Counter-Reformation alive and well

One of the things you have to understand about the Protestant Reformation is that it sparked a thing called the Counter-Reformation.

When the Catholics woke up and realized they were losing their grip on about 70 percent of Europe, they started what’s called the Counter-Reformation.

You’re familiar with Ignatius Loyola. These guys started a Counter-Reformation in order to push back the influence of Protestantism. One of their chief methods was to say the Protestants practice “bibliolatry.” That’s a Roman Catholic-derived term to downgrade the Protestant commitment to Scripture alone, says Richard Jordan.

Here’s a statement from a historian: “Revisions at moderate intervals of 50 years (revising the Scripture every 50 years) will keep alive the idea of man’s limited acquaintance with the original scripture in all the fullness of its meaning and prevent superstitious attachment to the letter; bibliolatry.”

When you hear people tell you that you can only find the Bible in the original languages, that’s the Catholic Counter-Reformation. You understand how serious that is?

Put it another way. They ask, “How do you know that you really have God’s Word? You don’t have the originals. Where are they? They’re lost.”

You see, the notion that the originals were the only thing inspired and inerrant originated with the Catholic Counter-Reformation.

When you look at a Protestant church today, since the turn of the 20^th Century, where even fundamentalism began to say, “We believe the Bible in its original writings were inspired of God,” that’s pure Roman Catholic doctrine designed to overthrow Protestantism.

I told people that back in the 1980s and got ex-communicated from one of the largest grace organizations in the country, the Berean Bible Society, by one of the most prolific grace teachers, Cornelius Stam, and his associates.

And you’re out. Why? Because you’re saying that the Roman Catholic Counter-Reformation doctrine is wrong; that it’s not right to say the Scripture is confined only to the original manuscripts or the original languages.

The distinction between inerrant autographs and inerrant copies was first made by a guy named Richard Simon (according to Philip Schaff and his church history), who was a Roman Catholic monk, a priest, who sought to counter the Protestant doctrine of “the Scripture alone,” by arguing that only the lost originals were inspired and therefore Catholic traditions were necessary to interpret the Scriptures.

His point, in his words, was to “utterly destroy the Protestant principle of Scripture alone.” So when you hear people say that, understand what they’re saying.

When I stand here and tell you that all the new bibles on the market today—they don’t do them every 50 years, they now do them every two years, because every publishing house has to have its own, and they’re all using a set of Greek manuscripts that are exactly what Rome put out. Rome’s happy with you when you put out there’s.

The Council of Trent anathematized anybody using a King James Bible. Did you know the Roman Catholic Church has an official anathema on you if you have a King James Bible? Yeah, that’s a serious matter.

Now, in America they didn’t do anything about it because they didn’t have the political clout, but in Europe they did, and they burned people at the stake because of it.