The Protestant Inquisition - "Reformation"

[Murphy]

The Protestant Inquisition "Reformation"

C O N T E N T S

I. PROTESTANT INTOLERANCE: AN INTRODUCTION AND OVERVIEW (http://www.catholicapologetics.info/apologetics/protestantism/protin.htm#I.%20PROTESTANT%20INTOLERANCE:%20AN%20I NTRODUCTION%20AND)
II. PROTESTANT DIVISIONS AND MUTUAL ANIMOSITIES (http://www.catholicapologetics.info/apologetics/protestantism/protin.htm#II.%20PROTESTANT%20DIVISIONS%20AND%20MU TUAL%20ANIMOSITIES)
III. PLUNDER AS AN AGENT OF RELIGIOUS REVOLUTION (http://www.catholicapologetics.info/apologetics/protestantism/protin.htm#III.%20PLUNDER%20AS%20AN%20AGENT%20OF%2 0RELIGIOUS%20REVOLUTION)
IV. SYSTEMATIC SUPPRESSION OF CATHOLICISM (http://www.catholicapologetics.info/apologetics/protestantism/protin.htm#IV.%20SYSTEMATIC%20SUPPRESSION%20OF%20C ATHOLICISM)
V. VIOLENT RADICALISM AND THE PROTESTANT REVOLUTION (http://www.catholicapologetics.info/apologetics/protestantism/protin.htm#V.%20VIOLENT%20RADICALISM%20AND%20THE%2 0PROTESTANT%20REVOLUTION)
VI. DEATH AND TORTURE FOR CATHOLICS AND PROTESTANT DISSIDENTS (http://www.catholicapologetics.info/apologetics/protestantism/protin.htm#VI.%20DEATH%20AND%20TORTURE%20FOR%20CAT HOLICS%20AND%20PROTESTANT)
VII. PROTESTANT WITCH HUNTS (http://www.catholicapologetics.info/apologetics/protestantism/protin.htm#VII.%20PROTESTANT%20WITCH%20HUNTS)
VIII. PROTESTANT CENSORSHIP (http://www.catholicapologetics.info/apologetics/protestantism/protin.htm#VIII.%20PROTESTANT%20CENSORSHIP)

BIBLIOGRAPHY (http://www.catholicapologetics.info/apologetics/protestantism/protin.htm#BIBLIOGRAPHY)

FOOTNOTES (http://www.catholicapologetics.info/apologetics/protestantism/protin.htm#FOOTNOTES)

SOURCE (http://www.catholicapologetics.info/apologetics/protestantism/protin.htm)

[Hweinlant]

Protestantism is first step towards sanity. Hope you take it one day.

[Brännvin]

Witch-hunt, not was only performed by Protestants and especially the censorship, since the Protestant movement from the beginning fought against it..

[The Lawspeaker]

The first country where it was outlawed was the Netherlands. If I remember correctly it was banned in 1613 by the States General. And "witches" from all over Continental Europe fled to Oudewater to be weighed and declared innocent.

At the end of the 17th century it was a protestant vicar, Balthasar Bekker, to take a firm stance against witch-hunts. In 1691 his The Enchanted World was published. But credit were credit is due.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/2f/Bekker_-_Betoverde_weereld.jpg

Already before our independence the Catholic doctor Johannis Wiers published works against witch-hunts. De praestigiis demonum in 1563 and De Lamiis Liber in 1577.
The last witch-hunts in what is now the Netherlands took place outside the jurisdiction of the Republic in the Lordship of Bredevoort in 1675.
In what was Dutch jurisdiction in 1608.

But credit were credit is due. In the Southern Netherlands under Catholic jurisdiction they stopped equally as early as the Catholic Church in the Southern Netherlands found it to be equally abhorrent.

[Lutiferre]

Obviously, everyone agrees that real, actual witches, wherever they are found, must be put to death as fast as possible.

That is, real witches, which implies that they use satanic powers, like manipulation and magic and deception to lure people to kill each other or commit horrible crimes like torturing babies.

The only thing we can disagree about is who is a real witch and who isn't.

And obviously, anyone who false accuses someone of being a real witch is himself a witch, because he has lured others into killing someone innocent - and it follows that he must himself suffer the punishment of a real witch.

[Lenny]

A site called "CatholicApologetics" is sure to be unbiased!

Next stop for impartiality, IanPaisley.org :D


Yes, yes, of course there was turmoil during that great period we know as The Reformation, as there is during any great social change. But in general, it is so very clear that the kind of theocratic craziness that impelled The Pope to trample on the necks of us Europeans for so many centuries was destroyed by Protestantism and as an aim thereof. Implying otherwise really is nothing but laughable apologetics, indeed.


In the wake of the Reformation, theocracy was dead in Europe-- even in the states that stayed under the Papal Yoke. Go back before the Reformation, and theocracy was a viable Weltanschauung in Europe. Indeed, it actually ruled Europe for centuries. Not surprisingly, the time it ruled is what we refer to as our Dark Age. After the Reformation began, Europe breathed a kind of collective sigh of relief and European Man exploded onto the scene, soon becoming the msot powerful people in history.

We all owe a tremendous debt of gratitude to the protestants of centuries past. It's almost certain that Europe would never have become a dynamic force on Earth if not for the social freedom that the Reformation gave us. It energized the nations and peoples of Europe, and cast away the darkness of feudalism and Roman-theocracy forever.

[Lutiferre]

Yes, yes, of course there was turmoil during that great period we know as The Reformation, as there is during any great social change. But in general, it is so very clear that the kind of theocratic craziness that impelled The Pope to trample on the necks of us Europeans for so many centuries was destroyed by Protestantism and as an aim thereof. Implying otherwise really is nothing but laughable apologetics, indeed.
How ignorant can you be? The pope and his authority was not at all crushed by Protestantism. Most of Europe remained under the pope, where the heretics were the ones who were crushed; a minority remained under Luthers schism.

Besides, it was never an actual theocracy (whether you know it or not), there were often times conflicts between secular interests of kingdoms and the interests of the Church, and the modern example of it which you now mention is what was the force behind the Reformation. It was a cooperation between worldly and ecclesiastical authority, but the ecclesiastical remained separated and independent in the Pope of Rome, until the Reformation where even the ecclesiastical authority fell into the hands of the individual kings, who became the complete dictators and almost became God in their own countries.


In the wake of the Reformation, theocracy was dead in Europe
There was what amounted to theocracy completely in the hands of temporal rulers, exactly after the Reformation in my country. I could care less what some American thinks he knows.


-- even in the states that stayed under the Papal Yoke. Go back before the Reformation, and theocracy was a viable Weltanschauung in Europe. Indeed, it actually ruled Europe for centuries. Not surprisingly, the time it ruled is what we refer to as our Dark Age. After the Reformation began, Europe breathed a kind of collective sigh of relief and progress exploded.
They were not Dark Ages, all the European universities were founded before the reformation by the Catholic Church and all the great academic traditions in Europe (even in Protestant nations) were founded and started here. It spawned such great Catholic minds and scientists and philosophers as Albert the Great, Thomas Aquinas, William of Ockham, Dun Scotus, Cardinal Nicholas of Kues (who Copernicus and Galileo copied), and all the great scholastics.


We all owe a tremendous debt of gratitude to the protestants of centuries past. It's almost certain that Europe would never have become a dynamic force on Earth if not for the social freedom that the Reformation gave us. It energized the nations and peoples of Europe, and cast away the darkness of feudalism and Roman-theocracy forever.
We owe nothing to them except to thank them for the eventual weakening of Europe and the Protestant nations, which ultimately lead to the creation of the Great Satan and the force with which pagan philosophy and secularism could thrive and became widespread in Europe and abroad.

[Loki]

Obviously, everyone agrees that real, actual witches, wherever they are found, must be put to death as fast as possible.


Why? Real witches have rights too. Or they should have, in any case. ;)

[Lenny]

The protestant movements can be seen as the bubbling-to-the-surface of long-repressed "Volkgeisten" of the nonLatin/not-fully-latinized people who had been under Papal Domination.

This is true in spades in the case of France. The oldCeltic, Germanic, and Nordic spirit(s) never necessarily went away, despite latinization and colonization by Rome. The Waldensians, the Albisengians, and the Huguenots were all drawn from the middle-class and petty aristocracies, people of heavily pre-Latin and post-Roman germanic extraction. They were attempting to revive something that was already dead, to reanimate Celtic France as something independent and not within the Roman cultural sphere. It's also obviously true in the Germanic world.

Anyway, in this sense, a third para-grouping of Christianity (along with Orthodox and RomanCatholic) emerged from the 1200sAD or so, and was unmistakable after 1517.

The three cultural groupings tugging at Europeans for cultural loyalty:
--Eastern-Orthodox/Slavic (after the death of Byzantium)
--RomanCatholic/Latin
--Protestant/"Germanic", the heirs to the European "barbarians". [Not one significant reformer emerged from the solidly-Latin/latinized/Mediterranean sphere.]

All Europeans laid down their cards and declared their cultural loyalty to one of those three groups. (There was a fourth group, Islam, which was quite significant for a long time, then went into retreat and is now on the comeback).

Because of the stakes here, in terms of cultural loyalty, the "Inquisitions" did make sense: The RomanCatholics tried to prevent people from leaving their sphere via their terror tactics of mass executions and torture; and the early Protestants (to the extent there was ever a "Protestant Inquisition at all) were afraid of the Papal Octopus overwhelming their weak cultural power structure and so put some Catholics to death likewise.

Viewing European sociopolitics in this way (in terms of religion-as-indicator-of-cultural-loyalty) makes a lot of things make sense. Why do Russians and Poles hate each other? Well, Poles are willingly aligned to the Latin-RomanCatholic sphere and not the Slavic-Orthodox one. Russians view them as cultural traitors to Slavdom. In the light, too, the Yugoslav hatreds/civil-wars are easy to understand, while without this paradigm they are terribly confusing.

[Poltergeist]

Why? Real witches have rights too. Or they should have, in any case. ;)

Yes, why deprive Alana of rights?

[Fortis in Arduis]

:popcorn:

[Loki]

Yes, why deprive Alana of rights?

No, Alana is a sweetie. :)

[Lutiferre]

Why? Real witches have rights too. Or they should have, in any case. ;)
Of course they have rights. They have the right to death and to hell :)

[Grey]

Obviously, everyone agrees that real, actual witches, wherever they are found, must be put to death as fast as possible.

That is, real witches, which implies that they use satanic powers, like manipulation and magic and deception to lure people to kill each other or commit horrible crimes like torturing babies.

The only thing we can disagree about is who is a real witch and who isn't.

And obviously, anyone who false accuses someone of being a real witch is himself a witch, because he has lured others into killing someone innocent - and it follows that he must himself suffer the punishment of a real witch.


Why stop at real witches? I'm all for burning (the majority of) Wiccans.

[Brännvin]

This is true in spades in the case of France. The oldCeltic, Germanic, and Nordic spirit(s) never necessarily went away, despite latinization and colonization by Rome.

How so? :confused: I wonder, some French would agree with that?

[Lutiferre]

Viewing European sociopolitics in this way (in terms of religion-as-indicator-of-cultural-loyalty) makes a lot of things make sense. Why do Russians and Poles hate each other?
Your overly politicoculturally reductionistic view is not necessary to answer that question.

While cultural and political spheres of influence and loyalty certainly have significance, nevertheless, the division between Catholics, Protestants and Orthodox cannot be reduced to it.

A more nuanced view is necessary, which still acknowledges that this division is both sociopolitical and cultural in nature, because everything which has to do with humans is in some way or another, and the sociopolitical changes brought about, for instance, by the Reformation, were extremely significant also in the ecclesiastical sphere. But on the same time, the dogmatic, religious and metaphysical conflicts have to be acknowledged to be at the core of sociopolitical and cultural changes and structures as well, and therefore, at the core of these divisions too.

The only concept which the matter tolerates to be reduced to, is that of the phronema of respectively Protestants, Catholic (the Catholic and Protestant phronema being significantly more tied together, given that Protestantism was a reaction against Catholicism and hence some of the same spiritual and temporal matters were pertinent to both mindsets, while the Orthodox were largely removed from the West for all the time that these tensions built up) and Orthodox, all of which differ significantly, and both in cultural and spiritual matters.

That is to say, they are all different religions in a kind of metaphysical and phronetic punctuation, not just different sociopolitical or cultural expressions. The dogmatic differences are only a result of those deeper punctuations of the different mindsets embedded in these religions, which are irreducibile to strictly sociopolitical matters, but represent a larger metaphysical tradition and mindset. That is also seen in the dogmatic emphasis; for the Catholics, especially Augustine and the great scholastics are emphasised, for the Protestants, the reformer of choice, for the Orthodox, the Church Fathers in general are extremely widely observed and emphasised.