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.
Lux Lucet 