A Simple Explanation

I said: The way I have put it in the past is, "at first, everyone just wanted to high-tail it out of Rome. That was the first mission. Once they got going, they found out they were going in different directions." I really think that is a good way of putting it.

The response came back:

To begin with, it's not so much the Reformation that enabled such things. Rather, when the Church of Rome lost her temporal power over time, she could no longer coercive people to tow the party line. The Inquisition required backing by the state. The status quote ante represented an artificial unity, like Communist countries when most folks, including most party members, no longer believed in Marxism, but had to pay lip service to Marxism for fear of reprisal (Siberian exile, gulags) lest they voice their doubts.

Why is the development of an Osteen or Hinn or Joseph Smith supposed to be alarming? Sure, if they were living in the Middle Ages, they would be nominal Catholics. But that just goes to show that, for many, Catholicism was a default belief in the absence of any alternative, for better or worse. What kind of faith is that? To believe in something merely because it's the only thing you've ever heard of? And even then, it was only by force of law that everyone more or less went along with official dogma during the Middle Ages.

Likewise, we had false teachers infecting the NT churches, why so many NT letters are directed against false teachers. We have NT prophecies about the rise of false teachers. So how are false teachers like Osteen or Hinn or Smith an alarming development? Isn't that to be expected?

I like the simplicity of this explanation.