Talk:Protestantism

Neutrality

This article needs more citations for many specific claims. Some of the statements reek of being copied wholesale from some book or article. Not only that, some statements are contentious or patently false. For instance, the comment that "The greatest man of the time beside Luther who renounced the ancient faith was Zwingli" is very tendentious. Luther must be rolling over in his grave for being accused of having "renounced the ancient faith" (and so must Zwingli). The whole point of their Reformation was that they accused the Roman Catholic Church of having abandoned the ancient faith. The Reformers claimed to be returning to classical Augustinian/Paulinian Christianity that Rome had diluted with what the Reformers considered heresies. Such sentences must be cleaned up (and cleaned out!). The comments about Calvin are also less than accurate. For instance, the notion that Calvin taught that God works both evil and good is a blasphemy that Calvin never taught. Whatever Roman Catholic book on the "Great Departure" this material has been taken from, it needs to be edited to cleanse this article of a great deal of nonsense. Michel van der Hoek 15:59, 12 May 2008 (CDT)

Michel assumes this is Catholic!--quite the contrary it mostly came straight from the main Protestant historical encyclopedia F. Kattenbusch and Arthur C. A. Hall, "Protestantism" in New Schaff-Herzog Encyclopedia of Religious Knowledge, (1911) Vol. IX. (Kattenbusch was a leading Protestant historian of 100 years ago--and professor of theology at Martin Luther University in Halle.) CZ is set up so that knowledgeable authors can add or substract material. For example, the entire complaint couyld be fixed by replacing "ancient" with "Catholic." Richard Jensen 16:25, 12 May 2008 (CDT)