[OBW]

Reading through the opening posts by aron (thanks for them), I was immediately reminded of a comment from a couple of Bible and church historians in a podcast just a couple of days ago. They noted that Protestants (of whom they both were squarely a part) see themselves as linked to the time from Christ through about Augustine, then jumping over everything until Luther. The fact is that, even with the introduction of various significant problems in the church, heavily beginning with the crusades, and other things, on up to the indulgences that Luther fought against, the history of what we now call the RCC is our history. Significant amounts of our theology came from that gap.

The point of this was not another plug for including the RCC in the Christian fold more firmly, but to note that despite the Protestant/Eastern/RCC rifts, there is a core of truth that is quite large. And it does not arrive at the place where a small, one-person-led group with novel theology is likely to be right while the 2,000 years of history has been wrong. No matter how fragmented we are on certain things, there is a large body of common ground that is traceable back through history to the source (the Bible). Some kind of "I've got the new and improved decoder ring" theology is just not worth its weight in raw sewage.

And, as I recall reading from sources outside the LRC, the fact that Martin and company went back to their warnings (attacks) is that this was just an early example of the times when the LRC/LSM confronted those who opposed them with agreements to play nice and give access, but there was actually no such access given, and since the evidence otherwise available left them (CRI and others) with what they had already discovered, they just went back to it. The LRC's claim that it was simply Martin who reneged is probably a bit of a falsehood. History is full of similar confrontations. The LSM publicly says "let's play nice" and then privately says "or we will sue." Since most of their opponents are not denominations, but much smaller non-profits that not much more than break even, just the process of discovery will cripple them while the LRC/LSM just keeps on grinding it out. That is how they "beat" Thomas Nelson and the guy that wrote The God Men.