All they seem to be requiring is complete and total surrender, what could possibly be wrong with that?

Rome is Rome.  At least they stand for something and you know exactly what that stand is.  I am not RC (anymore), but my respect is considerable.  I have the same attitude about the Orthodox Church.

#1,
  “He that findeth his life shall lose it: and he that loseth his life for my sake shall find it.”
That sort of preaching does demand total surrender. And if a church
or faith group does faithfully preach Christ’s gospel, then a surrender
must also be preached.

Amen, Ad Orientem and IchabodKunkleberry.

It appears that there are few of us left who stand with the English Reformers. I must respectfully disagree that Rome faithfully preaches Christ’s Gospel, that is why I left it.

Amen RMBruton. I see God’s hand in the fragmentation of the Roman monopoly. It did wonders in cleaning up a lot of the corruption, violence and evil that had become part of that church. Competition is indeed a blessing from above.

I see God’s judgment in the fragmentation of the Roman monopoly. And I see that same judgment in the Protestant Reformation fall-out several centuries after the fact - continued fragmentation until there are over 30,000 Protestant groups in the U.S.

I believe Rome eventually learned from her history - I don’t see that happening in the Protestant denominations.

What Roman monopoly?  When has Rome ever had a monopoly in Christendom?  The Roman Catholic Church and Protestantism are seen by some of us as just 2 sides of the same coin.

>What Roman monpoly?
Those protestants and Jews who lived in Roman countries 500 years ago found that there were few feasible ways to worship God, and those who tried to worship according to their conscience suffered a counterfeit Last Judgment and Hellfire as their reward.

>I believe Rome eventually learned from her history - I don’t see that happening in the Protestant denominations.

Since the majority of protestant churches are indepdent of each other (perhaps they should be judged as such). I don’t know about you, but I have not visited a hundredth of the existing denominations. Perhaps there are one or two that have, unbeknownst to you and me, “learned from their history,” whatever that means.

I thank God for the protestants, the cults, the Jews, the atheists. They have fought for my freedom to choose to be Roman if I so wish.

In some Orthodox-dominant countries such as Russia protestants still suffer suppression in the form of state-mandated licensing or religion and restrictions of evangelisation (not so euphemistically termed “proselytization.”)

Re #9

Those protestants and Jews who lived in Roman countries 500 years ago found that there were few feasible ways to worship God, and those who tried to worship according to their conscience suffered a counterfeit Last Judgment and Hellfire as their reward.

I’m not sure what your point is.  In Protestant countries the same was meted out to Romans and Jews.  Although I am no longer Roman; I have an ancestor who was tortured and subsequently hanged drawn and quartered for being Catholic.

Ad Orientem: thank God for courageous Romans who fought for our freedoms to worship as we see fit. It is not my intent to whitewash one particular party. I look forward to a Christ-centered unity, not a return to the hellish unity of one-church per country monopolies that some people seem to so long for.

#11 Ad Orientem
I doubt very much that your ancestor was ‘tortured and subsequently hanged drawn and quartered for being Catholic’.  That punishment was reserved for treason against the King and his laws.  It is most likely that your ancestor was rightly punished for treason, involving plotting against the realm, and that could include entering England as a Catholic priest and holding a catholic mass, or sedition again against the laws of England at that time.

btw much of my family were Catholic and always have been and none of them were tortured or hanged, drawn and quartered for the same.  If your ancestor deliberately disobeyed the law, he had only himself to blame.

#13, so Catholics could say the same re: any heretics turned over to the state for execution and/or torture?  Remember that heretics were viewed as a threat to the secular authorities as well as ecclesial.

#14 Thanks - my understanding is that by and large herecy resulted in a variety of punishments [as you say carried out by the state rather than the church, although the conviction may have been in the church courts], most extreme of which was burning.  Hanging drawing and quartering was specifically applicable to treason.  Just saying - thus AD’s ancestor will probably not have been found to have been a heretic, but to have committed an act directed at the state or its laws.  To have incurred this penalty for treason he will probably have been implicated in one of the plots of the time or have been a priest who came into England in breach of the prohibition, and many of whom were also suspected of being involved in sedition.

#15, ahhh ha!  I totally overlooked the drawn & quartered part of the equation, although the muddy waters between Crown and Mitre during the English Reformation period can make any attempts to clearly delineate acts of faith from politics.. well, it’s thorny at best.

In my comment #7, I used “Roman monopoly” in reference to justinmartyr’s comment #6, and in the European west, it was a “monopoly” of a sort. I consider fragmentation between the denominations not of the Holy Spirit, but of man’s pride. I also see the RC’s inability to deal constructively with Martin Luther part of that same pride. That is one of the primary reasons I left ECUSA and became Roman Catholic - the continued reliance (and insistence) on personal (at the expense of all else) interpretation of Scripture lends itself to continued splits.

My ancestor was among the Martyrs of Wexford.  If the practice of a certain faith is declared to be “High Treason” and one is subsequently convicted of defying that law and is killed for said offense, I think that would qualify as being killed for one’s religious beliefs.  We can split legal hairs and play semantic word games all day long.  They were killed for being Catholics.