The Internal Destruction of Christianity – A Sad Story Pt 1

I'm starting to think that the LDS Church is going to save Christianity.  OK that's meant as an ironic statement because it's pretty much what the LDS Church has stated since it's beginning and something that I've always taken on faith.

Here's what happened in my opinion.

At the time that Jesus lived the Romans ruled the Mediterranean and it was a stable world where the Gospel could be spread.  A unique time in history.

However it happened Christianity became the dominant culture in Europe, and in 1054 the Christian World split into an Eastern and Western part.  Actually this split just set in stone a process which had been going on much earlier and that was that Western Christianity spoke Latin and was influenced by Augustine, and the Eastern Christianity spoke and read Greek and followed other Greek Fathers.  In other words there were two Christianities, East and West, and two cultures East and West.

In the West Christianity was influenced by Scholasticism, which was heavily influenced by reason and logic.  This was a gift given to Christianity by the Islamic Culture.  Some people think that scholastism was started by Averroes.  It seems to me that these three cultures reached the same point; "Do we continue to use our reasoning powers to understand God, or do we just accept the word of God as final?"  In the Islam world they turned away from reason with the "The Incoherence of the Philosophers" written by Al-Ghazali.  Averroes was highly influential in the West, and you could find Latin versions of his commentaries on Aristotle in western universities.  In the Islamic world his works were never printed until the 20th Century.

So the West decided that reason was to be used and that new ideas were good.  This led eventually to the idea of Natural Theology.  Western Christianity decided that since God was all powerful and could have created the world any way he wanted to, the fact that He created this world the way He did should tell us something about him.  Therefore by studying nature, or Natural Theology, we would learn about God, and people in the RCC took to doing Natural Theology with a passion.  Almost every scientific discovery during the Medieval Age was performed by a Churchman, or someone who's profession was the RCC, or nobility.  People who had the leisure to perform scientific experiments, and while they were doing this they were coming to a greater understanding of God.  However, as they started doing this they started to notice something Aristotle wasn't always right.

Scholasticism was more of a method than a theory.  Part of that method was that if you had a question you would go to the sources that talked about the question and arrange all of the information about the question and then you would use that to make your decision.  The greatest scholastic scholar was Thomas Aquinas and his great accomplishment was to reconcile Aristotle with the RCC.  During the scientific revolution people started realizing that Aristotle was not always right.  Once people started realizing that not everything ancient was always right people started questioning the RCC.

There was a lot of questioning going on at the time of Luther and the Reformation.  However, everyone still pretty much accepted the Bible, or some deity.  Protestantism allowed different readings of the Bible, and the scientific revolution led to the Enlightenment.  During the Enlightenment people started reading the Bible critically for the first time.  Why not, everything else was up to scrutiny.

So people started reading the Bible critically for the first time in history.  Everything was set.  Printing made the Bible available and the years of learning made it possible to start scrutinizing the Bible.  Around the same time that this had started the restoration of the Gospel started with Joseph Smith and he informed the LDS Church that everything dealing with man was subject to mistakes, or that the Bible is "Bible is true only insofar as it is translated correctly."