A couple self-important Catlicks decided to take out after the Reformation mocking Martin Luther and insisting that the Reformation really wasn’t necessary.

My response?

____

Rome … forever protesting the Reformation despite the fact that they were

1.) Selling forgiveness
2.) Denying the plain meaning of Scripture
3.) Lifting the Church in its authority above Scripture’s authority
4.) Perverted nunneries and monasteries
5.) Grifting the rank and file with superstitious pablum
6.) Iconadules foisting idolatry on the Church
7.) Ubiquitous Simony
8.) Illiterate Priesthood
9.) Persecution of the Saints
10.) Anathematizing the Gospel
11.) Blaspheming Christ via dumbass Eucharist doctrines
12.) Mariolatry
13.) Multiple Papal claims simultaneously
14.) Turning Salvation into a human performance contest
15.) Laughable and idiotic elevation of relics to worship status
16.) Fundraising by purgatory
17.) Blending the Occult with the Faith
18.) The vile presence of the Bastard Jesuits

But, y’all go ahead with your bloviating about the Church not needing a Reformation. Whatever helps you keep your miserable Christ dishonoring lives together.

Cort Kirkwood continued the conversation

Father Martin Luther “reformed” nothing.

BLM responds,

Yeah right. Never mind the Reformation that came

1.) In the Table.
2.) In the number of sacraments.
3.) In the Priesthood of ALL believers
4.) In the Authority of Scripture over the Magisterium
5.) In the tyranny of the Church exercised over the laity
6.) In Ecclesiology
7.) In Soteriology
8.) In Anthropology
9.) In social order
10.) In the nature of the ministry (sacerdotal vs. ministerial)

The Reformation Reformed every area of life. For anybody to insist to the contrary just testifies to a willful blindness born of fish face bias.

CK wrote,

Hanging his hat on those abuses, he staged a revolt and invented a new religion to rationalize his sexual and other misbehavior, as well as to dispose of guilt owing to the sin of scrupulosity, which we know today in some cases to be obsessive-compulsive disorder.

BLM

Actually, Brother Martin staged a counter-revolution against the Revolt that was Rome. Rome had long revolted against Scripture and Martin revolted against that revolt.

Quite obviously then Martin did not invent a new religion but returned to the Christianity of Scripture.

And sexual behavior? I know you don’t want to get into the perverted sex habits of Rome’s finest. Give Luther credit… at least he wanted his sex in the proper boundaries of marriage, unlike countless numbers of Priests, Popes, Monks, and Nuns.

CK brilliantly wrote,

That is why he denied free will, fiddled with the text of scripture, and jettisoned scripture that undermined his new religion.

BLM

He denied Free Will because the Scripture denies free will. He fiddled with the text of Scripture in order to undo all the fiddling that the fiddlers of Rome had done.

And he jettisoned nothing of Scripture.

It never amazes me how stupid Rome continues to be on these matters.

Lessing’s ditch is a term used to describe a view of Gotthold Lessing (1729 – 1781) which argues that there is a ‘ditch’ between history and eternal truths that cannot be crossed. As a result, revelation in history is not possible, for historical truth cannot be demonstrated. Furthermore, he drew a distinction between the accidental truths of history and the necessary truths of reason. This view “grew out of his conviction that rationalism could be the only universally acceptable mode of understanding the world,” and thus he was “convinced that the bible could not be trusted as a source of description of any truth, let alone the truth of God.”

Theopedia

Lessing outlined the concept of the religious “Proof of Power”: How can miracles continue to be used, Lessing asked, as a base for Christianity when we have no proof of miracles? Historical truths which are in doubt cannot be used to prove metaphysical truths (such as God’s existence).

1.) Lessing is denying that one can reach eternal truths. However, by affirming this Lessing has contradicted himself by reaching his necessary one eternal truth that allows him to insist that no one else can reach eternal truths.

2.) If there is a impassible ditch between history and eternal truths that cannot be crossed how does Lessing know that there are eternal truths that one might try to cross over to? Lessing’s statement presupposes the existence of something that he himself suggests can’t be known. If eternal truths can’t be known than it can’t be known that they might exist to know. What we can’t say we can’t say, and we can’t whistle it either.

3.) We do have the best of proof of miracles because God’s Word says that Miracles happened. There is no need for more proof. There can be no greater or better proof. Lessing, presupposes his own autonomous word as being legislative. By Lessing’s autonomous word God’s Word is ruled out a-priori. However, God’s Word is authoritatively self-attesting and so if God’s Word says it is Revelation and if God’s Word records Miracles then Miracles have all the proof they need to be accepted and Revelation in history is indeed, not only possible, but certain. There is no ditch.

4.) In order for Lessing’s ditch to be impassible one has to presuppose anti-Christianity in order to prove anti-Christianity. If one presupposes that God’s Word is not authoritative, and if one presupposes that God cannot speak in time and space history, then it is indeed the case that Lessing’s non-God God can’t cross over Lessing’s ditch. Lessing, by locking God out of His universe, proves that God is locked out of His universe. That is an analytic statement wrapped inside a tautology, and accomplished under the canvas of alleged neutrality.

5.) Scripture teaches that by Christ all things consist.



 ¹⁶ For in him all things were created: things in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or powers or rulers or authorities; all things have been created through him and for him. ¹⁷ He is before all things, and in him all things are held together.

Scripture teaches that Christ as God’s creative and sustaining Word is the point of integration for all reality. If Scripture is accurate than no ditch can exist between history and eternal truths as both find their point of integration and existence in Christ. To suggest that their is a ditch between the accidental truths of history, and eternal truths that exist would be, by necessity, to deny both Scripture and the person of Christ as the point of integration of all reality.

6.) What can a “accidental truth of history” even mean if that accidental truth is cut off from eternal truth? Anything cut off from eternal truth can have no weight of truth about it unless one is using the word truth in a totally specious manner. Indeed, without eternal truths giving gravitas to accidental truths of history all those accidental truths are, in the words of Henry Ford, “just one damn thing after another,” which anyone can shape to their pleasing.

7.) Lessing’s ditch presupposes a God who is so transcendent He has lost contact with His creation. This kind of transcendence is not the transcendence of Biblical Christianity, instead it is the transcendence of Islam’s God, Allah. It is also the transcendence of neo-orthodoxy. Biblical Christianity posits a God whose immanence does not negate His transcendence. He is a God nearby by coming near to us in Christ. If God were transcendent the way Allah is or the way the God of Barthianism is Lessing would have a ditch he could not cross. However, the transcendence of Christianity allows for no ditches because of the doctrine of God’s immanence.

“Now by the nature of things, a Worldview is always ‘unified.’ As long as we have not understood, however, all the realms and spheres of creation as parts of a whole, our worldview is not rounded out and complete. Of course, the question here is not whether we have already brought our worldview to that point or ever shall do so, there can be no essentially different worldview in religion and in philosophy, for the common people and for the learned, for the academy and for life. If religion contains a worldview in seed form, and philosophy, in searching for the final ground of all things, always seeks after God, then it follows naturally, that they, in all their distinctions, have to conform inwardly to the essence of the matter and cannot compete with each other.

Only the Christian Worldview can fulfill this demand, because it makes known to us one God, the living and true God, and cuts the root of all polytheism.”

Herman Bavinck — Christian Worldview – p. 53-54


This quote teaches us again that Theology remains the Queen of the Sciences as well as Queen of the Humanities. To deny that the God of the Bible gives a unified meaning to all disciplines because He is the author of all disciplines is to embrace, by necessity, a polytheistic religion.
And with the casting off of the truth that theology is the Queen of the Sciences what we have at the same time accomplished is to embrace an “Enlightened Polytheism.”

This is evidenced by the fact that our Universities no longer have a “Uni” in their “Versity.” Instead now what we really have are Multi-versities where there is no unity wherein all the various disciplines can congeal and cohere. This is evidenced by the fact that our secondary schools by way of a sort of un-named catechism teach students to compartmentalize their thinking. There is zero search in our schools (or our churches for that matter) for a unifying motif in all learning. This is evidenced by the fact that it is a commonality to engage with people who reason by way of contradiction, and that quite without even knowing that they have contradictions littered throughout their noetic engagements. This is evidenced by our separating fact from value, logic from implication, and history from metaphysics (Lessing’s Ditch). This is evidenced by the fact that a theology that yet remains in the ascendancy in many quarters goes by the sobriquet “theology by contradiction.” One can only conclude that we are the most anti-Worldview social order which has ever existed.

And yet, this all is to be fully expected in a social order that has been given over to the enemy. Mephistopheles, is, after all, the author of confusion and the architect of chaos. It is impossible to not have dis-order in thought and life where Beelzebub has the whip hand.

“In former times, Aristotle’s distinction was normally granted, that science consisted in the knowledge of the thing through the proximate cause, while wisdom, on the other hand, stretched toward ‘the knowledge of the thing through the primary cause.'”

Herman Bavinck
Christian Worldview — 48

Bavinck goes on to say that because of the aprioristic speculation found in the philosophy of Hegel there was a counter-reaction that found primary causation being given the heave ho in favor of the proximate cause as the basis of all knowledge.

Behold the entry of Scientism.

However the problem with depending on the proximate cause alone for true truth is that all proximate causes are, by necessity, dependent on some primary cause for their being and definition. One can not have a proximate cause that exists without first finding its meaning in some primary cause.

And so Scientism must always fail because Science is a proximate cause that is only as good as the primary cause that produces the Science it produces.

Science that doesn’t presuppose the God of the Bible is a science that can justify Ilya Ivanov, String theory, and punctuated equilibrium found in modern Evolutionary theory. Science cut loose from its proper primary cause will be a science that isn’t very scientific.