Can the Reformed Approach Lead Away from Biblical Christianity?

[rako]

Reformed give several explanations to reconcile their fractiousness with their belief that their method that downgrades Tradition leads to Truth.

First, they object that it is not important whether they are intensely fractured. However, Paul himself warned against fractiousness in 1 Cor 1,10:

1. I appeal to you, brothers and sisters, in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, that all of you agree with one another in what you say and that there be no divisions among you, but that you be perfectly united in mind and thought.
...

18. For first of all, when ye come together in the church, I hear that there be divisions among you; and I partly believe it.

19. For there must be also heresies among you, that they which are approved may be made manifest among you.​

Second, they admit that they have opposing doctrines between each other, but that they agree on the fundamentals. So they propose that the Bible is "formally sufficient" and "perspicuous", but only in its fundamentals.

However, one might question whether those who use the Reformed approach that downgrades Tradition really do agree on the fundamentals. Many Jehovah's Witnesses, the early Unitarians, and conservative Quakers do not consider Tradition to be a core authority and they sincerely believe that their readings are scriptural. The first two groups denied Jesus was part of the Trinity, and the third concluded that major sacraments like the Eucharist were unneeded as rituals and thus ceased practicing them.

Further, it's doubtful if those issues on which Reformed disagree are really so unimportant. Calvinists starting with Calvin found that Servetus' and the Anabaptists' rejection of infant baptism to be a grounds to kill and otherwise persecute them. The debate between Calvinists and Arminians in the same broader Reformed community led the first group to impose mortal persecution on the latter in Holland. Christian Zionists, Dispensationalists, and nonZionist Reformed voice major disagreement on the relationship between the Old and New Testaments, Covenants, "Israel"(s) and Ekklesia, which make up core components of the Bible.

Finally, if the Bible's ease of intelligibility or is "formal sufficiency" are limited to just Christianity's bare fundamentals, it's very doubtful whether we should call the Bible easily intelligible or "perspicuous" after all.

This repeatedly leads back to a key question: If the Bible is easily intelligible on its own or Tradition is not a major authority to teach the Truths of the Bible and faith, then why are those who use the Reformed approach so intensely fractured with mutually exclusive doctrines on topics ranging from Dispensationalism to the nature of the Eucharist to Infant Communion to the relationship between the Testaments/Ekklesia?

Has the Reformed approach that treats Tradition so that it is no longer a core authority served to cut an anchor away from the theology of its adherents?

 

[Crucible]

Hello, Crucible.

I think that this was a major aspect of the Enlightenment. I can see how this "spirit's" trajectory could lead away from Christianity's basics, even if the Christian community's tradition is not "infallible". I think one would have to rely on a very careful balance on teachings that were definitely harmful and destructive to the core of Christianity, and secondary issues. For example, personally, I consider veneration of relics to be a secondary issue. In my personal view, RCs are not actually "idolizing" saints' objects or treating them like "idols"/gods. At worst, if there was no holiness or spiritual use in them, the relics would be fetishes, not actually idols. But in any case, in this thread I am not even talking about RC veneration of relics.

So my point is that if there was a fundamental problem with the RCs' theology, like if they actually taught that Mary was God or co-equal to Christ in directly bestowing grace or if they actually considered relics "gods", it would be right to dissent/protest fully. Whether one would then by oneself go about creating a parallel Church structure ex nihilio with no direct apostolic succession is another question.

If you believe the clergy have holy, apostolic power, then one can get around the notion of idolatry. However, if you decide that such apostolic power isn't real, then all of a sudden you will see an extremely idolatrous church- because then it's just men consecrating objects and adoring imagery.

They don't teach that Mary is God, but declaring her the 'Co Redeemer' is cringing. It is something utterly out of Tradition, being virtually non-existent in even a slightest implication of Scripture.

There are the similarities of the Roman Church with the details in the Book of Revelation. What's more is that Rome has direct Babylonian roots.

I'll stop here for now so that these points don't get too mixed- but there's a whole lot which the Reformers laid on the RCC and traditions thereof.

 

[rako]

Calvin even used materialistic reason as perceived by the senses to teach flat earth theory.

Wherefore he made the world in the form of a globe, round as from a lathe, having its extremes in every direction equidistant from the centre, the most perfect and the most like itself of all figures; for he considered that the like is infinitely fairer than the unlike.

Plato, Timmaeus

How lavishly in this respect have the whole body of philosophers betrayed their stupidity and want of sense? To say nothing of the others whose absurdities are of a still grosser description, how completely does Plato, the soberest and most religious of them all, lose himself in his round globe?

Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion (Book I, 5:11)

That is, for Calvin, it was not the Bible's occasional depictions (allegorical or not) of a flat earth that determined Calvin's views on the flat earth, it was his sense of "reason" vs. "absurdity".