THE CHAOS OF CHRISTENDOM OVER WATER WINE AND WAFER. (Part 1)
1. The readability of this radical article is dependent upon whether or not the reader is totally captive to any one church, or the Man of the Book, Jesus Christ.
2. The primacy of Jesus’ practice and teaching during his life-time ministry is more sacrosanct than those of flawed human apostles; or early Roman Church Fathers (apostolic fathers) in the post apostolic period of the 2nd C and 3rd C.
3. Whoever thinks that is not the case has been indoctrinated with one form of ecclesiasticism or another, and equates the infallibility of early apostolic practice with that of Christ.
4. The life, sayings and teachings of Jesus Christ during his forty months’ mission was not superseded by others writing after his death in the posthumous period before he rose from the grave.
5. There should be no conflict between his practice before Calvary and the Great Commission to the Eleven. If there are two opposing apostolic commissions in the first five books of the New Testament the only one acceptable is that consistent with the New Testament predictions by John the last prophet of the Law; the Lord Jesus himself, and Old Testament prophets.
6. This position may seem radically wrong to most believers who have been so indoctrinated from birth with the religion of Rome’s water, wine and wafer of any Roman styled sacramental denomination. Whether in the East or the West this position will also appear disturbing to Rome’s ‘separated brethren in Protestant or non Roman churches that comprise Christendom’s 2,800 denominations (Barratt 1970).
7. The reformers exiting from Roman Catholicism did not go far enough. They dumped 5 of The Holy Roman Empire’s seven sacraments added by the Emperor to the Latin Bible, but failed to examine Constantine’s 4th C Greek yet for inconsistencies in reaming two. Those water, wine and wafer rites caused division, disunity and disarray in disparate practices of transubstantiation, consubstantiation, and Zwinglian memorialism.
8. The student researcher of the Scriptures, like the Bereans is urged to ‘search the Scriptures to see if these things be so’. Hasty or indignant rejection of this short thesis as mere ideology is caused by addiction to one apostle or another; saturation by ecclesiastical tradition; pontificating clergy, or dishonest pragmatic intellectualization.
9. Of the five Roman Church’s sacraments the early Reformers from the 14th C Renaissance onwards began to abandon the ecclesiastic traditions, precedents, and practice of the thousand years after Constantine’s compulsory nationalization of Christianity.
10. The Waldensian, Albigensian, Hussite, Lollard, and Huguenot Christians were reformers even before Luther posted his 1517 thesis of ‘the just shall live by faith’. Even humanist scholars like Erasmus became involved with the Reformers’ quest.
TO BE CONTINUED.
