The early 16th-century Protestant reformers Martin Luther and John Calvin were not enlightened, forward-thinking individuals. They were brutal, superstitious, intolerant, and repressive individuals who exploited popular
stereotypes of "witches" in order to persecute those who disagreed with their views.
The Protestants' use of the witch craze to enforce religious orthodoxy was no less dramatic than that of the Catholics. One of Martin Luther's tools for attracting a mass following to his breakaway movement from the Catholic Church was the use of powerful emotional imagery. Just as he compared Rome to Babylon and the Pope to the Antichrist following his rejection of papal authority during the Leipzig debate in 1519, Luther was ready to brand eccentric or ideologically divergent individuals as "the Devil's wh~or~es."
Luther, in his 1522 sermon, charged the "witches" with a litany of supernatural behaviors, including transformation into different animals, accusations which, to the rationally thinking mind, would be ludicrous indeed. This further demonstrates that Luther's motive for breaking away from the Catholic Church was not to defend freedom of individual thought, but to establish a religious orthodoxy of his own.
Luther, in addition to his intense anti-Semitism, strived to encourage the adoption of his version of Protestantism as the state-sponsored religion of numerous German principalities, at the expense of the religious freedoms of those principalities' citizens. His intolerance extended even to the Zwinglians in Switzerland, with whom he exhibited only a minor disagreement over transubstantiation. Luther would undoubtedly have been eager to use the fear of witches as yet another weapon to direct mass hostility against those whose views diverged with his own.
John Calvin's description of witches in the Institutes of the Christian Religion even more transparently revealed his true motives of combating dissension from his version of Protestantism. Calvin draws, from his
passage on witchcraft, the conclusion that "we have to wage war against an infinite number of enemies." Calvin might have included under this category anyone who did not conform to the dicta of his strict church government in Geneva.
Calvin's policy was to stringently oversee people's private lives, church attendance, and intellectual expression, and ensure that nothing they said or did would displease God. It should therefore come as no surprise that Geneva experienced a far larger number of witch hunts than most other major European cities. H.C. Erik Midelfort's statistics show Geneva as having experienced 95 cases of witch persecution over 125 years, almost two and a half times more than had occurred in the entire Department of the Nord in France during 137 years.
Calvin was frank about his use of the witch craze to enforce the power of his own theocratic order, stating in the Institutes that he had brought up the entire issue "in order that we may be aroused and exhorted," i.e., rallied behind Calvin's religious movement.
I don't even want to call this person "Jude" anymore.
What a disgusting pack of lies.
This is something one could find on www.infidels.org
I think the only thing that is right, were the spelling of the names.
Why did you give the author?
Why did you put such slanderous lies on a Christian website???
There are some REALLY messed up people on CDFF discussion group!
And then of course we have the obligatory smart aleck comments by those who are literally childish enough to IGNORE that the article is a hit piece, and they don't even question why the authors name is not given.
James what did you say about people on this board is it not you that even recently try to slander those that are called of god and are great soul winners.
I ask again why do you get angry when people obey the gospel and are saved?
When I first came on this group, you rarely even replied to anyone concerning the subject being talked about.
I have read several people on this group ATTEMPT to understand your nonsensical ramblings, and they failed, because you would never make any sense.
As of late you have at least improved on being able to stay on a topic.
Now you are asking me why I supposedly get angry when someone "Obeys the Gospel and gets saved"?
There is no such thing as a Christian who gets angry when someone repents and trusts in Jesus.
What you are lying about, is that your Finney worship is out in the open now!
Charles finney reduced Adam to a bad example, and reduced Jesus to a good example, and taught that salvation can be had by works!!!
Your theology is DEEPLY messed up, and you picked a DEEPLY messed up individual to follow. The thing that makes me angry with you is, all this time I have posted on church history, and the rules of interpretation, and Reformed theology, and Christian living, and the Puritans, etc, YOU HAVE ACCUSED ME of teaching "doctrines of demons" etc, and THE WHOLE TIME YOU ARE A FOLLOWER OF CHARLES FINNEY!!!
I ASKED you twice what kind of church do you attend, and you would not answer. It was only by chance, when I posted an article on the sad legacy of Charles Finney, that you showed your hand!!
So,
1. You have been dishonest about WHERE you are coming from concerning the Bible.
2. You have been attacking me the whole time, and saying that I follow Calvin, when YOU are the one who has picked ONE MAN to follow and that is Charles Finney!!
Shared ~ I don't even want to call this person "Jude" anymore. What a disgusting pack of lies.
*** :waving:...Thats the name GOD has Given me...take it up with Him...and the Truth of History and the People within it will always Be Spoken for the Glory of GOD...I'd say these Dudes were both into Living a Lie...and Believeing it...what a Shame...to take Life for Self Righteous Glory...xo
Just trot off and find one negative article on Luther and Calvin by some enemy of the faith, and then you are done!
You don't have to read any long books by historians, and anytime anyone mentions anything pertaining to the Reformation, you will just ignore it, because after all you did find one article by someone, who knows, because you did not give the authors name.
It is like you saved yourself a lot of reading and thinking just by that one act.
In Case you repent of this attitude someday, please write this down and I think it will benefit you greatly:
There is a fantastic two volume set that you can even get in paperback called:
"A History of Christianity" by Kenneth Scott Latourette.
Christianbook,com has a great price on these, and you can buy one volume at a time if you wish. The first one starts at the beginning and goes to the year 1500. The second one starts at 1500 and then goes up to modern times.
