Where was your Church Before Luther? (Richard Field, Baptist Trail of Blood)
Gian The Baptist | 21 Aug. 2025
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NZaJRngnOJg
0:46 You are aware that the Council of Trent is available online in English translation by EWTN or by Papal Encyclicals?*
Would you mind going to the session on Justification and tell me where Trent dogmatises "justification by works"?
I'll give you canons I, XI, XXI, XXXI as a sample:
CANON I.-If any one saith, that man may be justified before God by his own works, whether done through the teaching of human nature, or that of the law, without the grace of God through Jesus Christ; let him be anathema.
...
CANON XI.-If any one saith, that men are justified, either by the sole imputation of the justice of Christ, or by the sole remission of sins, to the exclusion of the grace and the charity which is poured forth in their hearts by the Holy Ghost, and is inherent in them; or even that the grace, whereby we are justified, is only the favour of God; let him be anathema.
...
CANON XXI.-If any one saith, that Christ Jesus was given of God to men, as a redeemer in whom to trust, and not also as a legislator whom to obey; let him be anathema.
...
CANON XXXI.-If any one saith, that the justified sins when he performs good works with a view to an eternal recompense; let him be anathema.
3:02 So, Apostolic times "necessary doctrines" and no local Church successfully imposes an addition that's an error.
Corinth and Galatia are rebuked, so their errors do not spread, they accept the rebuke and return to truth. This part we agree on.
Some post-Apostolic times, prior to the Reformation, "necessary doctrines + accumulation of erroneous additions" and after that, Reformation, a concerted attempt to rid the Church of these erroneous additions ....
There is a certain ambiguity of wording here. Or at least of implications.
Do the erroneous additions actually contradict the necessary doctrines or not? If they don't contradict them, how can we determine they are errors and wouldn't stamping them as errors add a layer of unnecessary, though possibly true, doctrine? If they DO contradict them, how can we say the Church accepting them was, prior to the Reformation, still the Church? Which is the exact object of the question you and Field intended to answer?
3:14 Was relatively new, compared to the accumulation that preceded it ...
OK, you don't have someone making an error in 1978 and it immediately gets denounced by people already not recognising him as Pope?
Again, if the "accumulation of errors" wasn't hurting the necessary doctrine, denouncing it as such was adding un-necessary doctrine. A schism for nothing.
If it was, then "necessary doctrine" had in the meantime disappeared and this makes the Reformation as Religion, not a simply old but rather a old, gone, renewed one.
3:22 The Church which was in existence, was made pure once more
Impossible, about the Church universal. It's certainly possible about a local Church, because a pure Church exists elsewhere in the meantime. For instance, while Galatians were going astray, Rome was pure.
This is the meaning of the where part of the question Where was your Church Before the Reformation?
The Catholic polemicist certainly got "yes, we see that you consider Papal Rome was recent centuries NOT pure" ... the question just becomes, "so, which Church was pure?" Not previous to, but contemporary to Papal Rome "accumulating errors" ...
3:34 You are doing two things.
1) You are substituting a metaphor for an argument;
2) you are basically admitting the "truths of the Reformation" constitute health restored not health preserved.
The problem is, I can see what health and death are in doctrine, but I can't see what illness is, other than pure neglect. An active promotion of error and this getting universally accepted is not bad health but actual death.
You are basically again making the claim, and how unfortunate for Richard Field he was not debating Catholics over the internet, he was also (if you are now giving his position correctly) making the claim that the Reformation was a resurrection. Or that at one point, as to things on earth, it would have been correct to consider your religion as one which was, and is not, and yet will be
OR you are avoiding it by pretending the "accumulated errors" were not mortal, after all.
3:46 It's enough for the question that ONE Church as it is today was the Ancient Church, and that it DIDN'T go away.
We get what you are saying. The Ancient Church, on your view, is NOT Papal Rome. The Pope in 1418, Gregory XII, and the Archishop of Prague in 1405, Zbyněk Zajíc of Hazmburk, were on your view NOT the ancient Church. Our question in reply doesn't presuppose they or their successors were and are.
So, it didn't continue in 1405 to Prague or 1418 to Rome and Constance. Where then did it continue in 1405 and 1418?
4:30 Thank you very much for rejecting Trail of Blood.
It is an historic error, Donatists and Culdees and Albigensians never shared doctrine so as to be different successive or local names of one Church (and Culdees were actually Catholic, unless you would prefer classing them as Eastern Orthodox or Copts, Patrick arriving a bit earlier to Ireland than Chalcedon or the quarrel over azymes).
But James Milton Carroll had the merit of actually seeing the problem. His offered solution is a false one, but because he gets the facts wrong.
5:04 Yes, similarily** Richard Field, the one who died 1616, not the Jesuit who died in Dublin 1606, also used to fly before the arguments could be contradicted on the internet.
8:44 Richard Field is pretending that:
a) prior to Luther, some damnable doctrine was just present locally and individually;
b) but (arguably) that since Luther, unfortunately most of the Latin Church dogmatised a damnable error.
So, what damnable error would that be?
"Justification by works" is not dogmatised. See Trent Session VI. Indulgences and Purgatory and prayers for the dead already were dogmatised, they were reaffirmed by the Council of Trent.
Here*** is Lateran IV:
Catholics who take the cross and gird themselves up for the expulsion of heretics shall enjoy the same indulgence, and be strengthened by the same holy privilege, as is granted to those who go to the aid of the holy Land.
You don't grant an indulgence if you don't believe in Purgatory.
9:05 to 9:44
If they reply 9:07 that that church was theirs and not 9:09 ours, for that the doctrines they now 9:11 teach and we impugn the ceremonies, 9:13 customs, and observations which they 9:15 retain and defend, and which we have 9:16 abolished as fond, vain, and 9:18 superstitious, were taught, use, and 9:21 practice in that church wherein our 9:22 fathers lived and died. We answer, "Then 9:25 none of those points of false doctrine 9:27 and error which they now maintain and we 9:29 condemn were the doctrines of that 9:31 church constantly delivered or generally 9:33 received by all them that were of it, 9:36 but doubtfully broached and devised 9:38 without all certain resolution or factly 9:41 defended by some certain only,
This is simply false.
If he meant Purgatory, it was constantly taught. If he meant "justification by works" it was not taught by Trent and is not taught now.
If he meant Lordship Salvation (in a different style from Evangelicals, to be sure), it was dishonest of him to classify it as "justification by works" ...
10:05 When he parallels Corinth, Galatia, Pergamus and Thyatira, he forgets these were local Churches, which could be reformed from the Universal Church they were part of, wherein others did not share their errors.
When he claims (of presumed abuses) this:
it is true that they were in the Church wherein our fathers lived, but not without signification of their dislike of them, and earnest desire of reformation
he acts as a bad historian, conflating different things.
- Rome was, what Luther witnessed it as being, and after Luther's time, Rome received the Reformation actually needed and wanted from St. Philip Neri, who counts as "third apostle of Rome" (after Peter and Paul);
- he cherry-picks individual dissent (and most of it he could probably find in favour of Kings rather than Popes ruling diverse national churches);
- he pretends that dissenters who were condemned and seen as condemned as heretics were voicing a more general opinion of the Church.
This makes the treatment of Jan Hus in Prague and Constance very hard to explain.
When it comes to other rejections of Transsubstantiation, Jan Hus still believing a "physical" real presence, some of it depends on Albigensians denying Jesus was God in physical human flesh, like some very extreme views among Evangelicals depends on His having ceased to be so, His "resurrection body" (I dislike that term) being "a purely spiritual" one ... (which wasn't born of Mary nor Crucified).
11:22 to 11:35
11:23 It had been a vain challenge for the 11:25 stiff maintainers of errors and abuses° 11:27 to challenge the reformed party for 11:30 novelty to ask of them where their 11:33 church was before this reformation 11:34 began.
It wouldn't have occurred to them, because whoever answerd would very easily have said "in Rome, for instance"
Also questionable if there even were "stiff maintainers" especially united in some kind of church.
11:59 I would say that very briefly, Judaising became a common doctrine in Galatia.
St. Paul adresses the whole Church with "who has bewitched you" ....
I think it was rooted out and the false Cephas (probably not Peter) exposed and penitent so that it was forgotten even sooner than it had entered that Church.
TAKING A PAUSE HERE
* General Council of Trent: Sixth Session
Celebrated on the thirteenth day of the month of January, 1547.
DECREE ON JUSTIFICATION + DECREE ON REFORMATION
https://www.papalencyclicals.net/councils/trent/sixth-session.htm
** The speaker made an excellent point about Trail of Blood. I echo his wording.
*** Lateran IV
Constitution 3 On Heretics
https://www.papalencyclicals.net/councils/ecum12-2.htm#3
° Richard Field, read by Gian The Baptist is still talking of local errors in the Church of the First Century and featured in the Bible.
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