the church of "Antichrist" have those within it who have "number" of the Beast but never its "character."

Thompson notes the following about this:

"Forbes compared the true church to the temple of God in the midst of the court ‘given over to the nations'. The temple was the ‘sacrament of Baptism in substance remayning, & the doctrine of the Trinitie’ while the encompassing court of the gentiles was the RCC." (p.71)

He goes on:

"However, in Forbes’s view, the existence of true Christians in the church of
Antichrist was more a matter of faith than historical demonstration. In other
words, there was no way of showing historically where the true church was before
Luther...

...Yet, if the adversaries seemed to have history on their side, this was only because ‘the common Recordes bear but what obtained at the time; no Record
remaining of these, who, though for feare they durst not contest, yet misliked and mourned for the iniquity’

In other words, the typical Catholic polemic we see on X is that Protestantism was a sharp break from everything that came before, without any continuity. Started as a movement among a few isolated theologians that spread across nations and spurning everything that came before.

This is a facile and incorrect view of how some of the Reformed Orthodox presented the case of Catholicity.

Instead, the Reformation was a visible manifestation of an invisible rift in the church that had existed for centuries before. In rejecting the attempt at Reformation...

The Roman Church further solidified this rift, and, according to Forbes, more fully showed its face as the Antichrist of Revelation.

In rejecting the doctrines of Rome, the Reformed argued that they were not rejecting the substance of the faith that came before...

...nor were they rejecting that the church prior to the Reformation preserved the substance of the faith. Quite the cotrary, it did so through (for example, but not limited to) its practice of baptism and Trinitarian orthodoxy.

What it rejected were the practices of Popery, such as indulgences, the merits and invocations of the saints, purgatory, and the powers that the See of Peter arrogated to itself.

Obviously, Roman Catholics would not concede that Rome is "Antichrist." And that is not the point of this post.

Rather, the point of the post is as Forbes said: that the question of "where was your church in the 9th century?", to the Protestant, misses the point.

It is not a matter of demonstrating, historically, a visible instantiation of the Protestant faith (though there were some such as the Waldensians and Hussites). Rather, the Reformed Orthodoxy of Forbes accepted that his church prior to the Reformation...

Was the same visible church claimed by the RCC. While many within it had unity with it, they did not have the same character/unity of faith with its errors.

At the Reformation, the mutual rejection of each side resulted in a more visible rift that, previously, was invisible.

There's also the fact that many have a visible unity with the church but do not have the substance of the faith/saving faith. Claiming these distinctions are erroneous results in the conclusion that simple profession of unity with a visible church body is all that is required for salvation.

But all parties involved would say this is absurd.