- Nov 26, 2019
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Nearly every part of France had it's own regional dialect. At one time much of eastern France Switzerland and Italy used Romansch or Rumansch, or various other spellings of it. Now used only Switzerland, seems.
As to Peter Waldo. It is likely that the Catholics and Orthodox lord about him as they did with the Waldensians Bogomils, Paulikians, ect saying that they worshipped two gods.
Firstly, the Orthodox Church never had any contact with the Waldensians, but I myself have always had a deep admiration for them, including the mass martyrdom they experienced in the event known as the Piedmont Easter. Fortunately some survived and escaped to Switzerland, where they embraced Reformed theology. There is a Waldensian congregation in the PCUSA, in North Carolina if I recall correctly. Furthermore, in a nice turn of events given the martyrdom, the Waldensian Church merged with the Italian Methodist Church, adopted Wesleyan theology (I venerate John Wesley as a saint), and is now the main Protestant church throughout Italy.
The Bogomils were Docetic heretics as were the Paulicans, and contrary to the Landmark Baptist narrative neither group has any connection with the Waldensians. In the case of the Paulicans, don’t take my word for it; you can find online the mostly intact Book of Keys, which outlines their doctrine. And no one says the Bogomils, Paulicans etc worship two gods. That was not their error. Rather, they believe that Jesus Christ is not the son of the creator of this world, who is an evil entity in their theology, an incompetent demiurge, but rather that His father is the God of a higher purely spiritual realm usually referred to as the Pleroma which we must escape the material world in order to reach. In their system, matter is evil. Some of these sects are dualists, in the manner of the Zoroastrians of Persia, in that they attribute considerable power to their equivalent of the devil, but none of them worship the evil entity, although some non-Christian sects related to Docetism as well as some Syrian Christian heresies such as the Ophites regard the serpent in the Garden of Eden as being benevolent, imparting secret salvific knowledge. We know this largely because of surviving apocryphal scriptures written by these sects, including much of the material found buried in the Nag Hammadi cave in Egypt in the 1940s by some Bedouins, who frustratingly burned some of it as fuel before realizing its value, which drives scholars myself who have an interest in apocrypha a bit bonkers.
Now, Landmark Baptists incorrectly believe that several of these sects were proto-Protestant, but this is just not the case, as is proven by the archaeological record in terms of their writings, and the historical record. The Protestant movement originated in the early Renaissance period in Western Europe in response to specific practices the Roman Catholic Church engaged in at the time, such as the sale of indulgences, a lack of proper catechesis, et cetera, which were largely rectified in the counter-Reformation, after which time Catholics were undeservedly persecuted in some Protestant countries, particularly Great Britain, until after the Peace of Westphalia and the Enlightenment. Indeed much of the original raison d’etre for the founding of what is now the State of Maryland by Lord Baltimore was to create a haven for Roman Catholics, who were persecuted to the same extent as the Puritans who had settled in Massachusetts and Rhode Island, and the Quakers who had settled in Pennsylvania, and the Anglo-Dutch Baptists, led by an ancestor of mine, who settled in Long Island, New York.
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