[aron]

ICA, thanks for the reply. As you know, I'm a Protestant & a child of Protestants. It is the very human tradition and culture (and yet divinely inspired to a degree) I inherited when, in a Baptist congregation, I confessed the faith, that I am a sinner, and God loved me and sent His Son Jesus Christ. And Paul's advice, "in what you were saved, in this remain" has long seemed applicable, here.

But lately I've been examining the "recovery" narrative and it seems truncated, perhaps deliberately so. I know that Luther reacted within a sphere of late Middle Age thought and experience. Likewise, with Watchman Nee, Leland Wang, & others of the early 20th-century Chinese christians. In both cases the RCC dominated, in 16th century Western Europe literally; in Asia 400 years later Nee could confidently look to "the harlot and her daughters" in his narrative. Conceptually that's all there was. Western European & American sociopolitical might, and religious hegemony prevailed without challenge.

But a hundred years later we'd have to be deliberately obtuse to keep such a story as our primary motif. It just isn't so. Why can't we humble ourselves, even a little bit? Where's the seeking heart, the open-ness?