Now and again we see questions from Cathlics and Orthodox asking "where were the Protestants before the 16th Cent?" I've been thinking about this issue, and some related ones. The simplest answer is, of course, "being killed by the Catholic Church". It's absurd to claim that Christians agreed on everything until the 16th Cent., when the evil Protestants suddenly invented the idea of heresy. There were "heretics" all the time. The main difference about the 16th Cent. is that the politics had changed so that it was no longer feasible to burn them all. Thus it was finally possible to have a continuous tradition other than the Catholic one. What bothered me about this argument at first is that most of the heretics persecuted by the Church before the 16th Cent. really did seem to be heretical. I don't really want to consider Gnostics to be the forerunners of the Presbyterian Church. But the problem with this is that we really don't know all that much about the groups that were suppressed. Many famous heretics are known only through quotations in orthodox writers. If I read my sources correctly, most of our knowledge of groups like the Cathars and Waldensians comes from the writings of inquisitors. How far am I prepared to trust them? After the discussion we've just had -- and some reading of my own about the suppression of the Templars -- I have grave doubts. It's pretty clear that Gnostics did exist. We have the writings from Nag Hammadi as evidence. But traditional history says that between the 1st and 16th Cent. all we had were orthodox Christians, and Gnostics, with nothing between. I find that quite implausible. I consider Catholics and Gnostics opposite extremes because of their positions on authority. They certainly differ on other issues, but I think those other differences mostly follow from the basic ones. Catholic Christianity believes in authority, both historical and hierarchical. By historical I mean that they want to base their beliefs on historical accounts of Jesus' life, handed down from bishop to bishop, back to the Apostles. By hierarchical, I mean that the hierarchy provides a mechanism to make authoritative decisions on questions. The goal of all of this is to build a Christian society. The Gnostics rejected all of this. Their primary authority was direct revelation from Christ. They circulated gospels, but they tended to be works of imagination, not historical documents. They had no authoritative answers; indeed they valued creativity. Their goal was enlightened individuals, not an entire community of nominal Christians. There are things about both perspectives that I value, but there are serious problems when you go to either extreme. I certainly don't want anyone to think I'm a Gnostic. I do believe in using historical accounts of Jesus' life and teachings as a standard. However I also believe in more individual responsibility and creativity than the Catholic tradition does. While it didn't start out with this goal, I think the primary effect of the Reformation has been to develop a position between the two extremes. Like the Gnostics, Protestants value the freedom to develop our own ideas, place a personal relationship with Christ over orthodox doctrines, and value committed individuals rather than a whole population that is automatically baptized Christian. However like the Catholics, they want to base their ideas on historical knowledge of Jesus, not just speculation. It's pretty clear that the Reformers had the naive idea that if you just let people read Scripture, they would all come to the same obvious conclusion. This has just not happened. Now, returning to the pre-16th Cent. question. We can certainly trace groups with emphases similar to the Protestants for a Cent. or two previously, e.g. Hus, Wycliffe, and the Waldensians. They all placed Scripture above the authority of the Catholic Church, and rejected similar things about the Catholic Church. But as we go back farther, we being to see only more extreme groups, e.g. the Albigensians or Cathars. What I'm saying is that I think this may be largely an artifact of our limited evidence. I believe there were people who went to the Gnostic extreme. But I find it hard to believe that there wasn't anyone in the middle ground. What I suspect is that when the authorities found someone who rejected the authority of the Church, they tended to see them as having gone to the opposite extreme. And when your investigative procedures are like those used by the Church, you find what you expect to find. Even as late as the Reformation period, there are few writers who can be trusted to give a balanced account of someone they disagree with. People are not just wrong: they are immoral monsters. Is it really surprising that when the Church controlled the records, we find only irresponsible opponents? ---------- There's no question that the Catholic Church changed over time. However I think some of the claims in that regard made by Protestants are a bit hard to swallow. The traditional Protestant view is that the Catholic positions rejected by the Reformation were relatively recent, and people like Augustine held views similar to the Reformers. Now there's no question that the Papacy accreted power over time, that by the 16th Cent. it was corrupt, and that various events in the previous two Cent.'s had caused it to lose much of its prestige. However the basic features that Protestants rejected can be traced back very early, probably to the late 1st Cent. This includes the primacy of Rome (though no doubt a somewhat more modest sort of primacy than in the 16th Cent.), the authority of bishops, and many of the ideas about Mary. The Catholics that Luther and Calvin quoted, such as Augustine and Bernard, might well have been unhappy about the state of the 16th Cent. Church, but I doubt they would have been enthuastic about the Reformation either. Corruption was not a permanent feature. The Catholic Reformation largely fixed it. The tendency towards works righteousness was also addressed to some extent in Trent. While a Lutheran is not likely to find the result sufficient, Trent's position on election and probably justification appears to be similar to what I believe most American Protestants believe. But what I believe are the permanent features can be traced back to the beginning: (1) the concept of one true church which is largely identified with the earthly organization, (2) reliance on the authority of bishops in the apostolic succession to settle questions authoritatively, (3) the importance of Mary and the saints (originally the martyrs). You can see the beginning of the Catholic tradition in the NT. Look at the difference between Paul's (other?) letters and the Pastorals. In the former we have Paul the radical: the Law is dead, charismatic revelation is a major part of Christianity (though it should be presented decently and in order), etc. In the Pastorals, the main subjects seem to be clear leadership, reining in women, and correct doctrine. The Law has a purpose in the church if used properly. There's something of Paul's spirit left, and the offices don't seem to be quite as defined as those a few decades later. But the move towards the Catholic position is very clear. In the (other?) letters Paul is almost closer to the Gnostics than the Catholics: His authority is from a vision of Christ. He values ecstatic experiences. He rejects the Law. He has great reservations about the authority of the Apostles. What saves him from being a real Gnostic is that he bases his faith on the resurrection as an historical event, and refers to the testimonies passed on to him. He doesn't go in for the imaginative accounts of Jesus' life that you find throughout the Nag Hammadi documents. Also, he believes that God has made certain things sins, even if he rejects any specific Law defining those things. I see him as trying to combine Christian freedom with a dependence upon Jesus' historical life and teachings and a commitment to rigorous ethics. It's possible that by the time he wrote the Pastorals conflicts with real Gnostics had convinced him of the importance of authoritative teaching, and moved him in the Catholic direction. Or it's possible that we are dealing with someone else. But we can certainly imagine considerations that would lead reasonable people in that direction: the need to protect the developing church against both Gnostic inventions and opposition from the surrounding society. I don't know how I would have reacted at the time. Possibly authority really was needed. What I can say is that in the 20th Cent. West I think the best approach is Paul's original one: a balance between freedom -- from both the Law and would-be Christian authorities -- and a basis in Christ's life and teachings as found in Scripture. This view is certainly a result of the Reformation, but may not be quite what Luther and Calvin had in mind. Both of them wanted to get rid of corruption and doctrinal problems, but I think American denominational pluralism would have been a shock to them. It's hard to be sure exactly what they would have replaced the international Catholic Church with, but it looks like possibly a set of national churches. While they probably wouldn't have had authoritative bishops, and their churches would have made somewhat more modest claims for themselves than the Catholic Church, I believe they were still thinking in terms of one true church, and not Christian pluralism. Certainly both Luther and Calvin believed in churches including the entire community, as opposed to the "gathered church" (or "believer's church") that the left wing (the "anabaptists") favored. Protestantism, at least in the U.S. (I don't know much about anywhere else) has developed more in the direction favored by the left wing of the Reformation.