>
And he charged them, saying,
Take heed, beware of the leaven of the
Pharisees, and of the leaven of Herod.
Mark 8:15, KJB
*
* *
How you can be more a deceiver?
[My Italic, parenthesis, question marks].
"....... In 1184, they were included in a papal decree against dangerous heretics and became subject to anti-heresy legislation, despite lack of evidence [???] that they were unorthodox. But repression was patchy, depending on the interest of the authorities. (.....)....
Gradually tensions appeared within the movement. Valdes hoped for reconciliation with the Catholic Church [???] and having a reforming influence in it....(....)....
Somewhat surprisingly, many retained devotion to Mary [???], despite the teachings of their leaders. ....(.....).....
On baptism, there was uncertainty. They were not fully convinced infant baptism was biblical or appropriate, but they seem rarely to have abandoned it. [???] .....".
Written
by:
Stuart
Murray Williams
Tutor
in Mission
Stuart
spent 12 years as an urban church planter in East London and has
continued to be involved in church planting as a trainer, mentor,
writer, strategist and consultant. For 9 years he was Oasis Director
of Church Planting and Evangelism at Spurgeon’s College, London.
Since then, under the auspices of the Anabaptist Network, he has
worked as a trainer and consultant, with particular interest in urban
mission, church planting and emerging forms of church. He is the
founder of Urban
Expression.
He has written books on church planting, urban mission, emerging
church, the challenge of post-Christendom and the Anabaptist
tradition.
They "...seem rarely to have abandoned it"??...:
".... Not
only is there a lack of affirmation of a belief in infant baptism
among the early Waldenses, but there is evidence that they openly
rejected that doctrine. Everts says:
The
creed of the Bohemian Waldenses published in 1532 (quoted by Sterck)
is equally explicit on this point of dispute: "It is clear as
day that infant baptism does no good, and is not ordered by Christ,
but invented by man. Christ wants His baptism based upon His word for
the forgiveness of sins, and then He promises, he that believeth and
is baptized shall be saved.” [19]
Says
Orchard:
Jacob
Merning says that he had, in the German tongue, a confession of faith
of the Baptists, called Waldenses, which declared the absence of
infant baptism in the early churches of these people, that their
forefathers practised no such thing. . . . [20]
It
is interest in the Roman Catholicism to present the true Christians
contesting her blasphemies as "born from the void", without
any form of lineage coming from the early Christians and the Apostolic
tradition. Therefore Waldenses or Vaudoises, for the desire of the
popes, were only a “sect” born just only from the mystical
experience of a rich man, Waldo, who made out of himself poor in
order to “discover” Christian values.
The true interest of the
Catholic church, a concentrate of prostitution and abomination, is
the haunt of the Christians, to destroy them as ordered by Satan.
Therefore the vigorous exposition of the practice of the Roman
Catholicism, the mass, the pedo-baptism, the confession, the popery
and millions of other nails they everyday try to fix in the Jesus
Crhist's body, (His church of the true believers), has NOT to be
presented as the product of the transmission of the true
doctrines of eternal life directly from the Apostolic age. If the
Waldenses originated from Waldo, it means there was no one
before him and like him, and therefore the only
presence, from the Apostolic age, ought to be the one of the church of Rome.
Conclusion: if there was present only the church of Rome, it is natural consequence
to consider her (false) teaching as the “true Christian doctrine”.
Satan
has many bakers ready to cook his evil bread in the most different
shapes, also the “anti-Catholic” ones, because no one then will imagine it containing his leaven.
To be convinced about this, read James A. Wylie in his “The history of Protestantism”, Volume
first, book first, about the early Italian Christians of the late
ancient age. How is it possible that pastors like Stuart Murray Williams don't make the least hint to this early story of Christian struggle against Catholic apostasy, and how the Jesus Christ's doctrine could have been preserved all
along the centuries, directly from the Apostolic age, also inside the
valleys and on the mountains of the Alps and then everywhere in the
Central Europe? A true Anabaptist believer must have interest in to consider his/her belief as the true genuine one, of the first hour, flowing directly from Jesus Christ's grace, because the true sect created by men and inspired by Satan, here, is the one of Rome and not of the Anabaptists:
"...... The
Nobla Leycon, which dates from
the year 1100, [3] goes to prove that the
Waldenses
of Piedmont did not owe their rise
to Peter Waldo of Lyons, who did not appear
till
the latter half of that century
(1160)............"
by James A. Wylie
The History of Protestantism
by James A. Wylie (1808-1890)
CHAPTER 5 [exceerpt]
MEDIAEVAL PROTESTANT WITNESSES.
[my note, of avles: Aquileia town of Rufinus is about twenty kilometres from my town]
Ambrose of Milan – His Diocese – His Theology – Rufinus, Presbyter of Aquileia –
Laurentius of Milan – The Bishops of the Grisons – Churches of Lombardy in Seventh
and Eighth Centuries – Claude in the Ninth Century – His Labors – Outline of his
Theology – His Doctrine of the Eucharist – His Battle against Images – His Views
on the Roman Primacy – Proof thence arising – Councils in France approve his Views
– Question of the Services of the Roman Church to the Western Nations.
The apostasy was not universal. At no time did God leave His ancient Gospel without
witnesses. When one body of confessors yielded to the darkness, or was cut off by
violence, another arose in some other land, so that there was no age in which, in
some country or other of Christendom, public testimony was not borne against the
errors of Rome, and in behalf of the Gospel which she sought to destroy.
The country in which we find the earliest of these Protesters is Italy. The See of
Rome, in those days, embraced only the capital and the surrounding provinces. The
diocese of Milan, which included the plain of Lombardy, the Alps of Piedmont, and
the southern provinces of France, greatly exceeded it in extent.[1] It is an undoubted historical fact that this powerful diocese
was not then tributary to the Papal chair. "The Bishops of Milan," says
Pope Pelagius I. (555), "do not come to Rome for ordination." He further
informs us that this "was an ancient custom of theirs."[2] Pope Pelagius, however, attempted to subvert this "ancient
custom," but his efforts resulted only in a wider estrangement between the two
dioceses of Milan and Rome. For when Platina speaks of the subjection of Milan to
the Pope under Stephen IX.,[3]
in the middle of the eleventh century, he admits that "for 200 years
together the Church of Milan had been separated from the Church of Rome." Even
then, though on the very eve of the Hildebrandine era, the destruction of the independence
of the diocese was not accomplished without a protest on the part of its clergy,
and a tumult on the part of the people. The former affirmed that "the Ambrosian
Church was not subject to the laws of Rome; that it had been always free, and could
not, with honor, surrender its liberties." The latter broke out into clamor,
and threatened violence to Damianus, the deputy sent to receive their submission.
"The people grew into higher ferment," says Baronius;[4] "the bells were rung; the episcopal palace beset; and
the legate threatened with death." Traces of its early independence remain to
this day in the Rito or Culto Ambrogiano, still in use throughout the whole of the
ancient Archbishopric of Milan.
One consequence of this ecclesiastical independence of Northern Italy was, that the
corruptions of which Rome was the source were late in being introduced into Milan
and its diocese. The evangelical light shone there some centuries after the darkness
had gathered in the southern part of the peninsula. Ambrose, who died A.D. 397, was
Bishop of Milan for twenty-three years. His theology, and that of his diocese, was
in no essential respects different from that which Protestants hold at this day.
The Bible alone was his rule of faith; Christ alone was the foundation of the Church;
the justification of the sinner and the remission of sins were not of human merit,
but by the expiatory sacrifice of the Cross; there were but two Sacraments, Baptism
and the Lord's Supper, and in the latter Christ was held to be present only figuratively.[5] Such is a summary of
the faith professed and taught by the chief bishop of the north of Italy in the end
of the fourth century.[6]
Rufinus, of Aquileia, first metropolitan in the diocese of Milan, taught substantially
the same doctrine in the fifth century. His treatise on the Creed no more agrees
with the catechism of the Council of Trent than does the catechism of Protestants.[7] His successors at Aquileia,
so far as can be gathered from the writings which they have left behind them, shared
the sentiments of Rufinus.
To come to the sixth century, we find Laurentius, Bishop of Milan, holding that the
penitence of the heart, without the absolution of a priest, suffices for pardon;
and in the end of the same century (A.D. 590) we find the bishops of Italy and of
the Grisons, to the number of nine, rejecting the communion of the Pope, as a heretic,
so little then was the infallibility believed in, or the Roman supremacy acknowledged.[8] In the seventh century
we find Mansuetus, Bishop of Milan, declaring that the whole faith of the Church
is contained in the Apostles' Creed; from which it is evident that he did not regard
as necessary to salvation the additions which Rome had then begun to make, and the
many she has since appended to the apostolic doctrine. The Ambrosian Liturgy, which,
as we have said, continues to be used in the diocese of Milan, is a monument to the
comparative purity of the faith and worship of the early Churches of Lombardy.
In the eighth century we find Paulinus, Bishop of Aquileia, declaring that "we
feed upon the divine nature of Jesus Christ, which cannot be said but only with respect
to believers, and must be understood metaphorically." Thus manifest is it that
he rejected the corporeal manducation of the Church at Rome. He also warns men against
approaching God through any other mediator or advocate than Jesus Christ, affirming
that He alone was conceived without sin; that He is the only Redeemer, and that He
is the one foundation of the Church. "If any one," says Allix, "will
take the pains to examine the opinions of this bishop, he will find it a hard thing
not to take notice that he denies what the Church of Rome affirms with relation to
all these articles, and that he affirms what the Church of Rome denies."[9]
It must be acknowledged that these men, despite their great talents and their
ardent piety, had not entirely escaped the degeneracy of their age. The light that
was in them was partly mixed with darkness. Even the great Ambrose was touched with
a veneration for relics, and a weakness for other superstitious of his times. But
as regards the cardinal doctrines of salvation, the faith of these men was essentially
Protestant, and stood out in bold antagonism to the leading principles of the Roman
creed. And such, with more or less of clearness, must be held to have been the profession
of the pastors over whom they presided. And the Churches they ruled and taught were
numerous and widely planted. They flourished in the towns and villages which dot
the vast plain that stretches like a garden for 200 miles along the foot of the Alps;
they existed in those romantic and fertile valleys over which the great mountains
hang their pine forests and snows, and, passing the summit, they extended into the
southern provinces of France, even as far as to the Rhone, on the banks of which
Polycarp, the disciple of John, in early times had planted the Gospel, to be watered
in the succeeding centuries by the blood of thousands of martyrs. Darkness gives
relief to the light, and error necessitates a fuller development and a clearer definition
of truth. On this principle the ninth century produced the most remarkable perhaps
of all those great champions who strove to set limits to the growing superstition,
and to preserve, pure and undefiled, the faith which apostles had preached. The mantle
of Ambrose descended on Claudius, Archbishop of Turin. This man beheld with dismay
the stealthy approaches of a power which, putting out the eyes of men, bowed their
necks to its yoke, and bent their knees to idols. He grasped the sword of the Spirit,
which is the Word of God, and the battle which he so courageously waged, delayed,
though it could not prevent, the fall of his Church's independence, and for two centuries
longer the light continued to shine at the foot of the Alps. Claudius was an earnest
and indefatigable student of Holy Scripture. That Book carried him back to the first
age, and set him down at the feet of apostles, at the feet of One greater than apostles;
and, while darkness was descending on the earth, around Claude still shone the day.....". Etc.
Chapter 5. continues in the page at the above link.
"WALDENSES WERE INDEPENDENT BAPTISTS" [see Val di Susa]
