Religion for Mormons and other Idiots

American religion evolved primarily out of various Anglified variants of Calvinism. Calvin had almost nothing in common with Joseph Smith theologically, though Smith had been brought up on huge doses of Calvinism. Not much of it seemed to have rubbed off however. Calvin’s offshoot sects like the Presbyterians, came to be be Smith’s political and theological arch-enemies.

Calvin was no stranger to persecution of course, but unlike Joseph Smith he quickly learned how to politic himself into a position of power through stirring up the masses and local clergy to support him. He could also argue his way out of the noose when called upon and barely escaped being branded a heretic himself early on. Like Joseph Smith, he was a self-made “Prophet,” only he didn’t believe in those, or a self-declared “Pope” except he didn’t believe in those either. He had no easy credentials, no “Old School Tie” connections to speak of, no inherent money, lands, titles, legal, political or social power base. Everything he built in his Geneva Empire he pulled out of his own arse and had to create on the spot. Calvin literally created his own theocracy and assumed the role of its Protector for Life. To do this he took an urban wilderness apart at the seams and rebuilt it in his own image. With little more than his own big mouth and clever pen, he ousted political, social, and religious authorities who had ruled the “civilized” world for centuries. You can’t knock success.

But John Calvin beat Joe Smith to the New World, and because Calvin’s theocratic descendants knew exactly what Calvin would be doing if he had been the one founding America, American Christians for the most part just presumed from the start that Old Joe Smith would be attempting to pull off the same sort of theocratic dictatorship. Quite apart from doctrinal differences, this political reality in an American system meant that Christians could not let Mormons participate on an even playing field or they could simply recruit and reproduce themselves into political orthodoxy anywhere they established a social power base. That’s far easier to do in America than it is with an official State religion where Christians could easily define Mormonism out of the entire political and social process. That’s what Constantine did. That’s what Calvin did. That’s what virtually every one of the Protestant Reformers did. How even a hugely Christian majority could do the same thing in a Constitutional Republic with specific Constitutional protections for freedom of worship, became a serious frustration for anti-Mormon Christian crusaders.

Christian America’s reaction to Revolutionary Joe Smith has been from the start, primarily a territorial dispute rather than strictly a doctrinal or authoritarian one. Smith was threatening Protestant America’s ownership of the hearts, minds, and bodies of the New World simply by being allowed to exist. The specifics of his doctrines were only relevant insofar as they could be firmly defined as heretical, and that could have come down to anything from denouncing infant baptism, the Triune God, the Inerrancy of the King James Bible, or any number of pet, historically hot Christian controversies, depending upon which Christian clergy was looking to put down Mormonism.

Joseph Smith’s most offensive heresy however, in the minds of the professional Christians offended by it, was the very notion that some rural hick in his pre-teen years could turn whole populations against thousands of years of conventional Christianity based entirely upon a claim to personal revelation. If the general population was somehow willing to accept that premise, then anyone could worship God however they wanted and could establish by public acclaim any new creed or clergy they felt most comfortable with. The professional American Christian clergy would no longer have a captive audience. America’s up-and-coming Christian ministries certainly couldn’t have that sort of competition going on in their expansive, newly planted American fields of self-imagined glory.

America in Joseph Smith’s day represented the largest wide-open potential Christian harvest in the history of the planet. Those who owned the Christian brand at the time saw that if they did not vigorously–even violently–guard its use, it meant that America would become a place where anyone could come up with a more popular twist on the Bible or religion in general, and freely steal their sheep away. They saw that if they were forced by their own Church traditions to insist upon preaching doctrines to, and haranguing their congregations with dogma that generations of thinking Christians have known to be irrational, illogical, and often just plain asinine, they would never be able to compete against somebody free to deliver a gospel that made sense for a change. (Or at least, made more sense.) If Joe Smith were allowed by “inspiration” to say, no, there’s no such thing as immaterial matter, or that God just exists as a finer form of matter, but neither matter nor intelligence can be created nor destroyed, the fact is, unlike the Platonic, Athanasian, non-God that Christians are compelled to defend, an intangible being who is made of nothing and yet fills an infinitely huge universe, which He incidentally created out of nothing, Smith’s version is going to leave the professional Christian with merely a few obtuse apologies centered around murky mysticism, to try to cover up the clear impression most intelligent listeners would get, that Joe Smith makes absolute sense and his notion of God and physics are apparently scientifically valid.

In frontier America, if anyone was going to be fleecing America’s thriving flocks, it was going to be Christians. Professional, properly trained Christians. Even though the professional Christians in America’s revivalist-driven frenzies at the start of the 19th century fought fervently amongst themselves to define what exactly a Christian actually was, or what the word even meant, they were all pretty certain it didn’t include Joe Smith and his Mormons. Ultimately however, Christianity could not find a Constitutional relief from Mormonism. So Christianity went outside the Constitution and invented a form of Holy Retribution that became known as “mobocracy.” Where Calvin would have simply had the lawmen he owned haul Joseph Smith into the courts he owned, and torture a confession out of him after the Church thugs he owned had beaten him senseless enough, and then Calvin could have executed Joe Smith in a public square that he also owned, Calvin’s American children could only effect the same arrangement by assembling masses of Christian clergy and congregational supporters, declaring Joe Smith a heretic in absentia, and then execute their verdict through an embrace of violence and encouragement to the reprobates, low-lifes and back-sliders within their own congregations, or even unfocussed n’er-do-wells loafing around within earshot, to go enjoy whatever wicked pleasure they might gain from tormenting, sacking, pillaging, raping and murdering the Mormons with the blessing of God, and with full assurance that as non-Christian blasphemers and heretics, Mormons are beyond the protection of American justice. (Like Negros and Indians.)

Where Calvin would have had his own lawmen and politicians openly enact and enforce anti-Mormon statutes by force of arms, America’s career Christian religionists generally had to settle for an agreement from their civil officials and officers of the law to look the other way, or just be out of town that day, as the mobs did the dirty work of insuring Christian control over all civic affairs.

Like Joseph Smith, Calvin made beginner’s mistakes that could have ruined him. For instance, because John Calvin was throughout his religious career essentially making it up as he went, claiming the Bible as his and God’s only authority on this earth, one of his first major religious scuffles before coming to undisputable power in Geneva was with a French refugee, Pierre Caroli, a pastor who was a stickler for “orthodoxy.” In his many lectures and tours, Calvin was always imprecise in his Trinitarian and other “orthodox” terminology. The peculiar Calvinist vernacular he invented became a target for detractors who saw that he didn’t have the Latin Church creeds and related jargon down well enough in their minds to be considered reliably schooled in Christianity. In fairness to Calvin, this is because none of it is actually in the Bible.

Caroli accused Calvin of Arianism and Sabellianism, a couple of old anti-Trinitarian “heresies” supposedly long settled in both Roman, Eastern, Lutheran and most other Protestant circles. Caroli’s charges centered around the notion that Calvin never used the word “Trinity,” he used “Godhead,” and his Geneva Church did not formally subscribe to the Athanasian Creed. The Confession of Faith he forced his entire city to swear to didn’t specifically contain any Trinitarian language either. In 1537 Calvin and his cloister of religious consultants were therefore called before the synod in Bern and back-pedaled their way out of the charge of heresy with some effort and then kicked Caroli out of town and permanently banished him.

I’ve always found this brush with heresy on Calvin’s part amusingly hypocritical in light of the fact that some few years later, after ascending to his throne in Geneva, he would be condemning Michael Servetus to the fire for being anti-Trinitarian, the same charge Caroli used to almost get Calvin burned to a crisp. And if I can compare Joseph Smith just once more with John Calvin, we see that Smith’s biggest sin from the professional Christian’s perspective seemed to be that he just didn’t ever seem to play the Christian game by the established rules. Some rules were just not to be questioned, and Trinitarianism was probably the most sacrosanct of them all in either the Roman or mainstream Protestant traditions. If you could prove your critics and opponents were anti-Trinitarian, it was sure-fire trip to the gallows or the stake—or if you were under Calvin’s rule, he seemed to prefer decapitation with a pretty, ceremonial sword he kept around for the purpose. So, just in example, when Calvin recognized his Trinitarian error, he did not say, no Bishop, it’s just not in the Bible so it isn’t true. He said, yes sir, no sir, three bags full sir, and moved on. (He did not however, go back and amend any of his confessions of faith to include Trinitarian language, nor did he append to any of his theological dogma either the Nicene or Athanasian Creeds.)

Unlike Luther and most other Reformers, Calvin skipped out on his Catholic education and was not at all well versed in the traditions of the Church Fathers and their various creeds. In fact when confronted with the writings of the Church Fathers or Apostolic Fathers by opponents or debaters, Calvin would just say he had the “original” Greek manuscripts, he had the Latin and the Hebrew and could read from the original Biblical authors themselves. Sola Scriptura or the Bible Only was his motto. He didn’t care what some minor African bishop like Augustine of Hippo or some Roman Catholic council had to say about the metaphysical character of Deity back in 326 AD. (I won’t go again into the fundamental stupidity of his assumption that he had the “original” Biblical texts at his disposal.) He did however have the oldest Greek and Latin texts then in existence, and it could be argued that he would therefore be more reliable in his resources than say, the King James “Authorized Version” is then or now. In fact there is an ongoing battle between modern sects who are essentially Calvinist most of them, who view the King James Version to be absolutely inerrant, and a modern class of scholars who in fact take Calvin’s argument and make it a point to catalogue every single error in this inerrant work, based strictly upon how it differs from the Latin and Greek texts it was allegedly taken from.

http://www.biblestudy.org/basicart/what-are-the-errors-in-king-james-version-bible.html

http://www.bible.ca/b-kjv-only.htm

http://bible.org/article/why-i-do-not-think-king-james-bible-best-translation-available-today

http://www.raptureready.com/rr-kjvo.html

http://www.theology.edu/journal/volume1/tr.htm

http://www.religioustolerance.org/chr_bibl.htm

http://www.av1611.org/kjv/fight.html

The King James inerrancy battle should keep you occupied for a day or so browsing the net for links, if you really want to understand the base stupidity of  Calvin’s claim that God’s Church and the laws of God can be reliably extracted from what we have left of Canonical scripture whatever the manuscript. And when Joseph Smith came up all non-Trinitarian-ish after his First Vision, it wasn’t anything Calvin hadn’t been accused of long before. When Joseph Smith said the American standard, the King James Bible, wasn’t a perfect representation of the original texts, well, Calvin had already been there and done that. The same group of people bashing Joseph Smith on the head with the King James Version back in the frontier era, today now find that Joseph has rather a lot of support coming from scholars and doctors of divinity, and the intellectual giants of Christianity—just the sort of people his detractors claimed Joseph Smith was not and therefore everyone of letters surely knew with absolute certainty that Smith’ opinions about the King James Version were obviously idiotic.

As it happens, the translator of the first Bible in English, John Wycliffe, never fully documented his texts or processes. Because of this lack of scholarly surety, and the fact that Wycliffe was considered a heretic back when the Roman Church ruled England, and thus the Roman Church had put down his pre-Reformation Reformation, his manuscript and most of his copies were destroyed. After that they were too poisoned to be used by any English scholar as a basis for a new Bible anyway. Wycliffe’s English style was obsolete as well. So, the King James Version draws very heavily upon the work of William Tyndale, who’s Reformational zeal to have the scriptures in the common language drew only inspirationally from Wycliffe. Tyndale is claimed to have used only the Latin Vulgate for reverence, and is claimed to have not had access to older Greek text. The “inerrant” King James Version is therefore actually about three translations into it, Hebrew or Aramaic to Greek, Greek to Latin, and then Latin to English, before the King James scribes start their job.

It might be noted that although excommunicated by and politically severed from Rome at the time, Henry VIII wasn’t very keen on Tyndale for his efforts at making an English Bible for the masses. Henry also felt Tyndale was cheating the texts into a far more radically Protestant context than Henry felt comfortable with. Like most people who argued with Henry VIII, Tyndale was executed shortly after finishing his work. But then, Kings change and so does the Church. By James Ist’s go at the Bible, Tyndale had already done most of the hard work, thus his being inconveniently dead didn’t slow James I down at all. James I and Parliament were all all by then very happily Protestant as hell, so James didn’t mind any of Tyndale’s anti-Roman colorations. He had his team lose any Calvinistic calls to rebel from the king or Church that Tyndale may have put in the margins or allowed to be translated correctly rather than spun to favor the English Crown. Then James had his team more eloquently paraphrase Tyndale’s translation, while cross-referencing it with the ancient texts. They had a go at some Greek or Latin or even Hebrew in emergencies, compared texts back and forth, polished it all up for king and clergy, and James I quickly had himself an excellent version of the Bible in the modern, educated, “King’s English.”

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Wycliffe

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Tyndale

When John Calvin went at the Bible, he of course had older–and so he maintained a bit erroneously–more reliable texts. He wasn’t even dependent upon a translation. He had access to the oldest texts known in his day. If we concede this is true, then, one must ask, why did he miss the alleged importance of Trinitarian dogma? Calvin’s Humanist education made him quite familiar with the classical Greek logic of Plato, Aristotle and Socrates upon which the Nicene and Athanasian creeds were based. And in fairness to Calvin, when ultimately schooled by Caroli’s little Inquisition he found no intellectual reservations about Trinitarian theology. It’s just that nothing in the Biblical texts ever screamed “Trinity” at Calvin.

To Calvin, Trinitarianism was an extra-Biblical concept upon which he apparently had little or no opinion. Calvin deemed God’s nature of existence or the exact substance of His various manifestations to be fundamentally incomprehensible to the human mind, and irrelevant to the will of God in any case.

Calvin wasn’t preoccupied with knowing the nature of God, just in organizing what His rules were and making people obey them. (Mormons will tell you this is Satan’s plan, but that’s another matter.) Calvin looked at the Bible and Church tradition as a lawyer would, and systematically drew conclusions based entirely upon what he considered to be the most reliable evidence available to him in the Holy Canon.

There is only one other historical document that Calvin claims to have drawn upon in his deliberations of God’s True Will. This is known traditionally as the “Apostle’s Creed.” According to legend, the original of this document was drafted sometime in the vicinity of Christ’s passing from this earth by the Original Apostles. The story goes that they gathered together and each one contributed a portion of their personal gospel knowledge to compile its several statements, or “confessions” of Christian faith.

http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/01629a.htm

Reliable references to the Apostle’s Creed however, only date back to the time of the Apostolic Fathers, many many years after the death of the Original Apostles. The Apostolic Fathers knew the Original Apostles or close associates of them, and it is possible that it was the Apostolic Fathers who drafted this creed based upon what is now Holy Canon and even from personal memory. Even assuming that it was the Apostolic Fathers and not the Original Apostles who kicked this document off, the Apostle’s Creed, like the Bible, was still clearly never written and published in one complete and “inerrant” edition, because the many well-documented examples of it through the centuries show that it originated as a much simpler document and gradually generated into the form we find it today:

1. I believe in God the Father, Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth:

2. And in Jesus Christ, his only begotten Son, our Lord:

3. Who was conceived by the Holy Ghost, born of the Virgin Mary:

4. Suffered under Pontius Pilate; was crucified, dead and buried: He descended into hell:

5. The third day he rose again from the dead:

6. He ascended into heaven, and sits at the right hand of God the Father Almighty:

7. From thence he shall come to judge the quick and the dead:

8. I believe in the Holy Ghost:

9. I believe in the holy catholic church: the communion of saints:

10. The forgiveness of sins:

1l. The resurrection of the body:

12. And the life everlasting. Amen.

If we concede that this is the oldest and most reliable confession of Christian faith, then Mormons are obviously Christian. No Mormon would have any problem with making any one of these confessions except for a little leeway in what “conceived by the Holy Ghost,” means in actual practice. This Holy Ghost issue mind you, is something the Eastern and Western Church are still arguing about so the murky relationship between the “immaculate” conception of Mary and this Biblical allusion to the Holy Ghost and Mary “hooking up” in some fashion with one manifestation of God or another to effect her virgin impregnation is hardly a settled matter even in the historically “orthodox” Churches. Indeed, there are whole new schools of Protestant Christian scholars who are even comfortable dropping the entire “virgin birth” scenario based upon obvious errors or manipulations of Biblical texts over the ages designed to bolster this theory rather than just translate the actual record.

The truth of the matter is, the important “virgin shall conceive” Biblical prophecy of Isaiah 7:14 actually read, “a young woman shall conceive,” in literal translation from the much older Hebrew texts. The Greek Septuagint version Calvin claimed to be his “original” texts (not!) substituted “virgin” for “young woman.” It’s no great leap to assume then that the Greek scribes who “translated” what we now use as a New Testament likewise beefed up this “virgin birth” claim whenever they came across the New Testament authors’ allusions to Mary’s conception or Christ’s birth–whether it existed in the original Hebrew or Aramaic texts they copied from or not. If for no other reason they would have tended to try to keep this theme consistent by revising the thousands of years of records to plug it in where needed—whether they were just promoting this theory on a personal whim or whether it actually was true. (And I remind the reader that the original “original” texts, the so-called “Original Autographs” do not exist today. We have only the alleged copies of these allegedly original documents, made generations later by Christian scholars and historians in Greek etc.)

This is not my main point here, but I can’t resist the urge to point out that the Biblical “virgin birth” scenario also calls into question other Biblical assertions that Christ came through the line of David, which would have to mean his biological father was Joseph, not the “Holy Ghost,” or any possible “orthodox” variant of some cosmic, transcendent, Triune God-Being. The New Testament authors, as good Jews, obviously felt compelled to give us the paternal family tree of Jesus of Nazareth to fulfill the several ancient Messianic prophecies about the House of David. But in the process they blew a rather large hole in the whole “virgin birth” theory.

Some very clever Mormons out there are now chasing their tails around very self-importantly in a testimony-shaking panic, reassuring themselves from their position of higher knowledge, about “clones” and “supernatural genetic transfers” through the priesthood power of the Holy Ghost as God’s Eternal Agent, which they assume would easily explain the whole virgin birth process. A clone however, would be Mary-plus-Mary, clearly excluding Joseph’s patriarchal and priesthood lineage. Supernaturally transferred genetic material through whatever means, Whomever its Agent, would likewise bypass genetic input from Joseph’s patriarchal line. So you High Priest Groups out there in Orem, Springville and Provo just keep working on it. Personally, I’m not sure it matters much to God but if it makes you happy to speculate upon the practical application of Godly reproduction, knock yourselves out. This is the sort of rabidly marginal inbred Utah doctrinal fixations Mormon detractors embrace as a gift.

Clearly I have gone into a serious digression so I’ll just move on…

http://www.infidels.org/library/modern/richard_carrier/virginprophecy.html

http://www.city-data.com/forum/religion-philosophy/510316-line-david-contradicts-virgin-birth.html

http://www.gotquestions.org/virgin-or-young-woman.html

http://www.harrington-sites.com/terms.htm

Once again I’m only trying to point out the folly of claiming you can use the Bible and the Bible alone to “prove” what is or isn’t the “truth” with any sort of certainty. If it were that clear, we wouldn’t have hundreds of Christian sects killing themselves off back and forth over basic questions of Christian doctrine for two thousand years, beginning with the question of what is or isn’t “Canon,” what belongs, and what doesn’t belong in the “Bible,” and even the basic matter of exactly how literally this “Bible” is going to be used as a doctrinal guide.

Calvin wasn’t the first to pretend to base his entire theology upon so-called “Biblical Truth.” But Calvin was the first to successfully rid himself of a traditional clergy that would have otherwise bickered and politicked with him over its history and interpretation into some sort of moderation. Calvin was the first to actually sell an entire civilization upon the notion that one guy could deliver God-like Truth and Wisdom just by being clever with the way he gleaned through the Biblical texts.

If you look at the Apostle’s Creed however, and then read the volumes and volumes of Calvin’s own creeds, confessions of faith, and doctrinal theses, you have to conclude that John Calvin gleaned a lot more from the writings of the Biblical authors than those who actually wrote the Bible did. If we assume the Apostle’s Creed was written by the close associates of Jesus Christ within a heartbeat of His being with them personally, and this simple creed, this short statement of faith and brief historical sketch of Christ’s mission is all they thought to pass on to us as a summary of Christian belief, then the results of John Calvin’s deliberations over the Canonical texts show that Calvin had theological ideas that went well beyond the Apostle’s Creed or anything expressly in the Holy Bible itself, whatever its translation.

When Joseph Smith “straightened out” the Bible, he at least had the audacity to claim an angel had told him how to fix it, or that God or Christ or the Holy Spirit or all three at once showed him what the Biblical authors really meant to write instead of what we ended up with. Calvin, on the other hand, like most other Christian dogmatists, rather than revealing great “truths” via direct messages from Deity or other supernatural Powers-that-Be, very clearly drew his “Biblical Truth” from Classical Greek Theism and Western philosophy in general. The rest he admittedly pulled out of his backside with no apologies.

Calvin’s theology comes down to five main points-which incidentally were never written down by himself and presented coherently as five connected points. They were eventually gleaned from his writings and sermons by those wishing to debate him:

Total Depravity:
Sin has affected all parts of man. The heart, emotions, will, mind, and body are all affected by sin. We are completely sinful. We are not as sinful as we could be, but we are completely affected by sin.

The doctrine of Total Depravity is derived from scriptures that reveal human character: Man’s heart is evil (Mark 7:21-23) and sick (Jer. 17:9). Man is a slave of sin (Rom. 6:20). He does not seek for God (Rom. 3:10-12). He cannot understand spiritual things (1 Cor. 2:14). He is at enmity with God (Eph. 2:15). And, is by nature a child of wrath (Eph. 2:3). The Calvinist asks the question, “In light of the scriptures that declare man’s true nature as being utterly lost and incapable, how is it possible for anyone to choose or desire God?” The answer is, “He cannot. Therefore God must predestine.”

Calvinism also maintains that because of our fallen nature we are born again not by our own will but God’s will (John 1:12-13); God grants that we believe (Phil. 1:29); faith is the work of God (John 6:28-29); God appoints people to believe (Acts 13:48); and God predestines (Eph. 1:1-11; Rom. 8:29; 9:9-23).

Unconditional Election:
God does not base His election on anything He sees in the individual. He chooses the elect according to the kind intention of His will (Eph. 1:4-8; Rom. 9:11) without any consideration of merit within the individual. Nor does God look into the future to see who would pick Him. Also, as some are elected into salvation, others are not (Rom. 9:15, 21).

Limited Atonement:
Jesus died only for the elect. Though Jesus’ sacrifice was sufficient for all, it was not efficacious for all. Jesus only bore the sins of the elect. Support for this position is drawn from such scriptures as Matt. 26:28 where Jesus died for ‘many’; John 10:11, 15 which say that Jesus died for the sheep (not the goats, per Matt. 25:32-33); John 17:9 where Jesus in prayer interceded for the ones given Him, not those of the entire world; Acts 20:28 and Eph. 5:25-27 which state that the Church was purchased by Christ, not all people; and Isaiah 53:12 which is a prophecy of Jesus’ crucifixion where he would bore the sins of many (not all).

Irresistible Grace:
When God calls his elect into salvation, they cannot resist. God offers to all people the gospel message. This is called the external call. But to the elect, God extends an internal call and it cannot be resisted. This call is by the Holy Spirit who works in the hearts and minds of the elect to bring them to repentance and regeneration whereby they willingly and freely come to God. Some of the verses used in support of this teaching are Romans 9:16 where it says that “it is not of him who wills nor of him who runs, but of God who has mercy“; Philippians 2:12-13 where God is said to be the one working salvation in the individual; John 6:28-29 where faith is declared to be the work of God; Acts 13:48 where God appoints people to believe; and John 1:12-13 where being born again is not by man’s will, but by God’s.

Perseverance of the Saints:
You cannot lose your salvation. Because the Father has elected, the Son has redeemed, and the Holy Spirit has applied salvation, those thus saved are eternally secure. They are eternally secure in Christ. Some of the verses for this position are John 10:27-28 where Jesus said His sheep will never perish; John 6:47 where salvation is described as everlasting life; Romans 8:1 where it is said we have passed out of judgment; 1 Corinthians 10:13 where God promises to never let us be tempted beyond what we can handle; and Phil. 1:6 where God is the one being faithful to perfect us until the day of Jesus’ return.

http://calvinistcorner.com/tulip

Chronologically tag-teaming Calvin was the second major influence upon American frontier religion, the Dutch Reformer Jacobus Arminius. http://www.victorshepherd.on.ca/Heritage/Arminius.htm Arminius was born a few years before Calvin died and studied under Calvin’s brother-in-law in Geneva. He started his career as a staunch Calvinist Reformer but after a while noticed a few problems with Calvin’s Biblical and logical conclusions. It was mostly Arminius and his followers who started breaking Calvin’s teachings down into the five points he most emphasized because it was those five main points they disagreed with so much.

http://christianity.about.com/od/denominations/a/calvinarminian.htm

http://www.ondoctrine.com/10armini.htm

http://www.tlogical.net/bioarminius.htm

In a nutshell, Arminius came to argue:

• Humans are naturally unable to make any effort towards salvation (see also prevenient grace). They possess free will to accept or reject salvation.
• Salvation is possible only by God’s grace, which cannot be merited.
• No works of human effort can cause or contribute to salvation
• God’s election is conditional on faith in the sacrifice and Lordship of Jesus Christ.
• Christ’s atonement was made on behalf of all people.
• God allows his grace to be resisted by those who freely reject Christ.
• Believers are able to resist sin but are not beyond the possibility of falling from grace through persistent, unrepented-of sin.^[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arminianism

Generations later, Arminius’ theology came to be incorporated into the tenets of Baptists, Methodists, the Congregationalists in early New England colonies, the Universalists and Unitarians. Even a few “liberal” Southern Presbyterian congregations allowed some Arminian teachings—much to the chagrin of the Anglican Communion. The Smith family was associated with most of the above, particularly the Congregationalists, Universalists, and Methodists. Emma Smith, Joseph’s wife’s family were staunchly Methodist.

it was Arminian theology in particular that fueled the revivalist flames that created Joseph Smith’s so-called “Burned-Over District” in upstate New York. Christ’s “Great Commission” (Matthew 28:16) to take the gospel to the world was pretty pointless to the Calvinist, because God, in Calvinism, had already chosen those He was going to save and this election was assured and irresistible, and not based on merit at all anyway. Believe or not believe, confess or be baptized, it didn’t matter in the end. It was really all down to God, not you. The Methodists however, were driven to sell the sinner on the idea of repenting, since they believed it was the sinner’s choice to make. Salvation to the Methodist was dependent first upon you exercising your free will to accept Jesus.  And after that, Methodists were also fervently engaged in making sure they didn’t “backslide” and lose their election as they, unlike the Calvinists, believed to be possible.

http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Matthew+28%3A16-20&version=NIV

“Methodist” was originally an epithet used by Oxford students to describe the methodical way founders John Wesley, a professor there, and his younger brother Charles, had formed a “Holy Club” on campus to organize their lives. George Whitefield soon teamed with Wesley and introduced an animated form of open-air “revival” preaching to their club. Their original intent was a reorganization of the Church of England, but the whole “revivalist” approach infected branches of it to the point that they began to be called “Methodist.”

Wesley was very Arminian but Whitefield gravitated to some seriously Calvinist ideas as their church spread around Scotland and the British Isles, which strained their relationship. It was Whitefield however, who convinced Wesley it was not immoral to preach outside a consecrated church structure and brought the gospel message to all classes high and low, including labor castes who were until then outside the central focus of the Church. That’s not a particularly Calvinist approach mind you, and I can’t really account for Whitefield’s motivation for the populist, egalitarian overview of his Christian mission.  Whitefield was instrumental in founding an independent sect called the Free Church of England which ultimately led to an entirely separate Methodist church.

Whitefield first brought the notion of revivalism to the American colonies and fired up the First Great Awakening. When Whitefield died, Wesley, who outlived him, was free to take Methodism in an entirely Arminian direction with no further in-fighting from Whitefield. It’s this Arminian message in the Second Great Awakening, Joseph Smith’s time, that set the Methodists apart from the Calvinist pack as something new and exciting. The Methodists opened up the American religious playing field and the rest had to scramble to keep up with them.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Methodism

http://atheism.about.com/library/glossary/western/bldef_methodism.htm

While the Puritans of early America were certainly exposed to the thoughts of all the central Reformationists, including Jacobus Arminius in the Netherlands, Zwingli in Switzerland or even the German primo-heretic Martin Luther, they were addictively attracted to the brutishly simplified teachings and extreme disciplines of Calvin. Calvinists believed prosperity was always an indication of God’s favor, and hardship was always the result of sin and faithlessness. They believed that personal sin could bring God’s punishment upon the whole community and people required constant supervision and chastisement. Conversely, they also believed that hard work and faith was always rewarded by God. These concepts are inherently schizophrenic when objectively reviewed.

Calvin himself professed to believe in the “Priesthood of all Believers,” yet the purest descendants of Calvin’s religious machine, the Presbyterians, count Joseph Smith as an archetypal heretic because he claimed his authority without religious degrees or titles. “Who is this Joe Smith upstart?” they asked when he appeared in the thick of the religious scene of his day, telling them they had it all wrong. My Lutheran ancestors of course asked the same question about Calvin, when he did the same thing to Martin Luther’s followers back in the Old Country. My Lutheran relatives have described Calvin as an impertinent, egocentric despot who never finished a seminary class, never took a vow, and was never ordained by anyone of any authority to teach anything other than Legal Humanism. And that only in French.

Who the hell is Joe Smith? Who the hell is John Calvin? I could fairly reply. Thomas Jefferson asked himself the same question and came to conclusion that Calvin was Satanically inspired fool.

I can never join Calvin in addressing his god. He was indeed an Atheist, which I can never be; or rather his religion was Daemonism. If ever man worshipped a false god, he did.

-Thomas Jefferson, letter to John Adams, April 11, 1823

http://www.nobeliefs.com/jefferson.htm

Jefferson, almost as Joseph Smith was kneeling down in the woods to confirm his own dubious assessment, of period Christianity, was also writing this:

To talk of immaterial existences is to talk of nothings. To say that the human soul, angels, god, are immaterial, is to say they are nothings, or that there is no god, no angels, no soul. I cannot reason otherwise: but I believe I am supported in my creed of materialism by Locke, Tracy, and Stewart. At what age of the Christian church this heresy of immaterialism, this masked atheism, crept in, I do not know. But heresy it certainly is.

-Thomas Jefferson, letter to John Adams, Aug. 15, 1820

For a sample of the philosophical nonsense Jefferson was describing as the Platonistic, the “Classical” or rather, “Pagan” foundation of Calvin’s God, here’s a segment from the Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy Online:

          

  

http://www.rep.routledge.com/article/K113

http://books.google.com/books?id=5m5z_ca-qDkC&pg=PA97&lpg=PA97&dq=Plato+if+it+is+conceivable+it+is+possible&source=bl&ots=a3wqQSbc7C&sig=gWZBzy9EVDqGC_DY3P19RAMc_kI&hl=en&ei=oZqYTaKzDcyL0QHNzInvCw&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=4&ved=0CCgQ6AEwAw#v=onepage&q=Plato%20if%20it%20is%20conceivable%20it%20is%20possible&f=false

Regardless of the Biblical translation then, the Reformers and the Protestants, just like their Roman predecessors, were all decoding Biblical texts from their slightly varied but still narrow perspectives as products of a Hellenized, Greco-Roman, Western civilization. From the early Church Fathers and before, Christian scholars, Roman, Eastern, Protestant and Reformers alike have been trying to make Biblical texts support conclusions about the nature of God that Classical philosophers had long taken for granted as logical and thus true. The “Jesus of the Bible” or the “God of the Bible” was invented by Plato and Aristotle and Socrates and their Pagan Greek philosophical fellows. The writings of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John were simply jiggered and interpreted hundreds of years later to make them seem to support the established “science” of these Pagan philosophers.

The Church of England’s Westminster Confession of Faith, negotiated in 1646 for example, describes God as “without body parts or passions.” This is a concept of the Supreme Being the Pagan Greeks and other Western philosophers had formulated generations before Constantine and his Nicene Council first codified it into Christian dogma in 326. When you start from this Pagan assumption, and you then examine God’s Biblical dealings with man through the relatively narrow and scarce Biblical texts that have survived, it is very easy to produce the sort of absurd, even cruel and arbitrary God that Calvin invented for himself. And again, in fairness, though Calvin and his fellow Reformationists were all claiming to be using the “Bible Alone!” as their sole source of wisdom, they were in fact also simply plugging generations of written and unwritten base assumptions from the corrupted “Church” they were rebelling from, automatically into Biblical verse. They used base assumptions from their admittedly corrupt “Church Tradition” to fill in the holes and answer questions the Bible itself didn’t even come close to answering.

http://home.earthlink.net/~ronrhodes/Creeds.html

Contrary to the Pilgrim’s Puritan claim on America as their ultimate Calvinist free-fire zone, the actual Fathers of the Constitution were some of the first Western philosophers and religionists to actually look at the Bible without preconceptions and allow themselves to evaluate its provenance, historical and literary value dispassionately and realistically—apart from the thousands of years of Christian mythology and the fabled Church histories surrounding it.

Thomas Paine was one of the chief authors and instigators of the American Revolution. Like Jefferson and others in their circle of American visionaries, he had religious notions that drew serious rebuke from most of his Christian countrymen, authoring amongst other works, The Age of Reason, which was called by his detractors, “The Atheist’s Bible.” His main approach illustrated a modern, critical Biblical scholarship that was generations ahead of its time, though common today.

http://www.loc.gov/exhibits/religion/rel07.html

Both Paine and Jefferson expressed sentiments that could very easily be put into Joseph Smith’s terms: The Church had fallen apart and the Bible was never intended to be the last word on the subject. In other words, all three of these American patriots were saying that the Church had not been either Providentially preserved from, or inspirationally Reformed from heresy and fatal collapse. The the Bible was never a complete “How To” manual left directly from the pen of Jesus. Christ had never intended to leave a Biblical record in total perfection specifically to save the Church from error, so the boast that mankind didn’t need anything other than the Bible to run society in Christian harmony is ludicrous. Thomas Jefferson even edited his own version of the Bible, removing the parts he said were idiotic or anti-social, illogical, demonic and dangerous to the nation.

Yes, Jefferson was branded by many a heretic. It was a serious detriment to his political aspirations. However, Thomas Jefferson went on to found the nation and became its president in due time. Joseph Smith on the other hand, got shot down like a dog by an angry mob of Christians.

Timing is everything I guess.

And then again, Jefferson never claimed to talk to God and Angels. Jefferson never tried to found his own church and muscle in on Christianity’s piece of the American pie.

At this point in the Christian story Mormons may even know a little bit about the sort of Christianity that shaped and taught young Joseph Smith. With the advent of Protestantism in Christianity’s historical evolution, Mormons may think they know what prompted Joseph to go kneel down in the woods and ask God what his next move should be. They do know for sure, as part of core Mormon doctrine, he was trying to find his place amongst the wide array of third and fourth generation Protestants he grew up with in the weeds and woods of woolly Upstate New York, in the first decades of the 19th century. The truth of the matter however, is that the frontier American evangelists that Smith, his family and friends knew had little in common with the roots of either Protestantism or the Reformation Movement. 

The first definitionally “Protestant” or “Reformation” movement in the Church of course was the Great Schism of 1054. http://mb-soft.com/believe/txc/gschism.htm In this, the Eastern and Western Church excommunicated itself from itself. You may remember this had mostly to do with the Nicene Creed which had been in contention with the Eastern Church for hundreds of years by then. There were a number of other issues and the exact date that this schism became fixed and irrevocable is still debated. But in retrospect, it also had very much to do with the Western Church’s increased claims that the Roman Pope was the direct Apostolic heritage of Peter, and thus had primacy over all the other Popes, Priests, Holy Orders and of course, that meant the Eastern Bishops. The Eastern Bishops weren’t buying that argument in particular. When it came to a head they split Christianity formally into two clearly opposed and independent factions. 

The first generation of what we now call actual Protestants were in fact just Roman Catholics with a personal bitch against the Pope, the Priesthood, and the various Orders and/or the government of the Holy Roman Church in general. Not one of them probably started out with a mind to leave, damage, or compete against the Roman Catholic Church at all. They wanted to “fix” it. Hundreds of years later it’s very romanticized and spiritualized, but I use the colloquial word “bitching” here, because it is in fact exactly what was going on: routine, common, street-level bitching. There was no deep or serious intent to revolt from the Holy Roman Empire. At the right place, at the right time, and with the right person however, a well-worded bitch session can change the world. The very first official “Protestant,” the igniter of the Reformation’s Big Bang, was Martin Luther, a German monk with 95 reasons the Church was going to hell in a handbasket. 

Martin Luther was a German monk, ordained Roman Catholic priest and scholar born in 1483. He had a bright but sarcastic educational career in good schools and his wealthy and influential father shuffled him through a a great primary education in prestigious academies and encouraged him to get into law. His father, Hans Luder, (Anglicized later as Luther) made his fortune buying leases on copper mines and operated smelters. Coming from the lower classes, described in the day as “peasantry,” his father in particular was keen to place young Martin in the best and highest social and academic circles possible. He spared no expense in either Martin’s education or in wrangling the lad into social or religious positions to show off his genius. His father’s career plan had as its main objective gaining his son a high place in the civil service. His father served on four important regional civic councils and had a great deal of respect and influence locally. 

Following his father’s advice, Luther first pursued juris prudence but found law dry and uninspiring. He is quoted as claiming the law represented only uncertainty. He drifted almost immediately into into philosophy and made many explanations in the record that what he wanted was assurances about the nature of life. He had a special interest in the thinking of Aristotle, again following something of a traditional Augustine-like attraction to Platonist mentalities. Unlike Augustine however, even from an early age Luther was a very religious youth, actually overly-pious and highly critical of the profane habits of his fellows at school, and the laziness and ungodliness of society in general. He described his college as a “beerhouse and a whorehouse.” he concluded that pure reason could only bring answers about man but the only way you could learn about God is through divine revelation and the Holy Scriptures. 

Most Mormons naturally would find this to be a very familiar concept, but as I say, what Martin Luther was up to had very little to do with the religious environment or motivations Joseph Smith was most familiar with some three hundred years and more later. I’ll expand upon this when I deal with Luther’s translation of the Bible into German, but for the moment I’ll say that Luther’s concept of “divine revelation” is rather different than that of the Mormon’s “personal revelation” or “revelation” in general, as was his attitude to the “Holy Scriptures.” For one thing, he didn’t think a lot of them were Holy. And apparently, divine revelation to Luther was whatever he’d decided the scripture should mean, even if he had to write it out clearly himself. 

The story goes however, that Luther was riding a horse in the countryside one day in not very dubious weather, on his way back to his post at university, when a bolt of lighting came unexpectedly out of the sky and hit the ground almost right on top of him. (Perhaps this is the origin of the expression, “It came to me like a bolt from the blue.”) In any case, he was so upset, he rushed to his father telling the story, and saying, “ Praise Saint Ann, I will become a Monk.” Luther apparently felt that if God or Nature or like itself could just come blazing to an end in an instant without a hit of warning like that, then he should dedicate every last second of it making sure he was getting into heaven and serving God, rather than other vain and mortal pursuits. 

That of course is the Lutheran-to-neutralish Protestant version. If you want a study in revisionist history, or historical impressionism, first have a read from the official Catholic Encyclopedia: http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/09438b.htm  Then read the same summary of Luther’s life in the Wikipedia or any other source you care to Google: http://www.greatsite.com/timeline-english-bible-history/martin-luther.html http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Luther http://www.religionfacts.com/christianity/people/luther/bio.htm 

The Catholics obviously included the entire scope of Lutheran detractors in their history of the, well, it’s beyond a schism, it’s a revolt. If you listen to the Roman Church, Luther was the son of a brutal, money-grubbing blue-collar hick with delusions of grandeur who beat the hell out of his little Martin trying to buy into the aristocracy. The child Martin fled this brutal home life into the monastery, not out of a call from God, but in a desperate attempt to get out of the house so his father couldn’t abuse the hell out of him any more. His mother, by Roman Catholic accounts, was a whore and a washerwoman—not being sure which was the worse epithet. The fact that he was excommunicated and told the Pope to take a hike was not surprising, since he was the product of a false-conversion and a rebel in the first place. 

Frankly, I found so many contradictory sources on simple things like his days at school and other basic history I’m still not sure of the chain of events, but this is the best composite I could muster: 

At the age of seventeen in 1501 Martin Luther apparently entered the University of Erfurt depending upon who you want to listen to. He received his Bachelor’s degree in philosophy 1502. Three years later, in 1505, he received a Master’s degree and enrolled in the law school of that university. He then dropped out after the thunderbolt incident (allegedly) and joined the Augustinian monastery at Erfurt in 1505. 

Once in the monastic life however, nobody disputes the fact that our Martin threw himself into flagellations and fastings, pilgrimages and the whole gamut of extreme dedication to the Augustinian order he had joined. In the Lutheran version he just could not do enough to feel close to God. In the first generation of Roman Catholic detractors’ version, it appears that it was at the library there at the Erfurt monastery that he first ran into a copy of the Bible. Subsequent Roman Catholic versions say this is silly, and later generations of Roman Catholic detractors have admitted that he wrote extensively throughout his life about Biblical matters and obviously was familiar with the Bible from his youth. 

Johann von Staupitz, Luther’s Superior in the monastery, decided that Martin was spending too much time in his struggles over some grand universal revelation about life, the universe and everything. He encouraged Martin to continue his academic career and lay off the self-inflicted punishment a while. In 1507 Luther was ordained to the priesthood. In 1508 he began teaching theology at the University of Wittenberg. He  earned his Bachelor’s degree in Biblical Studies on 9 March 1508. He also completed a Bachelor’s degree in the Sentences by Peter Lombard which was the fundamental textbook of theology in the Middle Ages, in 1509. On 19 October 1512, the University of Wittenberg accredited Martin Luther the degree of Doctor of Theology. 

Luther soon became a world-renowned lecturer and scholars and theologians came to hear his explorations of Church doctrines and Biblical principles. Then he became more and more pointed in his criticisms of the way the Church was being administered and a thing called “indulgences” in particular, which were basically bribes to the Church keep God from sending you to hell for your sins. The Vatican needed a lot of money for expanding its empire, and it reaped most of its expenses for building monuments, basilicas, chapels and cathedrals like St. Peter’s Cathedral in Rome, from essentially granting the nobles of Germany, who had tons of cash in the day, a forgiveness of any sins they felt like committing for a suitable donation to the cause. 

On Halloween of 1517, Luther nailed his 95 Theses to the church door at Wittenberg. These were basically complaints against the Pope and Church in general that Luther claimed violated Biblical injuncture. Protestants often point to this event as the start of the Protestant revolution.  however,  John Wycliffe, John Hus, Thomas Linacre, John Colet, and others had already made similar complaints against the Roman Church without getting any attention from the Pope. Luther made specific charges of the selling of indulgences by Johann Tetzel, a Dominican priest, and he further made allegations damning the position of the clergy in regard to it’s role in determining individual salvation in general. 

In part due to the invention of the printing press, Luther’s 95 thesis were published almost overnight all over Europe. His bill of complaint came along at a time where not only was regional public acclaim ready for a reasoned argument against the Holy Roman Empire, but all of Europe and England were struggling with the subject of the Roman Pope and his puppet Emperors. Technology of the day suddenly allowed Luther’s well-crafted attack to be duplicated and transmitted worldwide. Though he never apparently intended it, his 95 theses, and eventually all of his writings became legendary in the Protestant movement. 

Luther’s observations were condemned as heretical by Pope Leo X in the bull Exsurge Domine in 1520. He was give 60 days to recant his 95 theses, and defend his writings. He was given another 60 days to confirm his public recantations to Rome. Luther was soon informed that the Pope had gathered all his writings and publicly burned them in Rome as heretical works. Luther responded by publicly burning his issued copy of Exsurge Domine. 

On January 3, 1521 the Vatican published the bull Decet Romanum Pontificem ([It] Befits [the] Roman Pontiff), excommunicating Martin Luther. It was customary after this step, to turn the heretic over to civil authorities to be burned or beheaded or hanged depending on how pissed off the Pope was with them. 

Consequently Luther was summoned to either renounce or reaffirm his views, at the Diet of Worms on 17 April 1521. When he appeared before the assembly, Johann Von Eck, by then assistant to the Archbishop of Trier, acted as spokesman for Holy Roman Emperor Charles the Fifth. He presented Luther with a table filled with copies of his writings. Eck asked Luther if he still believed what these works taught. Luther requested time to think about his answer. Granted an extension, Luther prayed, consulted with friends and mediators and presented himself before the Diet the next day. 

When the counselor put the same question to Luther the next day, the reformer apologized for the harsh tone of many of his writings, but said that he could not reject the majority of them or the teachings in them. Luther respectfully but boldly stated, “Unless I am convinced by proofs from Scriptures or by plain and clear reasons and arguments, I can and will not retract, for it is neither safe nor wise to do anything against conscience. Here I stand. I can do no other. God help me. Amen.“ 

On May 25, 1521, the Emperor declared Martin Luther an outlaw. This in those days meant among other things, he was without protection of the law and anyone could kill him without legal retribution. As precarious a decree as this was, the usual course of the Holy Roman Empire would have been to torture a confession out of him and light him on fire. Or more often, produce a surprise set of new witnesses against the accused, like the say-so of a couple of paid whores or Church lackeys who only had to testify that they saw him having sexual intercourse with a goat or calling upon the name of Satan after stubbing his toe. 

Luther had powerful friends however, one of whom was Fredrick the Wise, Elector of Saxony, his own prince. Frederick kidnapped him as he left the Diet and kept him about a year in Wartburg Castle. Luther grew a huge beard and dressed like a knight and called himself “Jorg.” He wandered around town and listened to common German dialects, which he used to continue his work translating the Bible from Greek and Latin sources into common German. He also not-so-secretly kept in touch with other Church rebels and Reformers by visitation and correspondence. 

Martin Luther published the first Bible in his nation’s most common tongue in 1534. He used mostly a Greek Bible, a recent 1516 edition of Erasmus, later called Textus Receptus for the New Testament he published in 1522, followed by the Old Testament in 1534, which completed Biblical canon. In many prefaces to the Biblical books he openly debated and sometimes berated the validity for even including them, and placed several of the ones he disliked out of their usual order in an appendix in the back–Hebrews, James, Jude and Revelation. Then he deliberately left them out of the index. He dropped entirely Tobit,  Judith, 1 Maccabees, 2 Maccabees, Wisdom, Sirach, Baruch, all of which were central and universally kept parts of the “Apocrypha.” He edited out parts of Esther and parts of Daniel which were longtime Old Testament canon in both Jewish and Christian tradition. 

In the process of publishing his Bible, he was amalgamating into a common, mutually familiar language all of the many mutually undecipherable dialects he found in the streets, cities, villages and farms in what is now most of modern Germany. Martin Luther essentially invented the modern German language and taught it to a linguistically confused nation through the media miracle of Gutenberg’s new printing press. 

The German humanist Johann Cochlaeus notes: 

Luther’s New Testament was so much multiplied and spread by printers that even tailors and shoemakers, yea, even women and ignorant persons who had accepted this new Lutheran gospel, and could read a little German, studied it with the greatest avidity as the fountain of all truth. Some committed it to memory, and carried it about in their bosom. In a few months such people deemed themselves so learned that they were not ashamed to dispute about faith and the gospel not only with Catholic laymen, but even with priests and monks and doctors of divinity.”^[19] 

Luther seems also to have given William Tyndale, an English Reformer and Biblical publisher/translator, safe haven and assistance in translating the same Greek-Latin sources for Tyndale’s English Bible. Tyndale’s New Testament of 1522 was a chief source for the King James Version of the New Testament roughly a hundred years later. 

Martin escaped martyrdom and lived peacefully to a ripe old age in the same small German town he was born in. In this time he wrote a little about everything. Some of these works now are claimed to be written by friends and students and a whole conspiratorial Protestant Movement full of mythical geniuses he associated with who borrowed his name or authority. But some of the things accurately attributed to Luther by his detractors I find refreshingly common, like urging his followers to, “Tell the Devil he may kiss my ass.” I find an earthy honesty of spirit in it. Luther was a sage of the middle-ages who loved his beer and spoke his mind. Queen Victoria’s bland, sterile, simpering virginity hadn’t yet infected the Church. 

There is such a thing as too much honesty when it comes to Luther’s attitude toward Jews however. Later in his career Martin Luther took rather a nasty anti-Semitic turn and started hammering away against the Jews, which he referred to as “That accursed race.” Originally he was quite tolerant of them, thinking they simply hadn’t heard the gospel and thus had no chance to accept its truth. After many years of his overtures to the Jews, and these efforts producing little interest in mass conversions to Christ, he began to preach that the Jews were eternally damned and set in their own evil, anti-Christian ways. He made moves to expel them from German politics entirely. He wrote a treatise entitled, On the Jews and Their Lies, and often quoted Christ in Matthew 12:34, where Jesus called them “a brood of vipers and children of the devil.” There was a little socio-political intrigue there in Luther’s motivations as well, since in Luther’s day Church Law superseded civil law, and the Jews were exempt in this arrangement from Church laws against usury, and could charge whatever interest they liked in making loans and other business arrangements. Luther in many ways conditioned the German public for the acceptance of Adolph Hitler’s similar theories against the Jews, and fed a longstanding resentment that found the nation very accommodating of Hitler’s “Final Solution” by suggesting they were all sneaky, unprincipled heathens out to steal the wealth of the nation and sabotage the happiness of good Christians all. 

Martin wrote and preached at one point that his followers should, “…burn down Jewish schools and synagogues, and to throw pitch and sulphur into the flames; to destroy their homes; to confiscate their ready money in gold and silver; to take from them their sacred books, even the whole Bible; and if that did not help matters, to hunt them of the country like mad dogs.” (Luther’s Works, vol. Xx, pp. 2230-2632 as quoted in Stoddard JL. Rebuilding a Lost Faith, 1922, p.99.) 

But Luther’s crazy anti-Semitic streak wasn’t his only gap in enlightened Christian thought. I’ve made references to Luther’s problems with the “approved” Biblical canon of his day a number of times. Here again are just a few of the disparaging comments he’s on record as having made about the Bible: 

Regarding the New Testament Book of Hebrews: It need not surprise one to find here bits of wood, hay, and straw (O’HarePF. The Facts About Luther, 1916–1987 reprint ed., p. 203.) 

The Epistle of James: “St. James’ epistle is really an epistle of straw…for it has nothing of the nature of the gospel about it. . . [It is] not the writing of any apostle” (Luther, M. Preface to the New Testament, 1546.) 

The Book of the St. John the Revelator: “About this book of the Revelation of John…I miss more than one thing in this book, and it makes me consider it to be neither apostolic nor prophetic…I can in no way detect that the Holy Spirit produced it. Moreover he seems to me to be going much too far when he commends his own book so highly-indeed, more than any of the other sacred books do, though they are much more important-and threatens that if anyone takes away anything from it, God will take away from him, etc. Again, they are supposed to be blessed who keep what is written in this book; and yet no one knows what that is, to say nothing of keeping it. This is just the same as if we did not have the book at all. And there are many far better books available for us to keep…My spirit cannot accommodate itself to this book. For me this is reason enough not to think highly of it: Christ is neither taught nor known in it” (Luther, M. Preface to the Revelation of St. John, 1522). 

Martin Luther on the Old Testament: 

“Job spoke not as it stands written in his book, but only had such thoughts. It is merely the argument of a fable. It is probable that Solomon wrote and made this book.” 

“Ecclesiastes ought to have been more complete. There is too much incoherent matter in it…Solomon did not, therefore, write this book.” 

“The book of Esther I toss into the Elbe. I am such an enemy to the book of Esther that I wish it did not exist, for it Judaizes too much…” 

“The history of Jonah is so monstrous that it is absolutely incredible.” (as quoted in O’Hare, p. 202.) 

Of the first five books of Moses:  “We have no wish either to see or hear Moses” (Ibid, p. 202.) 

In his most famous dispute translating his German Bible, he responds to critics who claim he’s inserting his own personal religious doctrine into his translation, particularly Romans 3:28 where he adds to the writer’s assertion that we are “saved by grace,” the word “alone,” making the reading, “saved by grace alone.” 

You tell me what a great fuss the Papists are making because the word alone is not in the text of Paul…say right out to him: ‘Dr. Martin Luther will have it so,’…I will have it so, and I order it to be so, and my will is reason enough. I know very well that the word ‘alone’ is not in the Latin or the Greek text (Stoddard J. Rebuilding a Lost Faith. 1922, pp. 101-102; see also Luther M. Amic. Discussion, 1, 127.) 

While this quote is used by his enemies to suggest he considered himself above the original writers, he also replied in other sources: 

The text itself and the meaning of St. Paul urgently require and demand it. For in that very passage he is dealing with the main point of Christian doctrine, namely, that we are justified by faith in Christ without any works of the Law . . . But when works are so completely cut away — and that must mean that faith alone justifies — whoever would speak plainly and clearly about this cutting away of works will have to say, ‘Faith alone justifies us, and not works’.” ^[121] 

In a sense, Joseph Smith’s “Inspired Version” wasn’t doing anything that Martin Luther hadn’t already done in his German translation of the Bible.  

Luther’s saga contains “Road to Damascus” incidents above and beyond the fabled lightning strike that sent him to the monastery and changed not only his Christian walk, but the entire Christian world. One such insight struck him while climbing a mountain and led him to give up his monastic life instantly when he finally realized self-induced misery was just a waste of his time and piety. Another came when he stopped dreading the “gospel” or “good news” as some sort of inevitable come-uppance with the Lord and realized it was really a promise of unconditional forgiveness and he could stop beating and fasting and stone-bedding himself into penance. There’s also a great story in there about smuggling nuns out of a convent in herring barrels and marrying one. All this makes good reading for the Lutheran or anyone else, but is irrelevant for Mormon study purposes. 

According to the Roman Catholic Encyclopedia, Luther’s main theological contentions were thus: 

The Bible is the only source of faith; it contains the plenary inspiration of God; its reading is invested with a quasi-sacramental character.

Human nature has been totally corrupted by original sin, and man, accordingly, is deprived of free will. Whatever he does, be it good or bad, is not his own work, but God’s.

Faith alone can work justification, and man is saved by confidently believing that God will pardon him. This faith not only includes a full pardon of sin, but also an unconditional release from its penalties.

The hierarchy and priesthood are not Divinely instituted or necessary, and ceremonial or exterior worship is not essential or useful. Ecclesiastical vestments, pilgrimages, mortifications, monastic vows, prayers for the dead, intercession of saints, avail the soul nothing.

All sacraments, with the exception of baptism, Holy Eucharist, and penance, are rejected, but their absence may be supplied by faith.

The priesthood is universal; every Christian may assume it. A body of specially trained and ordained men to dispense the mysteries of God is needless and a usurpation.

There is no visible Church or one specially established by God whereby men may work out their salvation.

  

If you’re the Roman Pope or any other authority in the Holy Roman Empire, some of these issues are a real threat to the established order—like directly discarding not just the entire structure of any Church at all, but throwing the priesthood call freely out to the unwashed masses. The bulk of his other contentions are just rehashes of theological battles Augustine fought over a thousand years earlier. The issue of indulgences, even the Pope knew were wrong. They were just profitable and necessary for the temporal advancement of a comfortable Papal clubhouse and the armies of labor, craftsmen, and soldiery to maintain it. Luther however, went through a number of phases theologically and organizationally before he died, and in fact never totally got a church or full litany of dogma organized. Originally, yes, he thought the common body of Christ could just elect its own priests, discern its own truths and run its own Church. Unfortunately, it wasn’t long before a little disaster called the “Peasant War,” got him re-thinking this whole concept. 

Initially, Luther seemed to many to support the peasants, condemning the oppressive practices of the nobility that had incited many of the peasants. As the war continued, and especially as atrocities at the hands of the peasants increased, Luther came out forcefully against the revolt; since Luther relied on support and protection from the princes, he was afraid of alienating them. In Against the Murderous, Thieving Hordes of Peasants (1525), he encouraged the nobility to visit swift and bloody punishment upon the peasants. Many of the revolutionaries considered Luther’s words a betrayal. Others withdrew once they realized that there was neither support from the Church nor from its main opponent. The war in Germany ended in 1525, when rebel forces were put down by the armies of the Swabian League. 

Luther resented Germany’s domination by a group of clergymen based in Rome, and these nationalist feelings may have motivated the Reformation to some extent. During the Peasants’ War, Luther continued to stress obedience to secular authority; many may have interpreted this doctrine as endorsement of absolute rulers, leading to acceptance of monarchs and dictators in German history. http://www.religionfacts.com/christianity/people/luther/bio.htm 

The Peasant War also gave birth to the appearance of three “prophets,” and a number of other hyper-Reformationists that went well beyond anything Luther had in mind. Luther had opened a Pandora’s box of individual, charismatic Christian rebellion. Luther subsequently fell back on a more conventional Church structure with an elite, institutionally educated clergy who ran the show and lost most of his faith in the greater body of Christ to govern itself. 

Zwickau prophets and the Peasants’ War

Main articles: Thomas Müntzer, Zwickau prophets, and Peasants’ War 

On December 27, 1521, three “prophets”, influenced by and in turn influencing Thomas Müntzer, appeared in Wittenberg from Zwickau: Thomas Dreschel, Nicolas Storch and Mark Thomas Stübner. The crisis came in the Peasants’ War in southern Germany in 1525. In its origin a revolt against feudal oppression, it became, under the leadership of Müntzer, a war against all constituted authorities, and an attempt to establish by revolution an ideal Christian commonwealth, with absolute equality and the community of goods. There were some common points between the Zwickau prophets and the later-developed Anabaptists. 

Münster Rebellion

Main articles: Münster Rebellion and Münster 

A second and more determined attempt to establish a theocracy was made at Münster in Westphalia (1532–5), led by Bernhard Rothmann, Bernhard Knipperdolling, Jan Matthys and John of Leiden. 

All things considered, Lutheranism, of all the Reformationist ideas had the most reasonable and measured spread into its country of origin. Not too surprisingly however, each of the various Reforming countries who followed his example, found its own heroes and its own doctrinal basis for Reformation, and went eagerly about persecuting, even civilly arresting and institutionally trying and slaughtering anyone who preached a different gospel, whether it be a Roman Catholic gospel or any of the competing “Reformed” gospels. Luther carried on some wild debates with a Swiss Reformer named Zwingli for example, about whether or not the Host actually was the flesh and blood of Christ. Though neither Luther nor Zwingli http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zwingli would have been inclined to set one-another on fire, hang, or chop off each other’s heads, the fact remains that had one or both of them tried to carry on the same debates a few years later in front of major Reformationist and prime Protestant, Jean Calvin’s Geneva religious empire, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Calvin they’d have been bound in chains, had their books piled upon them and they’d  have been lit up in the public square. Clearly, one of the main features of historical Christianity, the oppressing and killing off its rivals, dissenters, and free-thinkers, was not a feature of the Church being “Reformed” in the Reformation. It was just being passed on to a new set of Inquisitors. 

In the end, Luther ended up with a professional clergy running a highly organized, institutional church, and this apparatus was entirely supported by the general congregation. Luther’s new church is still claiming to be “One Church, Catholic and Apostolic.” The big difference in Luther’s Lutheranism compared to the Roman Catholicism he’d left was that the congregation got to vote on who they were going to pay to tell them what to believe. 

Modern Lutheranism is too broad a subject to be of interest to me in this context, nor could I or anyone else fully cover the insanely diverse directions it has gone in all of these centuries. In the American Lutheran variants alone we just achieved yet another split over whether actively Gay ministers can be ordained. Previous splits occurred over whether women pastors can be ordained. Splits have taken place over the issue of the inerrancy of the Holy Bible, and the Missouri Synod claims the modern King James Bible to be inerrant in spite of Martin Luther’s serious condemnation of major parts of it. Other synods use a wide number of other Bibles that have little in common with Martin Luther’s work as well and insist the Bible has to be read in social context and contains a high portion of symbolic and allegorical content.

You can send homosexuals to hell and shut the mouths of your women in God’s house, or you can ordain all of the above to be your ministers, and still call yourself a “Lutheran.” Or you can take the middle road, and ordain confessed Gay ministers who aren’t sexually active, or let women and Gay’s do everything else but minister, perhaps become lay ministers. The Bible can be inerrant and fixed four hundred years ago by King James of England, or five hundred years ago by Luther of Germany, or it can be a groovy paraphrase published when hippies and Jesus-Freaks roamed the campi of America in tie-dyed T Shirts and faded bellbottoms. Stern old Pastor Wilhelm will send teenage girls to hell for wearing lipstick and going to the school dance, and Pastor Shirley T. Ransexual will tell them that Jesus loves the sinner, and invite them back to the rectory to play Black Sabbath and drink really thin coffee, along with Pastor Bob, the young hip youth pastor just out of divinity school who always wears a big hood-ornament-looking crucifix medallion and turtleneck instead of his vestments. It all comes down to a vote and a list of by-laws when you’re a Lutheran. And yes, I’ve been there and done that.

Early in the fifth century AD, the North African Church in particular was very busy trying to suppress the ideas of the Donatists—a school of Christian belief that chiefly claimed that the validity of any Church sacrament was dependent upon the moral worthiness of the priest or clergy official performing it. Were this so, naturally it would require the Holy Roman Church to be accountable for purging its clergy of perverts, cheats, movers, shakers, and self-promoters of all sorts. It would put in doubt the worth of the entire operation in the minds of those dependent upon these sacraments. To the rescue of the Church, came our now venerated Augustine of Hippo, then, just a middleweight African Bishop and scholar, who countered, quoting Optatus of Mileum, his predecessor; “The Church is an institution, ‘whose sanctity is derived from the sacraments, and not estimated from the pride of persons. …The sacraments are holy in themselves and not through men.’”

Meanwhile, somewhere in the Celtic regions of the British Isles by best estimate, a very intellectual young priest and Celtic monk by the name of Pelagius was motivated to leave his friendly, wet, shamrock-covered isles and take his St. Patrick style ideas into the heart of Christianity and do battle with a Church he felt was going astray. Pelagius however, fell mostly on the side of the Donatists on the above point.

Pelagius’ first trip to central Christendom took him to Rome in 380. There he found a pompous, opulent, wasteful, prideful, and overtly corrupt Church that appalled him. Everything about the Church in Rome was in opposition to his ascetic Celtic upbringing. He was galled by the extravagance of the hierarchy—particularly the Pope. Pelagius was insulted to hear what he called a “moral laxity” in the doctrine of Divine Grace hehad heard a Roman bishop cite from Augustine’s Confessions. The idea of helplessly begging for whatever Grace God might give with no hope of influencing God’s Grace one way or another, imperiled the entire moral law, as Pelagius put it.

In his visit to Rome and the course of his many debates in various forums there, he found his closest collaborator, a lawyer named Celestius. Pelagius became primarily the speechwriter and Celestius became the battling orator, promoting what became known as “Pelagianism.”

Pelagius retired to Ireland at length, taking with him his disciple Celestius. Here they continued to flail away at the Bishop of Hippo and his then yet-to-be-canonized doctrinal inventions. At the very moment when Augustine was just starting to find regional Church acceptance of his doctrinal masterpiece, Original Sin, Pelagius declared this newly invented doctrine to be abominable and spoiled a lot of Augustine’s fun and fame. It was from then on, open warfare between these two saintly men—as both acknowledged the other to be.

According to Pelagius, Adam’s sin didn’t fatally corrupt humanity, but instead he taught that“Over the years our sin gradually corrupts us, building an addiction and then holding us bound with what seems like the force of nature itself.” (Letter to Demetrias, VIII) Humans by nature have a clean slate at birth, and it is only through voluntary sin that humans are made wicked. In theory, a human could live a sinless life and merit heaven. In practice however, man, being by nature imperfect an unequal to God, sin always stained mankind one way or another given enough time and temptation. Pelagius was not therefore, making a claim as his detractors maintained, that man would be just fine without God’s Grace anyway.  He was saying however that the argument made by Augustine that if killed, unbaptized infants burned in hell, was a load of crap. Pelagius was saying that dead babies never had a chance to sin willfully or otherwise and were given a “pass” by God.

About 412, Pelagius took a trip to Palestine where the Bishop John of Jerusalem, a good friend, welcomed him. Pelagianism had spread like wildfire around Carthage, and the appearance of its author in Augustine’s back yard so-to-speak prompted a flurry of opposition from the Augustinian camp. Augustine had already disseminated four official letters condemning Pelagianism. Augustine’s associate Jerome, AKA “Saint” Jerome, a Latin Church scholar, happened to live in Jerusalem. Jerome had also authored several strong letters attempting to censure and eradicate Pelagianism. Visiting with Jerome at the time was another virulently anti-Pelagianist, Orosius, a pupil of Augustine. Together Jerome and Orosius publicly charged Pelagius with heresy and demanded action from Bishop John of Jerusalem. John called a council in July 415.

Church records suggest that Orosius’ lack of Greek made him look unprepared and not very convincing as the main prosecutor of the case against Pelagius. Bishop John’s Eastern heritage also made him far more willing to entertain the idea that humanity was basically good rather than utterly evil at birth. The council delivered no verdict on the issue and the Synod of Jerusalem remanded the argument to the Latin or Western Church, since Jerome, Orosius, Pelagius and Celestius were all disciples of the Latin Church.

A few months later, December of 415, two deposed bishops came to Palestine ostensibly to give evidence against Pelagius before the Synod of Diospolis, headed by the Bishop of Caesarea. The council was met but neither instigating bishop showed up for various odd reasons. Orosius had also intended to carry on his prosecution at this venue but left Palestine with no explanation after a consultation with Bishop John of Jerusalem. Pelagius did appear, armed with letters of recommendation from many scholars and Church authorities including Augustine himself, who in spite of their disagreements upon doctrine, gave a hearty endorsement of Pelagius’ moral and scholarly credentials. The Synod of Diospolis declared: “Now since we have received satisfaction in respect of the charges brought against the monk Pelagius in his presence and since he gives his assent to sound doctrines but condemns and anathematizes those contrary to the faith of the Church, we adjudge him to belong to the communion of the Catholic Church.”

As if to settle up with Jerome and Augustine once and for all, in 416 Pelagius wrote his most famous tome, On Free Will. Or: De Libero Arbitrio . This work did a major hatchet-job on Augustine’s theories.

As if to shut Pelagius up once and for all, Orosius, faithful lackey of Augustine, came crying back to Africa where Augustine took matters into his own hands and convened two local synods on their own authority. This council wrote an official letter of condemnation of Pelagius and his teachings, and sent it to Pope Innocent I of Rome. Now, even though sanctioned by four other bishops, Augustine of Hippo had no serious title or right or following in the greater Christian body. Even with his four back-bush bishop buddies Augustine had no Apostolic See and no universally binding right to define what was or wasn’t “orthodox” without it. Augustine’s church hadn’t been founded by one of the original Apostles and that made him an inherently inferior bishop. Luckily, he and Jerome both were great pals with Pope Innocent I of Rome.

Pope Innocent needed little convincing from Augustine and his African council of bishops. He immediately ordered a response from Pelagius. Pelagius put together his arguments in a letter and sent it back to Pope Innocent I. By the time it arrived however, Pope Innocent I was dead as a doornail. The letter was read by Pope Zosimus of Rome instead. In 417 Zosimus declared that he had been duly impressed by the defense Pelagius had made of his ideas and their basis in scripture and tradition, and declared him innocent of heresy.

Augustine was shocked. In 418 he called the Council of Carthage. This council named nine beliefs it claimed in particular were universal and orthodox in all the Church and always had been:

1. Death came from sin, not man’s physical nature. [I could write pages on the stupidity of that notion.]
2. Infants must be baptized to be cleansed from original sin.
3. Justifying grace covers past sins and helps avoid future sins.
4. The grace of Christ imparts strength and will to act out God’s commandments.
5. No good works can come without God’s grace.
6. We confess we are sinners because it is true, not from humility.
7. The saints ask for forgiveness for their own sins.
8. The saints also confess to be sinners because they are.
9. Children dying without baptism are excluded from both the Kingdom of heaven and eternal life.

Augustine pointed out simply that Pelagius had denied each one of these basic, universal Christian beliefs, and therefore he was in effect a heretic regardless of what the Pope had just found. Pelagians were thereafter banished from Italy, and by extension, the Western Church entirely, but it wasn’t quite that simple or immediate however. The most reliable versions of the story claim that since Pope Zosimus had already declared Pelagius innocent of heresy, and of course, as a Pope he wasn’t inclined to admit he’d goofed the first time, that Zosimus. Augustine likewise, a loyal Western Church product, wasn’t going to push the issue too hard with Il Papa, so Augustine went to friendly civil authorities and had Pelagius, Celestius and all their followers declared public nuisances and disturbers of the peace, and the actual order banishing Pelagianism from Italy came from the Emperor and governors, not the Pope.

Now, I have just two points for you to consider with this little bit of history. And this is Christian history, recorded by the winners, not some secret conspiracy nonsense pulled from hidden archives. It is not even contended by Christians:

First, going on some five-hundred years into Christianity, two major players with major authority and thoroughbred Christian scholarly and clerical pedigrees came to two radically opposed conclusions from exactly the same sources. Both claimed they had come to these beliefs via preserved scripture and Church tradition. Both claimed the most canonized records supported their own interpretations and completely condemned their opponent’s opinions and interpretations.

Secondly, It took multiple councils and scores of bishops to get any sort of condemnation of the doctrines and writings of Pelagius, and likewise, having had the case before him twice the Pope in Rome Himself could not bring himself to issue an open condemnation of Pelagius. Conversely, there was no instant affirmation of anything Augustine was arguing throughout all the same councils, and again, even hearing the case twice the Pope in Rome Himself did not overtly endorse Augustine’s notions instantly as patently and universally perfect Christian tradition. It took some time and intrigue to make the endorsement finally. Therefore, five-hundred years and countless Popes and priests and bishops and scholars into Christian history, it was not quite certain to even the Pope, whether or not man was basically good or inherently, utterly evil. It was not quite sure whether or not the innocent unborn really were innocent, or whether they were doomed to eternal fire and pain unless rescued by the Church. And then, it was not even certain if you could rescue anyone at all, or if this person or that person was going to be “Elected” by God no matter what you or they did, and if this one or that one was just going to be ripped into the fires of hell because God had already decreed it when they were created. These brutally, extreme opposite concepts came evolving through hundreds of years and thousands of Christian thinkers and Christianity en-mass still couldn’t be sure which one was “orthodox” and which one was “heresy.”

How did Pelagius escape condemnation so many times in so many councils? Well, that was easy. Five-hundred years into Christianity all that had really been worked out is the Nicene creed and a couple of other vague statements of faith. All he had to do was confess his belief in these by then couple-of-hundred-years-old creeds and the whole rest of the controversy was anybody’s guess. The Nicene Creed is gibberish and could mean anything. It’s nothing to confess it and then go on to bigger problems.

And it’s an ongoing chain of viciously enforced guesswork by whatever Church or civil political and intellectual forces were at play. Two-hundred years before Pelagious saved his butt by clinging to the Nicene and Apostle’s Creed, there was the poor shmucks who were excommunicated trying to hammer out the Nicene Creed. You had one faction ready to kill and sentence to hell the other over inserting this one word or that other word that means almost the same thing. The winners of that argument became professors of “what the Church has always believed.” The losers became heretics. But that much had been settled by Pelagius’ time. So he just copped his faith in a nebulous Creed bickered out hundreds of years before his time and was then free to experiment with bigger ideas.

According to Roman Catholic records, which seem to go out of their way to prove the Pope was going to condemn him anyway–Pelagius and Celestius fled the hearings, leaving them unfinished. Augustine and his disciples had a connection to Valerian, who held an influential position in Ravenna, and this civil connection developed into the secular power taking part in the dispute directly through the Emperor Honorius, by rescript of 30 April, 418, from Ravenna, banishing all Pelagians from the cities of Italy. Somewhere in there when the emperor got involved, Pope Zosimus had a change of heart under the combined civil pressure and growing clerical support for Augustine. It became a popularity contest, and to support Pelagius was to insult the honor of Augustine. Augustine and his friends were favored by the emperor. Ergo, supporting Pelagius was also insulting the emperor. Zosimus finally issued a Papal condemnation of Pelagianism and in spite of this pressure, and several waves of pressure from both the Pope and civil authorities, by 428 18 bishops in Italy alone still refused to sign the Papal decree condemning Pelagianism. The penalty for this was being deposed from office and yet they refused.

Pelagianism in fact spread and grew until it was finally beaten and hounded to death through the Greek Church, Gaul, and into the British Isles, and had morphed into Semipelagianism, which attempted to take the best features of both Pelagius and Augustine’s ideas and reconcile them. It took until 529 to forcefully convince all of Christianity that man was born evil and God saved whoever he wanted and your human input of any sort was pointless.

Pelagius and his followers represent the last remnant of the other side of a doctrinal and philosophical war fought and won by Augustine of Hippo and his followers. The only evidence of Pelagius’ writings remains as quoted excerpts appearing in papers Augustine and his fellows used to defame them. That is the Christian pattern. The Greek Church doesn’t even name Pelagius or illustrate his “heresies.” He just vanishes in Eastern tradition out of the historical record along with all of his supporters. That is why a thousand years later John Calvin or Martin Luther during the Reformation and Protestand Movement, could probably honestly believe the Church had always believed Augustine’s entire body of guesswork.

But wrong or right, the fact is, it’s not even logically possible to claim that Augustine’s beliefs have always been orthodox and universal. It took a hundred years and more after the Bishop of Hippo first pulled Original Sin and Predestination out of his saintly backside just to decide Augustine’s ideas had always been believed by the Church. In the meantime, obviously not everyone in the Church was believing it for over a hundred years.

If Augustine’s ideas were all that universal and traditional, these debates could have never run for whole lifetimes and beyond, through trial after trial. Pelagius’ wholly opposing arguments could never have gone before higher and higher clerical authorities as Augustine personally tried to batter them down into infamy, while Popes and bishops and scholars scrutinized them without reaching any clear and unanimous insight into which of these two radically different positions were really the “orthodox” Christian faith.

Taking both arguments into account, and taking the sheer time, talent and effort put into proving the truth of either or both sides of the Pelagius v Augustine debate presented to and through many noted Christian judges and juries, all that the story of Pelagius actually proves is that both Augustine and Pelagius were pulling it all out of their backsides and making it up as they went along. What the Council of Carthage really proves, is that until 418 Christianity didn’t really have an official opinion on anything either Pelagius or Augustine had to offer.

Christian history shows indeed, that variations and combinations of both Augustine and Pelagius were melded and blended to become Semipelagianism, Arminianism, Calvinism, Methodism, Unitarianism, Wesleyanism, and a number of Eastern variants. And while the West claims to be the product of the pure and undefiled Christian tradition via Augustine, little concessions have been made over the generations to mitigate some of the most stupid and evil of Augustine’s assertions. For example, the last of Augustine’s quoted nine canons used against Pelagius at Carthage is no longer widely taught in Roman Catholicism. A Mormon, but not a polite one mind you, would say, because it’s the most evil and asinine. It’s self-apparently wrong and ungodly. Joseph Smith wasn’t the first to say as much and he wasn’t the last.

From a Mormon standpoint mind you, both Pelagius and Augustine were full of bologna. Mormons can’t even fathom that Christians could have, do, or ever did believe the sort of idiocy Augustine came up with. When Christians attack Mormonism, all a Mormon really need do is say, at least Mormons don’t have to believe that little dead babies are burning in flaming sulphur for all eternity through accident of birth.

The current Catechism of the Catholic Church states that children who die without baptism are “entrusted to the mercy of God.” The problem with that statement is that the very heart of this Augustinian nightmare we now call Christianity, of necessity sends even the aborted fetus to hell. No amount of “Provisional Grace” and postulating about “Mercy” or “Limboizing” and praying them out of hell with the help of a friendly saint or the Virgin Mary or begging for the intercession of Jesus Christ gets around the matter of all flesh being born utterly evil and thus deserving and doomed to hell unless you are Elected to be baptized into the Church and receive the necessary sacraments. If you die before that happens, however young, in or out of the womb, on this continent, on Mars or under a totalitarian state that refuses to let you know anything about Jesus, the Bible or the Church, all that means in Augustine’s theory is that you were not Elect and God chose not to Elect you. The manner of, or reasons for your non-election is irrelevant. God did it to you. How He did it to you or why He did it to you is above your pay grade. You are powerless to change it. You are powerless to change God’s mind on it.  Hell and Heaven are predestined.

Here it is straight from the Catholic Encyclopedia:

Some codices containing a ninth canon (Denzinger, loc. cit., note 3): Children dying without baptism do not go to a “middle place” (medius locus), since the non reception of baptism excludes both from the “kingdom of heaven” and from “eternal life”.

So, the Roman Catholic Church in this case, can choose to just omit printing it out and teaching it to little kids in confirmation class, but after the Trinity, the doctrine of Original Sin is the very core of the faith. It is the very core of virtually all modern, mainstream Christianity, and the more even an “enlightened” Protestant, American Christian variant claims to be “Traditional” the more that sect generally emphasizes it. If you have Original Sin, you have Augustine, and if you have Augustine, you have babies burning in hell.

It’s that simple.

Which gets me to my unnanounced third point in this historical episode. Let’s assume the Roman Catholic Church, representing “What Christians have always Believed” for the moment, condemned Pelagius for not believing that unbaptized children went to hell. We know this actually happened, and we know Augustine was behind it. This made Pelagius a heretic, because he did not confess loyalty to a major canon that the Church has “always” believed. Well, the “Church” doesn’t believe that any more. The “Church” therefore has stopped believing something it has “always” believed. A “universal” belief is now no longer “universal.” And the “Church” now believes another new thing it has always believed.

Many of us have been raised on the King James Bible. I hate to come back to bashing that venerable old record around, but there is no better evidence that the “Church” adjusts from era-to-era what it has “always” believed than the preface from the “Authorized Version.”

The Epistle Dedicatory

TRANSLATED OUT OF THE ORIGINAL TONGUES:
AND WITH THE FORMER TRANSLATIONS DILIGENTLY COMPARED AND REVISED,
BY HIS MAJESTY’S SPECIAL COMMAND

There are no manuscripts in the original tongues of the entire New Testament. The lie here is multiple: No original manuscripts exist nor do even copies of manuscripts pretending to be from the original New Testament authors in the “original tongues.” We have some Greek versions written long after the death of the original authors. The King James Bible also originally contained the Apocrypha and that got dropped entirely. Even today zealous Christian sects preach this particular version to be written directly from the mouth of Jesus into King’s English. But, Jesus personally had nothing to do with writing or preserving any of it. This is also not the “Authorized” version any more. The sanctioning clergy that commissioned and purified this “perfect” English Bible has adopted a new one.

But if the “Church” tells you this King James Bible is the real thing, the actual Bible Jesus wrote Himself and then handed down exactly like it is, and you’re still all too willing to believe this impossible fantasy in spite of all the absolute proof it never could have happened that way even from Christian records themselves, well, you’re just helplessly ignorant. You’re just going to let it slide on by without making waves when the “Church” tells you God is like a shamrock or that all the uncivilized, dirty little dark babies in the Heathen Nations have not been Elected and that’s why it’s fine that they burn in brimstone forever.

So, case closed. The “Church” changes what it believes. Sometimes the “Church” changes what it as “always” believed so much it has to change its name from Catholic, to Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox, or to Protestant from Roman Catholic, or Anglican, Lutheran, Presbyterian, Methodist, from Protestant and so forth. Or for that matter, from ELCA to LCA to ALC to EIEIO. The “Church” promotes what it believes at the moment and validates it by claiming it has “always” believed it. If you claim you find this to be also true in Mormonism, you must first also openly confess it in “Christianity” because Mormonism has only been at it for a couple of hundred years and still hasn’t made the radical sorts of basic doctrinal changes that your so-called “orthodox” Christianity has made hundreds if not thousands of times or the two-millenia it’s been inventing itself.

As a refresher, I’m attaching a handy chronology of Christianity’s general development to re-orient you before I move into the Reformation and Protestant Movements.

vvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvcApologetics Toolkit

DEVELOPMENT OF THE BIBLICAL CANON

adapted from materials of Professor Paul Hahn of the University of St. Thomas, Houston, Texas

---

Development of the Old Testament Canon

1000-50 BC:

The Old Testament (hereafter “OT”) books are written.

C. 200 BC:

Rabbis translate the OT from Hebrew to Greek, a translation called the “Septuagint” (abbreviation: “LXX”). The LXX ultimately includes 46 books.

AD 30-100:

Christians use the LXX as their scriptures. This upsets the Jews.

C. AD 100:

So Jewish rabbis meet at the Council of Jamniah and decide to include in their canon only 39 books, since only these can be found in Hebrew.

C. AD 400:

Jerome translates the Bible from Hebrew and Greek into Latin (called the “Vulgate”). He knows that the Jews have only 39 books, and he wants to limit the OT to these; the 7 he would leave out (Tobit, Judith, 1 Maccabees, 2 Maccabees, Wisdom of Solomon, Sirach [or "Ecclesiasticus"], and Baruch–he calls “apocrypha,” that is, “hidden books.” But Pope Damasus wants all 46 traditionally-used books included in the OT, so the Vulgate has 46.

AD 1536:

Luther translates the Bible from Hebrew and Greek to German. He assumes that, since Jews wrote the Old Testament, theirs is the correct canon; he puts the extra 7 books in an appendix that he calls the “Apocrypha.”

AD 1546:

The Catholic Council of Trent reaffirms the canonicity of all 46 books.

---

Development of the New Testament Canon

C. AD 51-125:The New Testament books are written, but during this same period other early Christian writings are produced–for example, the Didache (c. AD 70), 1 Clement (c. 96), the Epistle of Barnabas (c. 100), and the 7 letters of Ignatius of Antioch (c. 110).C. AD 140:Marcion, a businessman in Rome, teaches that there were two Gods: Yahweh, the cruel God of the OT, and Abba, the kind father of the NT. So Marcion eliminates the Old Testament as scriptures and, since he is anti-Semitic, keeps from the NT only 10 letters of Paul and 2/3 of Luke’s gospel (he deletes references to Jesus’ Jewishness). Marcion’s “New Testament”–the first to be compiled–forces the mainstream Church to decide on a core canon: the four gospels and letters of Paul.C. AD 200:But the periphery of the canon is not yet determined. According to one list, compiled at Rome c. AD 200 (the Muratorian Canon), the NT consists of the 4 gospels; Acts; 13 letters of Paul (Hebrews is not included); 3 of the 7 General Epistles (1-2 John and Jude); and also the Apocalypse of Peter.AD 367:The earliest extant list of the books of the NT, in exactly the number and order in which we presently have them, is written by Athanasius, Bishop of Alexandria, in his Easter letter of 367. [Note: this is well after the Constantine's Edict of Toleration in 313 A.D.]AD 904:Pope Damasus, in a letter to a French bishop, lists the New Testament books in their present number and order.AD 1442:At the Council of Florence, the entire Church recognizes the 27 books, though does not declare them unalterable.AD 1536:In his translation of the Bible from Greek into German, Luther removes 4 NT books (Hebrews, James, Jude, and Revelations) from their normal order and places them at the end, stating that they are less than canonical.AD 1546:At the Council of Trent, the Catholic Church reaffirms once and for all the full list of 27 books as traditionally accepted.

---

Digitized and formatted in HTML by the Augustine Club at Columbia University, 1995

http://www.religionfacts.com/christianity/timeline.htm

The following timeline of Christianity summarizes some of the most important events in Christianity since its founding about 2,000 years ago. (Events in light grey are non-religious events included for historical context.)

c. 4 BC
Birth of Jesus

c. 26 AD
John the Baptist begins ministry

c. 27 AD
Jesus begins ministry

c. 30 AD
Crucifixion of Jesus

c. 35
Conversion of Paul

c. 44
Martyrdom of James

c. 46-48
Paul’s first missionary journey

c. 49
Council of Jerusalem

c. 50-52
Paul’s second missionary journey

c. 51-52
First and Second Thessalonians written

c. 53-57
Paul’s third missionary journey

c. 57
Letter to the Romans written

c. 59-62
Paul imprisoned in Rome

c. 60
Andrew martyred by crucifixion in Achaia (Greece).

c. 66-67
Second Timothy written

c. 68
Martyrdom of Paul

70
Fall of Jerusalem

c. 90-95
John exiled on island of Patmos

c. 95
Book of Revelation written

c. 96
Clement of Rome’s Letter to the Corinthians written

c. 120
Didache written

202
Christians persecuted under Septimus Severus

211
Christians tolerated under Emperor Antoninus Caracalla

222
Christians favored Emperor Alexander Severus

230
Origen’s On First Principles

235
Christians persecuted under Emperor Maximin the Thracian

238
Christians tolerated under Emperor Gordian III

244
Christians favored under Emperor Philip the Arabian

251
Cyprian’s Unity of the Catholic Church

254
Death of Origen

303
Diocletian orders burning of Christian books and churches

312
Emperor Constantine’s conversion to Christianity

313
Edict of Milan establishes official toleration of Christianity

325
Council of Nicea

336
Death of Constantine

354
Birth of Augustine

367
Athanasius lists all 27 books of NT

379
Basil the Great dies

380
Christianity made official religion of Roman Empire

381
Council of Constantinople

386
Augustine converts to Christianity

389
Gregory of Nazianzus dies

395
Gregory of Nyssa dies

c. 400
Jerome’s Vulgate (translation of the Greek Bible into Latin)

407
John Chrysostom dies

411
Council of Carthage condemns Donatists

417
Pope Innocent I condemns Pelagianism

420
Death of Jerome

430
Death of Augustine

431
Council of Ephesus

451
Council of Chalcedon

787
Second Council of Nicea

950
Olga of Russia converts to Christianity

1054
Great Schism between East and West

1093
Anselm becomes Archbishop of Canterbury

1095
Council of Clermont: Pope Urban II proclaims First Crusade

1098
Crusaders take Antioch from Turks

1099
Crusaders recapture Jerusalem from Turks

1122
Concordat of Worms

1141
Peter Abelard condemned

1144
Fall of Edessa (crusader state)

1187
Fall of Jerusalem to Turks

1215
Fourth Lateran Council

1309
“Babylonian Captivity” (until 1377)

1337
Hundred Years’ War (until 1453)

1378
Great Western Schism (until 1423)

1409
Council of Pisa

1413-14
Lollard rebellion

1415
Council of Constance. Martyrdom of Jan Hus.

1420
Crusade against Hussites

1431
Joan of Arc martyred

1431-49
Council of Basel

1438-45
Council of Ferrara-Florence

1453
Fall of Constantinople to Turks

1478
Spanish Inquisition founded by Ferdinand and Isabella

1483
Birth of Martin Luther

1492
Expulsion of Jews from Spain by Ferdinand and Isabella

1505
Luther becomes a monk

1517
Luther posts 95 Theses

1521
Luther excommunicated

1530
Augsburg Confession

1534
Henry VIII’s Act of Supremacy

1536
Calvin’s Institutes of the Christian Religion

1541
Colloquy of Regensburg

1555
Peace of Augsburg

1559
Elizabeth I’s Act of Uniformity

1590
Michelangelo completes the dome of St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome

1609
Baptist Church founded by John Smyth

1611
King James (Authorized) Version of the Bible produced

1729
Beginnings of Methodism, led by John Wesley

1738
John Wesley feels his “heart strangely warmed” during a reading of Luther’s preface to Romans on Aldersgate Street in London

1775
American Wars of Independence begin

1783
America wins independence from Britain

1793
Louis XVI executed

1797
Second Awakening begins

1798
Pope Pius VI is prisoner of France

1799
Schleiermacher writes Speeches

1801
Cane Ridge Revival

1804
Napoleon becomes emperor

1807
Hegel writes Phenomenology of the Spirit

1808
French occupy Rome

1810
Mexico wins independence

1812-14
British-American War

1814
Reorganization of the Jesuits

1816
American Bible Society established

1822
Schleiermacher writes Christian Faith

1826
American Society for the Promotion of Temperance founded

1830
Joseph Smith produces Book of Mormon

1834
Spanish Inquisition officially abolished

1838
Abolition of slavery in the British Caribbean

1841
David Livingstone to Africa

1845
Methodists and Baptists split over the issue of slavery

1846
Pope Pius IX (until 1878)

1854
Dogma of Immaculate Conception of Mary

1859
Darwin publishes Origin of the Species

1861-65
American Civil War

1861
Presbyterians divide over the issue of slavery

1869
First Vatican Council

1870
Dogma of Papal Infallibility

1872
Moody begins preaching

1875
Mary Baker Eddy writes Science and Health

1882
Neitzsche declares “God is dead”

1895
Five Fundamentals

1900
Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams

1906
Azusa Street revival

1908
Henry Ford introduces the Model T

1910
World Missionary Conference, Edinburgh

1914
Assemblies of God founded

1914-18
World War I

1917
Russian Revolution

1919
Prohibition passed into law

1925
Scopes “Monkey” trial

1932
Barth’s Church Dogmatics

1939
Hitler invades Poland and sparks WWI

1945
Nag Hammadi Library discovered in Egypt;
US drops atomic bombs on Japan

1947
India wins independence from U.K.

1948
World Council of Churches founded

1950
Papal encyclical Humani generis

1956
First issue of Christianity Today

1960
Birth control pill approved by FDA

1961
First human in space
Papal encyclical Mater et Magistra

1962-65
Second Vatican Council

1963
MLK’s “I Have a Dream” speech

1968
Papal encyclical Humanae vitae

1969
First man on the moon

1971
Intel introduces the microprocessor

1973
Roe vs. Wade

1987-88
Televangelist scandals

1989
First woman ordained in an apostolic-succession church (the Protestant Episcopal church). Fall of the Berlin Wall.

1997
Birth of the internet

Sources

1. Earle E. Cairns, Christianity Through the Centuries (Zondervan, 1996).
2. Justo Gonzalez, The Story of Christianity (Prince Press, 1999).
3. Kenneth Scott Latourette, A History of Christianity, Vol. I: to A.D. 1500 (4th ed., Prince Press, 2000).
4. Encyclopædia Britannica. Encyclopædia Britannica Premium Service, 2004.

http://ministries.tliquest.net/theology/apocryphas/nt/

http://www.maplenet.net/~trowbridge/NT_Hist.htm

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_Christianity

http://www.internationalbibles.com/catalog/services/versions.htm

About fifty or sixty or so years after Jesus left us, all of his apostles had been hunted and tormented and killed or otherwise had all died off. Most of the written sacred records floating around the “original” Church were of dubious authenticity.

Mormons are wont to boast of having restored the “original” organization of the Church but frankly, what Jesus left behind wasn’t much of a Church in an organizational sense. Organizationally speaking, the Kingdom of God on Earth never emerged. What happened instead was that several kingdoms of slightly different “Gods” dug themselves into several geographical districts. These several, competing variant churches, each one claiming to be the fictional “universal” Church, almost immediately started sniping and hacking and shooting away at one-another. By even their own accounts the first two generations of post-Christ Church leadership moved only in a vague, general way toward a consensus of universal belief. To be even more pointed, the very first “universal” agreement these various branches of the Church hit upon was the notion that they were all independent of any central authority. Any branch of the Church founded by any apostle, or later, friend or student of an original apostle, was agreed to be as authoritative as any other.

In half a lifetime after Christ departed this world, there were none of His original apostles at all. Their students or disciples at that point had none of the same inherent authority to deal with even their own branch’s internal disagreement, disorganization, and in-fighting. They had no hope of enforcing any sort of order and uniformity outside their personal congregations. On top of this, these “Apostolic Fathers” as they became known, were also hounded by pagan and Jewish civil authorities and clergy.

They are today called “Apostolic Fathers” though of course, not even they claimed to be actual apostles. They did not in any way even suggest that they had the mantle of full apostleship handed down to them. But they did have living memory and some records of their masters. Unfortunately, they were beaten and tortured and all their writings and records and scriptures were taken away from them and systematically burned by various pagan Church-States and rival religious authorities. Bishops of the era were frequently publicly whipped and forced to offer sacrifices to the official pagan gods of Rome or other regions. Those who held out in faith were systematically killed off. It was a matter of decades only, until their testimonies and records were nonexistent and un-remembered. (I’ll deal with the “One surviving Group of True Believers” myths later on.)

The paradox of the first century after Christ, is that those branches of the original Church and the authorities who ran them who survived these persecutions, were almost certainly thus proved to be corrupted. Any Christian or branch of Christianity that would not be corrupted or at least compromise to worship the State or regional gods or pay homage at least a bit was destroyed—instantly and violently. Thus, any Christian Church that claims to be still around today from the beginning, is by definition at least slightly bent from the original.  Only the ignorant, average congregant and the seriously compromised clergy who’d been tortured into paying homage to the pagan status-quo remained in the flock. Oh, and of course the willing sell-outs. All the real “saints,” the original saints, were killed. Full stop. The “Primitive Church” as Mormons call it, degenerated in one or two life spans into an organization no more godly or holy than Herod the Great’s little temple operation at the time of Christ.

As these rapidly deteriorating conditions of persecution and rampant heresy overcame them, the Apostolic Fathers tried to preserve or recreate for us essentially all we will ever know of the Savior’s direct ministry after his passing from mortality. The books of the New Testament as we now have them, combined with records known as the “Writings of the Apostolic Fathers,” all of which appeared around 100 AD, just before or after, stem from this era in Church development. The Letter of Barnabus, The Teachings of the Twelve or the Didache, The First Letter of Clement of Rome, The Shepherd of Hermas, The Letters of Ignatius of Antioch, The Letter of Polycarp, The Fragments of Papius, are some of the chief examples of surviving Church literature from the era.

By name, Apostolic Fathers like Clement of Rome, Ignatius of Antioch, Polycarp, and the unknown author of The Letter of Barnabus were probably contemporaries of John the Apostle in his very late years of life. Biographical information on the Apostolic Fathers is thin at best and entirely missing in some cases. Modern scholarship casts even more doubt upon the various authorships but unanimously date these writings to the first century AD and It is fairly certain that these men did have association either with an original apostle or an immediate disciple of an original apostle. These records essentially document Church custom and practice of the first century AD era, and have been of great interest to Catholic, Orthodox, and Protestant scholars alike. Oddly enough, many of the arguments Mormons struggle through with modern Christians would be favorably resolved in favor of the Mormon point of view, were either Mormons or Christians in general familiar with the writings of the Apostolic Fathers. However, the reflections of the Fathers regarding specific Christian doctrines and customs have largely been passed over in favor of the rationalizing of later generations of Church scholars and theologians.

By the second century and beyond, the Church, (or Churches really) and Church leadership found themselves spending most of their time defending themselves against civil, physical, and doctrinal attack from both Jewish and Roman pagan authorities. This era was recorded by a group of men now called the “Apologists.” On top of constant Jewish persecution, early Christians were inflicted with a series of organized Roman persecutions that generated a more educated, legalistic justification of the Christian religion. These writers were scholars or lawyers, schooled in the Greek philosophical discipline. They made their arguments “logically.” They used allegory and metaphor and symbolic methods to teach and explain and decipher either the scraps of original apostolic scripture, and the older books and Jewish canon—roughly the Old Testament as we know it now, and a few less known or now lost records. They also used the writings of the Apostolic Fathers to formulate dogma and religious practice, but then wrapped it in slick, popular, “educated” and “logical” systems of response. They were only interested in defense of common criticisms of the religion.

Unfortunately, logic is logical to the parties in any given debate relative only to their common assumptions about how this or that operates. When the Church and everyone else, including the scientists and scholars of the period thought the earth was the center of the universe, it made perfectly good sense to the clergy to generate a whole system of teachings based on the assumption that God put mankind in the center of His Creation. It was very testimony-building to believe that you as a Christian were just that special to God. Every chapter and verse of holy writ that seemed to allude to this conclusion or could be made to support this conclusion was played up and played up until it seemed that an earth-centered universe was an integral concept without which the whole Christian belief system would collapse. And when smartasses like Copernicus and Galileo came on to prove beyond any shadow of a doubt that God had not put the earth in the center of the universe, it made perfect sense to the clergy to oppress, silence, and snuff out these troublemakers, even if they were obviously correct. It is better that one man should die than a nation perish in unbelief. It is also better than one man shall die than a Pope should ever have to say, “Ooops, had that one wrong…”

Which gets me to the concept of Papal Infallibility, but far to early in my explorations to go into it deeply. Strangely enough, the concept of a central, primal Pope, the Bishop of Rome being same, didn’t emerge for a thousand years and more. The claim of the bishop of Rome or any other Pope being infallible, didn’t come along until the early 19th century. When the first astronomers were being persecuted for contradicting longstanding teaching of the Church, they didn’t even have that personal, Papal infallibility issue at stake in a formal sense. But the Church authority as a general body was quite willing to kill, imprison, and certainly excommunicate its subjects simply for questioning Church “tradition.” This is quite an important and a rather sticky concept, this assumption that this or that doctrine or “Truth” has “always been taught” by the Church and therefore questioning it becomes a denial of the “Faith of our Fathers.” Even if that faith is knowingly false.

With the coming of true astronomy, the Church by empirical, irrefutable evidence was confronted a thousand and a half years into its pretentions to all wisdom, by the fact that its founders had made and perpetuated a foundationally stupid and utterly false assumption about the nature of Creation. Having totally misunderstood all of God’s Creation, the Church then went on to base generations of Church dogma upon it. Now, one would think that if this fact got ‘round the masses, it might lead the faithful to wonder, gee, if the Church was wrong on something so basic as that, just how right could it be about this other stuff?

Popes and Pastors and Prophets of all faiths are called upon now and again to fake their way through an answer to those sorts of suddenly unanswerable questions. That’s what a system of “apologetics” is designed to do–take a load of silly, ignorant twaddle, and present it in a way that makes it look brilliant and sensible. In the second century after Christ, that’s what the Apologists did. They gathered together all the known sacred Jewish and Christian writings and the writings of the Apostolic Fathers. They sorted through, gleaned, picked out, discarded, branded, labeled, validated, discredited and filtered all the known sacred and secular works pertinent in their estimation to the formation of the Christian Church. It was the Apologists who first began to carve in stone the vast bulk of Church dogma, and laid down the foundation of what was to become Christian canon scripture. But they did it based upon what made sense to them. To them the world was flat and sat in the center of the universe.

The main problem the Apologists had in this work then, is context. By the second century even the Apostolic Fathers were dead or dying. There was no living association with genuine apostles. The Apologists didn’t even know somebody who knew somebody who knew Jesus, or Paul, or John or Barnabas or anyone near the founding of the original Church. Most of them didn’t even know anything about being a Jew. That tradition was two-hundred years behind them. What they knew was Greco-Roman law, science, and philosophy—with an emphasis on philosophy. They were skilled debaters and persuasive writers but they were working out of a Greco-Roman world view—a view where the heavenly bodies moved around a flat earth on hollow glass spheres like massive window-paintings. Everything in the heavens moved in circles and everything on the earth moved in straight lines. That was logic to them.

So when the question kept coming back about just Who or What God really is, who this Jesus was in relation to God, and how the Holy Spirit fit into the whole scheme, they hammered out the answer to these sorts of questions amongst themselves based on “logical” assumptions of just how life, the universe, and everything really works—from a Greco-Roman world view.

Because no prophets or manifestations from God had taken place in some two-hundred years, it was logical to the Apologists that what recorded insight into the nature of God they had on hand was all they were going to get. God had closed the books and stopped talking to man. If God did not talk to them as earnest and studied and wise as they were, it made no sense that God would speak to anyone else. The notion of a closed heavens and a closed canon started with these men. On the other hand, “We don’t know,” or “There are no records on that issue,” were not acceptable answers for them. When they had no direct insight from legitimate records, they went Greek.

Now, the one central postulate that all the Greek and Roman philosophers universally agreed upon is the notion that all matter is corrupt. Matter, flesh, any physical existence is inherently evil. This was a fundamentally pagan Greek invention and the foundation of their whole scientific, scholarly, religious and political belief system. This is not a concept that came over from Jewish tradition. This is a very easily identifiable and uniquely Greek notion that can be traced exclusively to Plato, Aristotle and Socrates, not Jesus Christ.

It was Plato and his pagan philosophers who first postulated that God, being perfect, being really really pure and far bigger and more powerful than anything man could possibly comprehend, could not have any sort of physical existence. God had to be made of incorporeal matter. God had to be made of immaterial matter—which was a substance but not a substance. That made sense to them. It was logical. The Apologists then had to reconcile this notion with that of a very corporeal Jesus. Were they both God? The same God or actually two Gods? An actual Father and Son? It was vital for purposes of spreading the faith and maintaining unity to have some sort of “logical” final ruling on every point of dogma to keep both investigator and detractor happy when the questions came up.

For Aristotle, there were two souls. One was an animal soul and the other was a rational soul. The animal soul governed growth and healing and breathing and reproduction and  basically the physical senses. Animals had only this animal soul, but no thinking soul. The thinking soul was an act of specific creation. Fragments of this argument have survived in Christian tradition to explain everything from cruelty to animals because they have no intelligence or higher soul, to placing the Negro in a sub-human category due again, to their lack of this higher soul and thus being hopelessly lost to salvation.

Tertullian, one of the generation of Apologists who was prototypical of the full-time, institutionalized “Theologians” who took over Church studies in the late second, third, fourth, and fifth centuries, founded “Traduciansism,” which holds that procreation proceeds from the souls of the parents. When the animal spirit has grown a mortal body to a sufficient state, the rational soul enters into it, or “quickens” the body. For a while Christian theologians found this could be a way to transfer Original Sin to mankind from Adam and Eve, but when this theory lost favor the Church went to other rationale in later centuries–who’s theologians had by then adopted “Creationism,” an explanation for mortality with a slightly different bent that more or less said the spirit and body were created at the same instant and the spirit is the source of all character, the body being no more than a mechanism. Currently this doctrine forms the basis of the Roman Catholic position that at the instant of fertilization a fully created human body and soul are united.

There were early Church factions who thought Jesus and the Father were the same being, appearing to man via different manifestations. There were also originally a lot of Church scholars who thought there were two distinct beings in the Father and the Son. The only thing that was almost unanimously condemned in the early centuries is the contention that the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost are the same being, the same God all three, but manifested in three separate forms.

The issue of who the Holy Spirit is, has never actually been resolved in world-Christian terms to this day. There is in fact no effective way to resolve it and never has been, because today, as it ever has been, the “Christian” Church or the “Body of Christ,” in reality is little more than a voluntary association of councils and self-appointing committees who only occasionally call conferences to try to negotiate the much-touted, but still entirely fictional, “One Holy, Catholic, and Universal Church.”

The third and fourth centuries moved the Church past its cult status, having outlived the Jewish State and won approval of a series of Roman and Eastern Emperors. But true respectability in this context meant Christianity had to become an orderly State religion that sanctioned, and was sanctioned by, the State leadership. Christianity entered an era called, “Caesaro-Papism” where the Church and the Emperor were essentially bonded together into a single, all-powerful council. Christianity moved into this role with the Emperor Constantine, who among other things, beat up a few Bishops, called a conference, and made them spit out some final creed regarding this nature of God issue, so the Christian State could move on to other business and stop fighting about it.

Constantine moved the Roman world capital from Rome to a new city he build and named after himself, Constantinople. There he could build Christian churches in his own name and install Christian administrators of his empire who could freely worship in a Christian fashion, and the new regime could sidestep in one swift move the whole incumbent structure of Roman Emperor-as-pagan-defender-of-the-Roman-Gods. In the process he killed a son and a wife and never did get baptized until his deathbed, but he did get things done in his new Church-State.

In the third and fourth centuries and beyond, there were several centers of the Church: Rome, Antioch, Constantinople, Alexandria, and at least for some time, Jerusalem. There isn’t even a suggestion that the Roman Church or its bishop had any primacy over any of the others for century after century. There wasn’t necessarily even any regional “universality” and the various regional bishops would also hold councils and bicker about doctrine, then agree to disagree or sanction one-another with mutual charges of heresy. Local and regional, even global Church dogma changed suddenly and with deadly force as emperors or bishops or even governors and mayors changed.

In 325, Constantine (conceding a little bit of fairness to him as a ruler) set out to resolve a raging conflict on the nature of God. He ordered a council of bishops to convene in Nicaea, where they came to blows over one word, homoousios. They already had a rough idea of what was needed in the creed Constantine had demanded of them. In polishing it up however, it turned out that nearly all their objections hung on this one word. Apart from this controversy it was fairly smooth sailing. Constantine doesn’t seem to have had a personal stake in the question, he simply wanted  to get on with ruling an orderly Christian empire by brutal force. In 326 this council eventually produced what was supposed to be the defining Christian statement of belief.

The Nicene creed did not make everyone happy and create the “Universal” Church Constantine was demanding at all. It set off another string of clerical battles for the next several hundred years. The language of the Nicene Creed itself defines God the Father and Jesus Christ as being out of the same substance, not some separate substances. That was what the big fight was all about. All those centuries, all those years trying to nail it down, and that’s all they came up with. The Nicene Creed also defined Jesus as “Logos” or “the Word,” or more accurately, “the Verb” which implies the acting force or action. Logos was co-eternal with the Father and of the same substance. The whole “Word made Flesh” thing would be hashed for generations with great fury.

But pain of excommunication, torture and death didn’t settle the matter either, and Christianity has had several goes at the same statement like this entry from the Wikipedia:

The Athanasian Creed (Quicumque vult) is a Christian statement of belief, focusing on Trinitarian doctrine and Christology. The Latin name of the creed, Quicumque vult, is taken from the opening words “Whosoever wishes.” The Athanasian Creed has been used by Christian churches since the sixth century AD. It is the first creed in which the equality of the three persons of the Trinity is explicitly stated, and differs from the Nicene-Constantinopolitan and Apostles’ Creeds in the inclusion of anathemas, or condemnations of those who disagree with the Creed.

Widely accepted^[1] among Western Christians, including the Roman Catholic Church, the Anglican Communion, and most liturgical Protestant denominations, the Athanasian Creed has been used in public worship less and less frequently. The creed has never gained much acceptance among Eastern Christians.^[1]

What any of these creeds and professions of faith actually mean is anybody’s guess. The point of these creeds was to auspiciously state the mystery, not explain it. It was very important to these philosophers, which words they chose to explain how you could not understand the nature of God.

Now, the Western Churches adopted the Nicene Creed almost immediately. The Eastern Church basically adopted the creed but continued to argue about what it meant, quibbling about that one word, homoousios, until the Second Ecumenical council, also called the first Council of Constantinople in 381, where the riddle was not solved, but it was agreed to be unsolvable, one of the mysteries of God that was inappropriate to question.

The Nicene Council defined God as pure and immaterial. At the same time it declared the Father and Son to be two divine Persons. Logos, was pure and immaterial, not created and co-eternal of the same substance as the Father. Man was created by God or Logos, out of nothing. The nature of Logos is entirely different than the nature of Man. Man had a spirit, created by Logos, and this (depending on who’s your bishop through the ages) is infused with the animal spirit and body, which is also created out of nothing by Logos. This is pure Platonism. This is Plato’s concept of God and Man.

To this point in the Church-wide doctrinal bickering, the main interest was this so-called “Trinitarian” theology. (To be honest however, the Holy Spirit is given very little thought in the process. It’s really “Binitarian” more than “Trinitarian.”) The Nicene Creed, with the force and authority of the Church, East and West, and the Roman Empire, rather than put the matter to rest, only led to what would become known as the “Christological Conflict” and the “Theotokos” problem–the nature of Mary, the “Mother of God.”

As the battle raged over Trinitarianism however, the winning side became more and more entrenched in the Nicene statement whatever other problems it caused elsewhere theologically. The Nicene Creed http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/02033b.htm comes right out and just says God in all His forms is incomprehensible and if you don’t believe it you’re dead to God and more importantly, the Church. That’s pretty stern warning against anyone thinking otherwise.

Depending upon who you want to believe, an even more enhanced version of the Nicene Creed was developed  which further reinforced the mandatory belief in Trinitarian dogma. Until recently this was called the Athanasian Creed without thought to the validity of its actual author. This version probably grew out of some regional conferences starting in about 361 AD. Others contend it couldn’t have been in use any earlier than 500 AD. Frankly, it’s even harder to decipher than the Nicene Creed. The actual author is now widely in question, but it bears strongly the influence of the thinking of Athanasius of Alexandria, the presumed author of the original Nicene language, though it was written in Latin, not Athanasius’ Greek, and in a style of Western authors, not an Alexandrian. This enhanced Nicene language also reinforces the writings and postulations of one Augustine of Hippo, http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/augustine/ (354-430 AD.) Which brings us to the essentially full-time, professional theologians of the 4th and 5th centuries.

A new development in the Church in the middle of the first millennium, was monasticism. Former priests or sometimes those with no formal Church connection or authority at all formed closed orders dedicated to Christian study. Out of one of these in suburban Constantinople emerged a monk named Eutyches. Eutyches stuck his nose into the then again raging theological fights between Antioch and Alexandria concerning the nature or natures of God and Christ. He favored the Alexandrian position, which had just won out violently and sneakily at the Council of Ephesus in 431 under the pressure of the Patriarch of Alexandria, Cyril.

Now, Cyril was a brutal Jew-exterminating thug who called the council after bribing a lot of bishops and the governmental officials involved to grease the system in his favor. He also didn’t inform the Eastern bishops, none of whom would have agreed with his personal doctrinal lines. Cyril passed away in 444 AD but the dogmatic legacy of his council lives on today. At Ephesus, Cyril sought to exterminate a theologist of note at the time, named Nestorius. Nestorius taught that Christ had two natures, a human and a divine nature. Before the incarnation these were separate, and after the incarnation they were again separate. Cyril roused all of Christendom at the time by saying it was blasphemy to split our Lord Jesus Christ in such a way.

Eutyches, picked up the fight after Cyril’s death when Nestorianism was rearing its ugly head again, and argued that there were two natures before the incarnation but after, the two natures were intimately fused into one nature, the human and the immortal bound into one purified and divine nature.

I confess that I am a Mormon, and as such this quibbling bores me to tears. I at once understand why it is so de-emphasized in the LDS system. The specifics of these debates are still treated by general Christianity as if the very essence of light and truth and knowledge is being sorted out. Under the lightest analysis however, they actually sound mindless and in print look completely idiotic—like bad free-verse or a sort of poetic clanging. (It’s a psychological phenomenon common to lunatics who prattle earnestly away and seem entirely convincing till you realize it’s all nonsense.) It pains me to go into much detail about these early theological battles but it is vital for those both Mormon and Christian faithful to understand that they did go on. And on. And on. The claim today is that Christianity represents what “Christians” have “always believed.” There is no such thing. In the first three or four centuries “What Christians have always believed” changed from bishop to bishop, year-to-year, emperor-to-emperor. And it didn’t stop there. This is true whether or not Joseph Smith was a prophet of God or just an idiot-savant with incredible storytelling abilities.

None of the specifics of early Church gibberish actually matters much to most Christians today. They believe in Jesus as their personal Savior and that’s the entire depth of it. Most self-professing Christians couldn’t tell you what their actual religion stands for or what all they’re supposed to believe in if there was money in it. In fact they give money to professional Christians to keep reminding themselves what they stand for and believe in. But not even the professional Christians really get down to the basic guts of the religion. Those who do so, are considered radical, fundamentalist nut-jobs. Sadly, these fundamentalist nut-jobs actually come closer to “What Christians have always Believed” than most modern, mainstream, harmless, Jesus-friendly versions of the faith. Above all else, going way back to the first century, the common thread that holds Christian faith together has been that if you don’t think like we think, if you don’t believe as we believe, you’re burning in hell.

For those still true to Old World Christian religions, the only thing you need to know is that you do not believe in the Faith of your Fathers. Or perhaps, you belief the faith of your fathers, but not of your father’s fathers, or their fathers before them. At some point some group of your father’s, father’s fathers had bought into a violently different Christian faith than yours. You believe the latest version of what Christians have always believed in. You do not believe what Christians have always believed because there has never been an “all of” Christianity and it’s changed what it believes in frequently for two thousand years. It took two thousand years of vicious murder and intrigue between Church and State for you to scrounge together a “Faith” you could even pretend that Christians have always believed.

But back to Eutyches. His nature-of-Jesus Christ argument did win out in the long run, and became adopted almost universally. For the Protestant, however, particularly American Protestant, like Joseph Smith and company in their day, the most important thing that made it into the central heart of every Christian argument afterward however, is the way Eutyches proposed to prove his claims: Eutyches said, “Since God has written a book, He must have put in it everything that was important for us to know. It is just a question of reading God’s book and understanding it. The sentiments of the Fathers are no help.” The authoritative emphasis of Christianity then shifted from those closest the original documents and doctrines, to a feeling that it was all up to the learned Theologians, some holy writings and a lot of “figuring it out.”

Eutyches may have not been the absolute first person to express this sentiment, but in his time and in the major debates he undertook for this or that doctrine, his concept of accepted scripture being the only full authority on earth to speak for God took root as justification for just about anything the clergy, monks, and scholars then cared to argue. Then, as now, of course, you could take any tangential phrase from any Biblical author and make it support anything you want if you’re clever enough. This naturally, was one of little Joe Smith’s first observations and the impetus which he says prompted him to go right to the source.

Smith’s solution of course, was against the rules in the early Christian Church and still is. You can talk to God all you want, but if He starts talking back, you have a problem. Science, logic, now, that was perfectly sound however. The Apostolic Fathers were brushed aside as useless in one stroke. The ramblings of the Apologists took on more importance than those who actually knew the original saints and biblical authors. In fact, by Eutyches’ day, the Apologists had indeed already determined most of the Creeds and arguments that were still being developed, defined and expanded by the Theologians. The Theologians however, were driven to take the Apologetic arguments into more exact language–mighty poetic, philosophical language to glorify the mysteries into even more glorious mysteries. The mysteries of God were not comprehensible to man anyway, so it was simply a case of expressing them in the most poetic and mystical fashion. You must understand that most of Christian spiritual writing and analysis to this day concerns itself with worship and marveling at the Great Mystery that is God–not in getting to the bottom of things.

Eutyches brazenly asserts some three or four centuries into the well-known shambles of the randomly preserved Christian library, that God wrote us a complete, comprehensive manual. This is another good example of how “logic” is often just another word for “BS.” Simply asserting that God wrote a book doesn’t make it true. Proceeding from this unfounded assumption may sound “logical,” but in truth is just silly.

Case in point: the New Testament as we know it was not canonized and adopted by all branches of the Christian Church for another good thousand years or so. Eutyches couldn’t have even get a council together in his own day to agree upon just what book, or collection of books, he was talking about when he referred to “God’s book.” Indeed, half of any council or any number of bishops assembled in the day would violently disagree upon the validity of half the allegedly holy scriptures anyone cared to put before them at the time. Nevertheless, this notion grew that God had written a book, a “bible” or “The Bible” or “Holy Bible.” 

So, having spent three hundred, four hundred years trying to decide if Jesus and the Father were made of the same stuff or two different bits of stuff, the Church then had the problem of figuring out how that decision could be reconciled with a couple of other hard doctrines they’d been mostly ignoring: like explaining Christ, born of a human woman, who lived and died and suffered with an obvious physical body, which He raised from the tomb and went to heaven with. This was clearly the whole point of the surviving New Testament library. There were four known Gospels from genuine apostles clearly telling all about it. The human Jesus born of a mortal woman with God as a Father clearly described in their now totally authoritative Bible did not harmonize now with most of the more mystical theology they’d worked on amongst themselves for the last three or four hundred years.

This “Trinitarian” argument of Nicaea, central as it seems now, was merely the main argument going, not the only argument going all this time of course. The Apologists, the Theologians, had whole libraries full of their teachings that were now going to have to be reconciled with written, authoritative holy scripture. And of course, they hadn’t really defined just what they were going to call holy scripture, or what translation they were going to consider reliable, much less, authoritative.

And while all of Christianity openly knew of these limitations with holy scripture, the notion of a “Bible” still grew more and more promoted and sanctified. And since God was now claimed to have written it, it was the only authoritative Word of God.

Jesus was gone. The apostles were gone. The prophets were all dead. The Apostolic Fathers were all dead. Now the Church and the various councils and divinity schools and holy orders would take these questions up directly from what was fast becoming Holy Writ. Any observation or conclusion made by anyone of any authority was as valid as any other—if it was based upon the Holy Bible. This made getting just the right translation, just the right wording to fit your particular sect just all that much more important.

Did this new move to a Biblical “authority” solve any problems with the “Universal Body of Christ?” No. Christianity thereafter went furiously about, excommunicating and killing one-another for reading or daring to publish the “wrong” Bible. The Bible became just one more reason to torture you to death—usually by piling your “false” Bibles and heretical writings on top of you and burning you to ashes with them in the town square as an object lesson to others who might stray from the Church’s official narrative.