Martin Luther as Hercules Germanicus by Hans Holbein, 1523. “In the picture, Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas, William of Ockham, Duns Scotus and Nicholas of Lyra already lay bludgeoned to death at his feet and the German inquisitor, Jacob van Hoogstraaten was about to receive his fatal stroke. Suspended from a ring in Luther’s nose was the figure of Pope Leo X,” The Reformation Room.
Now the Lord is the Spirit; and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty.
2 Corinthians 3:17
“Then the children of Israel…forsook the LORD and served Baal and the Ashtoreths. And the anger of the LORD was hot against Israel. So He delivered them into the hands of plunderers who despoiled them; and He sold them into the hands of their enemies all around, so that they could no longer stand before their enemies” (Judges 2:11,13-14).
It’s often been noted that Israel under the judges went through a number of cycles of faith in the Word of God prosperity, followed by unbelief, leading to bondage to foreign powers, followed by repentance, and finally deliverance from oppression.
Perhaps the most noteworthy aspect of this cycle is the close connection between belief and liberty, on one hand, and unbelief and oppression on the other. The passage just quoted from Judges is a good illustration of this principle.
Put another way, spiritual liberty, faith in the Lord, leads to political and economic liberty. Rejecting the Word of God produces slavery both political and economic.
Put still another way, spiritual liberty leads to political and economic liberty, spiritual bondage to political and economic bondage.
Not only did this pattern hold true in ancient Israel, it also holds true today. It was the widespread preaching of and belief in the Gospel of Justification by Faith Alone that spiritually freed the people of the nations to which the Reformation came from the bondage of sin and guilt. And those same nations were the very ones to become the freest states on earth politically as well as the most prosperous.
Martin Luther’s courageous rejection of – in the name of written revelation, logic, and freedom – of this faith-works religion laid the necessary theological foundation for the emergence of a free, humane, and civilized society from the ancient and medieval paganism of Christendom. The result was religious freedom and her daughters: political, civil, and economic freedom (38).
Where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty. First spiritually, then in other ways politically and economically.
Indeed the people are one and they all have one language, and this is what they begin to do; now nothing that they propose to do will be withheld from them.
Genesis 11:6
He has made from one blood every nation of men to dwell on all the face of the earth, and has determined their preappointed times and the boundaries of their dwellings, so that they should seek the Lord, in the hope that they might grope for Him and find Him.
Acts 17:26-27
Among the besetting sins of the 21st century American Protestantism is its propensity to form ungodly pacts with unbelievers. It amounts to a return to the failed policy of Israel, which, when the going got tough, often resorted to going down to Egypt to seek Pharaoh’s help when they instead should have sought the Lord.
The close, and seemingly every closer, ties between mainstream Evangelicalism and Roman Catholicism one again were brought to mind this week by Joe Biden’s executive order blitz and the similar reaction to them from both the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) and the Evangelical Immigration Table (EIT). The reaction to Biden’s executive orders on immigration from the USCCB and the ersatz Evangelicals at EIT was so similar that one could be forgiven for thinking they were penned by the same person.
One of the landmark texts produced by the neo-evangelicals is an ecumenical document dating from 1994 and co-signed by Charles Colson and John Neuhaus, with Colson representing the Evangelicals and Neuhaus the Catholics.
A book titled Evangelicals & Catholics Together: Toward A Common Mission (ECT) was issued the following year edited by Colson and Neuhaus. The main argument of this evil book was that Evangelicals and Catholics, while they had their differences, in the end really are brothers in Christ and, for this reason, ought to cooperate toward the common goal of uniting Christians “that they may be all be one.”
Of course, for Evangelicals and Catholics to be one requires the prior understanding that both Evangelicals and Roman Catholics believe the same things are Christians. Now it may well be true that Southern Baptist Chuck Colson believed the same things as Richard Neuhaus, but this would simply prove that Colson himself was not a Christian, not that Protestantism and Catholicism have any propositions in common.
This March, it will be 27 years since the release of ECT, and that is enough time to trace out at least some of the evil fruit of this document. To do it full justice, would take far longer than could be done in a short blog post. But I’d like to take this opportunity to demonstrate just how close the cooperation has become between the Roman Church-State and conservative, ersatz Evangelicals in just one area: immigration.
On Immigration, the USCCB and EIT Speak as One
The past few days have been busy ones at the USCCB. The bishops, it seems, can hardly believe the embarrassment of riches that has fallen into their lap with the election of America’s second Roman Catholic president. Oddly enough, in both cases when America elected a Roman Catholic president, there were widespread and credible charges of election fraud, but that’s another story.
Focusing on just the USCCB’s press releases, we find four on immigration:
EIT, on the other hand, while a little less energetic than their colleagues at the USCCB, nevertheless managed to put together two recent press releases on immigration
In both cases, the press releases celebrate the fact that the Biden’s executive orders will release a flood of taxpayer subsidized immigration, migration, and refugee resettlement, the cost of which will be underwritten by the American people as their moral obligation.
The Evangelical Immigration Table includes Bethany Christian Services, the Council for Christian Colleges and Universities, the Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention, Faith and Community Empowerment, the National Association of Evangelicals, the National Latino Evangelical Coalition, The Wesleyan Church, World Relief and World Vision.
Other signatories include additional faith groups including the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops/Migration and Refugee Services, a wide range of trade associations and businesses, local police departments and chiefs of police, and a diverse spectrum of civic and advocacy organizations (emphasis mine).
One point of emphasis that I’ve made many times in print and in podcasts is that Roman Catholic Church-State is the premier globalist organization there is, a fact almost always overlooked, even by those who claim to be independent journalists and podcasters. They simply do not have eyes to see the exceedingly great evil of the Vatican’s globalism, even as it stares them right in the face.
So, we have EIT, which includes the influential Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention of which the prominent Russell Moore is currently president, connected both to the USCCB and George Soros, which never sleep in their efforts to subvert the Constitution of the United States of America and to bring about world government. Both the USCCB and George Soros see immigration as a way of destabilizing America and other nation states to make it easier to fold them into their hoped-for global superstate.
The Evil of Globalism
The 1648 Treat of Westphalia settled the Thirty Years’ War and ushered in the current system of international politics known as the Westphalian World Order. The Thirty Years’ War was the first pan-European war and was a battle between nations to which the Reformation had come and the nations in subjection to the Pope. Essentially, it was a war between Protestants and Catholics, and the Protestants won.
The principal ideas of Westphalian World Order (WWO), are such that if you were you to explain it to people, many likely would respond that it’s just common sense. Yet it took the Protestant Reformation and a major war to establish them in international law. So what are the main ideas of WWO? First, each state has sovereignty over its territory and domestic affairs, to the exclusion of all external powers. Second, that each state, no matter how large or small, is equal in international law. One implication of this is that supranational organizations such as the United Nations impinge on the sovereignty of nation states and are, therefore, to be avoided.
In his 2014 book World Order, Henry Kissinger remarked, “The Westphalian peace reflected a practical accommodation to reality, not a unique moral insight,” but this is incorrect. The WWO is not merely a “practical accommodation to reality,” but an idea whose origins can be found in the Scriptures.
In Genesis 11, we see man’s first attempt to build a global empire in the form of the Tower of Babel frustrated by God. The reason given is that, if they were to succeed, then, “nothing that they propose to do will be withheld from them.” To prevent the centralization of power and the evil that would follow from it, God confused the language of the people, scattering them into their own nations according to their languages. Another reason for separating people into their own nations was, as the Apostle Paul noted in his address on Mars Hill, to cause them to seek the Lord. “He has made from one blood every nation of men to dwell on all the face of the earth, and ahs determined their preappointed times and the boundaries of their dwellings, so that they should seek the Lord, in the hope that they might grope for Him and find Him.”
With these passages in mind, it seems that the nation state system that came out of the Peace of Westphalia was not so much a “practical accommodation to reality” as one of the implications of the widespread preaching of and belief in the Gospel of Jesus Christ. Put another way, the WWO is one of the implications of Christianity. If this is true, and I am persuaded that it is, then those individuals and organizations – individuals and organizations such as the afore mentioned George Soros and USCCB – are doing the devil’s work when they attempt to overthrow nation states to produce, as it were, their globalist Nirvana, which we could perhaps call Tower of Babel 2.0.
Mass, nation breaking, taxpayer subsidized immigration, migration and refugee resettlement are some of the most powerful tools in the toolbox of these wicked globalists. That Donald Trump opposed these policies is likely one of the reasons he was targeted for removal by the globalists.
To the degree that nominally Evangelical organizations such as EIT are aligned with George Soros and the USCCB, they share in their sins of immigration treason. To the degree that ordinary Christians are co-opted by EIT and other Romanist, globalist front organizations, they too share in the sins of the immigration reason lobby.
Protestants do not oppose immigration. Indeed, America has a history of being exceedingly generous with its immigration policy, and this is due in large measure to its Christian heritage. But immigration, migration and refugee resettlement of the sort supported by the Biden administration, EIT and the USCCB is destructive of nations, including America, represents immigration treason, and should be soundly rejected by Christians.
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Just over a month back, Protestants celebrated the 500th anniversary of the Reformation. It was a noteworthy occasion. October 31, 2017 marked 500 years since a little known Augustinian monk nailed his 95 theses to the Wittenberg church door and changed the course of history.
But while as Protestants we look back with joy at Luther’s bold stand against the papacy and proclamation of the Gospel of Justification by Belief Alone, not everyone was or is so appreciative of his achievements and the achievements of the other Reformers. But to call them unappreciative is really far too mild. The truth is, Luther and his contemporaries were hated unto death by representatives of the Roman Church-State (RCS), who did everything in their power to frustrate the spread of the Gospel in the 16th century.
And their efforts to quash the preaching of the Gospel did not stop in the 16th century, but continue unabated to this day. One example of this is the way the Pope Francis and the RCS attempted to co-opt this year’s Reformation Day celebration and turn it into a great big group hugging, Kumbaya singing rapprochement between Rome and her erring children, the “separated brethren” of the Reformation.
But Rome isn’t the only false church singing a false Gospel siren song in the hopes of wooing Protestants onto the rocks of works righteousness. No, Eastern Orthodoxy wants in on the act too.