DHK said:
...Luther was condemned for the same reason. He nailed his 95 theses on the door of the church that soundly condemned the ungodly doctrines and practices of the RCC, and thus he was condemned. At one time he thought that the RCC could be "reformed." Eventually he gave up all hope. He was a "Protestant", protesting against all of its ungodliness.
I certainly have some appreciation for Martin Luther and the Reformers for their reasons for championing the Doctrine of Sola Scriptura.
When one considers the corruption in the Roman Church at that time, the degenerate teachings that it promoted, and the distorted understanding of tradition that it used to defend itself — along with the fact that the West was several centuries removed from any significant contact with their former Orthodox heritage — it is difficult to imagine within those limitations how one such as Luther might have responded with significantly better results.
How could Luther have appealed to tradition to fight these abuses, when tradition (as all in the Roman West were lead to believe) was personified by the very papacy that was responsible for those abuses?
To Luther, it was tradition that had erred, and if he were to reform the Church he would have to do so with the sure undergirding of the Scriptures. However, Luther never really sought to eliminate tradition altogether, and he never used the Scriptures truly "alone," what he really attempted to do was to use Scripture to get rid of those parts of the Roman tradition that were corrupt. Unfortunately his rhetoric far outstripped his own practice, and more radical reformers took the idea of Sola Scriptura to its logical conclusions.
Hence the notion of sola scriptura, at least for the Lutherans, has changed over time...to the more reformed notion of "
only that which is in Scripture" not the intention of the Lutheran confessions "
that which is not in conflict with Scripture".
In XC
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