RamistThomist
Puritanboard Clerk
Jacob, it’s kind of odd to me, this exchange we’ve been having. And I don’t quite comprehend the stand you are taking with the facile responses being giving me as regards the testimony of Peter Allix and George Faber (both Anglicans, Allix of the French Huguenot community), and William Cunningham (a Scottish theologian and co-founder of the Free Church of Scotland) over against the Roman Catholic accounts of the Albigensians.
Seeing that what the Albigensians believed and practiced has been expunged by their murderers as thoroughly as their lives were, it is little wonder there is no evidence of it, save what Rome gave to justify the blood and horror (the web will testify of their effectiveness!). You might as well tell African Americans to believe the KKK’s accounts of the characters of those they tortured and hung, and Jews to believe the Nazi’s accounts of those they gassed and cremated, as to tell Protestants to believe the likes of Pope Innocent III and his henchmen as regards the Albigenses and the Waldenses!
For you to tell me with a straight face my discounting Rome’s testimony over the painstaking investigations of godly men is “a genetic fallacy”, appears to me to be giving credence to murderers and thieves (landgrabbers) easily as wicked and depraved as the Klan and Hitler’s men. One must consider the actual merits of a claim, not merely the possible flawedness of its origin. It is not a logic honored in Heaven.
Were you to simply say, We cannot know with certainty what the Albigenses believed, given the lack of documentary evidence, I would agree; although, for my part, I would strongly lean to accepting the testimony of a man such as Cunningham, of whom it was said in the 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica, “rigidly impartial qualifying him to be an interesting delineator of the more stirring periods of church history”. As I noted above, he reproved Faber’s attempt to prove an apostolic succession by means of the Waldenses and Albigenses throughout the NT church age (as per an Anglican view, not a “trail of blood” baptistic view), yet concurred in his overall investigatory conclusions as to their character and doctrines. To restate what I said, “We cannot know with certainty what the Albigenses believed”, so I readily will concede that to you.
From a slightly different angle, re the Waldenses: History of the Reformation in the Sixteenth Century, p. 30, by J.H. Merle D’Aubigné,
“From their mountain-heights the Waldenses protested during a long series of ages against the superstitions of Rome.* ‘They contend for the lively hope which they have in God through Christ—for the regeneration and interior revival by faith, hope, and charity—for the merits of Jesus Christ, and the all-sufficiency of his grace and righteousness.’**[* Nobla Leygon (The Books of the Vaudois). ** Treatise on Antichrist, a work contemporary with the Nobla Leygon.]“Yet this primal truth of the justification of sinners,—this main doctrine, that should have risen from the midst of all the rest like Mont Blanc from the bosom of the Alps—was not sufficiently prominent in their system. Its summit was not yet raised high enough.”
So Cunningham puts in perspective the lacks in the Waldenses’ theology. It remained for Luther and the Reformers to supply this lack.
As I've said numerous times in this thread, my discussion is not about the Waldenses. You keep bringing them up for some reason.
My point is pretty simple: you have no primary evidence to support your position. Cunningham was a great man, but he provides no primary evidence, either.
