Spinning off wildly from Luther's Reformation, radical Anabaptists led by Jan Matthys tried to form a communal theocracy in Munster. Matthys was a fanatic (in the negative sense) and on Easter Sunday, 1535, stormed the besieging Catholic-Lutheran army (strange bedfellows!) with 30 followers believing himself to be a modern day Gideon - and was quickly dispatched.
In his place, Jan van Leiden took his place as "King David" of Munster, the "New Jerusalem" (yeah, it's a weird story) and continued where Matthys left off. Eventually, and quite soon, two citizens became fed up with the whole fiasco and they opened one of the city gates to the army outside, who entered and took the city.
In January of 1536, van Leiden and two of his henchmen were condemned, torn apart with hot pincers and their bodies were hung in iron cages suspended from the steeple of St. Lambert's church. The cages are still there to this day.
What's the point of all this? There are probably many, but for this post, the point shall be the importance of truth and sound doctrine. Martin Luther made a glorious discovery when the Holy Spirit revealed grace to him and redeemed his soul from its prison. His revolution was a turning point in church history. As that missile of truth rocketed brightly into the darkness of medieval Europe, there was some obviously errant debris. And since there is nothing new under the sun, we must realize that in our time everything slapped with the label "Christian" isn't necessarily so. There is no end to the heretical wackiness that many mistake for the true Gospel these days. We must be careful. We must know the Word, we must preach the Word.
If you want to read further on this odd little bit of history, I recommend The Unquenchable Flame, an extremely readable account of the Reformation period, and you can also read the Wikipedia article on the topic.
5 comments:
If we tore heretics apart with hot pincers and hung their shredded bodies in little cages outside our churches, the Christian bookstores would look a lot different.
For the record, I'm glad we don't. Your call to sound doctrine is a better way.
Blessings,
Derek
Derek - I just laughed SO hard! Great, great point...;)
weird...just discussing theocratic communalism/socialism this afternoon...seriously.
and hey, i have that book!
Kevin - Is that what G.P.s discuss over lunch?
And I'm going to have to step it up if this pile of books is to be read by the end of the year. . .
actually, it was at our fellowship gathering on saturday...our current afternoon study is "what is a healthy church" (dever), and we somehow got to discussing why socialism doesn't work on a large scale: people are too greedy/self-centered by nature, nobody knows the future, and nobody can understand the entire system/country at one time.
introducing God into the equation undoes all these problems. a benevolent dictatorship/theocracy with God at the head, functioning socialistically is probably the ideal system. the problem, of course, is that right here, right now, God is not in the equation, therefore a capitalistic, representative government probably works the best to keep those other factors in check. as believers, however, we need to realize this distinction. while the latter is probably the best system for this broken world, the kingdom will most certainly be closer to the former.
so many american christians seem to worship a nostalgic ideal they have of our government in times gone by, practically equating patriotism with saving faith, embracing individual liberty at all cost, bristling at notions of spreading the wealth, a king, etc.
don't get me wrong; i'm all in favor of the system for the here and now (and certainly opposed to our recent trend toward socialism), but perhaps inside the church should look different. we should be unquestionably submitted to our benevolent dictator/king and we should be putting the needs of our (faith) community ahead of our individual needs. our ingrained, rugged, american individualism (is that one word?) fights against striving for the picture that Scripture presents of the body working together, submitted to the head. it's not survival of the fittest, or every man for himself, and it's not a democracy. anyway...that's how we got to theocratic socialism :-)
and nah, FPs just complain about not having enough time over lunch to discuss things over lunch.
seriously, how many of those books are you going to try to tackle this year? i don't think i've started any of them...actually i started listening to "finally alive" (piper) last night on my way home from work, if that counts...anyway, i still have too many on my list from before the conference... :-0
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