Archegnum wrote:I have to say that I am no expert on history, biblical or otherwise. However, from what I have heard and learned, the Protestant movement was a breakaway from the Roman Catholic Church (well, dur). Their reason (I mean true Protestants, not those who did it for convenience like Henry VIII) I believe, was that they believed that the Pope and his Bishops, Abbots etc had been given more power than what Christ had commanded. Apparently it had something to do with the increase in Bibles translated into Europeans native languages rather than Latin, bringing access to the Word to everyone. Some people (e.g. Martin Luther), when reading these translated Bibles, realized that the Pope had been introducing new laws etc into Christianity that were not stated in Scripture, which suggested that the Pope himself was not following the very verse you quoted
Kindasorta. Protestantism didn't start as a revolt against Catholicism. It was a reformist movement that targeted what it saw as systemic problems within the Church's administration - things like the sale of indulgences, which was a doctrine that stated that certain types of sins could be absolved in part through the giving of alms to the church, and which fed the growth of the Church into one of the richest organizations in Europe. Had the problems that Luther and others brought up been addressed by the Church, it's likely that the Reformation would have ended there.
Unfortunately the Church acted rather heavy-handedly and only drove more discontent, and the resulting backlash lit a political powderkeg that had been brewing for at least a century between (broadly speaking) the urbanized middle classes of the north of Germany (who were annoyed at economic inbalances between the south and the north of the Holy Roman Empire) and the more traditionally-oriented aristocracy of the south (who believed in and were invested in the traditional power structure of the Empire), with a number of popular peasant revolts erupting in the middle of the dispute. Luther stuck to his reformist position throughout all of this, but that lead to a schism within the movement between those who sought to reform the Church and those who believed in more radical solutions, including the dismantlement of the existing church hierarchy. The Lutherans and Anglicans, broadly speaking, are descended from the former, while groups like the Anabaptists, Baptists, Quakers and a number of other sects are descended from the latter.
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