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.

It is the undeniable truth that Calvinists took over England, and through English colonization, Calvinism was the main religious force in opening up the North American continent, specifically those colonies who later became the United States of America. What Calvin’s modern fans try to obfuscate however, is the fact that the small group of truly great thinkers who authored and crafted the US Constitution, particularly the Bill of Rights where the relationship between religion and State authority was cleanly severed, were in truth a coven of dissidents reacting directly to Calvinistic oppression and abuse of power. They had seen it historically on two continents for many generations. For this reason, the Founding Fathers incorporated protection for all religion in the Constitution. They also limited government from taking a position on religion at all, other than acknowledging the Great Architect of the Universe, the Creator, Who grants all mankind its universal rights.

From the birth of the Church of England to the American Revolution, the State enforcement of Christianity had been seen by America’s Founding Fathers to be, a capricious and bloody disaster. After Henry VIII, the Church of England had first undergone a violent flip-flop back to brutally enforced Roman Catholicism with the short-lived “Bloody Mary,” Henry’s daughter. She died mercifully prematurely in her reign, and from then on the Parliament became over-run with Protestants eagerly driven to force Roman Catholics out government, the court, and ultimately all of England if they could manage it. They rapidly codified anti-Catholic laws including the proscription of Roman Catholics from ever taking the English Crown again. This power-hungry English Parliament looked over the channel in Europe, and jealously spied Calvin’s incredible control of every aspect of Genovese society. They soon adapted themselves to exploit Calvin’s whole approach.

In 1567, Mary Queen of Scots was forced to abdicate the Scottish Throne because she was a Roman Catholic.  Scotland had been forcefully aligned with England and politics had gone all Puritan on her. Her heir and son James, had been raised a Protestant. He met the new Protestant requirement to take his mother’s throne, but James was only 13 months old however. Several regents ruled on his behalf while he grew up. Before he ascended to his kingly duties, he took to travelling Denmark and Norway to learn the sport of witch hunting, which was immensely popular in Scandinavia at the time. He was a very active participant in these trials and punishments, and in one famous case testified that the witches involved had cast a spell of bad weather that was intended to sink his boat and prevent his participation as he travelled to the court. He authored a little book on the subject titled Daemonologie  in 1597, which became something of a handbook for witch hunting fanatics.

James I (Known as James VII of Scotland) practiced his witch hunting hobby as the Scottish King a while. He took a Danish wife while he was at it. Inevitably his mother was executed as a threat to English Protestantism by Elizabeth I. This cleared the way for him to take the English throne without dispute, since unlike his mother, James’ religion was all in order and he had a proper Protestant spouse to make proper Protestant heirs with. He united the two kingdoms of Scotland and England in 1603 as James I of England, when Elizabeth I died childless.

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

http://www.elizabethan-era.org.uk/elizabethan-witchcraft-and-witches.htm

http://www.historylearningsite.co.uk/james-I-witchcraft.htm

In 1605 a Catholic soldier named Guy Fawkes, supposedly guarding a pile of firewood underneath James’ first parliament as English king, was discovered to also have a pile of powder kegs nearby with which he intended to blow up the entire government. After that, James forced English Catholics to swear an oath of loyalty and deny the supremacy of the Roman Pope over English law. He was quite friendly to them afterward however.

http://talesofcuriosity.com/v/GunPowder/

James I also tried to conform the Scottish Protestants as closely as he could to the English Protestants. This annoyed the Scottish immensely. Part of James I’s problems with the Scottish had to do with the Scottish Reformationists claiming way too much independence from the English Church, of which he was now the head, and resting way too much authority on the scribblings of John Calvin. Of course, as already noted, in reality James I had begun his King’s career in Scotland as a back-woodsy Calvinistic Puritan like all the other Scottish Protestants. When he came into the English Throne however, all his witch hunting and whatnot alienated the English Court’s more cosmopolitan, educated Puritans who considered him to be unsophisticated and superstitious. But James I was well thought of throughout his kingdoms, and he made many important cultural and religious “advances” at least from the English, Protestant perspective.

In 1607 a group of settlers sailed from James I’s England and founded the American colony of Jamestown in his name. This entrepreneurial venture became the toe-hold of the Church of England on a big new continent.

http://www.historyisfun.org/jamestown-settlement.htm

James I gave us the era of William Shakespeare. He fostered art and architecture, music and social progress. He brokered something of a peace between Catholic and Protestant, England, Ireland and Scotland, and he sponsored the translation and publication of the Bible that would become the New World English Standard, his “Authorized Version,” which was first published in 1611.

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

Oddly enough, neither the Pilgrims, other American colonists, or the common English used their king’s “Authorized Version” until around 1651, some thirty years after he made it available to them all. Until around that period, the Geneva Bible was used in the home. This had been compiled in Geneva in part by Calvin’s brother-in-law, as headed up by English refugees from Bloody Mary. It was finally published and Dedicated to the new Protestant Queen, Elizabeth I in 1560.

The Geneva bible was flamingly anti-Roman, something the Anglican church had no quarrel with, but it was also flamingly anti-authoritarian, something the English Crown had issue with. So the Bishop’s Bible was used in church.

This Bishop’s Bible wasn’t the first English “Authorized” Bible. In 1539 Henry VIII ordered Thomas Cromwell to supervise Myles Coverdale in producing the English Great Bible, so-called because it was huge. It is sometimes also called the “Cromwell Bible.” It was also very expensive. It was a clergy-only authorization not meant for the masses. Because Henry VIII grew impatient with the scholarship and tedious deliberation involved, Coverdale ended up basically ripping off the work of William Tyndale who Henry had branded a heretic and traitor, and executed three years previously. Coverdale took Tyndale’s work and removed the objectionable anti-Catholic and anti-authoritarian marginal notes, consulted the Latin Vulgate and various German translations and made editorial corrections for political and dogmatic reasons to keep his king happy. He did not spend any time at all looking at any ancient Biblical texts. The result was clumsy Olde English and would be scarcely understandable today.

Another irony of the Great Bible is the fact that Myles Coverdale in 1535 had already published the first complete English Bible. The Coverdale Bible, unlike other English translators, included the full New and Old Testaments. Like the Great Bible, it was based on Tyndale and German translations. So it is important to note that the Great Bible was very specifically published by the Church of England for some very specific editorial reasons not at all related to scholarship or accuracy. Henry VIII already had an excellent English complete Bible from Coverdale. He wanted one like it, but spun to his own purposes, as supervised by his Vicar General Thomas Cromwell, to insure the resulting volume met the express interest of supporting his king as the sole Defender of the Faith. Not the Pope. Not the Bible. Not John Calvin. But Henry VIII, King of England.

http://smu.edu/bridwell_tools/specialcollections/prothroexhibit/english27.htm

http://www.chaplain.us/Bible/bible.htm

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

http://www.greatsite.com/timeline-english-bible-history/

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

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

It could be fairly claimed that all of these translations served one political or theological purpose or another rather than represented true and accurate preservation of Holy Writ. But when the Geneva Bible made the Holy Scriptures available in common English vernacular it became immediately popular with the common folk. It was very much a Calvinist document however, a movement that hadn’t yet been smoothed into existing Anglican doctrines maintaining the unilateral Church authority of the English King. Unlike Calvin’s Calvinism and the masses who actually might like a little Biblical anti-authoritarianism, the Church of England and its heads of state didn’t like using a Bible infested with Calvinesque marginal notes authorizing rebellion from Crown and Church. Calvin encouraged slaves and servants to choose God over their masters, and a host of other dangerous free-thinking intimations. So in 1586, under Elizabeth I, a council of bishops produced yet another Bible based on William Tyndale’s work. This again is ironic, since Tyndale had only decades before been arrested by Henry VIII and imprisoned for over 500 days in filthy conditions until he was nearly dead. Finally Henry invented some feeble evidence and Tyndale was convicted of heresy and treason in a contrived trial and then strangled and burnt at the stake in the prison yard on October 6, 1536. His last words were, “Lord, open the king of England’s eyes.“

http://www.greatsite.com/timeline-english-bible-history/william-tyndale.html

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

http://www.reformed.org/documents/index.html?mainframe=http://www.reformed.org/documents/geneva/Geneva.html

http://biblehistory.ca/article.php?fragid=22&year=1568

For James I’s Biblical mission, he didn’t have to worry about Henry VIII’s fondness for all things Roman Catholic, that had passed from the Anglican Church in no uncertain terms. But when he left the Scottish rabble and became an English king as well, it became a problem of uniting the equally rabid English and the Scottish Protestant factions not against a Roman Pope, but into agreement upon the sovereignty of the King of England as head of both Church and State. That just wasn’t an easy proposition. English Calvinists brushed over rather a lot of Calvin’s views on rather a lot of Church-State issues because they didn’t fit the Anglican foundation. James felt he had to insure this Anglican power base would be observed throughout his kingdoms. This meant he had to mount yet another Biblical rendition that either left all the politics out, openly supported his role as King and Church Head, or the very least, walked that fine line between a sort of neutral accuracy and asking for trouble. Again, he used Tyndale’s work as a centerpiece. His team would go back to the oldest known manuscripts and attempt not just a literal translation, but something that captured the majesty of the Word of God, something everyone could not only read and enjoy as literature, but a Bible that would exclude all marginal interpretations and leave it to the Church (Him as its head) to do all the interpreting.

And the rest is history…

Backtracking the English Bible even farther however, to be fair, the first first delivery of the Holy Scripture to the English masses of course, has to be credited to John Wycliffe. Wycliffe was such a prolific religious idea man and academic genius that he, not Martin Luther, is lauded by the scholarly as the precursor to the Reformation Movement. He was in fact, a Reformer before the Movement caught up with him. He professed that the Bible should be an open possession of the Body of Christ, not a secret collection of scribblings in a language the common population couldn’t even read. He was embarrassed that English nobility read the only common-language Bible they could easily get in French, the only other available being the Vulgate, which was in Latin, which by that time was no longer a common language and was used only by academics and the clergy. Wycliffe instigated an English translation from the Latin that resulted in English versions of the New Testament and an edited, more readable edition of the Old Testament that had been already finished, by Nicholas of Hereford, all of which was again edited and revised by Wycliffe’s associate John Purvey in 1388.

Wycliffe’s pre-Reformation Reforming led to his Roman Catholic opponents saying, “The jewel of the clergy has become the toy of the laity.” And in Wycliffe’s time, Rome was the only game in town. The Roman hierarchy attempted to completely exterminate Wycliffe’s work, but about 150 manuscripts still remain. Tyndale was indeed inspired by Wycliffe’s efforts, which is but one more thing that put him at odds with Henry VIII. Henry VIII did not look at Wycliffe as a Reformer. Henry VIII was the only Reformer Henry VIII needed in his Court. Henry VIII saw Wycliffe as a rebel and troublemaker who in the end was declared posthumously a heretic, excommunicated, dug out of the Church’s Holy Ground, and dumped ignominiously into the local river. Just to make sure he stayed dead, his writings and books were all burned and declared heretical and banned.

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

At any rate, 1653 brings us to England’s first full-bore Calvinist witch hunter and overall pompous English bastard, Oliver Cromwell. By by 1653 Cromwell had promoted his exploits killing Catholic Celts on the battlefield into a high position in Parliament. He then overthrew King Charles I, had him executed for ostensibly for seeking help from a Catholic army during the battle which Cromwell sold as treason, dissolved Parliament, dissolved the monarchy, formed the “Commonwealth of England,” and installed his own “Barebones” Parliament consisting of hand-picked ministers.

Oliver Cromwell was a distant relative of Thomas Cromwell, the man who’d found Henry VIII the legal and doctrinal excuses for taking over the job of English Pope. Henry had taken Oliver’s kin to the heights of power in his Kingdom, but Thomas eventually found his English Reformation plans put on hold as Henry cut off his head. It seems Parliament thought he was getting too big for his britches and convinced Henry Thomas Cromwell had to go. His kinsman Oliver obviously figured out how to prevent that from happening again by killing the king first, and taking over Parliament himself.

Oliver Cromwell was a truly raving England-First Puritan who professed that God guided his every move. And being a true Calvinist to the core, he had no use for a monarchy pretending to be the head of the Church, and he had no need for a professional clergy to tell his Parliament how to govern English society.

When Oliver Cromwell quoted the Bible it was the full Calvinist Geneva Bible mind you, not the King James Version. Cromwell was all about doing God’s will as he saw fit and any one or anything that encumbered this mission was eliminated. Cromwell had won brutal battle after battle in his campaign against Scottish and Irish Catholics, and even formed a violent aversion to his period Scottish Presbyterians who refused to conform to his English Church and legal systems. He knew what was best for them and he was damned well going to force them to accept it. After conquering them all, he declared himself  “Lord Protector of England, Ireland, and Scotland.”

Cromwell’s army slaughtered more than forty-percent of the native Irish population for refusing to renounce Catholicism, and drove by force the remaining indigenous population to County Connaught, with the Act of Settlement in 1653. His treatment of the Irish has been categorized by historians as “genocidal.” Even the Scottish Presbyterians had been fighting for a Stuart restoration to the Scottish and/or English Throne, in the person of Charles II, but Cromwell easily and brutally put down both Catholic and Protestant supporters of the Stuarts.

The only thing Oliver Cromwell hated worse than Catholics was heretics and traitors. The only thing he hated worse than heretics and traitors were witches. And be slaughtered a lot of each.

http://www.forerunner.com/champion/X0004_3._Oliver_Cromwell.html

http://www.britannia.com/history/monarchs/mon48.html

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

Cromwell’s Commonwealth died with him and the monarchy was restored in 1660 with Charles II, who dug up his bones and hung him by his shroud at Tyburn, except for his head which was cut off and displayed outside Westminster Hall. For the most part his ethnic cleansing of the Irish and gloating victories over the Scottish combined with his furious Calvinism still to this day overwhelm any contributions he may or may not have made to English society.

The English Crown in the 18th century diminished into something close to a “Super Minister,” and almost a figurehead that Parliament could listen to or not. But though a figurehead, the king remained an important figurehead and led by example if nothing else.

In 1745 “Bonnie Prince Charlie,” Charles Edward Stuart, Scotland’s last Stuart pretender to the English and Scottish thrones, returned to Scotland from his safe exile in France, and led a  Jacobite or “Highland” rebellion that recaptured his Scottish throne. This surprised everyone including his loyal followers. The English were taken aback and in a state of panic. He then stupidly insisted upon taking on his claim to the English throne. That didn’t go so well for him.

http://www.britishbattles.com/battle_of_culloden.htm

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

Invading England and capturing its capitol city was not an entirely idiotic notion. The Scots were actually doing quite well at first. (And of course they had God on their side…) The English Parliament even fled town and the entire government was essentially in the process of abandoning London to the oncoming Scottish forces. In the last push however, Charlie got spooked, received some bad intelligence and became convinced a huge force was just waiting for them a few miles closer to their goal. He turned tail and retreated back up into Scotland to have a rethink.

George II of England couldn’t believe this stupid move, thanked God for such a stroke of luck, took advantage of the time Stuart had granted him to rest, rally, and reorganize his forces. Then he sent the Duke of Cumberland chasing backup to Inverness with his best and brightest to solve the Scottish Catholic problem once and for all, in the same way Oliver Cromwell had solved the Irish Catholic problem generations before.

On April 15, 1746, Cumberland’s army faced off with the last Stuart claimant to the English throne with cannon, musket, and sword at Culloden Moore in northern Scotland. When he was finished, there wasn’t much left other than carnage and bloody tartan. He followed up the Jacobite slaughter by systematically burning out the entire Highland population. Likewise, by legal proscription, rape, pillage, and mass murder he drove out or effected the near genocide of the Highland Clans. The Jacobites were mostly Catholic, mixed with a smattering of Scottish Episcopalians, who had splintered from the Scottish Presbyterians because they wouldn’t conform to the Church of England’s guidelines. I mention this again because it isn’t coincidental. This butchery didn’t take place because of simple politics. It was a religious war. It was Christians killing Christians because they disagreed who should be running the Church and State.

(So in one-thousand seven-hundred and forty-five years since the birth of Christ nothing much had changed.)

As usual, George II mainly ended up the King of England because he wasn’t Roman Catholic. George II’s father, George I had been imported from Hanover, which is now in Germany, even though there were English and Scottish heirs with perhaps better claims. The British Isles contestants were all Roman Catholics or had Catholic sympathies.

George I spoke very poor English. He was regarded as a bumpkin and a foreigner by Parliament, and turned out to be far more conciliatory to Roman Catholics than they’d imagined he would be. Undaunted by his efforts at moderation, Parliament continued to enact anti-Catholic measures that grew increasingly oppressive. The English public never warmed up to him either, and it was said that his heart was never in England, but Hanover.

As a young heir to the English throne, George II came to heated debates with his father over the dangers of allowing Roman Catholics to undermine the English Church and State by allowing them power and position when they were forsworn to a foreign Pope. This was an attitude that carried over to the American colonies and remained stalwart amongst the Protestants in the United States of America until about 1960, when John Fitzgerald Kennedy, an Irish Catholic, was elected president midst much the same objections from opponents over his allegiances to Rome. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_F._Kennedy)

Over these Catholic conspiracy issues and other matters of governing England, George II became enraged at his father in public one too many times, and was banished from Court till his father passed away and he took the throne in 1727.

Unlike his father, George II spoke fluent English and was a gung-ho Calvinist. He refused to go back to Hanover for his father’s funeral and this little gesture of contempt won him the approval of all English society. His slap-down of the Jacobites at Culloden was the last pitched battle ever fought on English soil. Protestantism had unquestionably been secured in the British Isles.

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

http://www.englishmonarchs.co.uk/hanover_2.htm

But a pitched battle was brewing on American soil at the same time. In 1776, George II’s heir, King George the III, ultimately lost the American colonies. I leave you to sort out the reasons for this heated move to independence by the English colonists. There are a lot of theories, but a look at actual history will tell you it had as much to do as a whiskey tax and a beer tax and the price of tea, as it did with securing religious freedom. And perhaps the Calvinists were right in the end: the exercise of bashing Bibles back and forth for so many centuries eventually beat some sense into America’s head.

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

America had begun to realize that religious liberty wasn’t liberty at all unless all individuals were allowed to debate and investigate their own understanding of religious truth, and were then free to observe these beliefs. America had also learned from Calvin’s oppression, that religion wasn’t worth anything if you could not enjoy the fruits of your own labors. Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness may not be in the Bible, and happiness may not even be pious, but it wasn’t a bad as it was cracked up to be. And perhaps America had even learned that it was none of the local church biddies’ business if you wanted to dance, or sing, or fart on your own doorstep. In America, a man’s home truly became his castle, and that made him head of his own church in his own home.

John Calvin may have been given credit for founding the hardworking American ethos. But he taught God’s truth by bad example. America learned the value of true religious freedom by suffering the lack of it under Calvin’s colonial hell on earth.

http://bustill.blogspot.com/2008/04/religious-intent-providence-politics.html

http://www.worldviewweekend.com/worldview-times/article.php?articleid=5153

I’m having a hard time slogging through the repetitiously violent and repressive movements of historical Christianity. It must be done however just to get to the point where we can intelligently discuss Joseph Smith and all the “funny” ideas detractors claim he had. I suppose that’s one reason why Mormons don’t bother to do so any more on any level. It’s tedious, contentious, and the vast majority of self-professed Christians don’t know much about any of it either, nor would they care to debate it with any intellectual honesty.

Most devout Christians don’t really want to even try to understand their so-determined “non” Christian peers at all. That’s because, if you are not a “Christian” as they define it, you are not their peers. You are not their brothers in Christ and you should be treated like any other heathen. (http://articles.latimes.com/2011/jan/19/nation/la-na-alabama-governor-20110119) They want to “save” you, because you are going to hell if you don’t see things their way. It doesn’t matter to them if you worship the Great Money God, Space Aliens, or Satan Himself. Mormons, Muslims, Jews, Hindus, followers of Zeus, it’s all the same to the Christian. Some Christian political and social apologists today will beg off this very central Christian doctrine by sliding around it with the argument that, no, they’re not our brothers and sisters in Christ, but they’re still children of our Father in Heaven. Anyone without a head not already firmly planted in a very dark and cramped place, would reply, well, if you’re a Trinitarian our Father in Heaven and Jesus Christ are exactly the same guy. It’s just more Christian “Mystery” gibberish.

The job of the Christian apologist in these enlightened times is to attempt to make fundamental Christian dogma sound pluralistically forgiving enough that the Christian can at least wait till you die of natural causes to let God dish out your eternal punishment. It sounds like the average Christian wouldn’t be inclined to hasten your demise because you didn’t measure up to their definition of “Christian.” The well-meaning but historically ignorant Christian will pretend his faith allows him to agree to disagree, to live in peaceful co-existence with the infidel in a culturally and religiously diverse republic. This however, has not been the “traditional” Christian social or political standard, or in fact shall I say, Christian military standard:

Onward Christian soldiers, marching as to war with the cross of Jesus going on before…

The late 1960’s produced the inventors of the “Jesus Freak” or “Red Letter Christian” modern embrace of the always loving and conciliatory words of Christ Himself. The concept of focusing almost entirely upon the teachings of Jesus is a very recent invention of the latter-day Christian recruiter. One of the most successful of these, Joel Osteen, who inherited the ministry of his father’s pioneering Houston Texas, Lakewood mega-church in 1999. He began to be pressed about his reluctance to send all non-Christians to hell in his sermons. This came to a timely inquisition mounted by fellow evangelicals framed by concurrent political events involving a prominent Mormon presidential candidate and other defense-of-family related political and social issues. Mormon elements and the evangelical Christian crowd had found themselves mixing together trying to meet mutually desired political results and it became imperative for Christian activists to draw lines for the future rule of the country after disposing of their temporary Mormon allies. Osteen replied essentially that he wasn’t going to be the one to define who was or wasn’t Christian, or who was or wasn’t going to heaven, Christian or not. Osteen said he was just trying to focus on the gospel of Christ’s gift of salvation and teachings of positive living. Osteen was immediately sent to the corner by his Christian fellows, with a dunce hat on his head.

Osteen is just the latest “Christian” with half a brain in his head to actually sit back and examine some of the preposterously evil tenets of “traditional” Christianity and try to find a way out of its inherently stupid consequences. But in Christian circles, this sort of open thinking, or frankly, thinking at all, brings very active protest from the Christian establishment as quickly now as it did in Joseph Smith’s time. Osteen’s church has been literally mobbed and assailed by his fellow evangelical Christians in protest of his attempts to make the Christian faith sound intelligent and enlightened. A Mormon might be inclined to take Osteen’s side in this debate, but this won’t help Osteen any. His Christian protesters are right. Allowing the acceptance of Christ alone to be the primary indicator of a “Christian” faith represents a serious surrender of centuries upon centuries of stridently developed basic Christian dogma. The notion that non-Christians might not only avoid burning in hell but actually go to heaven is unthinkable in “orthodox” Christianity.  http://www.av1611.org/osteen.html     http://www.safeguardyoursoul.com/html/joel_osteen_exposed.html http://www.forgottenword.org/osteen.html http://www.blog.joelx.com/joel-osteen-megachurch-pastor-without-christ/668/

One of Osteen’s problems is that he did not suffer the lengthy education of divinity school or any sort of seminary, wherein he could have been properly conditioned to read the Bible in general, and the words of Christ in particular, in a properly slanted direction. Most Christian theologians, scholars and clergies through the ages have concluded that God deliberately created the savage, the heathen, the “non” Christian fundamentally without hope of salvation and of little or no worth to God or man. Christianity differs only in its understanding of whether or not God saves these worthless humans all on His own according to His whims, or if man has any sort of power or obligation to ask to be redeemed from his natural-born sentence in hell. In some cases, even the most current Christian theologians will propose clearly and boldly when asked, that natural-born man is entirely the spiritual creation of the devil, and physically born of filthy parents on a filthy planet that has been surrendered in God’s disgust to Satan. In most of Christianity, man is not only no son of God spiritually or physically, but he’s some other creature entirely created body and soul by Satan.

I use the word “legislation” here very purposefully, because that is exactly what the collections of bishops and Christian councils through the ages have been doing—legislating their particular Christian beliefs and setting appropriate punishments for not conforming to the religious-political bills they have thus authored. Christianity as it is popularly known today, based upon these generations of arguments and committee decisions made “orthodox” only by brute force, is no more infallible or inspired than your local city council meeting. The main difference between a city council meeting and say, the Council of Nice , is that if you lose the vote in a city council meeting they don’t draw and quarter you in the local park and sell tickets to the spectacle to fund youth hockey. (Unless you’re talking about my city council meetings…) Christian tradition is a litany of club rules no more “True” than the charter and by-laws of your neighborhood bowling league and bears no higher spiritual or moral authority to send you to either heaven or hell than the Cub Scouts or the Rotary Club.

All politics is local they say, and that’s exactly the level at which every now monumental Christian sect and tradition began. Through the centuries these local movements have fought, won, lost, amalgamated, grown, conquered and spread into worldwide institutions. But they all started with one, two, a handful of non-spectacular local guys with a few big ideas they pulled out of the Bible or a few “purifying” gospel gimmicks like full-immersion baptism or changing the Sabbath back to Saturday. They just kept selling their innovations or “restorations” or “reformations” by hook or crook, or through brute political force whenever possible. And then they outlawed and obliterated anyone or anything that preceded or opposed them.

The same of course, can be said of Mormonism—with the exception of these processes being almost utterly internalized. Brigham Young in particular was a very heavy-handed nation builder. He took Norwegians, Swedes, Danes, English, Irish, Scottish Immigrants, Roman Catholics, Protestants, Jews, and converted them directly into Mormons. Not Americans, but Mormons. Deseret Mormons.

Apart from an incident or two however, Mormons have made no effort at all to use any sort militant force to expand and conquer the Christian world by force. Since conquering pagans by force of arms is the history of Christianity itself however, Mormonism’s Christian opponents in the United States in particular, have always had tremendous fear that Mormon subjugation would be the inevitable outcome of allowing Mormons to have human and civil rights like any other citizen. Christians were already in the process of subjugating heathens in America and they naturally concluded that Mormons would do the same thing to them if they ever got a political or social foothold in a constitutional republic that protected their minority world view.

While Mormonism hasn’t obliterated American Christianity by any means even in its Utah home, within the traditions and educational history of the LDS church itself today however, and Insofar as present-day Mormonism is concerned, they’ve erased the entire history of Christianity right up until Joseph Smith was old enough to read a Bible.

In the Beginning, God created Joseph Smith.

This brings me back to my point of this collection of exploratory essays: God the Father and His Son Jesus Christ didn’t choose Brigham Young or John Taylor or any of Smith’s other better educated, better read and better prepared contemporary LDS church founders; Deity chose to appear to Joseph Smith. You would think the Mormon would thus be interested in understanding what Joseph Smith was all about at the time this choice was made. But not so. Joseph Smith was a Christian. Most Mormons today don’t even know what a Christian is.

In his own words,  Joseph Smith was just a confused kid in an era and in a region of the frontier United States that enjoyed its religion the way we’d go to a movie or sporting event today. It was what Joseph Smith did instead of watching TV or playing video games. The religion of the Smith’s day and chief sport in Joseph’s neighborhood was Mainstream Protestantism. They had a league and a set of rules, and you had to play the religion game their way or you were kicked off the field and out of the association of professional American religionists.

This is still particularly true of the sort of devout Christian who likes to mount the ever-popular anti-Mormon, anti-“cult” and anti-everyone-else sorts of crusades. It’s religious glory. It’s entertainment. It’s a living. Their mission isn’t one of helping you to understand the followers of the “false” gods they parade before the trembling faithful. The mission of these professional Christian spook-chasers is to bring the intellectually curious or wavering Christian back to Jesus by illustrating to them that exploring other religions leads only to blackest hell and eternal torment. These sorts of itinerant anti-Mormon, anti-cult crusaders make a fair living reassuring their fellow Christian meal tickets that their salvation is secure, and giving them just one more reason to feel even better about themselves being Christians. That, and just sitting around being pious or thinking of good works to do is boring as hell. http://www.boblarson.org/ http://www.demontest.com/

http://www.waltermartin.com/whatsnew.htmlChristian faith is, in general, every bit the product of “occultic mind control” and “blind obedience” as Christian critics claim Mormonism to be. Most Christians were born Roman Catholic or Anglican or Lutheran or Baptist or whatever, and they don’t even know what that really entails other than party loyalty. They love Jesus. They know the Bible is the Word of God. They accept at face value that Bible says exactly what their clergy says it says, and that it comes to us exactly as God wrote it personally. Most of them recite lengthy creeds and prayers every week that just clang like cheerful little bells in their ears and make them feel better but make little sense to them.

When most Christians come up with questions their ministers and clergy can only dodge or answer inanely with an allusion to the “mysteries of God,” they frankly just aren’t motivated enough by sheer intellectual curiosity or spiritual insight to push beyond this unsatisfying response. So they passively concede the point and accept that some day when they are carried up to meet Jesus, they may start to understand how stupid they were for thinking that so many of their central church doctrines sounded idiotic, cruel, and heartless. They’ll look into their Savior’s eyes and suddenly realize, yeah, I get it now: You created those savages out in the jungle expressly so they could burn in hell. You put them there and prevented anyone from reaching them with a Bible because you were going to send them to hell anyway. That makes total sense to me now. That’s not cruel or unfair at all. You meant for it to be that way because you created them inherently worthy of hell. How could I have been so ignorant?

Because God’s will is a “mystery” beyond human comprehension, the discerning Christian will try very earnestly to stop being quite so discerning until all the overtly stupid parts of their religion no longer bother them. They will quietly and faithfully accept that they are saved from the fires of damnation. That’s the important thing. Those other guys aren’t. Those errant denominations, those false Christians, those non-Christians–as good as they might be in earthly terms–they’re going to hell and we aren’t. That’s all that’s important in the end.

Now, nowhere and at no time more than in Joseph Smith’s young America was this revivalist Christian war against the human intellect fought more fervently and openly between the competing branches of professional Christian recruiters. No criticism, no examination of Mormonism would be fair or informed without knowing exactly what Joseph Smith and his period fellows were responding to in their local Christian environment. Remember; God Himself was prompted to come down and straighten out the whole American Christian mess—if you believe Joseph Smith. That is the argument here you know.

http://homepage.mac.com/oldtownman/civilwar/01/burned.html

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

http://www.routledge.com/books/details/9780815337928/

http://elektratig.blogspot.com/2009/02/burned-over-district-vs-passed-over.html

Why Smith? Why America? Why then? Christianity had already decided amongst itself on various levels back and forth, over, across, up and down the globe, that Christ’s Church had in fact fallen all apart—several times and then some. They differed only on matters of how far the Great Apostasy had progressed and of course each little sect claimed to have either escaped it as a secret branch of “True Believers” or claimed to have “Reformed” the Church before it collapsed entirely. Most of the big Christian dogs acknowledged major failings in the Church but claimed that God had used a corrupt system in a corrupt institution run by corrupt men to pass along His perfect and unsullied Truth through “Divine Providence.”

Christianity had indeed been arguing the same question Joseph Smith was asking when he came back from the revival tents and tried to sit down with a Bible and make sense of their competing ideas: Ok then, Smith wondered, which of this stuff is actually gospel and who gets to say what’s in and what’s out? Until Joseph Smith however, every time Christianity brought one of these authoritative arguments to a head, the most politically connected side “won” and the other side became “heretics.” Joseph as it happened this time around, was protected under a spanking-new constitutional republic that granted him the unalienable right to worship in any manner he pleased without fear of legal reprisal. If convention, conformity, and peer ridicule wouldn’t work, America’s Christian industry needed to eventually invent ways around the law and Constitution, the Bill of Rights, so they could ban Smith’s ideas and kill this heretic anyway. http://www.exvampire.com/

Joseph Smith’s entire post-vision history from a legal and sociological standpoint can be summed up as a case of professional American Protestants repeatedly finding themselves out of luck on the score of being able to convict him of heresy and burn him as a witch. They struggled for decades at it and then finally tried to go for treason instead. When it became clear that he’d obviously win that court battle too, like he had won acquittal over the years on scores of their other legal gambits against him, they just formed a mob, stormed the jail and shot him dead. http://www.relfe.com/07/Bill_William_Schnoebelen.html

Though Joseph Smith’s Christian detractors were arguing complaints against him as if Christianity was the official state or national religion, the Founding Fathers had already realized that if you do make Christianity the State religion, the first thing that would happen is the state and federal government would be empowered to define what was and wasn’t “Christianity” all on its own. This would allow the government to stifle, foster, proscribe, and persecute, whoever and whatever it deemed not to be “Christian,” or “Christian enough.” The Founding Fathers decided by Constitutional amendment, that there were never going to be any “official” heretics in the United States. Oh, there were plenty of “heretics” around mind you, and still are. The Founding fathers, many of them, were just as particular about their “orthodoxy” as Joseph Smith’s critics. The authors of the US Constitution however, just felt that the Church and/or State had no right to take these heretics down to the church basement with the local mayor and sheriff, beat a confession out of them with a blowtorch and an axe handle, and then burn them to a crisp in a public square or hang them from the nearest tree, in “traditional” Christian fashion.

Joseph Smith, like Jesus lecturing his elders in the temple as a child, passed into full heresy by alluding to his frontier American Christian clergymen and their various denominations as “having a form of godliness but denying the power thereof.” http://scripturetext.com/2_timothy/3-5.htm This turning of scripture against those who claimed to profess its infallibility is particularly annoying to those being thus belittled. It’s a great putdown if nothing else. But really understanding what he meant by this isn’t possible unless you’ve spent the same childhood trotting from preacher to preacher, revival to revival, stump-sermon-to-stump-sermon in rural New York at the dawn of the 19th century. To understand Joseph Smith and all those who followed him into his radically liberal new form of 19th century heresy, you first have to understand what Smith’s home-town country preachers were sermonizing about all his life.

Joseph Smith started out a fervent Bible-believing Christian from a family of longstandingly fervent Bible-believing Christians, and yet became so disenchanted with the local promoters of this belief system, that he rejected many of the basic institutionalized doctrines of the religion itself. He did that entirely without the help of any angels. This is no small observation. Joseph Smith came to his heretical opinions primarily through the Bible. Modern Mormonism imagines it has taught itself about its history and formative leadership, but this amounts all too often to a superficial wallowing in self-indulgent tribute to the saintliness of joseph Smith and lesser Mormon demigods like Brigham Young. In reality, modern Mormonism has so sanitized and saintified its founders that it has no clue just how brilliant and insightful the foundational doctrines of Mormonism are.

In reality, Joseph Smith was a beer-drinking, stick-fighting, pioneer prophet who died with a belly full of wine and a flaming gun in his hand. Joseph Smith went out of this life in a hail of bullets and a blaze of glory, bringing down his assailants shot-by-shot. Even the mob that killed him essentially said, He lived good and he died good. (Footnote pg 285 BH Roberts Comprehensive History, from journal of PP Pratt.) Brigham Young by contrast, limped his wagon into the Salt Lake Valley a couple of years later, sat his portly old sack of bones wearily up from his sickbed in the back, puked over the side, said, “This is far enough, this is the place,” and set immediately about rebuilding Joseph’s radical little church into a docile Quaker’s Paradise.

Because it does not educate itself about “normal” Christianity, the sort of Christianity Joseph Smith’s “First Vision” was prompted by and the religious environment in which Mormonism was cultivated, the Utah Mormon culture is quite incapable of understanding, much less appreciating the nature, meaning, or beauty of the conversion experience they so pretend to admire in their pioneer ancestors. Simply put, you can’t emulate the original pioneer spirit sitting on your fat Mormon backsides in a comfortable Wasatch Front hideout for nearly two-hundred years trying to convince yourself that church basketball is as entertaining as the NBA and local Mormon musicals are every bit as good as Broadway simply because it’s by Mormons and for Mormons. You can’t then then pop your heads out of the dust into the real world after almost two centuries , and expect to carry on a sensible conversation with actual Christians as if you’ve really got anything in common with them any more. You don’t. Even the so-called “Christians” who invaded the peaceful Mormon valleys came out primarily to badger and hound and “civilize” and otherwise persecute Mormonism, so even the Christians Mormons have been in contact with out there remain an aberrant bent and Mormons have been ignoring if not shunning them outright for generations anyway.

Joseph Smith, Brigham Young, John Taylor, yes, all of those founding Mormon saints had everything in common with the greater Christian world. They were Christians from various accepted Christian sects and they’d already decided that Christianity was pretty screwed up before they ever ran into Joseph Smith. They had all independently come to find the same complaints against Christianity that Smith was addressing. They weren’t sure what was true any more, but they knew what wasn’t true. They may not have known exactly how to fix Christianity, but they spoke the same language. They thought the same thoughts. When Joseph Smith appeared before them giving new “Christian” answers that suddenly seemed to make sense, they accepted his inspiration because they’d already been through the same questions and prayed themselves into similar conclusions. All today’s modern Utah Mormon culture has left of this magnificent spiritual awakening is a correlated system of answers to questions they don’t know enough to ask in the first place. They know these answers are true only because the “Prophet” (insert current name here………) says so. For the native Utah Mormon this is a sad, shallow experience compared to their pioneer ancestors. And the whole truth of the matter is, the modern Utah Mormon experience simply can’t pretend to be worthy of the heart and soul of its newfound converts outside the Wasatch Front who are re-creating that pioneer Mormon rebirth on an ongoing basis.

The Mormon missionary program for one is little more than a sales-pitch made up of rote prattle that the young missionary has no understanding of whatsoever. Many now prevalent Mormon recruitment fables are actually embarrassingly contrived when presented to a Christian with any sort of Biblical education at all. In Matthew 16:18, Mormonism has back-engineered for example, a great Biblical argument to explain its own authority versus the Roman Catholic Church. The Romans for some time how have claimed this verse as proof of a direct blessing upon the Roman Church by Christ Himself. Protestants and the Eastern Church have however, debunked this verse for ages. When Mormonism inserts itself into the equation amid these two or three longstanding lines of interpretation, Mormonism just looks a little contrived and “me too.”

Whenever it was that Mormonism first eventually came into contact with the Roman Church and its proponents, it apparently never occurred to LDS leadership and apologists that there is no inherent need to prove via the Bible or Church tradition that Joseph Smith had the “authority” to found the most correct version of the Church of Christ. Most people would think that God coming down personally and telling Joseph Smith that he was the guy would be enough to make the prospective Mormon happy on that score. If Joseph Smith talking to God directly doesn’t impress you enough to believe he’s authorized to organize “The Church” you’ve just got no reason to join up. http://bible.cc/matthew/16-18.htm

But yes, if you have to scrounge up something in the Bible, Mormons can say Peter was the not the “rock” upon which the Church would be built, but it was the notion that Peter had come to know Jesus was the Christ through personal “revelation” to which Christ was speaking in this verse. Mormons claim then that It’s revelation  the Church would be built upon. Peter is a Greek word meaning “rock,” and you could say that Jesus is making a pun here in saying that it wasn’t going to be Peter  “The Rock” but a different “rock.”

And I say also unto thee, That thou art a “rock” Peter, but upon this rock instead–this whole revelation thing you’re talking about here–I will build my church; and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it.

Matthew 16:18 Pro-Smith Version

Mormons say Jesus refers to revelation . To read it that way however, the word “but” should replace “and.” It would also help if you were drunk, because you can check any manuscript or translation you want, but it always says, “and.” The Mormon interpretation relies heavily upon connecting the previous verse’s inflection I suppose: Yeah, you’re one kind of a rock Peter, and (but) upon this similar rock, (your personal revelation that is) I’m going to found my Church…

Joseph Smith’s Protestant peers however, have generations of anti-Pope rebuttal arguments that just seem to make far more sense than the Mormon attempt to hijack this blessing. Protestants have long said that Jesus was simply referring to Peter’s confession that Jesus is the Christ, and the Church would be built upon this principle of confessing Christ to be your Savior. Related Protestant interpretations have argued that that Jesus referred to the object of Peter’s confession itself, the Person of Jesus, meaning that Jesus was acknowledging that He was indeed the Christ and that His Church would be built upon Himself and the salvation He offers.

By relying upon this sort of interpretive reading, even out of the Bible, you are unfortunately playing the same self-limiting religious game in which Joseph Smith felt trapped. Young Joe indeed went out into the grove to pray his way out of this pointless self-imposed maze of self-defeating Old-World Christian Biblical lobotomizing. Joseph had been through the Bible back-to-front-to-back-again. He’d heard every scripture in the Bible read to him every which-way; upside-down, sideways and backwards. As a result, Joseph Smith had only concluded that religious professors were not much help in understanding Christian dogma even if they meant well. The only clear and universal answer he could find in the Bible was to take his questions directly to God and expect a direct reply. (James 1:5) http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=james%201:5&version=KJV

Quoting the Bible with a Mormon spin only sounds great if you give a damn about the Roman Church’s claim to primacy in the first place. Mormons have been pointlessly spinning and bashing that verse for absolutely no reason for going on two centuries now. Why? This Roman claim of primacy is a claim that the Roman Church took almost two millennia to concoct for itself and finally lobby itself into agreeing upon in the first place. That passage could in fact mean exactly what the Roman Church says it means and it would entirely irrelevant to Mormonism. The Mormon claim to authority doesn’t come out of agreeing upon an interpretation of what is or isn’t in the canon, and then agreeing upon what the canon actually means word-by-word, phrase-by-phrase. The Mormon claim to authority comes from God picking Joseph Smith to reorganize the Church and replace that whole process with a direct pipeline of communication from God’s mouth to Man’s ear. In any case, the Roman Church in everyone’s eyes obviously went straight to hell after Peter died anyway as far as anyone but the Romans are concerned. Rock or no Rock, Peter, Pope and all, you still have all the historical proof of Joseph Smith’s “Great Apostasy” even if the Romans are reading that verse correctly as some sort of initial blessing on Peter.

Roman Catholics were a scarce commodity in early America however. Joseph Smith didn’t go into the woods to pray about the primacy of a Roman Pope. The claims of the Pope in Rome were all but irrelevant in early American politics and religion. All the details of the generations of hardened religious arguments attendant to the Eastern Church v Western Church, or Roman Catholicism v Reformation were dumped happily on the other side of the pond insofar as American Christianity was concerned in Joseph Smith’s day. Papists were just bad. Papists were loyal to Rome, not America. No further discussion really. There may have been pockets of Roman Catholics here and there, but they were curiosities more than primary religious movers and shakers relative to Joseph Smith’s experience. America was about hard-core Protestantism at full throttle.

Almost at the same moment Joseph Smith was having visions in the trees, American Protestants were wrapping up their religious, social, and political mandate in a concept that came to be known as “Manifest Destiny.” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manifest_Destiny This concept specifically named the “Anglo-Saxon” race’s God-given assignment to fill the North American continent from sea-to-shining-sea with devout Anglo-Saxon Protestants. (I can’t explain how such a large portion of this allegedly Anglo-Saxon blessing was actually perpetrated upon its victims by Norman, Irish, Scottish, or English/Nordic stock.) The specificity of this in all honesty “just plain white people’s” commission from the Almighty became very evident in several bits of legislation and forced removals of the highly peaceful and Christianized “Five Civilized Tribes” from the company of their White Anglo-Saxon Christian brothers in the Eastern states. This ethnic cleansing culminated in 1839 along the “White Man’s Trail of Tears” that left 4000 Cherokee dead and the rest half-frozen, half-naked and starving along the forced winter march from their homeland in the East to a piece of crap reservation in the raw frontier of Oklahoma. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trail_of_Tears The Five Civilized Tribes were called so because they were almost entirely assimilated into “White” society and culture. They were some very serious Protestant Christians among their other “civilized” qualities. But that wasn’t quite enough. They were still “Indian,” and they were taking up some very convenient property the Anglo-Saxon Master Race wanted to use at the moment. Joseph Smith and his Mormon adventure into not quite good enough American Christianity ended in almost exactly the same result for the very same reasons.

Of course today’s Christians resent any comparison to their treatment of Native Americans or Mormons for that matter, with the actions of one Adolph Hitler. Manifest destiny, and the several Mormon Extermination orders drafted, some officially and legally, were pretty much the same program Hitler was using to justify the expansion of his own state religion and absorption of surrounding lands, peoples and cultures into it. http://basangpanaginip.blogspot.com/2007/02/hitler-man-who-used-evangelical.html

Almost co-incident with the Protestant Illinois and Missouri-based mobs that killed Joseph Smith in Carthage Jail in 1844, there was a series of major Protestant mobs that formed in Philadelphia, the “City of Brotherly Love” to riot and kill or drive the Roman Catholics out of that city’s Anglo-Saxon Protestant American Paradise. http://www.aoh61.com/history/bible/phila_bible_riots.htm http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philadelphia_Nativist_Riots

Along with frontier America’s very mainstream WASPS of course, Joseph Smith would have been acquainted with a few local Shakers and other peculiar or aberrant Christian Protestants, but they were even less influential on a young man in the American wilderness than the Roman Catholics, because it turns out that in the Shaker example for instance, expecting members to willfully not reproduce or engage in any of the related fun activity both diminishes any recruit’s motivation to join the group, but ultimately thwarts expansion and continuation of the movement.

There were also Quakers http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quaker and Mennonites and Amish and a whole host of the odder sort of buttonless, funny-hat-wearing, primitive, Fundamentalist-Puritanical-Protestants floating over to early American and developing their clannish infestations in the US. These however, were mostly non-English immigrants and practitioners of closed or tight communal orders, often speaking German or some other foreign tongue. Especially in those days, plain, dumb, white, English-speaking Americans would not be in any way attracted to these odder sects and would in fact be prone to ridicule and persecute them. This worked out well for the Amish and so forth, because frankly, they didn‘t want anything to do with the “English” as they still call anyone other than themselves.

The Quakers or “Religious Society of Friends” unlike some of the other peculiar Reformation era spawns, spoke English and came out of a British Isle experience alright, but they were already condemned as heretics on numerous scores on both sides of the Atlantic. Most offensive to the American Puritans was the claim that man could talk to Jesus Christ directly without benefit of any clergy at all. In the Massachusetts Bay colony, Friends were outlawed entirely and subject to immediate execution on sight. Several Quakers (Mary Dyer) were hanged on Boston Common for publicly preaching. In England, Friends were excluded by law from sitting in Parliament from 1698 to 1833.

The Baptists, descendants of the English and European Anabaptists who were universally despised by Roman Catholic and Protestant alike on both sides of the pond only two generations previously, had by Joseph Smith’s time gone almost mainstream. It had helped the Baptists to be separated from both the Inquisition and the Reformation, both of which found reasons to object to Anabaptist theology. But in New England, they were still battling lingering suspicion and condemnation.  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baptists

The snake-handlers, the glossalalliacs—tongue-speakers–the whole Charismatic Movement had almost kicked off in Smith’s time, making the Baptists’ Old World controversy of infant baptism-verses-Believer’s Baptism hardly exciting at all. As for the Charismatics; these fledgling evangelicals got shunned into obscurity and were considered freaks for the most part by the fervent and demanding New England conservative clergies who dominated Smith’s local scene.

Joseph admittedly experimented with “folk magic” or what became known as “Spiritualism.” Rather a lot of the Christians Smith fellowshipped with were into “divination” and other “spiritual gifts.” Though this benign activity translated into a history of detractors characterizing him as a “money digger” or “spook hunter” of some sort, had Smith been born a century later, his notions of prophesy and the “Full Gospel” gifts returning to earth would have by then become downright common.  As for “money digging,” this charge was a major hobby in Smith’s day, as every American believed the place was littered with ancient Indian gold and pirate treasure—the only issue at hand was the method of sensing where it was buried.

Prophecy in and of itself as a concept, actually became a big business in Christian circles a century after the founding of Mormonism–Smith was just a bit premature in this effort. Today you can turn on the radio or television at any given moment and hear fully-accredited Christian televangelists refer to themselves as “prophets of God” and talk at great length about their “visions” and “revelations.” One famous such proclamation came from the master evangelist Oral Roberts back http://j-walkblog.com/index.php?/weblog/comments/rating_the_dead_televangelists/ in 1987 during the height of the televangelist era, when he prophesied that Jesus was going to call him home if he didn’t get eight million dollars to save his City of Faith complex in Tulsa Oklahoma, which was hemorrhaging cash to the tune of ten million dollars and more a year. http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,964970,00.html Roberts had proven this strategy already in a previous vision in 1980 connected with raising funds for the Christian medical tower around which his City of Faith development was centered. This previous vision featured the image of a nine-hundred-foot-tall Jesus Christ towering over the completed skyscraper of his hospital–which is now CityPlex Towers and mostly office space, since the project immediately went belly-up after its centerpiece was finished. So far there are no mobs led by ordained Christian ministers burning Christian “prophets” like Oral Roberts out of their homes, raping their women, pillaging their villages, and seizing the property they are forced to flee or die. Unlike their contemporaries in Joseph Smith’s day, Christian ministers have been most forgiving of their overtly sinful behavior. Most of these fallen tele-prophets went right back into business after a year or so of public self-flagellation and a lot of open weeping. There’s a reason for this. Christians believe that Christ died for every sin you have ever committed, every sin you are now committing, and every sin you will commit. If you have accepted Jesus as your Savior you are just flat out saved period no doubt no contingencies. You have been, are now, and always will be forgiven. And we’re all sinners anyway. Sin is sin big or small it’s all the same. Forgiveness is free. Heaven is heaven, and all Christians get there in the end. Yeah, I know, it doesn’t seem right does it? It’s God’s will though. It’s a mystery.

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

http://www.rickross.com/reference/tbn/tbn19.html

http://www.rapidnet.com/~jbeard/bdm/Psychology/char/more/hist.htm

http://www.epk.com/entertainment/jessica-hahn-hit-on-larry-king/

http://www.txcn.com/sharedcontent/dws/dn/religion/stories/DN-tilton_28met.ART.State.Edition2.50eb9da.html

My Lutheran relatives however would correct; God may forgive you, but the congregation never will. I mean this literally, because archetypal Faith Healer Oral Roberts blitzed through the family homestead in North Dakota on one of his early revival tours and “healed” a relative who had a heart condition that required him to keep nitroglycerine pills handy when he had an incident. Roberts told him to trust Jesus and throw away the pills. That worked for quite a while. Oral Roberts was long gone with all his loot of course, when my kinsman had another fit, dropped nearly dead to the floor, and as he lay there struggling, everyone realized the pills that would have brought him out of it in a few minutes were also long gone.

Uncle Oscar should have had more faith I suppose. That must be his fault then.

A lot of effort has been put into revising Joseph Smith’s pretty orthodox childhood Christian credentials into some sort of hillbilly occultic humbuggery. This is to be expected from his critics, who believe Mormonism is Satan’s own Church. The thing to remember however is, they believe everyone’s church other than their own is going to send you to the devil as well. You don’t have to see angels or talk to God or be a false prophet to burn in hell as a non-Christian. Even John Calvin, who invented most of modern American Protestantism found that out when he was hauled into a heresy trial at the start of his religious career for merely being imprecise in his Trinitarian language. http://www.assistnews.net/Stories/2009/s09060184.htm The truth is, when Joseph Smith went seeking answers in the Bible, he went seeking answers about mainstream, modern, institutionalized Protestant denominations and the problems he had with their doctrines. He wasn’t praying for help in digging up pirate gold. He wasn’t out in the woods asking for God’s divine plan to fund the first Christian amusement theme park. He wasn’t looking for a nine-hundred-foot-tall Jesus to bless his religious empire. He was trying to figure out what the Methodists, Presbyterians and Baptists were all squabbling about amongst themselves. And when he studied his Bible, he studied it as one of them—he studied the Bible as a Christian.

Henry Tudor VIII, King of England, Ireland, Pretender to the French throne, eventual King and uniter of England with Wales, Defender of the Faith, would-be Holy Roman Emperor, was born 28 June 1491. He took his father’s throne on 21 April, 1509, and died 28 January 1547, more-or-less peacefully, and still King of England. In his prime he was a handsome, fit, vigorous sporting man with a healthy wit. Contrary to popular opinion, he was not much of a rake or a lady’s man–unless they were fertile, not too ugly, skilled in childbirth and produced male offspring. The image we most conjure up of him is that of a deteriorated, disturbed, obese, probably syphilitic wreck obsessed almost entirely with providing his throne with a healthy and clear heir. In truth, Henry VIII was probably not syphilitic, and by most standards fairly chaste—with perhaps a couple of exceptions. He mostly had sex only with women he already had in the marriage queue with the intent of bearing him a son.

His plans for an heir were first thwarted in 1502, through his marriage to his older brother’s widow, Catherine of Aragon, youngest child of Ferdinand and Queen Isabella of Spain. You may coincidentally note that a few years earlier in 1492,  when Henry was a year old , these two had sent one Christopher Columbus off to discover an island way the heck down off the Coast of South America. For this random landing, Columbus would get credit as the “discoverer” of “America” for the next five or six centuries. We know now of course, that the Norse, and probably Clan Gunn, Norse descendants from Scotland with some undisclosed Swedish shipmates, along possibly with St. Brendan of Ireland, had repeatedly “discovered” North America over a thousand years previously, and actually hung out at Plymouth Rock and other places where God would lead the “Pilgrims” and seekers of religious freedom at the actual start of “America” as we know it. This probably includes portaging up the St. Lawrence into Duluth and roaming down into the prairies of what is now Minnesota, where my own Lutheran ancestors would end up, also looking for religious and political freedom. I don’t know what that means, but when you start linking historical events together in the context of “God’s Divine Providence,” you can make anything fit into God’s master plan.

Henry became the Prince of Wales and heir to the throne of England, and his father, Henry VII, figured he needed to reaffirm that his Spanish alliance was cinched up in a tight bundle so he could poke away at France in case a chance to take that throne came up in the mix. Henry VII proposed that his new Heir, Henry VIII should step into the void and take young Catherine as his bride.

In the book of Leviticus, however, is the damning passage: “If a brother is to marry the wife of a brother they will remain childless.” This required a Papal dispensation to remove any doubt as to the validity of the union. To aid this scheme, Catherine claimed her marriage to Arthur had not been consummated–which is almost plausible since she was nearly a child and Arthur was in ill health and barely into puberty. (However, I know what I would have been doing at age 15 had I been given a “wife” and told to produce an heir…)

Catherine’s mother, Queen Isabella I, browbeat Pope Julius II into writing a Papal bull. A little more than a year after her husband’s death, Catherine was then betrothed to Henry VIII–who was just taking on secondary sexual characteristics and probably hadn’t had his voice change yet.

By 1505, Henry VII had gotten bored with the intrigues of a Spanish alliance, and Henry VIII had gotten bored with the notion of marrying Catherine for whatever reason. (Probably do to subsequent wistful options.) He claimed the union had been put together without his consent. Stalling and political maneuvering dragged on until his father died in 1509. One stumbling block to the wedding had to do with Henry VII being a frugal old coot, and he was holding back his huge portion of the wedding dowry. Isabella and company then held back on theirs.

On Henry VII’s death, Henry VIII took his old man’s money, his kingdom, took his Spanish dowry on top of it, and followed the political path of least resistance. He married his betrothed Catherine on 11 June, 1509, at the ripe old age of 17. They were crowned King and Queen of England at Westminster Abbey later that month in a huge, multi-national, fairy-tale wedding. This was the first of a lifetime of huge party blowouts Henry VIII was to throw to enhance his image at home and abroad.

Had this arrangement worked out for Henry VIII the English would have almost certainly remained Roman Catholic, and the Scots and Irish would have, for one, been so much the better for it. American history would have been entirely re-written and events in North America, notably the formation of the United States, would have probably gone in radically different directions.

Even without his evolving marriage issues, there were a great number of political and ostensibly religious arguments Henry VIII had with the Roman Pope at the time. He did however go through three Popes on friendly terms before Henry’s fixation on trying to fix his marital problems bottomed out into his eventual heresy and revolution. For one thing, England only got one Cardinal out of 50 to represent itself in Rome. Far lesser countries, Italy, France, Spain, had coach loads of Cardinals. The English Cardinal had no prospect at all of ever becoming Pope. England was doomed eternally to be ruled in many aspects of law and life right out of OF the Vatican. Henry VIII at one point very quietly put out his name as a candidate for the office of Holy Roman Emperor, ostensibly the political leader of the Roman Catholic world. This office was mostly political but required a blessing from the Pope, his cardinals, and all his councilors at the Vatican. This ambition, again, was ultimately without hope. From the standpoint of the Church, the Holy Roman Empire, and the leaders of its European ruling nations, Henry VIII was only the minor king of an isolated, barbaric Island. He only rated one cardinal, and was all but cut off from European society.

There was also the matter of England’s Papal representative, Cardinal Thomas Wolsey himself. Henry VIII’s mode of operation was to exploit the genius of others to his own benefit. From his earliest days as king, Henry VIII allowed Wolsey the post of Lord Chancellor, and he ran most of Henry’s government policy until 1529 when he was arrested, tried under some random, conveniently trumped-up charge, and died mysteriously in custody in 1530. (Probably because Henry didn’t feel at that point he could just behead a cardinal without going to hell.) This remained Henry VIII’s general manner of administration throughout his reign.

Henry was educated, insightful, discerning, and in most ways very wise—just managerially lazy. He had up to this point only tended to stay fixed on any given matter of state for brief periods. He preferred to monitor the work of others in this regard, and if they got in his way or created significant problems for him, there was always some way to get rid of them permanently. Unlike his father, Henry VIII was not frugal at all. He was instead a spendthrift who genuinely appreciated fine art, music, craftsmanship, architecture, and all the things a good civilization can bring a very wealthy man. He entertained all of Europe and created gardens and palaces. He hosted sporting contests and spectacles to overwhelm his high-ranking visitors from abroad. Well into his first marriage he remained a conventional, pious family man and a popular king.

In 1516 Pope Julius II declared a League (union to defeat) between the Holy Roman Empire and France. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_of_the_League_of_Cambrai Julius II wanted the French out of Italy. The French of course, were all Roman Catholics, and the French cardinals some of the most devoted to the Pope. Politically speaking however, the French controlled most of Italy and the Vatican itself. This had grown stifling and unacceptable to the Holy See.

Henry VIII joined in the fun, but unfortunately had to back out of the fight prematurely. This was not due to a dissatisfaction with the notion of liberating the Pope, or lack of military success. It was because the cost of the adventure and the way Cardinal Wolsey had ruthlessly extorted and bled taxes and coerced “loans” from nobles and peasantry alike had soon led to a revolt at home that Henry had to deal with. The League involvement cost Henry VIII a fortune, gained him nothing but a bit of sport, and made hellacious political strife in his kingdom.

As the years went by, Henry came to see that Cardinal Wolsey manipulated English foreign and domestic policy to benefit Wolsey and Rome first and foremost. England’s foreign policy went back and forth between France, Europe, and all around the various sides of the Holy Roman Empire’s quarrels almost at the cardinal’s will, based mostly upon the concerns of the Vatican. By the time King Henry VIII was personally annoyed with him, Wolsey had centralized the English national government and extended the authority of national courts into all local regions of the kingdom. These were courts which Wolsey then essentially dictated according to his personal desires as well. He ran the original Star Chamber. He compelled the rich, the nobles to make loans to the central government to pay for his Pope’s foreign adventure wars, and became the hated enemy of the wealthy of all classes because of his overtly ostentatious living. Wolsey was running foreign and domestic policy and the English legal system at his own pleasure, under direct supervision of Rome.

Eventually, Wolsey’s tax and other compulsory funding sources were all tapped out, and he had to tell the king the treasury was empty. Wolsey’s presentation went something like this: “Gee Sire, I’ve done my best to manage the budget, but you’ve spent years and years in outrageous, unbridled spending, and we’re going to have to do something serious about raising taxes and other income… “

The king’s reaction went something like this: “Hey, why didn’t you mention this before? And what about all those lands and properties and loot you’ve got there? Seems to me you’re richer than I am at this point! And what do you mean my noble peers and the wealthy merchant classes all hate me because they’ve been bled dry and can’t be asked to pay any more in taxes for fear of another revolt and an attempt to dethrone me? What do you mean your fiscal extravagance and stifling taxation has killed my economy and we are now in a major financial depression? I seem to be really shafted here and you seem to be at fault Your Eminence. Hmmm…what do you think I should do about this problem Cardinal?”

By this time Catherine of Aragon had given Henry VIII a male heir. But the child died soon after birth. She had also given birth to a living heir, Mary Tudor I, AKA “Bloody Mary,” who would be so-tagged when she finally gained the throne and brutally undid all the things Henry VIII had eventually done to break away from the Roman Church. (Reversal and retaliation was one of the main problems with Henry VIII’s self-justifying theories regarding a king’s right to rule by God’s manifest will. But let’s not get too far ahead of the story.)

So, coming into 1529, Henry wasn’t happy with merely a female heir. Only a male heir could secure the Tudor dynasty. No Queen had ever ruled England without her reign ending in war, revolt, split political factions and family disaster. Henry began to insist upon another marriage and ordered Wolsey to free him from Catherine, claiming apparently sincerely, that he was cursed by the prophesy in Leviticus.

Now, not only had Wolsey blown the treasury, but England’s lone-duck cardinal found himself unable to cajole, beg, reason or otherwise extort an annulment out of the Vatican. What had been dispensed with had dispensed with–Leviticus or not. Pope’s don’t back up and have a “re-think.” This time  Wolsey had no help from Henry’s powerful in-laws in Spain. The situation drove home just how ineffectual Henry’s crummy little cardinal was and how little influence his throne really had with Rome and Europe.

Henry VIII for the most part was a pious man with a sincere respect for the Church, but only in a schizophrenic sort of way. He also knew damned well that the Pope was little more than just another Italian prince and most of his decisions were just as political has Henry’s own. Henry still felt bound by canon law however, and always put some color of “legality” on every move he made, however warped or asinine it clearly looked to anyone else.

By Wolsey’s end-time, Henry VIII had gone through Pope Julius II and on to Pope Leo X, both good allies. Leo X ironically granted him the title “Defender of the Faith,” for a treatise he authored condemning Martin Luther. After Leo X, Rome blinked and lost a short-lived Pope Adrian I, also a good friend to Henry VIII. As his problems with Catherine of Aragon came to head, Henry was by then dealing with Pope Clement VII. Though Henry VIII was out of it by then, the Papal League against France had gone all askew on the Vatican in the meantime and il Papa was up to his cassock in troubles. Unfortunately for both Henry VIII and Pope Clement VII, the key player in this particular Euro-war drama was the very same Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor, formerly of Martin Luther’s little burg, still eagerly making trouble for poor brother Martin and his silly Reformation movement. On the latter the Pope, Charles V and Henry VIII might all agree, but Charles V also happened to be the nephew of Catherine of Aragon, Henry VIII’s suddenly unwanted wife. Charles V also happened to be holding the Pope hostage. Literally.

Henry got into the Papal League early on, but only momentarily diddled around in France to strategically tie up French troops there while the Vatican could be liberated. Charles V on the other hand, dropped all his holdings and business in Germany, Netherlands, and elsewhere, relocated to his Spanish holdings and prepared to take Italy from the French directly. So, the Pope owed Henry VIII almost nothing, but The Holy Roman Emperor and the Queen of Spain combined were openly taking the side of Henry’s unwanted wife and daughter. In fact, by the time Henry VIII was earnestly pissed off at Cardinal Wolsey for not winning over the Pope, it was clear to the Holy See, that what he was seeing was Charles V routing out the French occupation all the way into the Pope’s front porch with no apparent intention to stop, or leave afterward.

It also didn’t help Clement II that he hadn’t been very supportive of Charles V’s election as Emperor. Clement II got to thinking perhaps it was going to be payback time for the Pope in St. Peter’s Square sometime soon if the Emperor had a mind to go that far. He diplomatically waffled back to make inquiry’s of the French, asking a truce essentially, and asking if they would help in protecting the Vatican at least from Emperor Charles VII.

Timing is everything. You’d think an infallible head of the Church would see it coming, but just as Clement II’s wavering allegiance had been noted by Charles V, the Holy Roman Emperor defeated his last stand of enemy ranks and there was nothing but open, undefended travel between himself and the Vatican.

The assault on Rome took place on 6 May, 1527, ostensibly due to a demand Charles V had made for a personal audience with the Pope. Clement II either refused or did not reply and instead, holed up with the Swiss Guard and the armies of his various cardinals. (Yes, cardinals had personal armies as did the Pope.) The story goes that Charles V’s weary troops decided to storm the imposing, heavily defended Vatican walls and secure an audience for their Emperor with or without Papal consent. They were led by a fine officer and gentleman, one Duke Charles. The Duke as usual, wore his customary bright white uniform to mark himself in the battle for his men. It also made him an easy target. He was rather quickly shot and killed. Philbert of Chalon took command of the Imperial troops. He was not much of an officer, nor was he a gentleman, but he was about all that was left of a ragged and battle-torn Imperial officer corps.

Charles V’s troops had arrived at the Vatican gates after much fighting on the Pope’s behalf, only to be snubbed by the Pope and actually find he’d been making deals with the very French they’d been called in to drive out. The Imperial troops were thus pretty irritated by the time they made it inside the Holy City. Almost the entire Swiss guard was slaughtered on the steps of St. Peter’s Basilica. A thousand other defenders of the Holy See who’d survived the invasion initially, were soon brutally executed in the square. Pope Clement VII had escaped to safety however. History does not record whether or not he was thinking very much about Cardinal Wolsey’s great legal arguments, or concerning himself at all with Henry VIII’s “Great Matter.”

On May 8, Cardinal Pompeo Colonna, a personal enemy of Clement VII, trotted into Vatican City, thinking he’d join in the victory and get some revenge directed at the cardinals and the Pope himself. The Vatican’s armies had recently been sent to perform the sacking of his own lands and properties do to some politically inspired Papal orders. When Colonna got inside however, Colonna was so sickened by the ongoing pillage, rape and plunder that he hid out in his palace with his contingent of a peasant army, protected himself and guests, hosting Roman citizens as they fled the carnage and horror outside his walls.

After three days of mayhem, Philibert ordered his troops to cease sacking activities of any and all sorts. Very few of the soldiery even listened to him. Troops loyal to the Pope arrived from various supporters in Italy, but apparently weren’t very enthusiastic about their Papal defense, because they had no luck overcoming the entirely drunken and disorganized Imperial invaders of the Vatican. Instead, they brokered a deal on 6 June, in which Clement VII surrendered and agreed to pay a very large ransom in exchange for his life. He was forced to concede several important lands and properties to the Holy Roman Empire, meaning Charles V.

This bungling of Clement VII killed the Roman Renaissance, seriously weakened the Papacy’s worldwide image of omnipotence, and untied Charles V‘s hands to stifle the Reformation in Germany—particularly via bringing political, financial, and threatened military force against the German princes allied with Luther. It was a bit embarrassing religiously for the Holy Roman Emperor to have taken the Pope prisoner and held him hostage, but politically it worked out swell for Charles V.

About the sack of Rome, Martin Luther remarked:

“Christ reigns in such a way that the Emperor who persecutes Luther for the Pope is forced to destroy the Pope for Luther” (LW 49:169).

And so it came to be, In the context of all this Holy Roman lunacy and all of England’s domestic problems, that the former autocratic friend and confidant to King Henry VIII, Cardinal Wolsey, was arrested and suffered a mysterious death in custody. This not only made Wolsey’s domestic critics happy and deflected blame from the king, but it was a warning to the Pope and to the Roman clergy of England regarding the likely outcome of disagreeing with the king’s desires particularly in “The King’s Great Matter.”

With Wolsey gone, Henry VIII took complete control of everything that went on in his court and kingdom. He chose mostly however, to ignore most of the political squabbles or daily civil matters of ruling his government, and instead pressured and begged one Christian authority after the other for some acceptable way out of his marriage.

One of the solutions to Henry VIII’s problem–speaking of Mormons–was suggested by numerous sources: Divorce may be prohibited Biblically, but there is no such prohibition in the Bible against taking another wife in addition to the one he was having offspring problems with. In fact, his advisors suggested that another wife was the usual Biblical solution to this very issue of getting issue. Furthermore, to make any claim of God’s condemnation of this custom would be to damn all the ancient prophets as adulterers, fornicators or whoremongers. The Old Testament treated this solution as a matter of course and there was nothing in the New Testament that contradicted it. In fact the New Testament genealogy of Christ Himself made Jesus of Nazareth merely a bastard pretender without a valid principle of plural marriage. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polygamy_in_Christianity#Reformation_period

Martin Luther in his examination of the issue wrote:

“I confess that I cannot forbid a person to marry several wives, for it does not contradict the Scripture. If a man wishes to marry more than one wife he should be asked whether he is satisfied in his conscience that he may do so in accordance with the word of God. In such a case the civil authority has nothing to do in the matter.”

That was just a bit radical for the king’s thinking. It would create diplomatic difficulties with other nations who observed the Roman custom of taking only one fiscally, or politically arranged wife, and then having sex for love or just sex’s sake alone with anyone or anything you wanted in addition to it. (The Roman custom left clear heirs and made stronger unions between royal houses so fewer assassinations would be encouraged.)

For all the brutality to his nemeses, and his historically exaggerated fits of temper, Henry VIII was indeed an enlightened, Roman Catholic man. Beyond his self-delusional end-runs around canon law, he was upright and sensitive to the mood of commoners and nobles alike. He understood the nature of how an economy works, and led a fundamental Tudor revolution in English government structure. Thomas Cromwell is often credited as  being the actual driving force behind this movement, but Henry, as I say, was very comfortable with turning the reins of his kingdom over to highly competent, highly principled and reasoned delegates–until of course he found they were failing him or heading him in a direction he didn’t want to go.

(Thomas Cromwell is not to be confused with a later Oliver Cromwell, Thomas’ nominal relative by way of a sister. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oliver_Cromwell Oliver was an evil, Calvinist, regicidal bastard and genocidal mass murderer, who violently re-did the viciously brutal un-doing of her father’s reformed Church that Bloody Mary had just thuggishly un-doodled.)

Thomas Cromwell may have been one of the authors of the “king rules by divine right” theory, but he had also conceived of a British commonwealth that included common participation through Parliament. He did not propose that the king surrendered any authority to houses either of commoners or peers in a house of nobles or lords. He explained the arrangement as using this consent of the common man and the noble man as a way to consolidate the king’s power by popular consent.

Thomas Cromwell drifted into Henry VIII’s chief ministership in 1532. It was a symbiotic gravitation toward reform both of government and religion—both of which went to the heart of the king’s “Great Matter.” After a time of functioning like a noble with the very authority of the king himself minus any titles at all, Henry VIII formally appointed him Chancellor of the Exchequer, Master of the Rolls, Secretary and Lord Privy Seal, and then on to Lord Great Chamberlain over the king’s household. Though I’m ahead of the story a bit here, he was also granted very high supervisory roles in the Church in England, that were well above his common caste and layman status.

One of the first things Thomas Cromwell helped get out of the harried Pope Clement II, is approval to appoint a sympathetic cleric to the post of Archbishop of Canterbury, the highest Church authority in England–for that moment anyway. Thomas Cranmer http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Cranmer it was believed had assured Henry and Cromwell that he would have no trouble entertaining any arguments they might make for the annulment of his marriage or divorce of his wife. Cranmer had been in fact previously requested an assignment from the crown to take a religious canvass of Church scholars all over Europe seeking insight on the king’s “Great Matter.” Oddly enough, this led Cranmer to traipsing about with the realm of Holy Roman Emperor, Charles V, who, while kidnapping the Pope, was also hunting down Lutherans and the very Reformers Cranmer and team were trying to interview.

Thomas More at that moment was Henry VIII’s Lord Chamberlain. They were all still Roman Catholics mind you, but he too was keen to make this universal Christian scholastic canvas, to take some heat off his own backside. More you may know was a very famous Roman Catholic martyr, who was tortured to death later by Henry VIII because he would not openly acknowledge Henry’s universal authority over the Church in England. While the traditional story is best known via Hollywood’s finest Roman Catholic directors, Thomas More merely suffered the same agonizing death he’d enthusiastically inflicted upon a great many others when he was in a position to make the religious charges against his rivals. More’s deadly removal opened up the post of Lord Chancellor so that the king’s new pal, Thomas Cromwell could take it.

While in Europe’s religious academic centers,  Thomas Cranmer discovered in person this thing called “Reformers,” including whole civilizations built on the ideas of Martin Luther. Cranmer found their theories very promising and had many lengthy conversations with them centered upon scripture and Church tradition. While in this process of fraternizing with heretics, Thomas Cromwell and King Henry were selling Cranmer to Clement II. The Pope had no idea what Cranmer’s travels or studies were about. Therefore, being imprisoned and besieged with his own problems, seeing no obvious objections, Clement VII threw Henry VIII a bone and approved of Cranmer’s elevation to Archbishop.

In and out of the Church, Cromwell made many enemies of the rich and noble for rising too quickly above them in the king’s court. Though Cranmer was on his side, the rest of the Church in particular had serious cause to dislike him. What was really going on under the Roman Church’s nose between Cromwell, Cranmer, and their new friend the king, was the English Reformation.

In the parliamentary sessions of 1532, Cromwell had his first go as Chief Minister. He pushed through measures that cut off the main sources of Papal revenue, transferred all Church income to the king, and gave the Church’s legislative powers back to the crown as well. In short, all lands, titles, property and authority was removed from the Church and transferred to the king. The following year he passed the Act in Restraint of Appeals which cut off English legal appeal to Rome—which incidentally meant the English Church could grant an annulment for example, just coincidentally, on its own authority, and nobody could whine to the Vatican about its validity:

Where by divers sundry old authentic histories and chronicles, it is manifestly declared and expressed that this realm of England is an Empire, and so hath been accepted in the world, governed by one Supreme Head and King having the dignity and royal estate of the imperial Crown of the same, unto whom a body politic compact of all sorts and degrees of people divided in terms and by names of Lords Spiritual and Lords Temporal, be bounden and owe to bear next to God a natural and humble obedience.

Cromwell used the label “Empire” for England in an innovative manner. Henry VIII was not like a “Holy Roman Emperor.” That was an elected office. Or, an emperor could also claim that title by ruling more than one kingdom. Cromwell’s Act declared England to be an Empire on its own, free from “the authority of any foreign potentates.” England thus declared itself an independent sovereign nation-state no longer under the jurisdiction of the Pope.^[10]

Edward Foxe, Cranwell’s close friend had actually coordinated their “Great Matter” research expedition, and their team published Collectanea Satis Copiosa , The Determinations, which gave historical and theological support for the argument that the king exercised supreme jurisdiction within his realm. This didn’t directly make an argument on the annulment issue of course, but it removed Clement II from the debate along with any future Pope, and satisfied themselves at least that they weren’t going to go to hell by telling the Pope to butt out of English life, law, and religion.

Cromwell and Cranmer crafted a very smooth but revolutionary system of events. Archbishop Warham the sitting Archbishop of Canterbury, died in August, 1532. Cranmer was appointed his successor. Cranmer had a few alleged problems like a wife and a few other things, but Clement II was literally the prisoner of Charles V at the time, he had no idea what was coming, and it seemed like it would shut England up for a while. Clement VII signed all the appropriate wavers. On 25 January, 1533, before Cranmer had been consecrated to his post, Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn, his next victim–er–wife, were married by Cranmer in a quiet ceremony. On 15 April 1533, Cranmer received his consecration and officially took his post as Archbishop of Canterbury. On 23 May, parliament, having already forbidden any appeals to Rome on pain of death, declared Henry to be supreme authority in both Church and State. Cranmer pronounced Henry’s marriage to Catherine of Aragon invalid and she was sent packing. On 28 May, Cranmer declared Henry’s marriage to Anne Boleyn valid. On 1June Anne was crowned. On 7 September Anne gave birth to a daughter. (Queen Elizabeth I in the future.) On 11 July 1533, Clement II issued a Bull of excommunication against Henry VIII, King of England, and Thomas Cranmer, Archbishop of Canterbury. This was ignored.

While Cromwell had led the argument to make Henry VIII the head of the English Church. (This was effected by the Act of Supremacy of 1534.) Henry VIII almost immediately delegated the Church powers he thus gained, to Cromwell, making him the new “Vice Regent in Spirituals.” Cromwell then presided over the Dissolution of the Monasteries which began in the winter if 1536. His title morphed into a higher position, Vicar General. This gave him power as the highest judge in all ecclesiastical matters and created himself as a single unifying institution over the then two divisions or provinces of the English Church (Canterbury and York.) For Cranmer’s part, he did not seem to resent this encroachment and looked upon Cromwell as a junior partner and quite the Church scholar. Plus, Cromwell did most of the hard work and Cranmer could keep his head down and out of the politics.

Cromwell created a professional caste of bureaucrats and made the tax system more efficient. He was the architect of the unification of English and Welsh laws, and strengthened the English government of Ireland. He became a patron of English intellectual humanists (not godless secular humanists, but godly clerical humanists) that Cromwell rallied in his promotion of the English Reformation through print, using the printing press as a new communication and teaching tool in a major way for the first time in England.

Thomas Cromwell probably crossed the line with his antagonists both in court and amongst the commoners, when he was created Baron Cromwell on 9 July, 1536, became 300th Knight of the Garter in 1537, and Earl of Essex on 17 April 1540. The peasants thought of him as one of their own…lording it over them. And the lords thought of him as a peasant…lording it over them. Roman Catholics, who had many secret loyalists in court and around the kingdom still, wanted him dead, as did all the Monks and Holy Orders he broke up and seized. The peasants these Church institutions had been feeding and healing and caring for all those centuries, now deprived of any support at all, really really hated him. A popular revolt in fact, ensued after the dissolution of the Monasteries. Very large peasant and middle-class armies were raised and even nobles seemed sympathetic. After much violence, Henry VIII coaxed some 300 representatives of the various unhappy factions into coming down for a meeting of truce and settlement. True to his nature, as they stood in the the meeting, he had them all arrested and killed in grisly ways as a warning to others with similar plans to impede the resolution of his “Great Matter.” There were no further “popular” insurrections under Henry VIII.

I might as well mention that Henry the Eighth had six wives (as if anyone would not know this) and all of these fated marriages followed a fairly common trail way off the happy path to marital bliss, into a hellish home life ending in misery and death. (But then who’s marriage doesn’t eh guys?) He made truce with some, banished some after annulment, those he couldn’t annul, he just killed. When his second try at marriage failed for instance, and Anne Boleyn turned into a shrew he didn’t much like any more, this only accentuated the fact that she couldn’t produce a proper son either. Cromwell, with very little coaxing, supported Henry VIII in disposing of Anne Boleyn and replacing her with Jane Seymour. He engineered charges of treason and had Boleyn’s head chopped off. Seymour died giving birth to the future Edward VI and she was never crowned.

Though he’d gotten his heir, Henry was bored as a single man and so was counseled by Cromwell to marry Anne of Cleves, a princess from the Duchy of Cleves, which is an area in Lutheran Germany. This was arranged sight-unseen upon the word of trusted proponents such as Cromwell. In this coupling, Cromwell hoped to put the English Reformation ball back in play, since he’d just met with a fiasco concerning the publication of the Six Articles.

The Six Articles effort was intended as a new statement of faith cooked up between he and Archbishop Cranmer and some German scholarly supporters they’d invited to England for a convention lasting seven months. In this they painstakingly drafted up six basic beliefs to be proposed for the Anglican Church, centering around Luther’s Confession of Augsburg. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Augsburg_Confession They were met with staunch resistance from English clerics who wanted to part with Rome alright, but desired to join with the Greek Church, or Eastern Orthodox as it is now called, rather than the upstart Lutherans. Henry VIII was himself still leery of Lutheran ideas, particularly the whole democratic nature of  “voting” on things , like the commoners choosing their  own beliefs and clergy. Cranmer and Cromwell’s Six Articles went to parliament, and the combined English religious and secular parliamentarians entirely re-wrote the Six Articles into six articles exactly like their Roman Catholic equivalents, under the same title, Six Articles. This was approved unanimously. Henry VIII later wrote The King’s Book defending most of Roman Catholic dogma, including transubstantiation and the Six Articles.

Cranmer did however, eventually start authoring a specific set of uniquely English Church beliefs that were eventually very well received, including his Book of Common Prayer, his 10 Articles, and his 42 Articles, under Edward VII, which tried to be a complete expression of the official faith of the Church of England, and others. Thomas Cranmer was tortured into a retraction of his Reformationist beliefs under the revenge-driven Roman Catholic Mary I, but when released he gradually went back to speaking his true conscience and was executed for it.

When Mary I died at the age of 42 in an angst-filled depression of hysterical pregnancies and other psychotic breaks, her half-sister, the staunchly anti-Catholic Elizabeth I took the throne and published the 39 Articles (of faith) most Mormons think are so relevant to themselves. They aren’t. These primarily distinguish the relationship between the English Church and the Roman Church—having been written after a lot of turmoil and bloodshed to finally settle the whole English/Roman feud. Elizabeth’s 39 Articles most clearly illustrate how the Church of England has chosen to pursue a path of least resistance between its Roman Catholic roots and the Protestant and Reformationist soil in which it first grew.

But again, back in Henry’s time almost no changes were made from Roman Catholic canon or dogma and even his contrived divorces and annulments, his formation of an independent Church State, were all painted in the tones of One Catholic and Universal Church. Even Protestant Reformers, particularly those openly questioning his marital habits, were persecuted under his rule, including the famous John Wycliffe.  Henry VIII never even embraced Luther’s whole thesis that the Pope, or certainly the greater Church structure of professional clergy, was invalid. He just side-stepped the issue.

Any hope of actual “Protestant” or “Reformation” activities in Henry VIII’s reign came to a sudden halt when Thomas Cromwell’s Anne of Cleves recommendation became an embarrassing debacle. King Henry finally, frustratedly, mentioned to Cromwell that he had not consummated the marriage, did not care to, and asked if Cromwell could get him out of it legally somehow. His reasons seemed centered upon her crude, repulsive, Germanness. Historical evidence and testimony don’t confirm that she was particularly unattractive however. In any case, Henry apparently felt awkwardly if not perilously stuck in the marriage even if a legal means could be concocted to escape it. It represented an invaluable union with the wealthy and powerful German Protestant Princes, nobles, and merchant classes, who Henry VIII could not afford to insult. They kept Charles V and the Holy Roman Empire at bay. Now that England was a heretical kingdom this was a big consideration. Luckily, knowing which way the wind blew between herself and the king, Cleves confessed that the marriage had never been consummated and Henry gave her money and Anne Boleyn’s old manor house to live quietly out her days away from court.

Cromwell’s opponents, notably the Duke of Norfolk took this moment of Henry’s angst to poison the king’s mind against Cromwell. It’s not entirely certain why Henry went along with Cromwell’s opponents in the court, but on 10 June 1540, Thomas Cromwell was dragged out of a council meeting and imprisoned in the Tower of London, where he remained under a sort of protection by Henry VIII, until his marriage to Anne of Cleves could be wrangled into an annulment without another European war breaking out. This came at great cost politically, financially, and lowered the world prestige of England and King Henry VIII.

Cromwell was executed on Tower Hill 28 July, 1540, essentially as Henry VIII went happily on his way to marry Catherine Howard.   Cromwell’s head was boiled and placed on a spike on London Bridge, facing away from the city.

About eight months later, Henry VIII had become wracked with grief and accused his ministers of making false accusations against Cromwell. He bemoaned Cromwell’s execution till the day he died. Edward Hall, a chronicler in the day, recorded this about Cromwell’s downfall:

Many lamented but more rejoiced, and specially such as either had been religious men, or favored religious persons; for they banqueted and triumphed together that night, many wishing that that day had been seven year before; and some fearing lest he should escape, although he were imprisoned, could not be merry. Others who knew nothing but truth by him both lamented him and heartily prayed for him. But this is true that of certain of the clergy he was detestably hated, & specially of such as had borne swynge, and by his means was put from it; for in dead he was a man that in all his doings seemed not to favour any kind of Popery, nor could not abide the snoffyng pride of some prelates, which undoubtedly, whatsoever else was the cause of his death, did shorten his life and procured the end that he was brought unto.^[17]

Catherine Howard, who Henry VIII called his, “rose without a thorn,”  was executed a couple of years later allegedly for adultery, which, in her position of Queen of England, was treason.

I suppose this chapter of Christianity’s development should have been about Thomas Cromwell. Or Thomas Cranmer. But Henry VIII wore the crown, and history gives him all the glory. He did, after all, create the first protestant Nation-State, even if it was little more than Roman Catholicism with an English brand on it’s flank, and an English king wearing the Pope’s hat.

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.