To Archenland Knight: I don't agree with everything in your post necessarily, but to me it is the clearest statement of what I think is wrong with the ancient churches that I have ever read in these forums.
To others, I would state that this does not mean that I disagree with every belief of the ancient churches, or even most of them. I just cannot understand how anyone could use the argument that precedence of history gives sole authority to these churches, given that history also shows such great abuse of power in the past. The leadership of the ancient churches has been at times very corrupt. How then can we say that succession of leadership in, say, the Lutheran church, is any less valid than in the Roman Catholic Church? While an unbroken tradition from the apostles exists, an unbroken moral line does not, at least not among the leadership.
In these debates I also come down more on the side of the Eastern churches than the RCC because the RCC adopted so much more Romanitas than the east, but it was the unified church that submitted to the conflation of church and state to begin with. Theodosius introduced what I call the "Antichristian Heresy" which is that one's faith should be enforced under pain of death by earthly political forces, i.e. that it is just for Christians to threaten non-Christians with pain in order to convert them. While the vast majority of "holy wars" and inquisitions originated in the West, the East is not entirely innocent.
I also hold to the view that while a church may have been corrupted, its members are not necessarily corrupt. I do not wish to convey in any way that I don't respect Roman Catholics. In fact, in the American South where I live, the "protestant" denominations seem to have far more "imperialist" leaning members (as compared to the aspirations of the Roman emperors) than the Catholics do. It may be that more net reformation has occured in the RCC in the last 400 years than in some of the protestant churches, even though the protestant churches started the process first.
Anyone who is a practising RC has heard these arguments before (often repeatedly).
