What’s the Pope got to Do with Anything?
Apr 18th, 2008 by ljkim
It’s hard to know what to make of the whole Pope thing… Martin Luther and the Protestant reformers called the pope the “anti-Christ. ” Shocking@! …But Billy Graham and other modern Evangelical leaders considered the Pope a genuine brother in the faith and a rightful representative of Christianity. What are we to make of the Pope and the Roman Catholic church with all its requirements and traditions and power?
If you went to college in the 70′s and 80′s, you might have had “History” course that dealt with regular history. I think by the 90′s most colleges switched over to calling it what it really is: “European History.” So when you read about Charles Martel and the Battle of Tours, that is a significant moment in “Medieval European History” not “history.” Most people get that now…I think. But when it comes to “church history” – “European Church History” is usually passed off as “history” itself. Why the history rant you ask? Because the Pope, and the institution of the Pope is the head of the Medieval European Church… Medieval culture loved order and hierarchy. The Roman Empire had crumbled and left the European continent in tatters, and the Roman Church was the only institution able to provide stability and literacy and peace and education… So it makes sense the way the Medieval Christians structured their church: lower priests and higher priests and bishops and arch-bishops, and the head of all arch-bishops, the pope…
By contrast, the Enlightenment Christians of the 1700′s (who felt choked by structure and hierarchy) believed in democracy and representative government, so Congregational churches worked as pure democracies, and Presbyterian churches had elders voted by the congregation (with the Pastor being one elder, one vote, out of many).
All that to say that the Pope is a representative (maybe even THE representative) of the (historically) European Medieval Church – for better or for worse. It’s not really our place to meddle in the way other people organize their houses… Whether it’s birth control or abortion, we shouldn’t feel the need to meddle in other family’s policies; there are other strains and traditions of Christianity that think differently. Very differently on some things! Nevertheless we understand that within this rather large family of Roman Catholicism there are large numbers of genuine believers (who we feel are brothers and sisters)… What would the world be like if we hadn’t known Mother Theresa?
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