“Some reasons I am not a Roman Catholic”

I like this stuff. Here are a few comments of my own.

WARNING: Sensitivities might be offended!
Proceed at your own risk.

• While God in his mercy includes all sorts of people who have been ill-taught (including all sorts of Protestants), it is nevertheless eternally dangerous to embrace serious sin when one knows better. It is an act of unbelief. Contacting dead people and praying to/through images is high-handed sin. Some of the severest warnings and punishments in Scripture are assigned to such practices along with murder and sexual perversion. Sure, grape juice in the Lord’s Supper is an abomination. But it is your abomination, the one God assigned you to deal with. Trading that for necromancy and idolatry doesn’t seem remotely safe.
• More positively, the Protestant Faith seems like a much more likely place to truly escape gnosticism. After all, for all the real virtues one finds in the Roman Catholic or the Eastern Orthodox communions, whispering prayers to omniauditory ghosts and talking to pictures is hardly an affirmation of anything embodied or alive, let alone both. We have the potential, at least, to truly put the community back in its proper place as the embodied inhabitation of the Spirit of God. Other people are God’s images, his icons. And when you are face to face with them you can and should ask them to intercede for you. In interacting with other living, present people, rather than artificial images or imaginations, God will renew us in the image of Christ. Idolatry leads the other way:
  

  The idols of the nations are silver and gold,
  the work of human hands.
  They have mouths, but do not speak;
  they have eyes, but do not see;
  they have ears, but do not hear,
  nor is there any breath in their mouths.
  Those who make them become like them,
  so do all who trust in them!

  Emphasis on the “blank wall” in church architecture is a distraction from what the Second Commandment really means, but it is one that can be more easily cured. Everyone knows the Sixth Commandment means “Love your neighbor as yourself.” Eventually people will figure out that the Second means we should regard one another as a means of grace.

• More on the anti-gnosticism thing: While even as late as Benedict Pictet vile allegations against the Mother of God were deemed pious, we are now all happy that Mary and Joseph joyfully did it to and with one another and gave Jesus a bevy of brothers and sisters. God blessed Mary and Joseph with orgasms and children. Deal with it. Even if nothing more had been at stake, the idea that antique squeamishness and false view of spirituality and deity should be permitted to be perpetuated would alone be worth a reformation and a schism or two if necessary. I do appreciate the way that orders of celibates can accomplish great things for the kingdom. If that can be continued without making sex evil, more power to such groups. If not, we’ll have to live without them.
• You can’t play both the institutional card and the development card in the same hand and expect to win anything. If the Papacy was instituted by Christ, then everyone from Peter on down knew about it. But, as anyone who reads Clement’s letter to Corinth knows that he was unaware of this great bequest So we come to the idea that the Papacy naturally evolved. It probably did. And it also withered quite drastically. Why would we chain all the present and future church to an arrangement that was so obviously an adaptation to the world of Classical antiquity. No one denies that the Pope can serve as a transnational reference point (i.e. compare the German Roman Catholics to the German Evangelicals in the struggle against Nazism). But these benefits can probably be derived from a more stable foundation. In most cases the doctrine of the Papacy seems comparable to burying a widow alive in the grave of her husband.
• And how can any Protestant who takes church history seriously not simply shake one’s head at the historical revisionism that must be swallowed. The relationship between the medieval church and Trent is that of a pregnancy to a late abortion. Christendom flowered with new knowledge and scholarship and suddenly we are told that all theology must come from the Vulgate. This form or reactionary repristinization is as revolutionary as anything Luther ever dreamed of and is an obvious kick at the Jerome who thought so highly of recovering the true text of Scripture. I don’t think it would be hard to point out many other discontinuities. There is nothing in history that compels anyone into Rome.

Some good things to think about.

Some day the word “Rome” will mean nothing but to a few scholars who specialize in early Christian history. 182 thousand years from now a few people will speak of TBN and Origen as belonging to a single age of the Church Perhaps somewhere there will be a sect demanding that we “go back to the earliest churches” and join something called “Calvary Chapel.” They will teach that it was pastored by Irenaeus, no doubt. The entire myth of Rome will be forgotten. No one will know why Washington DC had all those columns. The cultural force of the whole mystique that has affected the architecture of our capital and the religious identity of Russia will have long since evaporated.

Nor will there be any doctrinal standards geared to the Protestant / Roman Catholic divide. Other errors as yet undreamed will be repudiated by name. The Reformation will mean nothing to anyone outside of some obscure branches of academia.

My point is that as important as the divisions are now, some day there will be a church with a whole different set of issues. The differences between Irenaeus and Billy Graham will probably be miniscule compared to the difference between us and our descendents in a hundred thousand years. Or a million. This will pass. We have to be faithful in our time, but God will bring things right some day.