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So Many Kinds of Voices's avatar

I would say that a magisterial Protestant is one whose church holds to one of the historic Protestant confessions of faith. Augsburg (Lutheran), 39 Articles (Anglican), Westminster (Presbyterian), London 1689 (Reformed Baptist) and so on.

Having said that, I would not say that a Fundamentalist Baptist with zero interest in church history and who claims to have "no creed but the Bible" is not Protestant. He clearly is descended, ultimately, from Reformation figures such as Zwingli and

Karlstadt. Yes, I know Zwingli had people who rejected infant baptism put to death. But otherwise he seems very close to modern Fundamentalist or Independent Baptists in his theology.

Some Baptists claim that they are not Protestants because in fact Baptists have been around ever since the time of the Apostles (see J.M. Carroll's tract 'The Trail of Blood'). That thesis, to put it mildly, does not withstand historical scrutiny.

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Laurence Phillips's avatar

I haven’t yet read Levine’s essay about China and the auto destruction of the West, but it occurs to me that many of the negative trends identified by him are equally prevalent in East Asia ( e.g., collapsing birth rates, social atomization on steroids, decline in the role of the family, loss of faith in institutions, … ). Is the East really rising, or is the entire world sinking?

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