Feeds:
Posts
Comments

Archive for the ‘Reformation, The’ Category

Reformation Day 2023

Posted in Reformation, The, tagged , , , , , , , on October 29, 2023| 12 Comments »

The Wittenberg Church Door where Martin Luther nailed his 95 Theses, October 31, 1517.

In two days, we will mark the 506th anniversary of Martin Luther’s nailing his 95 Theses to the Wittenberg church door. 

Luther wasn’t the first to push back on the theological and political abuses of the Roman Church-State.  John Wycliffe in England had done so 150 or so years earlier.  Jan Hus, another reformer, was murdered by the Church-State in 1415, just 102 years before Luther’s famous act.

Predating these men were the Waldenses, Italian Christians who left the Roman Church-State and built their own civilization in the valleys of the Alps.   According to Wylie in his History of the Waldenses, “When their [the Waldenses] co-religionists on the plains entered within the pale of the Roman jurisdiction, they retired within the mountains, and spurning alike the tyrannical yoke and the corrupt tenets of the Church of the Seven Hills, they preserved in its purity and simplicity the faith their fathers had handed down to them.”[1]

As our nation, as the whole of the formerly Christian West, turns more and more away from its historic Protestant roots and more and more toward tyranny of various stripes, I cannot help but wonder if we twenty-first century Protestants will not have to follow in the footsteps of the Waldenses to escape what appears to be a coming wave of persecution in our own time.

Read Full Post »

The Reformation and Free Speech

Posted in Politics, Reformation, The, tagged , , , , on February 19, 2023| 1 Comment »

This man does not deserve to die.  For he has spoken to us in the name of the LORD our God.

  • Jeremiah 26:16

Today, I saw the meme above in a tweet from, of all people, Elon Musk.  It’s funny, but there’s a serious aspect about it that requires comment.  And that’s the connection between the liberties historically enjoyed in the West and the Protestant Reformation.  Specifically, I have in mind the relationship between the First Amendment guarantee of free speech in the Constitution of the United States of America and the Protestant Reformation.

Americans rightly believe that the right to free speech is one of the defining characteristics of our nation.  It’s our birthright, given by God and guaranteed by our Constitution.  But as is often the case, and I include myself here, it becomes easy to take our birthright for granted. 

But in the past few years, beginning in 2018 and accelerating with the tyrannical Covid hoax in 2020, the ability of Americans, and of Westerners generally, has increasingly come under pressure. 

I mention 2018 because it was in August of that year that the first big strike against free speech on the internet took place with the rapid-fire banning of Alex Jones and his Infowars website from nearly every major social media outlet. It gave every appearance of being a coordinated attack and was extensively covered in the press. I wrote about it myself in this space at that time.  Worth noting is that Infowars has as its tagline, “There’s a war on for your mind.”  That’s true, and it has always been true.  And that war is fought with words and with propositions.  If we believe the truth, we live.  If we believe the many lies out there in the world, we perish.

In Romans, Paul tells us that faith comes by hearing and hearing by the word of God.  But what if people never hear the truth of the gospel.  How can they believe?  This was a major problem in the Middle Ages, ruled as it was in Europe by the Roman Church-State.  Rome and her innovations such as the real presence of Christ in the mass blinded people to the gospel of Jesus Christ and the Antichrist popes enforced the people’s blindness by torturing and murdering those who dared speak out against Rome’s evil system. 

One might say it was Antichrist’s version of cancel culture. 

Read Full Post »