Friday, March 19, 2021

Sterling W. Sill's Negative Assessment of the Protestant Reformers

  

The great Protestant reformers, and many men since that time, knowing that the original church organized by Christ had been corrupted by apostasy and changes made in doctrines, took it upon themselves to try to reform the theology of the church and in the process, without divine authority or direction, organized churches of their own called them by their own names, and taught their own doctrines. These reformers were themselves frequently in error for two conflicting statements cannot be correct. As a result of the work of the protesters, the Christian world had many man-made churches. They did more to introduce confusion into the minds of people than they did to purify the apostasy that they recognized in the mother church. Because teaching false doctrine is such a serious sin, it naturally follows that to identify with such a group makes one an accessory to evil. The Lord condemned this very fault as he found it being practiced in his own day by splinter groups known as the pharisees, sadduccees, and essenes, and the other conflicting groups. He said to them, “ . . . ye shut up the kingdom of heaven against men: for ye neither go in yourselves, neither suffer ye them that are entering to go in.” (Matthew 23:13.)

 

Many people in these unauthorized Christian churches frankly and honestly admit that their church has no authority or power to minister the ordinances of the gospel, and yet by their influence they draw other people into the same error. (Sterling W. Sill, Thy Kingdom Come [Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 1975], 6-7)