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@samuelmark25 1. Nonsense. I’m a Protestant, in part, because I read and teach history. First, we must define “Protestant.” It doesn’t = modern evangelical. It means: what the Protestant churches confessed in the Reformation.
@samuelmark25 2. The Roman sacramental system was not confirmed until the late 13th century (Lyons II). NO ONE in the 2nd century knows anything about any sacraments but 2 dominical sacraments. The 5 false sacraments were unknown as late as the 9th century.
@samuelmark25 3. There’s not a shred of actual, historical evidence for the papacy in the 2nd century. There’s nothing like a real pope until Gregory I and he said Bishop who claimed universal authority = Antichrist.
@samuelmark25 4. Virtually everything that makes Rome what it is, e.g., Marian dogma and piety, is either a late-medieval development (the feast of the BVM was disputed in the high medieval period), Tridentine, or later. No one in the 2nd century is invoking the BVM.
@samuelmark25 5. The Roman doctrine of transubstantiation didn’t even exist until the 9th century and didn’t become dogma until the 13th.
@samuelmark25 6. We have a pretty good idea of what 2nd century worship looked like and it looked NOTHING like a medieval or Tridentine (or later) Roman mass.
@samuelmark25 7. And the same is true for the Eastern churches. The Church was universally opposed to icons until the 7th century.
@samuelmark25 The Eastern traditions have deep roots in Origen (whose intellect I admire but whose theology I do not) but he is hardly representative of the entire ancient church.
@samuelmark25 9. The historic, confessional Protestant churches (i.e., the Lutherans and the Reformed) have deep roots in the ancient church. The Reformed have Barnabas’ covenant theology (as well as Justin’s and Irenaeus’)
@samuelmark25 10. We have the soteriology of Diognetus (and his view of Christ & culture. Our worship services (when we are faithful to our own confessions) is quite like what is prescribed in the Didache.
@samuelmark25 11. Our Trinitarian theology is Nicene-Constantinoplitan and that of the Athanasian Creed. Our Christology is Chalcedonian.
@samuelmark25 The Reformed particularly have done more than any other tradition to keep high Augustinian soteriology alive. We with Cyprian re extra ecclesiam nulla salus est. In short, we’re not sectarian Anabaptists (nor their children). We are catholics and evangelical in the best sense.
