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"Since that was the only church, we get into the notion that the Bible fundamentalists are using the teachings of the Catholic Church. How terrible."
Not to get too far into a discussion of theology- but yes, that's one of the things that threw me for a long time. I thought that the Protestant Reformation corrected the errors of Roman Catholic integralism, but it didn't. Luther and his fellow Prot schismatics also transferred some of them over to their own "reformed" quasi-political clerical institutions- including much of the fanatical intolerance of the medieval Roman Catholic clericalists, for instance. So to get even a general ballpark idea of what the original Christians were up to, you have to make an end run around all of that, and go back to the era before Christians held sway in any political establishment- even in Armenia and Abyssinnia, just to be sure.
That's pretty much the same conclusion that many well-respected Americans of the Enlightenment tradition such as Thomas Jefferson came to, as well- that the only words that they could really hold trustworthy were the ones spoken by Christ in the Gospels. Most of those guys were nominally Christians- but they were Liberal Enlightenment Christians, influenced by Deism, philosophical agnosticism, and "freethinking".
I mean, someone like Thomas Jefferson would look at the movements that came after his lifetime, in the 19th and 20th centuries- like Dispensationalism, Fundamentalism, Pentecostalism, Dominionism- as if the adherents had taken leave of their senses, in masse.
