defferent between protestant and reformation?

Question

religion

Answer 1

The Catholic church was instituted around the year 600. The word "Catholic" means "Universal". The religion was largely based on the relatively new "Christian" religion that had been sweeping the Roman Empire for those last 600 years.

Over time, some people began to feel that the Catholic doctrine had taken in too many concepts from pagan religions, and they began to protest.

Eventually they quit the Catholic church and became known as "Protestant" congregations. Now there were two major splits in organized religion. There were still individual congreations of Christians, too. These were modeled after the early church congregations outlined in the New Testament.

As the Protestant churches grew, there were congregations that developed their own traditions and interpretations of Scripture. As disagreements arose regarding these differences, the churches continued to split and divide. Many churches followed a particular leader, such as Martin Luther. His followers became known as "Lutherans" following his death.

As years went on, there were many of these denominations, and some of them were dissatisfied with the way the churches ran, and with the continuing disagreements.

This group wanted to bring things together and began a reformation movement. Reformation tried to close the gaps between the denominations, because the Bible warns us that this is not what God wants us to do.

Later on, there was a third movement, called the Restoration Movement. The purpose of this was to go back to the "Good Old Days" as listed in the Bible. The idea was to restore the structure that was outlined in the Bible.

That structure does not allow any leadership beyond an individual congregation's Deacons and Elders. These leadership positions are described in the Bible, and no other leadership is authorized. They also took away all the identifying names, as the only authorized names, as listed in the Bible are "Churches of Christ". For clarity, we can put an identifier after that, like Church of Christ on Broadway, or Church of Christ, Sunflower MS.

Restoration churches tend to follow the examples in the Bible faithfully, including the elimination of musical instruments from the worship service. They did not have them documented in the New Testament, and we don't use them now. Some folks may think that is weird, but that is our tradition, and we stick to it.

We are encouraged to compare any teachings we may hear to what is written in Scripture. We are encouraged to ask questions and fully understand what is being said. We regularly question our minister. Now, most times, he turns our to be correct, and he can show how scripture supports whatever he said. There have been a few times however, one of the congregation has a better understanding, and our minister retracted something he said. He is, after all, a human being too, and is imperfect like the rest of us.

Most of our ministers have regular jobs, and they do their ministering after work and on weekends. It is truly a labor of love. Some big congregations pay their ministers a stipend, and some really big ones pay a full-time minister. Our congregation is about 400 members, which is a nice size, sort of on the small side of medium.

Answer 2

In simple terms "Protestant" describes those who are in protest of the Church established by Christ which is the Catholic Church. the "Reformation" is the name of the movement that sparked the departure of some Christians from the Church. this movement went in several different directions with all kinds of "man"made" changes to the worship and practices of those in protest including fundamental changes such as denying the Sacraments established by Christ and going so far in most of the Protestant Churches of denying the corporeal Christ from being in worship and being the focus of worship for the faithful as it had been for 2000 years.

Many of these Reformers justified their protests by creating fanciful history attacking Christ's Church even to the point to claiming that Christ's Church was in need of restoration. Fundamentally this approach to justification suggests that Christ was a liar in establishing His Church when He said that the gates of hell would not prevail against His Church. A Church in need of restoration is indeed one that has not endured and prevailed as Christ said and has not fulfilled His promise that the Church would endure until the Parousia.

Furthermore the Protestant movement denies the leadership established by the enduring Church to the faithful and instead of the ordained clergy established by Christ in apostolic succession they create a movement based loosely on the Bible, which is part of Sacred Tradition of His Church, instead of the authority of His Church as was established and ordained by Christ. Consequently the movement has been plagued by exponientially increasing schisms without end, in opposition to Jesus' desire in His last prayer in the garden that we all be one.

In conclusion, the Protestant Reformation as been one of the most sucessful schemes of men and Satan to separate the faithful from Christ's Church and the Sacraments needed to endure in faith and live eternally with God.

In Christ
Fr. Joseph