FROM JUDAISM TO CALVINISM
Preface
“And others had trial of cruel mockings and scourgings, yea, moreover of bonds and imprisonment: They were stoned, they were sawn asunder, were tempted, were slain with the sword: they wandered about in sheepskins and goatskins; being destitute, afflicted, tormented; (Of whom the world was not worthy:) they wandered in deserts, and in mountains, and in dens and caves of the earth” (Heb. 11:36-38). Before the Lord went away, he told the disciples, “They shall put you out of the synagogues; yea, the time cometh, that whosoever killeth you will think that he doeth God service” (John 16:2).
In that one sentence the Lord recorded in advance much of the history of the church. The experience of his people has been one long trail of blood. At every turn the adversary has used fair means and foul to hinder the gospel. In this little booklet we will look at some of the experiences of the saints. But while we will be as faithful as possible to record that long trail of persecution, we want to be as careful as we can be of the tender feelings of those who read these lines. We have no desire to injure the feelings of any person.
For centuries Christians have chastised the Jews for crucifying the Lord. But when we read the Bible record we discover that “the common people heard him gladly” (Mark 12:37). It was the religious leaders, the Pharisees, the Sadducees, and scribes, who saw him as a threat to their wealth and power, and they dogged his every step. “The chief priests and elders [the religious hierarchy] persuaded the multitude that they should ask Barabbas and destroy Jesus” (Matt. 27:20). It was at their urging that the multitude cried out, “Crucify him, crucify him.”
By the same token, for centuries Protestants have chastised Roman Catholics for persecuting their ancestors, and there can be no question that during what we call the Dark Ages, and especially during the Protestant Reformation, the Roman Catholic Inquisition did sentence untold numbers of Protestants, Anabaptists and other dissenters to be tortured and killed. While that record is clear, it does not give anyone the right to act as if our own Catholic neighbors were involved in those atrocities. Most of us know Roman Catholics who are as decent, as honest, as God-fearing as any of us. We need to be careful about the way we present the historical record. The Lord pronounces a great woe on those who offend one of his little ones.
One thing we hope to demonstrate in this booklet is that while Protestant writers have been faithful to record the transgressions of the Catholic Inquisition, they have been just as careful to conceal the fact that when the shoe was on the other foot, the Protestants were just as brutal in persecuting those who differed with them. Again, we tremble at the thought of putting the facts on paper. We cannot hold the Protestants of our day responsible for the transgressions of their predecessors. But our people have the right to know the facts.
For over 400 years, Protestant writers have been rewriting their history, and very few Protestants of today have any idea of their own history. In 1554, John Fox published the Latin edition of his Book of Martyrs. He detailed the suffering of his brethren, especially under the reign of Queen Mary. No one can read his material, especially some of his other letters, without being convinced that John Fox was a truly godly man. But, godly man though he was, when he published his English edition in 1563, his loyalty to his friends would not allow him to record their own atrocities against the Baptists, Quakers and others.
In the Peasants’ War, the German peasants had requested such rights as choosing their own pastors, gathering firewood to heat their homes, supplying their tables with fish and game, and being paid for any work they did above what was customary. The German princes refused, and Martin Luther urged them to “stab, kill, and strangle” them. 50,000 peasants (many of them Anabaptists) were butchered at Luther’s urging. Fox recorded Luther’s struggle with the Pope, and especially his objection to the sale of indulgences, but for what he called causes reasonable, he did not tell about Luther’s involvement in the slaughter of the peasants. In his early days, Luther advocated liberty of conscience, but Fox did not record that he later urged that Anabaptists should be pursued to the death, and that he made good on that threat. The Catholics burned Baptists; the Lutherans more often drowned them.
To his credit, Fox does mention John Calvin’s involvement in the burning of Michael Servetus, but he pretends Calvin was swept along with the spirit of the time. He does not mention that Calvin had previously threatened that if Servetus ever came to Geneva, he would see to it he would never leave alive. He mentions that Calvin tried to prevent the burning. He does not mention that Calvin wanted him beheaded instead. He does not mention that the Consistory, of which Calvin was President, ordered a child’s head to be chopped off for striking his parents. He mentions that Calvin “made all the people declare, upon oath, their assent to the confession of faith” he and William Farel had written. He does not mention that those who objected were driven out of their homes, and banished from the town.
Fox died long before the Presbyterians took over Parliament in England in the 1640’s. So he was too early to record their drive to assume the power that once belonged to Rome. By 1611, the Protestants learned that burning Baptists at the stake only fueled the fire. But that did not stop them from arresting Baptist preachers, and leaving them to starve and freeze in filthy jails until they finally died there. Among many other things, if a person happened to die not long after being baptized, they pretended the chill of being immersed was the cause. They then charged the preacher with murder, and did all within their power to have him hanged. Samuel Oates was one preacher so charged.
When the Puritans came to America in 1629, they set up their own theocracy, and forbade any other kind of worship. Until the First Amendment put a stop to it, they arrested, publicly whipped, and banished Baptists and Quakers. They drove Roger Williams from his home in the dead of winter. They publicly whipped Obadiah Holmes until he had to sleep for weeks on his knees and elbows. Because she refused to pay a tithe to support the Puritan minister, they arrested Isaac Backus’s mother on a cold winter night, even though she was burning with a fever, and carried her off to jail.
Again, we have no desire to injure the tender feelings of those who identify themselves as Calvinists. Many of them are the victims, not the villains, in this matter. They have just not done their homework. They have no use for Arminianism, and they have no taste for much of what, today, passes for the Christian religion. Some of those they see on television look more like religious charlatans than gospel preachers. Then they read brilliant and articulate Calvinistic writers, and it seems like a breath of fresh air. They devour their books, without realizing there is a much better, and more scriptural alternative.
It seems very few of today’s Calvinists have actually studied Calvin as an original source. They usually know him from very carefully—and cautiously—selected quotes by Calvinist writers. I have no doubt that many of those good brethren would recoil with horror at much of what John Calvin actually did and taught.
Our American people have been so free for so long we have forgotten what religious persecution is all about. The First Amendment has been so effective in quelling persecution, we have forgotten how brutal both Catholics and Calvinists were so long as they were able use the law to force conversions.
We hope to show that a person does not have to be an Arminian, nor a Calvinist. There is another system, which for want of a better term, we call Bible doctrine.
Harold Hunt
From Judaism to Calvinism
The single greatest mistake in church history is the notion there was a fundamental difference between the way the Roman Catholics persecuted Protestants and Baptists, and the way early Protestants (most of whom were Calvinists) persecuted Baptists, Quakers and others. A careful reading of church history clearly shows the Protestants were just as bloodthirsty as the Catholics ever were.
There were three differences between persecution by Catholics and Protestants.
1. First the Protestants never gained such absolute power, for so long, and over so large an area, as the Catholics did. That limited the scope of their power to persecute. It did not limit its severity; but it did limit its scope.
2. Protestants gained just as much satisfaction in burning and hanging Baptists as the Catholics ever did, and they did more than their share of it. But experience taught them they would not suffer as much backlash, if they instead left Baptist preachers to starve for years in cold, filthy jails until they finally died. All the while their families were freezing and starving on the outside. Sometimes, their wives and children joined them in jail, and they all starved together. If anything, the Protestants were more cruel than the Catholics.
3. Protestants have done a much better job of rewriting their history, and most people are unaware of their atrocities. For instance, when John Fox wrote his Book of Martyrs. He was very faithful to record the persecution of Protestants by Catholics, but he was just as careful to conceal the fact the Protestants were just as vicious with Baptists. For instance, he faithfully recorded the steadfastness of the Protestants, Cranmer, Latimer, and Ridley, as they were led to the stake to be burned. He did not record that not long before that he had personally pleaded with Cranmer not to burn a Baptist, Joan Boucher, (Joan of Kent) at the stake. It would have taken away from the story, if his readers had known he was probably reaping what he sowed.
Thomas Crosby (1738) tells us, “These sad instances of persecution practiced by the Protestants in this king’s reign against the Anabaptists are in Fox’s Latin book of martyrs [1554], but left out in his English edition [1563], out of a tender regard, as is supposed, to the reputation of the martyrs in Queen Mary’s day” (vol. 1, pg. 59). Fox published both editions of his book while John Calvin was still living, and, regardless of his tender regard for the reputation of his friends, with that book he began a whitewash, that has continued now for over 400 years.
But how did this conflict with Catholicism come about? How did Baptists come to be so in conflict with Protestantism? The Bible provides clear answers.
You might spend a lifetime studying every piece of religious and philosophical literature available, and regardless of however ancient, or however modern, your material may be, you will discover in all of it the same notions, and the same arguments. New features, new ideas, new eccentricities, are added; but the fundamental principles are always the same. Suffice it to say, the adversary constantly changes his face, but he never changes his ways. No really new religion, no new philosophy, no fundamentally new doctrine, ever comes on the scene. It is always a different version, a modification, a new combination of old doctrines.
The Bible provides all the material you need to answer any false doctrine you will ever face. It will always be some variation of a doctrine that was faced by Christ and the Apostles.
During his public ministry the Lord was constantly harassed by the Pharisees, the Sadducees, and the scribes—by unbelieving Jews. “The common people heard him gladly” (Mark 12:37), but the Pharisees and other religious leaders laid wait for him, “seeking to catch something out of his mouth, that they might accuse him” (Luke 11:54). They mocked him, ridiculed him, and plotted to kill him. They were not concerned whether what he told was the truth or not; they had no interest in the miracles he performed; they just wanted him dead. Finally they took him through a mock trial, and crucified him.
After his crucifixion, it was still the Jews, and Judaism, that most persecuted the early church. The Gentile authorities did not pay them much attention, but the Jews dogged their every step. No persecution was too harsh, no measure too underhanded. They were determined to wipe the church off the face of the earth, and to sweep the name of Christ from the pages of history.
Then in the year 70 A.D. the Roman authorities besieged the city of Jerusalem for five months; they starved the inhabitants into submission, overran the city, and burned it to the ground. Flavius Josephus records that a million people died during the siege, and one hundred thousand were sold into slavery.
Fifteen hundred years before, when God gave them the Law, he promised them great blessing, if they kept the Law. But he warned them they would suffer if they disobeyed. They had long since ceased to observe the Law, but in spite of the fact they despised the Law, and cast it behind their back, that Law was still in full effect. The Law would exact its penalty. In the twenty-eighth chapter of Deuteronomy, God described in detail what they suffered in 70 A.D. They fell victim to the Law in all its fury. God did exactly what he had promised.
The back of Judaism was broken. The Jews who survived were sold into slavery, and scattered to the four winds. The Jews would themselves become the hunted, the persecuted. God had promised, “And the Lord shall scatter thee among all people, from one end of the earth even unto the other ….And thy life shall hang in doubt before thee; and thou shalt fear day and night, and shalt have none assurance of thy life” (Deut. 28:64,66). In that condition they could no longer harass and bedevil the Christians.
But that brings on a curious question. Virtually every conflict of Christ and the Apostles was in a Jewish context. That is the constant theme, especially, in the book of Acts. Very nearly every attack was from the Pharisees, the Sadducees, the scribes—the Jews. We are well informed of how they suffered at their hands.
Jerusalem was destroyed in 70 A.D.; the Jews were scattered among the nations, and from that time until now, Christians have had little direct contact with Jews or with Judaism. Pharisee is a name we no longer fear. Most of us have never been inside a synagogue. Unless we have a Jewish doctor or lawyer, some of us from small towns may not even be acquainted with a Jew. We have conflict enough with Gentile detractors, but it is not often that a Jew dissects and attacks one of our sermons.
Since that is the case, why are the historical parts of the New Testament almost entirely given over to conflict between the early Christians and Judaism? Why are we told so much about the Pharisees and Sadducees? Why prepare us for battles we will never fight?
If we miss that question, there is not much of church history that will make sense. If we get that question right, it is amazing how simple church history becomes.
The book of Acts is not out of date. We need every piece of information it contains. We need that information, because virtually every battle the Church has ever been called on to fight has been with those basic principles that go to make up Judaism. Our battles are not with Judaism itself; we have very little contact with Judaism. But most every conflict has to do with practices that have been borrowed from Judaism. That is the reason the New Testament provides so much material about Judaism. That is the place the major battles have always been fought.
The fiercest battles in the early church were with those who wanted to merge Judaism with the Lord’s church. That is the theme of the book of Galatians, but the material we need is spread throughout the entire New Testament. If the Pharisees could not destroy the church from without, they would subvert it from within. They would make the church like themselves.
In Acts chapter fifteen we read, “And certain men which came down from Judea taught the brethren, Except ye be circumcised after the manner of Moses, ye cannot be saved” (Acts 15:1). They wanted to make the church into a Jewish sect. They almost divided the church at Antioch, but Paul fought that battle and won it.
Later in the same chapter we read, “But there rose up certain of the sect of the Pharisees which believed, saying, That it was needful to circumcise them, and to command them to keep the law of Moses” (vs. 5). Paul challenged them, “Why tempt ye God, to put a yoke upon the neck of the disciples, which neither our fathers nor we were able to bear” (vs. 10). Those Pharisees believed, but they did not believe as much as they should. They did not believe the grace of God was sufficient without their keeping the law—without their carrying their traditions over into the church.
This Pharisaism/Judaism sometimes crept in, and swept away whole churches. Hassell tells us, “The first fifteen Bishops (or pastors) of the church of Jerusalem were all circumcised Jews, and this church united the law of Moses with the doctrine of Christ” (pg. 367).
More often than not, it was a mixture of Judaism and heathen philosophy that was brought in. Paul warned us, “Beware lest any man spoil you through philosophy and vain deceit, after the traditions of men, after the rudiments of the world, and not after Christ” (Col. 2:8).
Their greatest success came in the year 180 A.D. In that year Pantaenus, a “converted heathen philosopher,” founded the Academy at Alexandria. Clement, another “converted heathen philosopher,” followed him in 189 A.D. The most famous of the Alexandrian teachers was Origen. He and Clement are two of the most often quoted of what the Roman Catholics call the Ante-Nicene Fathers. Origen headed the school from 202 until 232. The school operated for 215 years and closed in 395 A.D.
Hassell tells us, “The last teacher was Didymus, in A.D. 395. The two objects of this Alexandrian school were to prepare people, especially the young, for the church, and to prepare talented young men to preach. The number of students was very great, and it is said that many eloquent preachers were sent out from this school” (pg. 365). He goes on, “Religion was gradually blended with and superceded by philosophy. Judaism and paganism were kindly brought in; and a broad, liberal, eclectic system, adapted to accommodate and reconcile all parties was devised.”
In those seven words we have the key to the perversion of the Christian religion: “Judaism and paganism were kindly brought in.”
The Academy at Alexandria finally accomplished what the Judaizers had been trying to do for generations. They combined this eclectic combination of Judaism and paganism with their idea of the Christian religion. Eclectic just means you take a little from here and a little from there, depending on what suits your fancy.
With that combination of Judaism, paganism, and some Bible doctrine they put together the framework of what, over the centuries, developed into the Roman Catholic Church. That is exactly what Catholicism is, a combination of those three systems.
In order to understand what the Academy accomplished we need to first know what Pharisaism/Judaism taught. Keep in mind that when we refer to Judaism we are not talking about the Law of Moses. Sometimes even the best of writers talk about those who added the Law of Moses to the gospel, when it was not the Law they added at all; it was Judaism. The two are not the same.
The Law of Moses had long since ceased to be practiced by the Jews when John the Baptist appeared on the scene. When Paul refers to his own life prior to his Damascus Road experience, he does not refer to his service under the Law. He says, “For ye have heard of my conversation in time past in the Jew’s religion, how that beyond measure I persecuted the church of God, and wasted it: And profited in the Jew’s religion above many my equals in mine own nation, being more exceedingly zealous of the traditions of my fathers,” (Gal. 1:13,14). Notice that he says nothing about the Law of Moses; he was not serving under the Law. He calls it the Jews’ religion. In the original language the word is judaismo—Judaism. He repeats it twice in two verses, so we will not miss it. The Jews had forsaken the Law and replaced it with Judaism—the Jews’ religion.
Judaism is a parody—almost a mockery—of the Law of Moses. It does teach much that was contained in the Law, but its primary purpose has always been to explain away the Law and set it aside. It is their way of justifying themselves in violating the Law. They replaced the doctrine of God with “the commandments of men.” That is the way the Lord explained it.
“Ye hypocrites, well did Esaias prophesy of you, saying, This people draweth nigh unto me with their mouth, and honoreth me with their lips; but their heart is far from me. But in vain they do worship me, teaching for doctrines the commandments of men” (Matt. 15:8,9).
To understand something of what happened we need to look at five basic doctrines of Judaism. Those five doctrines are not all that is involved in Judaism, not by any means; but they are five of the most distinctive features of the system. They are the doctrines it is most necessary to understand, if we would understand what Judaism is all about.
But before we get to those five doctrines, we need to look at another of the doctrines of the Pharisees. One of the most fundamental doctrines of the Pharisees, and the doctrine most basic to their entire system, was fatalism. Granted, what one writer affirms, another denies. Every false doctrine is like that; no false doctrine is ever consistent with itself. But most Pharisees were convinced that God predestinated everything that would ever be done by men or devils.
If a person would learn about Judaism, there are any number of books available. Perhaps the best known authors are Flavius Josephus and Alfred Edersheim. There are any number of others, most of them written by devout Jews in defense of Judaism.
The Pharisees’ brand of fatalism was like the Absolutism of our day. Alfred Edersheim records, “But the Pharisees carried their accentuation of the Divine to the verge of fatalism. Even the idea that God had created man with two impulses, the one to good, the other to evil; and that the latter was absolutely necessary for the continuance of this world, would in some measure trace the causation of moral evil to the Divine Being. The absolute and unalterable pre-ordination of every event, to its minutest details, is frequently insisted upon. Adam had been shown all the generations that were to spring from him. Every incident in the history of Israel had been foreordained, and the actors in it—for good or for evil—were only instruments for carrying out the Divine Will” The Life and Times of the Messiah, pg 317.
He goes on, “But there is another aspect of this question also. While the Pharisees thus held the doctrine of absolute preordination, side by side with it they were anxious to insist on man’s freedom of choice, his personal responsibility, and moral obligation….It was, indeed, true that God had created the evil impulse in us; but he had also given the remedy in the Law” ppg 318,319.
This absolutism, this notion that God gave man a law, forced him to break it, and held him responsible for doing what he was forced to do, is only one of the doctrines held in common by the Pharisees, by Augustine, and by John Calvin.
But it is not necessary to go to the bookstores to learn about the nature of Judaism. Much of the New Testament is given over to recording the persecution, and crucifixion, of Christ by the Jews—by the devotees of Judaism. They were the most bitter enemies of the Lord and of his church.
1. First, they had a kind of reverence for the scriptures bordering on superstition. They were sure that was where they got eternal life. The Lord corrected that notion. He told them it was the role of the scriptures to talk about him. “Search the scriptures, for in them ye think ye have eternal life, and they are they which testify of me” (John 6:39).
Their scribes were, like Apollos, mighty in the scriptures (Acts 18:24). They numbered every word and every letter. They bathed themselves before they would sit down to transcribe any part of the text. They would not correct more than the tiniest number of typos in their work. If they made more than the smallest number of mistakes, they did not correct them; they destroyed the work and started over. Of all the charges the Lord made against them, he never once charged them with corrupting the manuscripts.
But with such a superstitious regard for the scriptures, they were still convinced the scriptures by themselves were not enough. They had a huge body of oral traditions which they taught alongside of, and sometimes in opposition to, the Law.
2. Notice that, not only did they raise their traditions to a level with the Bible, they changed whatever they did not like in the scriptures, and taught “for doctrines the commandments of men” (Matt. 15:9).
One of the commandments is “honor thy father and thy mother.” It is our place to respect and provide for our parents. Their tradition set that commandment aside, and pretended that anything they did for their parents was simply a gift; it was not necessary for them to do it. But the Lord said, “Why do ye also transgress the commandment of God by your tradition? For God commanded, saying, Honor thy father and mother: and, He that curseth father or mother, let him die the death. But ye say, Whosoever shall say to his father or his mother, It is a gift, by whatsoever thou mightest be profited by me; And honor not his father or his mother, he shall be free. Thus have ye made the commandment of God of none effect by your tradition” (vss. 3-6).
3. Judaism provided a form of church/state union with the High Priest as the supreme leader. But somebody objects, was that not exactly what God provided under the Law of Moses? No, it was not. Under the Law they did have church/state union—but it was with God at the head. The High Priest was not God. They had long since rejected God as their king. God told Samuel, “They have not rejected thee, but they have rejected me, that I should not reign over them” (1 Sam. 8:7).
The church/state union of Judaism was of purely human origin. It began in the period between the Old and New Testaments. Hassell records (pg. 166) that Judas or Aristobulus, the son of John Hyrcanus, was the first to reign as priest-king about 106 B.C. His grandfather was Mattathias, the founder of the Maccabean dynasty. About that time there was much struggle and infighting both between the Jews themselves, and against the Syrians, under Antiochus Epiphanes, and later against the Romans. There were enormous changes going on among the Jews, and it is uncertain whether Aristobulus can be credited with establishing the arrangement.
What is certain is that, under the occupation of the Romans, the High Priest was allowed to exercise a kind of lordship over the people, based on their own laws and traditions, so long as they did not try to overthrow their Roman conquerors, and so long as they did not impose capital punishment. If they wanted anybody executed, they had to deliver them to the Romans (John 18:31). Up to that point, church and state were one.
4. God provided circumcision as a covenant with Israel, but they perverted the practice, as they did so many things. Many years before, God had given circumcision as a sign to Abraham that he was righteous. “And he received the sign of circumcision, a seal of the righteousness of the faith which he had, yet being uncircumcised” (Rom. 4:11). Circumcision did not make him righteous; it was a sign that he was righteous.
Circumcision was a seal of righteousness to Abraham only; it was not a seal of righteousness to anybody else. Many of those who were circumcised were not righteous. Some of them were unspeakably wicked. To them it was a sign they were the natural male offspring of Abraham, and as such, they had a right to the natural benefits that belonged to the offspring of Abraham—so long as they obeyed the Law given. It did not guarantee heaven to anybody.
But they began to look to circumcision for salvation. It was circumcision that separated them from all other nations, and they thought that made them superior. They were sure salvation reached as far as circumcision reached. Circumcision gave them a monopoly on God; if you were circumcised, you were safe; otherwise you were doomed.
Paul put an end to that notion. “For the name of God is blasphemed among the Gentiles through you, as it is written. For circumcision verily profiteth, if thou keep the law: but if thou be a breaker of the law, thy circumcision is made uncircumcision. Therefore if the uncircumcision keep the righteousness of the law, shall not his uncircumcision be counted for circumcision? And shall not uncircumcision which is by nature, if it fulfil the law, judge thee, who by the letter and circumcision dost transgression the law? For he is not a Jew, which is one outwardly; neither is that circumcision, which is outward in the flesh: But he is a Jew, which is one inwardly; and circumcision is that of the heart, in the spirit, and not in the letter; whose praise is not of men, but of God” Rom. 2:-25-29.
5. The fifth point is that they were so sure of their superiority, they thought they had the right to persecute, torture, and kill those whose preaching they counted to be a threat. The Lord said, “They shall put you out of the synagogues: yea, the time cometh, that whosoever killeth you will think that he doeth God service” (John 16:2).
They were alarmed at the preaching of Stephen, and they arrested him, and brought him before the council. While he preached to the council, “All that sat in the council, looking steadfastly on him, saw his face as it had been the face of an angel” (Acts 6:15).
They saw his face; the evidence of God’s presence was clear, but it made no difference with them. The high priest questioned him, and he delivered a sermon that should have brought them to repentance, but when he finished his speech, we read, “When they heard these things, they were cut to the heart, and they gnashed on him with their teeth. But he, being full of the Holy Ghost, looked up steadfastly into heaven, and saw the glory of God, and Jesus standing on the right hand of God. And said, Behold, I see heaven opened, and the Son of man standing on the right hand of God. Then they cried out with a loud voice, and stopped their ears, and ran upon him with one accord. And cast him out of the city, and stoned him” (Acts 7:54-58).
Both the attitude of Paul before his Damascus Road experience, and the attitude of the Jews toward Paul after he began to preach, illustrate the mindset of Judaism. They were sure they had the right to persecute, torture, and kill those whose doctrines they counted to be a threat.
“And the witnesses laid down their clothes at a young man’s feet, whose name was Saul….And Saul was consenting to his death….As for Saul, he made havoc of the church, entering into every house, and haling men and women committed them to prison,” Acts 7:58, 8:1,3). At that time Paul was still called Saul. He got his first taste of Christian blood that day, and he would never lose his appetite for Christian blood until his experience on Damascus Road.
When he could find no more Christians in Jerusalem he went to the high priest for authority to pursue them wherever they might be found. “And Saul, yet breathing out threatenings and slaughter against the disciples of the Lord, went unto the high priest, and desired of him letters to Damascus to the synagogues, that if he found any of this way, whether they were men or women, he might bring them bound unto Jerusalem” (Acts 9:1,2).
“And I persecuted this way unto the death, binding and delivering into prisons both men and women, As also the high priest doth bear me witness, and all the estate of the elders; from whom also I received letters unto the brethren, and went to Damascus, to bring them which were there bound unto Jerusalem, for to be punished” (Acts 22:4,5).
“I verily thought with myself that I ought to do many things contrary to the name of Jesus of Nazareth. Which thing I also did in Jerusalem; and many of the saints did I shut up in prison, having received authority from the chief priests; and when they were put to death, I gave my voice against them. And I punished them oft in every synagogue, and compelled them to blaspheme; and being exceedingly mad against them, I persecuted them even unto strange cities” (Acts 26:9-12).
Before the Lord appeared to him, Paul was the hero of the Jews. He was the rising hope of Judaism. He was so exceedingly mad against the Christians, he had them arrested, beaten, imprisoned, and whenever possible— executed. After he began to preach the gospel they treated him in the same way. Three times they beat him with rods; five times they laid thirty nine stripes on his back (2 Cor. 11:24,25). When he went back to Jerusalem, they tried to kill him, and they would have done it, if the Roman soldiers had not rescued him. He got away that time, but they still pursued him, hoping to do away with him.
Judaism is a very broad and complex religion, and these five doctrines are not all they teach, not by any means. We have singled out these five doctrines, because, more than any others, these are the five principles that were involved, when, as Hassell tells us, “Judaism and paganism were kindly brought in” at the Academy of Alexandria. If you keep those seven words, and those five doctrines in mind, it will simplify your study of church history.
After the Academy at Alexandria, the next great force to appear on the scene was Augustine of Hippo. The Academy closed in 395 A.D. Augustine was ordained in 391, four years before the Academy closed. He was appointed bishop at Hippo in 396, and published his Confessions in 398. So his rise exactly coincides with the demise of the Academy.
The Academy worked out the merger between pagan philosophy, Judaism, and their idea of the Christian religion. They educated young ministers and sent them out to propagate their new doctrines. But while Clement, Origen, and the other teachers at the Academy worked out the system, it was left to Augustine to use the political and military power of the Empire in support of the new system, and force it on the people.
Augustine was a born genius. His writings fill several large volumes, and they continue to be republished after 1600 years. There are very few writers who are still being studied after that long a time.
Augustine was as much a philosopher as he was a preacher. Among many other things, he laid the foundation for modern psychology, and his works are still being studied from the point of view of the psychologist. Unlike most psychologists, he started his inquiry with the doctrine of original sin, and human depravity. Not many modern psychologists will acknowledge either one, and that cripples their entire system. With those two principles as a starting point, he was able to produce a profound and wide ranging system of psychology. Much of his Confessions is given over to the subject. He did that 1500 years before Sigmund Freud, but even til this day, very few, if any, psychologists can equal his insight into the human psyche.
He had a vast knowledge of the scriptures. Regardless of the subject under consideration, he always had an array of proof texts he could call into service. Whether the text proved his point or not, he could convince his followers they were on solid Bible ground.
But as well known as his life and legacy are, he remains a mystery. When I was searching for the Lord’s church, I spent considerable time studying his books. I was still a teenager fifty years ago, when I first struggled, line by line, through his Confessions. The book is tattered and yellow with age. It has my little ex libris on the fly leaf. I used to do that when I finished a book. At last count, I had nine of his huge volumes in my library.
His experience and struggles of mind are such reading as will move any God-fearing person to tears. It is not easy to read of his heart-searching struggles of mind without coming to the conclusion this is a heaven born soul.
But he had a darker, much darker, side. He had political skills that would have made Machiavelli proud. He could manipulate and persuade the emperors of Rome and Constantinople. He got those proud and arrogant men to issue the decrees he used to arrest, torture, and banish those preachers, who would not submit to his authority. When all else failed, he had them killed.
Sylvester Hassell says, “Augustine’s theory of the right of a State to persecute its citizens to make them conform to a national religion involved the germs of absolute spiritual despotism, and of even the horrors of the Inquisition; but in practice he is said to have urged clemency and humanity upon the magistrates. Sacramentalism and religious persecution are as diverse from predestinarianism as night is from day; and as Augustine held all these three principles, we learn that even God’s regenerated people may be in great darkness on some important points, while they have light on other points still more important—in other words, that we are utterly dependent on the Holy Spirit to open our understandings and hearts, and to enlighten us on all spiritual subjects” (History ppg 406,407).
G.H. Orchard, was not so gentle with Augustine as Elder Hassell. He writes, “In 412 Cyril was ordained bishop of Alexandria. One of his first acts was to shut up all the churches of the Novationists, and strip them of everything of value. Augustine, supported by a kindred spirit in Cyril, exercised all his influence, and consequently the edicts procured against the Donatists, were now of a more sanguinary character.”
“The Catholics found by experience, that the means hitherto used had been ineffectual against the Donatists; they now prevailed on Honorius and Theodosius, emperors of the east and west to issue an edict, decreeing, that the person re-baptizing, and the person re-baptized, should be punished by death. In consequence of this cruel measure martyrdoms ensued.”
“Gibbon remarks on these edicts, that ‘three hundred bishops, with many thousands of the inferior clergy, were torn from their churches, stripped of their ecclesiastical possessions, banished to the islands, proscribed by law, if they presumed to conceal themselves in the provinces of Africa. Their numerous congregations, both in cities and the country, were deprived of the rights of citizens, and the exercise of religious worship. A regular scale of fines, from ten to two hundred pounds of silver, was curiously ascertained according to the distinctions of rank and fortune, to punish the crime of assisting at a schismatic conventicle; and if the fine had been levied five times, without subduing the obstinacy of the offender, his future punishment was referred to the discretion of the imperial court. By these severities, which obtained the warmest approbation of Augustine, great numbers were reconciled to the Catholic Church; but the fanatics (or faithful) who still persevered in their opposition, were provoked to madness and despair.’”
“Augustine owned, the city of Hippo had been full of conventicles, till he procured penal laws for their suppression. When the Donatists reproached him with making martyrs of their bishops and elders, and told him God would require an account of their blood at the day of judgment; he replied, ‘I know nothing of your martyrs, martyrs! martyrs to the devil. There are no martyrs out of the church, besides, it was their obstinacy, they killed themselves,’” (Orchard’s History, ppg 94,95).
I cannot deny that I have been moved by reading Augustine’s account of his experience, and his spiritual struggles. But then I read of his using his enormous influence to bring about the death of so many innocent people, whose only offense was in worshiping their Maker in ways he did not approve. And I cannot conceive of how any heaven born soul could engage in what was nothing more than calculated, cold-blooded murder. It was judicial murder, but it was murder, nonetheless.
It is far too much that he drove them from their families, from their homes, and from their churches, but for him to have them killed is simply unexplainable. And, keep in mind that, more than any other person, Augustine was the instigator and enforcer of what he calls these penal laws.
After 1600 years, the name of Saint Augustine is still one of the most revered of names, and I really would like to give him the benefit of the doubt. But I hear John asking, “For he that loveth not his brother, whom he hath seen, how can he love God, whom he hath not seen” (1 John 4:20). And I confess that I have a hard time understanding how a humble, loving child of God could treat people the way he did. How could he go to such lengths to get laws passed demanding their death.
Somebody tells us that Augustine was simply the product of his times; that it was the practice in that day to torture and kill those who refused to be converted. But that does not explain anything. More than anybody else, he was the man who started the practice.
Had Augustine later expressed remorse over the people who died because of his campaigns, we might reach other conclusions. Even a secular court of law takes remorse into consideration. But the fact that Augustine seems never to have regretted the many innocent people whose death he brought about, and the fact that, from all we can learn of him, he died, totally unrepentant over their deaths, we must forever withhold judgment.
It is, or should be, a source of great relief that it is not our responsibility to determine the eternal destiny of others. And yet, it leaves us bewildered how any heaven born soul could behave the way this Saint Augustine did and escape the chastening rod of his maker.
“For whom the Lord loveth, he chasteneth, and scourgeth every son, whom he receiveth. If ye endure chastening, God dealeth with you as with sons; for what son is he whom the Father chasteneth not? But if ye be without chastisement, whereof all are partakers, then are ye bastards, and not sons,” Heb. 12:6-8.
All of that brings on the question, what could cause a person like Augustine to behave the way he did? If he did have an experience of grace, what could make him spend his life persecuting the saints? What could prompt him to have them tortured, banished, and killed? It is impossible to imagine anything more contrary to the doctrine of grace.
The answer is found in the doctrine he preached. It does make a difference what you believe, and you can be sure that any time such a brilliant, strong willed, and self important person advocates the doctrine Augustine preached—to the limit the law allows—he will behave the way Augustine did.
Whether you are talking about the Christian religion in America, or Nazism in Europe, or Communism in Russia and China, or the doctrine of Augustine and his followers, every doctrine produces its own peculiar kind of conduct. There is nothing history teaches more clearly than it teaches that lesson.
What, then, did Augustine teach? First, he taught much that is clearly true. He taught what would later be called the Five Points of Calvinism. He taught them as John Calvin taught then—not as the Bible taught them—but he taught them nonetheless. He is recognized by Calvinists as the founder of Calvinism. He made the same serious mistakes John Calvin did, and we will get to that later, but he did teach those doctrines.
He was clear on other major doctrines. He taught the creation, and the inspiration of the scriptures. He taught the resurrection of the dead, final judgment, and heaven and hell. On many points he was as clear and as accurate as we could expect anybody to be.
Those doctrines were not what made him the tyrant he became. We already pointed out the Academy merged pagan philosophy, and Judaism with their idea of the Christian religion, and Augustine continued that tradition. That was what made him a tyrant.
1. Judaism claimed the power of the sword to force conformity. Augustine claimed that power, and he applied to Honorius and Theodosius, the emperors of the Eastern and Western Roman Empire for authorization to use force, lethal force if necessary, against the Donatists.
From all we can learn of the Donatists, they taught essentially the same doctrines the Primitive Baptists teach today. They would not recognize infant baptism; they believed baptism should be limited to believers. They refused to recognize the baptism of the Catholic party. (At that time the Catholic party had not entirely coalesced into the Roman Catholic Church as we know it.) If someone came to them from the Catholics, they required them to be baptized. The Catholics said they rebaptized them. The Donatists said they only baptized them; their first baptism was not valid.
One of the reasons they would not recognize Catholic baptism was that many of the Catholic preachers were openly immoral. They insisted wicked preachers could not perform valid baptism. Augustine claimed the wickedness of the preacher did not affect his ability to baptize.
They insisted they were the true church and the Catholic party was not. For these doctrines and others, Augustine pursued them, closed their churches, and claimed their meeting houses for his own party. He had their preachers banished from the land, and if they persisted in returning, he had them executed. It was because of that the Donatists charged him with making martyrs of their preachers.
One thousand years later, John Calvin and the other Reformers would follow precisely in the footsteps of Augustine. They copied more than his doctrine. They copied his bloodthirst for preachers who would not submit to their authority.
When Calvin wrote about Anabaptists, he called them heretics and blasphemers, dogs and filthy dogs, swine and filthy swine. He made no effort to conceal his bitter hatred for them, and to the limit of his ability he dealt with them the same way Augustine had dealt with the Donatists.
Those who think we criticize Calvin and the Reformers unnecessarily should put themselves in the place of the wife of some Anabaptist preacher, who stood by, watching helplessly as her husband was burned alive. She watched in horror as his skin blistered and burned, and his hair caught on fire. Imagine the feelings that must have gone through her as she wondered what would become of her and her little family. Imagine how bewildered she must have been, as she wondered how those Protestant preachers could get such satisfaction in delivering other preachers to be killed.
In order to justify their treatment of Anabaptists, the Reformers made the most outrageous charges against them. They accused them of baptizing people naked, devil worship, conniving at human sacrifice, plurality of wives, plotting to overthrow the government, etc. They used every means available to inflame the masses against them.
Baptists have never seen the need for supplements to the Bible. For that reason they have never adopted confessions of faith in the manner the Reformers have. But in the 1600’s and 1700’s they put out a spate of confessions.
Those confessions of faith were totally different from the Protestant confessions. They were never intended to be supplements to the Bible, and they were not intended to be standards of doctrine. They were purely a defensive measure. They hoped that by issuing a clear statement of what they believed, and how they worshiped God, they could get the Reformers to stop torturing and killing them. They enjoyed very little success; the Reformers already knew what they believed. It was their existence they resented.
There are those in our day who pretend those Baptists put out their confessions voluntarily, but we have their word for it, they would never have put out a confession if they had not been forced to do so.
In the preface to the second volume of his four volume history, Thomas Crosby tells us, “And the rather, because they declare, ‘they are forced against their whole minds to publish it, for the clearing of their innocency in such things.’” Notice that he quotes them as saying they were “forced against their whole minds to publish it.”
Crosby lived during the time those confessions were being issued. His father in law, Benjamin Keach, was one of the three leading Baptists in England. The other two were Hansard Knollys and William Kiffin. All three of them signed the Second London Confession. It seems reasonable to think the signatories of the confession were better aware of their own motives than those who try to second guess them in this day.
They issued the confession, because their very lives, and the safety of their families, depended on it. They did it in an effort to get the Protestants to stop tormenting them.
Our Calvinist friends will continue to rewrite their own history. They will continue to cover up the cruelty of their founders. But history is too plain to be concealed. Anyone with the will to look at the record can learn the facts. The only difference between persecution by Catholics and persecution by Protestants was in the duration and the scope.
2. Judaism perverted circumcision. They looked to it for salvation, and insisted that salvation only reached so far as circumcision reached. If one was not circumcised he was doomed. Augustine preached that baptism took the place of circumcision. The Law called for babies to be circumcised; therefore babies ought to be baptized. Like Judaism before him, he taught that salvation only reached so far as baptism reached, and he pursued to the death those who refused to submit their babies for baptism.
3. Judaism had church/state union with the High Priest at its head. Both Augustine and Calvin insisted the church should be allied with the state, and the government should have the power to enforce religious decisions. The Westminster Confession (Chap. 23, sec. 3) still claims the right of the civil magistrate to suppress heresy, and to see to it that church ordinances are “duly settled, administered, and observed,” in other words to prosecute those who will not submit to their authority. It is only the First Amendment to the Constitution that prevents them.
4. Judaism called on the scriptures for their authority, but they had their huge body of tradition as supplements to the scriptures. Augustine claimed the authority of Confessions of Faith, and decisions of Councils as supplements to the scriptures. Especially with his notion of the union of church and state, he called on the decrees of the magistrate as authority. One thousand years later, Calvinists would prepare such documents as the Westminster, Savoy and Belgic Confessions, and the Canons of Dort as their secondary authorities to supplement the Bible.
5. Judaism changed what they did not like about the Law. Augustine claimed the same right. He substituted the baptism of babies for the baptism of believers. Calvin would later claim the right to change sprinkling for immersion where immersion was not convenient, because of weather, etc.
Augustine and the Catholic party finally prevailed, but it was only after they had closed literally thousands of Donatist churches, killed many of their preachers, and confiscated their meeting houses.
We already quoted Sylvester Hassell to the effect that, “Augustine’s theory of the right of a State to persecute its citizens to make them conform to a national religion involved the germs of absolute spiritual despotism, and of even the horrors of the Inquisition.”
The pattern laid down by Augustine in his campaign against the Donatists set the pattern for the Roman Catholic Church for more than a thousand years. Literally rivers of blood were shed by those who thought they had the right to persecute and kill those who would not submit to their authority. Augustine was long since dead when the Roman Catholic Inquisition was doing its torture and killing, but he was the man who laid the groundwork.
The Inquisition was a court system set up by the Catholic authorities to try those whom they deemed to be heretics. Those who refused to deny their faith were tortured and killed in the most diabolical ways. They were burned at the stake. They were put on the rack, and their bones were pulled out of joint. They were tied up in sacks with scorpions. They were scalded with boiling oil. Human ingenuity exhausted itself in devising new ways of torture.
That persecution reached its height in what has come to be called the Spanish Inquisition. Thomas Torquemada was at its head. Under his leadership there was a constant parade of innocent victims led to the stake and burned alive. Their only offence was in worshiping God in a manner not approved by the Roman Catholic authorities. He did his job so well that today, over four hundred years later, Spain is still virtually clear of spiritual religion.
Our Calvinist historians have been faithful to relate the huge numbers of their own people who were killed during the Roman Catholic Inquisition. But they have been as silent as the tomb about literally thousands of innocent, God-fearing preachers who were torn from their homes, from their families, from their churches, and finally banished from the land—by this first and most illustrious Calvinist preacher.
For almost 400 years now, the Protestants have been grinding out their books, rewriting their history. They have kept us well informed about the suffering they experienced at the hands of the Roman Catholic authorities during what has come to be known as the Inquisition. What they have been very careful not to mention is that when the Calvinists were in authority, they were just as bloodthirsty as the Inquisitors ever were.
The main difference was that the Roman Catholics persecuted Protestants and Baptists, while the Protestants and Catholics both persecuted the Baptists. That was the one thing they could agree on. They were both determined the Baptists must not survive.
We have already pointed out that Calvinism did not begin with John Calvin. Calvin simply resurrected the ideas put forth over a thousand years before by Augustine. That fact becomes obvious to anyone reading Calvin’s huge work, The Institutes of the Christian Religion. If you will go through the two volumes underscoring his various quotes (underscore the name of the source only), you will notice, first, that except for a few quotes from pagan philosophers, his quotes are always from Roman Catholic authorities. You will also notice that he quotes Augustine twice as often as he quotes all the other Catholic authorities put together.
The Reformers never intended to forsake the Catholic religion; they intended to live and die as good Catholics. They just did not intend to be Roman Catholics. They would not be subject to the Pope of Rome. Calvin and the other Reformers hoped to bring about a reformation, to produce a new form, of the Catholic religion. That is why it is called the Protestant Reformation (literally the re-form-ation). Calvin wanted to restore the Catholic religion to what it had been in the time of Augustine. In that he was totally successful. The Presbyterian Church of Calvin’s day was precisely what the Catholic Church had been in Augustine’s day.
In this little booklet we have only taken the briefest look at those doctrines both Catholicism and Calvinism borrowed from Judaism. There are several doctrines on which Calvinists and Catholics disagreed. The Reformers dropped auricular confession, selling indulgences, and penance. They did not carry over the doctrine of purgatory, or limbo, or transubstantiation, or papal infallibility. But even though they did not claim infallibility, anybody who refused to subscribe to Calvin’s confession was forbidden to live in Geneva. Claiming to believe all that is in the Bible was not enough; they had to subscribe to Calvin’s confession. That seems close to claiming infallibility for Calvin.
There were several points on which the Reformers disagreed with Rome, but on those principles they borrowed from Judaism, Catholicism and Calvinism were and are identical.
There is much more that needs to be said about Calvinism, and I am preparing a book of about 200 to 250 pages in which we will take a longer look at the system. The book is almost complete, and we expect to send it to the printer by January 31st.
In that book, among other things, we will notice that John Calvin did not himself fully believe the Five Points. He believed in Unconditional Election, but, inconsistent though it was, we will show that he preached Universal Atonement.
The Synod of Dort and the Westminster Confession taught that man’s depravity is the source of his sin, and man only sins when God permits him to sin. In the book we will show by direct quotes from Calvin that he laughed at the notion of God only permitting sin. He taught that when men sin, it is because God holds the helm, and directs their efforts. He insisted they sin because God bends them to execute his judgments. He went so far as to say that God “forces the reprobate to do him service.” None of the great Protestant Confessions would go with Calvin so far as to say God forces sinners to sin.
We will show that even though the Five Points, as they were preached by John Calvin, resemble five points of the doctrine of salvation by grace, it is only a resemblance. John Calvin was seriously at odds with Bible doctrine on every single one of those doctrines.
We will show that the Baptists in England in the 1600’s were some of the bravest, and most self-sacrificing people that ever lived. They showed enormous steadfastness as they suffered every indignity we can imagine at the hand of their Calvinist tormenters. We will show that the Protestants put the Catholics to shame in their ability to torment Baptists.
We must be very cautious and very reverent when we talk about those brave warriors. For that matter, we should be very careful about criticizing those brave men who put out the London Confession and other confessions of that time.
We are walking on sacred ground. None of us have spent years starving and freezing in a filthy jail for the things we preach. None of us have worried about how our wives and little ones were suffering while we were languishing in jail. None of us have seen our husbands beaten and hanged.
But while we bow our heads with tears in our eyes when we consider the faithfulness of those brave warriors, we still need to be aware that for all their faithfulness, they made just as serious mistakes as the Baptists in any age have.
For one thing, at the same time they were planting Baptist churches, many of the Baptists of that day, especially around London, had not yet broken with the Establishment Church. Henry Jessey was still ministering to the Establishment church at St. George’s in the morning, while he served a Baptist congregation in the afternoon. John Tombes was the minister of the Establishment church at Bewdly, when according to Crosby’s History, he “there gathered a separate church of those of his own persuasion, continuing at the same time minister of the parish.” The list goes on and on of those who served Baptist and Protestant churches at the same time.
The point is that, regardless of how brave, and how self sacrificing those men were, the very last place you should go to look for Baptist infallibility is among preachers who serve as Baptist pastors at the same time the serve as pastors of Protestant churches. And, that being the case, we should not be surprised that they incorporate some Protestant doctrine in any confession they put forth. There were a lot of subjects they had not made up their minds about. The purpose of the gospel was one of them.
We will show that when the Puritans (Calvinists all) came to America, they set up a tyrannical theocracy, especially in New England, in which they tortured, banished and, sometimes, killed, those who would not submit to their authority. They arrested Obadiah Holmes and beat him publicly for no other offense than preaching without their permission. They took a whip with three prongs and laid thirty lashes on his back. For weeks he had to sleep on his knees and elbows; he could not suffer his back to touch the bed.
They persecuted Baptists in that manner until the First Amendment took away their power to do so. We will show that, while the First Amendment denied the federal government the power to regulate religion, it did not take that power from the states, and it was another fifty years before, in 1841, the Puritans (Congregationalists) in New England were finally forced to relinquish that power.
During that intervening 50 years, they still taxed the general population to pay their own preachers. They continued to seize the property of Baptists and claim it for their own. Isaac Backus was a well known Baptist preacher. His aged mother refused to pay her tax to support the establishment preacher. She was sick and burning with a fever, when the authorities arrested her on a cold, rainy, winter night, and carted her off to jail.
We will show that, even when Baptists began to gain some relief from paying to support Establishment preachers, they still had to prove they were supporting their own denomination and their own preachers. One statute required them to produce endorsement from five churches, and they had to prove the orthodoxy of those churches. It was against that backdrop they were virtually forced to adopt the New Hampshire and Philadelphia Confessions. That was the only way they could retain their church property, blunt the malicious charges the establishment preachers made against them, and gain some relief from their oppressive taxes.
We will show that when the Separate and Regular Baptists came together in 1787, they did it on the basis of the London Confession. But they adopted the confession with the understanding that nobody was required to believe all of it. That was the result of a compromise with Arminians in their own ranks. Again, any collection of Arminians and predestinarians is not a good place to look for Baptist infallibility.
We will show that John Leland compared those who placed too much confidence in any confession with those Catholics who place too much confidence in the virgin Mary.
The First Amendment makes the former kind of persecution more difficult, but it does not entirely prevent it. Even now there is a strong movement in America to curtail religious freedom.
We will look at the effect the recent Supreme Court decision with regard to Eminent Domain will have on religion. City governments can now seize private property and award it to private developers. If they choose to do so, there is nothing to prevent those developers from then selling a portion of that property to any church with sufficient funds to meet building codes and zoning restrictions.
For a long time Disney Corporation has been no friend to the Christian religion. They aggressively support gay rights; and they lace their children’s films with pagan themes, and sexual innuendo. For the last 9 years they have been boycotted by American Family Association.
But according to World magazine (Dec. 15, 2005), “Al Weiss, a top-ranking Disney executive, is planting churches— doctrinally sound ones, and lots of them. As chairman of the board for newly formed Vision USA, Mr. Weiss aims to raise $300 million over the next ten years for aggressive church planting in 50 of the country’s most influential cities.”
Thanks to the Supreme Court, they can again take your church building and transfer ownership to another church. Only today it takes three or four steps to do what once only required one or two steps.
Lest we might be too reassured by the promise that those new churches will be doctrinally sound, we should read the rest of the article. We are told the organization has teamed up with “a former youth pastor at John Piper’s Bethlehem Baptist church” and “Though affiliated with the Baptist General Conference (BGC), Vision USA has partnered with a range of denominations willing to affirm the Lausanne Covenant, male eldership and Reformed theology—most recently aligning with Redeemer Presbyterian Church in New York City.”
It sounds for all the world like we are being led right back to the very practices the First Amendment put a stop to.
The government would never try to tax people to pay the salaries of denominational preachers. But there are those who are even now trying to find a way for the government to fund what they call faith based initiatives. That will free up those churches’ other funds to pay their preachers. The bottom line is still the same.
Our liberties are under attack. For over 200 years Americans have been properly proud of our freedom of speech, but Congress has a bill in conference that would make it a hate crime to criticize homosexuality. If that bill becomes law, any minister can be arrested and prosecuted for saying homosexuality is sinful. It is already happening in Canada and Sweden. If the law passes, it will happen here.
And if the courts decide the pastor was speaking as an agent of the church, it is a short step to arguing that any homosexual can sue the members of that church for civil damages. There is more than one way to take away our meeting houses, our homes, our property.
Someone has said, “Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty.” I believe that is right. Someone else has said, “Forewarned is forearmed.” We hope to have the book ready to distribute by April. I believe the need is urgent, and it is our goal to provide a free copy for every preacher who will return a request card.
We request your prayers and any assistance you may feel impressed to provide for what I believe is a necessary effort.
THE END