How The Church Got To Where It Is Today pt. 2

Fred Whitman is a missionary supported by our local church. He is the Founder and president of a fundamental radio station in Italy. He also planted and pastors a Baptist church there as well. The following is a booklet that he wrote and gave away to those who wanted it. I am presenting it here essentially untouched and unedited. It may take several installments. My hope is that others will find his thoughts insightful and be blessed. Pray for Brother Fred and his family as they ministers to those in Italy.

In His fellowship,
Brother John

How the Church Got to Where it is Today

by Fred Whitman

Around the year 1200, the church came up with the idea of celibacy. It was forced celibacy for the priests and nuns. I could go into a lot of detail about that, and you know where that has taken us, and what's all coming out now, here in America, which is NO news. It's nothing new. It's been like that for a long time. It's just that frightened people are having the courage to stand up and talk about it. Sure someone chooses celibacy for the kingdom of God, to not marry, but in course of history, how many single men and women have left for the mission fields for God? It's not brought against that, but the point was, Paul said to Timothy that it isn't necessary. Pastors should be the husband of one wife, his children are in submission, and so if he doesn't know how to rule his own house, how could he rule a church? The biblical teaching is so plain, but then the Bible wasn't in the language of the people. In fact, it was against church law to translate the Bible into any language. According to church law, the only "inspired" version was Jerome's Latin Vulgate. That is the reason why the Roman Church was so much against Tyndale and Huss. Their having to put the Bible in the language of the people was their biggest problem with the Catholic Church and why they were persecuted and burned. Actually, Wycliffe’s bones were dug up and re-burned. Their problem was that they translated the Bible into the language of many people, and the Roman people did not want that.

Martin Luther was a Roman Catholic Augustinian Monk. He went to Rome. He had been teaching the book of Romans in his church in Wittenberg. That's a good place to start if you want to learn about God and salvation. He got to Rome and saw the moral decay, and he was amazed. He was appalled. He couldn't believe it when he saw how the Pope and Bishops and the Roman Cardinal were living. One of the things he did when he was in Rome was to go to the church of the Holy Stairs. The church is still there today. You can still go there, and when you walk in the front door, you'll see a sign on the wall. These steps were supposed to be brought to Rome by Helen, the mother of Constantine, from Palestine steps from Pilate's judgment hall that the Lord walked up. On these marble steps, there are a few spots that are red like red blood, and they put a glass cover over them. The sign says that if you go up these steps on your knees in a prayerful attitude, and say you're Rosary, you will earn one year and eleven days out of purgatory.

Martin Luther went in there and he was going up those stairs on his knees, and as he writes in one of his commentaries, while he was going up those steps on his knees, he came to the realization of salvation by grace, not by works. "Therefore, being justified by faith, we have peace with God." He realized all those external things that he had been preaching and that he had been doing were totally vain before a holy and righteous God.

He went back to his church in Germany and wrote out what is called the 95 Thesis, in which he listed 95 conflicts between Roman doctrine and practice and the Bible. And I have to say that today, with all the changes that we talk about, that about 75% of them are still absolutely practiced in the Roman Church. As this document was printed and spread over Europe, it was like a flame that ignited dry timber in that time period. Soon after, in 1525, the Anabaptist Movement began in Switzerland. This was a great movement, and people were leaving the Roman Church in droves. It was very, very scary. Almost as scary as today when they have been paying off so many millions in lawsuits for all these accusations against the priests, and they are scared about what they're going to do for money. So what did they do? They called the Council of Trent. Trent was a city in the mountains between Italy and Austria. So, the church leaders came from Northern Europe and on down, and those from the south in Italy came up to this city of Trent. Four basic things happened there. They defined the Roman Catholic doctrine. You may think it strange, but it is true. Although St. Thomas Aquinas and others had written their own thoughts on doctrine, the Roman church had never formulated its own statement of faith in all of these years. And how they were forced to do it was that all the Reform movements were writing their catechisms, their statements of faith. We can still get copies and translations of their statements of faith, their confessions. These confessions were written by Reformers. Well, the Roman Church found itself in a corner, and they actually wrote their doctrinal statement in a reaction to the little tiny groups scattered around Europe with their Bibles.

Something else came out of this council. The Bible was outlawed. They came up with a list of books that were absolutely causing them a lot of problems. They did not want people to read these books. Among these books, on a list called The Index was the Bible. It's hard to believe, but for over 300 years the Bible was actually outlawed by the Roman Church.

(to be continued)