God’s forgotten Word 6 Lost Lawbook 5 Heretics

Heretic

Throughout the Middle Ages small groups Bible believers, who often clandestinely had a Bible in their vernacular (a most precious asset at the time) opposed these developments. But we know little about their actual circumstances. They were often fiercely persecuted by the state church and portrayed as heretics and apostates from the right doctrine.

Disputatio pro declaratione virtutis indulgentiarum, 95 theses (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

What we know, we know of their persecutors, and it will be clear that that is not objective reporting. That changed with the Reformation. The revolt against Rome was seized by some more radical thinkers to return to the original situation. The Reformers felt even initially for those ideas that were quite clear of biblical nature. But over time they have turned away from these groups. Their ideas were for them too radical in their eyes and the time was not yet ripe. The protective hand of local government was their preferred, and they asked again for a state church, be it at the national level and no longer directed from Rome. This resulted finally in a prosecution of those who really wanted to return to the faith of the Apostles, a prosecution that was as bright as that of Rome, and only recently the applied qualification ‘Anabaptist‘ (as they were called by their opponents) still was the most despicable heretical curse in both Catholic and Reformed circles (when I was a few years ago in a correspondence with a Reformed Christian and told that our biblical view was akin to that of the 16th century Anabaptists, he thanked me very much for my openness, as if I had just confessed that I was a sex murderer in my spare time, of course, that was the end of the correspondence).

Dissemination of Anabaptism over Western Europe in the period 1525-1550

Verduin shows that the Reformers thus maintained the sacred character of their churches. And they defended it with the same quasi-scriptural evidence that the church in Constantine’s day had done. This sacred character therefore also features many of today’s Protestant churches, even though we now experience a complete separation between church and state. And there lies before us a fundamental distinction. The Brethren in Christ perhaps among the last who appeared on the historical stage that the “constantinic mistake ‘have been recognized. But it is certainly one of the reasons that we are forced to go our own way with respect, opposite most churches around us.
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* Editors Note: In the years, several Anabaptist and Baptist groups also preferred to enjoy the pagan festivals and human traditions and took more and more the site of the trinitarian churches.

Preceding:

God’s forgotten Word 4 Lost Lawbook 3 Early digressions and Constantinic revolution

God’s forgotten Word 5 Lost Lawbook 4 The ‘Catholic’ church

Dutch version / Nederlandse versie: Gods vergeten Woord 6 Verloren Wetboek 5 Ketters

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