Churchianity

Capitalism is the final de facto religion to emerge on the world stage, which it quickly dominates. Meanwhile, Christianity, which is given two thousand years to flourish—as seen in key Scriptural events and prophecies—is integral to the system of the two beasts of Revelation 13. The identity of that second beast is also revealed, allowing us to mark our place on the prophetic timeline.

Shalom, and welcome to our history podcast. This is a production of Kingdom Preppers.org. I’m your host, Kingdom Prepper, and you’re listening to: Churchianity: Two Thousand Years of Leaven. We continue with our history.

Christianity emerged amidst European powers, and was therefore Eurocentric in its origin and throughout its formative years. That Eurocentric nature is even evident in the rise of America and other world powers, but this is also according to prophecy. While Christianity enjoyed its greatest European height during the most dominant years of papal supremacy, and it spread like a mysterious plague during the Great Awakenings, its power waned considerably in the twentieth century, being eclipsed by the new unofficial religion called Capitalism.

Capitalism, it must be stated, reigns over the entire earth, making merchandise of nearly every conceivable thing, which it then incorporates into its all-consuming structure. Even politics is subject to capitalism—you need only look to Wall Street and the many deep-pocketed lobbyists who descend on Washington, D.C. to note that. But in order to see how this is all according to prophecy, even being fulfilled according to a specific timeline, you would have to apply prophetic symbols to their appropriate existing counterparts. Those who believe that the United States is Babylon, for instance—and use various analogies to prove that out—will not see the true prophetic purpose of America.

Babylon is essentially a “beast rider,” not having enough power in and of herself to be considered a beast. She manipulates and influences beast powers. America, on the other hand, is large enough and powerful enough to exist as a beast, however, and does not ride something more powerful than itself. The rules of this great dynamic are carefully laid out in the books of Daniel and Revelation, which both state that beasts are in fact kingdoms, and their horns, kings.

[2] “Daniel declared, ‘I saw in my vision by night, and behold, the four winds of heaven were stirring up the great sea. [3] And four great beasts came up out of the sea, different from one another.’ ” [19] “Then I desired to know the truth about the fourth beast, which was different from all the rest….” [23] “Thus he said: ‘As for the fourth beast, there shall be a fourth kingdom on earth, which shall be different from all the kingdoms….’ ”

[1] “And I saw a beast rising out of the sea, with ten horns and seven heads, with ten diadems on its horns and blasphemous names on its heads. [2] … And to it the dragon gave his power and his throne and great authority.”

Unlike the harlot, Babylon, this beast from the sea is endowed with power from the dragon, who we know from Revelation chapter 12, is the devil:

[9] “And the great dragon was thrown down, that ancient serpent, who is called the devil and Satan, the deceiver of the whole world.”

The first beast of Revelation 13 arises from the sea because it emerges at a time when a multiplicity of peoples, speaking various languages, exist within burgeoning nations. This is none other than Europe, where Rome emerged as the dominant power prior to being overtaken by a spate of barbarian tribes. These various nations and peoples are represented as a sea, or waters. When the papacy began to manipulate European kings and steer the fate of nations from behind the scenes, this was the prostitute sitting on those waters, as pictured in the 17th chapter of Revelation:

[15] “The waters that you saw, where the prostitute is seated, are peoples and multitudes and nations and languages.”

But a second beast, which is mentioned in the very same chapter, arises not from the sea, but from the earth, signifying an absence of the complex dynamic of nation-states, feudal laws, a state religion, sophisticated economic trade between peoples, and other societal elements present in Europe.

[11] “Then I saw another beast rising out of the earth.”

Wherever this beast emerged, none of that was present. This cannot be said of the African continent, which was already inhabited by diverse peoples, various tribal nations, and filled with many languages. Asia too must be counted out for the same reasons. In fact, the only puzzle piece that fits are the lands that were inhabited solely by Native Americans, who had not created the kinds of complex and diverse societies seen elsewhere in the world. Other areas of the world could not be conquered in the way they were, and Europeans gazed on their holdings like virgin earth, or virgin territory. In his book, American Architectural History, author Keith L. Eggener writes:

“The first European settlers in what is now the US saw the American landscape as virgin territory, raw and undeveloped. They brought with them tools and memories, patterns and conventions, which they used to shape their new homes…. Never again would the American continent seem so utterly and frighteningly void of design as it did to these first settlers, so in need of ordering systems for its habitation and successful exploitation.”

And, as a second witness, Chris Gosden writes in his book Archaeology and Colonialism:

“Virginia was a double play on words. It contained a homage to the Virgin Queen on the part of Raleigh, but it also represented virgin territory for Europeans to acquire and use.”

The interesting thing is, the second beast of Revelation 13 is only referred to as the second beast, or “another beast” in this chapter. In subsequent chapters, it is referred to as something else entirely, and I have not heard anyone address this important shift directly, though it is of extreme prophetic importance.

A clue as to what it was called was a subject of our previous podcast. Now, bear in mind, this takes spiritual discernment, and it is not readily apparent to most. Remember, there are two beasts mentioned in Revelation 13, but following that chapter, only the first beast is referred to by the term “beast.” This is the case in verses like Revelation 14:11 and 15:2, which are in fact referring to the first beast of Revelation 13, whom the second beast forces the whole world to worship, according to Revelation 13:12. Now, to learn what the primary role of the second beast is, which is revealed in the title it is given in other chapters, you have to understand the following:

[13] “It performs great signs, even making fire come down from heaven to earth in front of people, [14] and by the signs that it is allowed to work in the presence of the beast it deceives those who dwell on earth….”

Consider the phrase, “It performs great signs, making fire come down from heaven to earth in front of people.” What could this be referencing? The answer is found in 1 Kings 18. The full story is told in verses 20 to 40, but in summary, a contest of sorts was arranged at Mount Carmel, between King Ahab’s prophets—the prophets of Baal and Asherah—and Elijah, the prophet of Yah. To finally prove who was the true prophet and who were the false, Elijah ordered that two bulls be slain, cut in pieces, and laid on wood piles with no fire kindled. This was to be special burnt offerings, with the idea that the fire that would consume either sacrifice would come from Yah, directly from heaven, which would identify the true prophet.

Ahab’s prophets went first, calling on the name of Baal from morning to noon, but there was no answer. In the end, they cut themselves with swords and lances until blood gushed, according to their custom. Elijah’s turn came, and he gathered the people around him and went through the motions of preparing his sacrifice. Finally, he prayed to Yah saying: “let it be known this day that you are Elohim in Israel, and that I am your servant, and that I have done all these things at your word.” The payoff comes in verse 38:

[38] “Then the fire of Yah fell and consumed the burnt offerings and the wood and the stone and the dust, and licked up the water that was in the trench.”

To add to this equation, Yeshua, in revealing the signs of the times to his disciples, said:

[24] “For false messiahs and false prophets will arise and perform great signs and wonders, so as to lead astray, if possible, even the elect.”

These passages are directly related to Revelation 13:13, and are in fact clues that point to the fulfillment of John’s prophecy. The second beast power “performed great signs,” which is the exact phrasing Yeshua used in describing a distinct group of people who would emerge to lead many astray. By those signs, the second beast was able to “deceive those who dwell on the earth,” we are told.

Some may be looking for literal fulfillments of this prophecy, and while there are individuals who literally perform signs and wonders and deceive people, the prophecy concerning this second beast is largely symbolic, given the clues that point to it. The fact that the second beast calls down fire directs our attention to a specific portion of Scripture, which we already covered. This refers to Elijah, who was a prophet. So, all we are being told in Revelation 13:13 is that the second beast is in some way a prophet. The fire-from-heaven phrasing is used as an identifying marker. The rest of verses 13 and 14 give us additional information. This is a false prophet we’re dealing with, as its actions fit the very description Yeshua himself gave. And this is exactly why the second beast is referred to as just that in subsequent chapters of Revelation, the first of which is this one:

[13] “And I saw, coming out of the mouth of the dragon and out of the mouth of the beast and out of the mouth of the false prophet, three unclean spirits like frogs.”

The second beast—the false prophet in question—rises out of the earth, unlike the first beast. Following the Protestant Reformation, Europeans migrated to the new world, peopling the colonies and infusing them primarily with their borrowed religion, which was Catholicism 2.0. You see, European Catholics invented the thing that is called Christianity. And it was legalized chiefly by European kings like Constantine. History bears that out. Of course, the prostitute who rides that beast power stole the concept from the emissaries and falsely reinterpreted it, but it is essentially a Catholic concept. American Protestantism, on the other hand, is Catholicism with brighter colors and a variety of styles to choose from. It is a repackaging in other words, or the second beast causing the world to worship the first beast by embracing Protestant Christianity. And this it does by way of deception, or false prophecy. This is clear, judging from the events in our previous podcast.

For Christians, heaven is the place where the dead go immediately upon death; and there is no law since everyone is saved by grace; there is a pre-tribulation rapture from which the righteous will be spared; and hell is an eternally burning place, and so many other misconceptions. But as to that last one, let’s pursue it further, since it ties directly into our previous podcast, as well as Revelation 13.

We’ll be back with more exciting scriptural history . . . in a moment.

[MUSICAL INTERLUDE]

We now continue with our podcast.

It is important to remember that beasts in Scripture represent nations, usually large, powerful ones that control or greatly influence other nations. But the general rule is, in order to qualify as a beast, you have to also control the spiritual fate of citizens within your territorial boundaries, which must include Yah’s chosen people: True Israel. This was the case with ancient Babylon, Medo-Persia, Greece, Rome, Byzantium, the Holy Roman Empire, etc. We are told in Revelation 13:14 that the second beast, which rises out of the earth—the false prophet—“it deceives those who dwell on earth, telling them to make an image for the beast that was wounded by the sword and yet lived.”

So, the second beast orders the people to make an image to the first beast. This is interesting language, and people tend to interpret it in all manner of ways. In short, the first chapter of the book of Genesis has Yah saying:

[26] “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness.”

The result was Adam, who was a physical manifestation of the Father and his Son. Then in the fifth chapter of that book we are told:

[3] “When Adam had lived 130 years, he fathered a son in his own likeness, after his image, and named him Seth.”

Having something formed in your image, after your likeness, is simply referring to a close copy, or replica. It is safe to say that Adam did not look exactly like the Father, nor did Seth look exactly like Adam, but they were close enough to the original. In considering the second beast of Revelation 13, who orders people to make an image to the first beast, we have to consider what the first beast was like. Heading back to Revelation 13, the first few verses give us a description of the first beast. It has horns and heads and crowns, which signifies rulers and sovereign power. Interestingly, the next description is the appearance, which was like a leopard and bear and lion. If you head over to Daniel chapter 7 and read Daniel’s vision of four beasts, you’ll see the same animal representations. This means that elements of Babylon, Medo-Persia, and Greece would be absorbed into the government, culture, economy, societal makeup, and religion of the next ruling power: Rome and its offshoots. The first beast also spoke blasphemies, yet it received worship. Worship is actually a big deal with this beast, seeing it is mentioned several times. This beast also goes out to make war with Yah’s set apart ones and succeeds in conquering them. (Listen to episodes 24 and 29 to see both the first and second beasts fulfilling this action.)

The image of this beast, therefore, must represent several of these characteristics. But most important among the many aspects mentioned, is the religious one. The first beast enforced Catholicism. That was its state religion. The second beast enforced Protestantism, as that was its state religion, particularly during the colonial period. In 2003, Melvin E. Page and Penny M. Sonnenburg released Colonialism: an international, social, cultural, and political encyclopedia, Volume 1. On page 496 of that volume, we read:

“Of all religions, Christianity has been most associated with colonialism because several of its forms (Catholicism and Protestantism) were the religions of the European powers engaged in colonial enterprise….”

One of the characteristics of the first beast is its dependence on an invention known as purgatory, which we have covered over the course of this series. This it occupied with the false notion of hell, and lay Catholics had no hope of bypassing these nonexistent places and heading off to heaven without the mercy, intercession, and forgiveness of priests and popes. But the concept of hell must be looked at from a proper Hebrew perspective. The word hell is derived from the Hebrew she’owl, word H7585. Scholars have attempted to link this word to Catholic concepts like a place of burning or even purgatory, but its foundational meaning is “the grave,” or a “pit” for burial. When someone dies, they are usually placed in she’owl or the grave. In Greek this is called hadés—some pronounce it “hay-dees”—which is word G86, but the senses have all been mythologized to mean supernatural nonsense.

That being said, hell, or hadés, which is the grave, follows death. Simple concept. When we look at Revelation chapter 20, we see something interesting about both.

[14] “Then Death and Hades were thrown into the lake of fire.”

Hell, which is supposedly an eternally burning place, is itself cast into a lake of fire? Doesn’t make sense. What makes sense is this: eternity will have no place for death and burial, since each and every soul will be immortal. If you take note of Revelation 19:20 and 20:10, you’ll see that the devil, the first beast, and the false prophet—which is the second beast—are all thrown into the same lake of fire, as there will be no place in eternity for these evil beings and institutions either.

But getting back to the hell concept, which is an important aspect of the religion of the first beast, the false prophet orders the deceived inhabitants of the world to make an image to this beast. Then we are told:

[15] “And it was allowed to give breath to the image of the beast, so that the image of the beast might even speak and might cause those who would not worship the image of the beast to be slain.”

The word slain here, is killed, word G615, apokteinō. While Revelation has a few literal prophetic applications, this one, like several others, is metaphorical, since it relates to concepts within a broad metaphor—beasts and images, a dragon, signs and wonders; you get the idea. So, in considering this, we should jump straight to the second sense of apokteinō.

Sense 2. a. metaphorically, to extinguish, or abolish; to inflict moral death.

Remember, this is referring to the word slain, or killed. We’re talking about a metaphoric, moral death, not a literal one. But the second sense gets to the heart of the matter.

2. b. to deprive of spiritual life and procure eternal misery.

Essentially in hell. The first beast is guilty of this, for, since ancient times, the prostitute seated upon its back openly declared that souls would be doomed to damnation apart from Catholicism. The second beast breathed these very lies, giving life to an image of this. The fire and brimstone preachers of the Great Awakenings said the very same things, but in a more sensational manner as it pertained to Protestantism. And this has changed little over time.

“There is no salvation in hell. There’s no savior in hell. There’s no bible in hell. There’s no blood in hell. There’s no altars in hell. There’s no forgiveness in hell. Whatever goes to hell, stays in hell!”

This kind of preaching, as the second sense of apokteinō points out, has deprived audience members of spiritual life, leaving many of them to feel they will procure eternal misery in a place of burning called hell if they do not become Protestant Christians by joining a local church. This is Revelation 13:15 in action. Christianity—from the harlot mother church down to her daughters:

[2] “She has become a dwelling place for demons, a haunt for every unclean spirit, a haunt for every unclean bird, a haunt for every unclean and detestable beast.”

And this coincides perfectly with Yeshua’s parables of the Kingdom in Matthew 13:31 – 33, which he likens to a tree that grows larger than all other plants in the garden, so that birds make their nests in it. And it is like thoroughly leavened dough. In Matthew 13, Yeshua explained in his parable of the sower, that birds, which snatch away seeds as soon as they fall on the ground, represent the wicked one who snatches away truth from the heart of hearers before they can understand it. These are the same wicked birds that make their nests in Christianity, as pointed out in Revelation 18:2. And we have already gone over the leaven angle in episode 1 of this podcast series.

An account in the book of Mark also highlights the Christian experience. In Mark 11, Yeshua and his disciples cross the Sea of Galilee and arrive at the Country of the Gerasenes—some manuscripts say the Gadarenes, but both were people of cities situated east of the Sea of Galilee and the Jordan River. Also, both were actually Gentile cities, whose citizens were Greek, rather than Semite, hence the many pigs they raised. According to Roswell D. Hitchcock, who authored The Interpreting Dictionary of Scripture Proper Names in 1869, the word Gerasene, means: “those who come from pilgrimage or fight.”

At any rate, no sooner did Yeshua step off the boat than a man possessed of an unclean spirit approach him from the tombs. There is so much prophetic value here. Remember that Babylon is a dwelling place for demons and a haunt for unclean spirits, and here is a man possessed of unclean spirits living among the tombs. Also remember that Yeshua warned of the leaven of the Pharisees and Sadducees, which is false teaching or doctrine (see Matthew 16:5 – 12). Well, take note of another identifying mark. Yeshua also said:

[27] “Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you are like whitewashed tombs, which outwardly appear beautiful, but within are full of dead people’s bones and all uncleanness. [28] So you also outwardly appear righteous to others, but within you are full of hypocrisy and lawlessness."

This represents Christianity, which for two thousand years has been guilty of the same thing. This is why the man possessed of unclean spirits is seen coming from the tombs, where he lived. We are also told that no one could bind the man for the strength he possessed, since he easily broke his metal bonds. “No one had the strength to subdue him,” we are told in Mark 5:4. This speaks to the strength of the Catholic beast empire that conquered much of Europe under the authority of the dragon, Satan. Revelation 13:4 even asks: “Who is like the beast, and who can fight against it?”

Going back to Mark chapter 5, upon seeing Yeshua, the man from the tombs—filled with demons who believed Yeshua came to torment them—rushes over to Yeshua and falls at his feet. The demons beg that Yeshua not send them out of the Gentile country. Instead—and this is very telling, yet requires discernment—they spot a herd of unclean pigs numbering a certain prophetic number feeding on the hillside, thus they said to Yeshua:

[12] “ ‘Send us to the pigs; let us enter them.’ [13] So he gave them permission. And the unclean spirits came out and entered the pigs; and the herd, numbering about two thousand, rushed down the steep bank into the sea and drowned in the sea.”

About two thousand swine to equal the 2,000 years of leavened Christianity, and into the sea they plunged, which is also prophetic. This entire 2,000-year history has revealed several things. Christianity attempted to replace True Israel, according to prophecy, and in doing so, it in fact paralleled a lot of what Israel experienced. For one thing, Augustine was like its Moses, all of the popes and Christian kings are akin to the many corrupt and unrighteous kings and priests we endured. The church was split in two, forming the Roman Catholic and Greek Orthodox branches, similar to the split between Israel and Judah. Then the Protestant Reformation forced the church to splinter into factions and spread throughout the earth just as the divided nations of Israel and Judah were scattered among the nations. The early persecutions of the church represent the horrors of the Egyptian bondage prior to the Exodus. The repeated barbarian, Arab, and other invasions are akin to the invasions Israel suffered at the hands of the Assyrians, Babylonians, Greeks, and Romans. In short, if you want to stand in the shoes of True Israel, you must endure what they endured.

In the end, when Yeshua returns, the vast majority of the world will still be Christian, Buddhist, Hindu, Muslim, and other religions, which is why only 144,000 of all the 12 tribes will be sealed in the forehead. Also, this is why in Isaiah chapter 2:1 – 4, many will go up to the mountain of Yah’s house to worship there and get the truth. This will be fulfilled in the millennium.

To be clear, Yah raised up Christianity like he raised up the Babylonians, but that doesn’t mean that the ways of ancient Babylon were pure, or that we should all become Babylonians. It was a temporary judgement. But even the corrupt nations and systems he raises up, he eventually destroys, because they are only a means to an end. This is also true of the Christian movement, which started out as the white horse of Revelation 6:2 following the time of the emissaries, before it was usurped and morphed into the papal structure. If people who are in the Christian church are truly living up to what they believe, then Yah can reach them and bring them up to a higher level by removing them from that setting. This is part of the calling out process:

[4] “Then I heard another voice from heaven saying, “Come out of her, my people, lest you take part in her sins, lest you share in her plagues.”

In Mark 3:24 – 25, Yeshua said that a kingdom or house divided against itself cannot stand, and the fact that Christianity—which was never meant to succeed—has been divided for so long, and continues to divide even today—it will not stand, nor can it usher in the Kingdom. But it must exist, for it is the place from which the true servants of Yah will hail. Remember that those servants are told to, “Come out of her.” The vast majority of us who are in the truth have all passed through the Christian movement at one point or another, before we were called out. Well, others are still being called out of her now. My hope is that this series will aid in that process. 

That wraps it up for the entire Churchianity: Two Thousand Years of Leaven podcast. A production of Kingdom Preppers.org, this series was written, produced, and hosted by yours truly, Kingdom Prepper. All praise, honor, and glory are due to my boss, Yah Elohim, and to his right hand, Yahushua HaMashiach. You can access the transcripts for this series on our website. That concludes our history. We hope you enjoyed this podcast. Shalom.

Keywords: beast rider, beast from the sea, beast from the earth, harlot Babylon, America, Europe, Capitalism, the first beast, the second beast, the false prophet, purgatory, hades, hell, the grave, image of the beast, image to the beast, Ahab, Elijah, Prophets of Baal and Asherah, come out of her, churchianity, two thousand years of leaven, history of Christianity, church history, Hebrew history, kp, kingdom preppers

—Tyrone T.

As Christian denominations spread throughout the colonies, sans the support or protection of any central government, they each found a way to gain a foothold while learning to tolerate one another. Within this new environment, and surrounded by unbelievers as they were, a series of revivals took place that led to two Great Awakenings. This in turn led to the birth of several new harlot daughters of Mystery Babylon.

Shalom, and welcome to our history podcast. This is a production of Kingdom Preppers.org. I’m your host, Kingdom Prepper, and you’re listening to: Churchianity: Two Thousand Years of Leaven. We continue with our history.

Christianity flourished in Europe for hundreds of years, becoming the de facto religion of peasant and noble alike, with the state itself maintaining Christian laws. Church and state were fused in an age-old union that saw corrupt popes steering moral affairs (and sometimes political ones) while Christian emperors handled secular business (and at times interfered in ecclesiastical matters). This often happy arrangement was disrupted by the Protestant Reformation, which was a great upheaval to longstanding Christian traditions as well as affairs of state. In the place of Catholic order, princes rose up in various regions and attempted to fuse the state of their given nation to new Protestant churches. New laws supported and empowered these churches, some of which became oppressive by foisting new religious obligations on their members.

When the way was opened to the new world, the prospect of new opportunities drew Protestants there in their thousands. A new Christian mode was developed in these new lands, but in time, attempts at establishing a central church on the order of the old model failed. Too many varying beliefs and distinct nationalities were present in the colonies to justify one established church. A case in point of this disparity would be New York, particularly the banks of the Hudson River, which, in 1646 was home to a host of people speaking no less than 18 different languages. All that these varying Christian groups had in common was their innate desire to obtain religious liberty and be allowed to freely proclaim their personal Christian viewpoint. But each Christian group was shoulder to shoulder with another that held a different belief. This meant that each had to learn to cooperate with and tolerate the other.

What is also crucial about this time is that Christianity on a whole existed without the support of any established state. No king or prince with their army of knights, warriors, or hired mercenaries were there to protect Christians in America. The various denominations, which had no states forcing their particular religious views on the public, were now on their own. This meant evangelists had to volunteer to go out and win converts to their church through sheer persuasion, and they had to foot their own bills since there was also no state budget allotted to the cause.

In this period, what is known as the first Great Awakening occurred.

“What historians call ‘the first Great Awakening’ can best be described as a revitalization of religious piety that swept through the American colonies between the 1730s and the 1770s.”

Writes Professor Christine Leigh Heyrman for the National Humanities Center.

“That revival was part of a much broader movement, an evangelical upsurge taking place simultaneously on the other side of the Atlantic, most notably in England, Scotland, and Germany. In all these Protestant cultures during the middle decades of the eighteenth century, a new Age of Faith rose to counter the currents of the Age of Enlightenment, to reaffirm the view that being truly religious meant trusting the heart rather than the head, prizing feeling more than thinking, and relying on biblical revelation rather than human reason.”

While Christianity permeated the colonies in various forms, and only church members could hold any office, which wasn’t subject to elections derived from voting, many remained unconverted to the religion and were considered destitute of faith. All such persons were deemed worthy of the fires of hell—hell itself being another misinterpretation of the Messianic Writings by Christians of the day.

The Great Awakening had its beginnings in America among Presbyterians in Pennsylvania and New Jersey. It was among them—and in those colonies—that early religious revivals were initiated in the 1730s, chiefly in the form of fiery sermons given by clergymen of the Tennent family, who were Scots-Irish immigrants. Much like wildfire, the religious fervor spread to the Puritans—or Congregationalists—and Baptists of New England.

“By the 1740s, the clergymen of these churches were conducting revivals throughout that region, using the same strategy that had contributed to the success of the Tennents.”

Writes Professor Heyrman.

“In emotionally charged sermons, all the more powerful because they were delivered extemporaneously, preachers like Jonathan Edwards evoked vivid, terrifying images of the utter corruption of human nature and the terrors awaiting the unrepentant in hell.”

This was, let’s say, the first foray into fire and brimstone preaching, which would become wildly popular in future revivals. The first Great Awakening in America, meanwhile, continued to pick up steam with the entrance of George Whitefield, an ordained minister in the Church of England. Molly Worthen, an associate professor of history at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, says of Whitefield:

“He had a charisma that electrified his listeners and he capitalized on that. He relied on public opinion, not the church hierarchy to make him a celebrity. He developed a sophisticated ad campaign, and when he planned to preach in a town, his advance men would be there ahead of time drumming up interest. More important, his revivals centered on the individual experience of the new birth. Whitefield's tactic was not to convince you to obey church authorities, but to persuade you that if you, the individual, would simply recognize your sins, and open yourself up to grace, you could be saved. He put aside that thorny problem of predestination. Wherever he went, he was controversial. Now he was not a social radical; his message was not pro-democracy or overtly political. He endorsed slavery, probably because he wanted to be able to preach in the south.”

Because of Whitefield and others, the preaching did extend well into the American South, where Separate Baptists began to emerge. Fear was used to draw tens of thousands to Christianity. Whitefield soon allied with John Wesley, a prominent English theologian and evangelist, in an attempt to reform the Church of England, but this resulted in a revival movement within the church that was led primarily by Wesley. It was known as methodism, and is the foundation for the Methodist church. So, the Methodist denomination is a branch of the Anglican Church, which itself is a direct offshoot of Catholicism, as seen in episode 28 of this podcast series. But all Christian denominations—each and every one of them—trace their roots back to Catholicism, as prophesied.

John Wesley also disagreed with Martin Luther and John Calvin on the subject of Christian conversion. While he believed in what theologians called justification by faith, he did not believe in predestination. He believed and taught that any sinner could receive the grace of Elohim, not just the elect. But Wesley put a Methodist spin on what theologians called sanctification, and made it his own.

“After conversion, he taught that a born-again Christian experiences a process called sanctification.”

Says Professor Worthen.

“This gradually brings them to a state of ‘Christian perfection,’ and their sinful urges are suppressed. Calvin and the Puritans believed in a sanctification process too, but the emphasis on ‘Christian perfection’ was distinctly Methodist. Wesley even said that in some people this sanctification could be almost instantaneous. And some of his followers came to believe that this so-called ‘second blessing’ could make you perfectly holy and totally eradicate any trace of original sin.”

That said, a widespread revival along the lines of the first Great Awakening was possible in part because Protestant Christianity was not subject to the control of any government, and this led to a mutual co-existence between various denominations that created something on the order of a common faith. This was something that had not been seen before in the splintered, Protestant arm of the movement. Professor Worthen sums it up wonderfully in stating:

“The eighteenth century was the period when Puritanism, Scots Presbyterianism, and other traditions merged into a common religious culture that we can call American evangelicalism. Something new and different happened here. Revival movements placed a new stress on individual connection with the divine. They questioned the old established state church model, and they involved a jostling of multiple groups in a new pluralistic context.”

On the strength of the success of the first Great Awakening, a second swept the United States between the 1790s and 1840s. The second Great Awakening in effect transformed the country’s religious landscape, and Christianity itself was altered, no longer resembling the lackluster version handed down from the papal past. This shift is evident in the statistics left to us from the era. During the start of the American Revolution, Congregationalists—who were the eighteenth-century descendants of the Puritan churches—along with Anglicans (who later renamed themselves Episcopalians), and Quakers were essentially the largest denominations. However, by 1800, the Methodists and Baptists, became the fastest-growing denominations in America.

The second Great Awakening built on the foundation of the one that preceded it, and Protestants, who could all be considered evangelicals at the time, enjoyed something close to an empire, in that they dominated many cultural institutions in the U.S., and even founded schools like Brown University and Dartmouth College. Indeed, evangelicals gained a degree of political power as well, but some of their reform efforts split the movement, such as the abolition of slavery, which spawned the Southern Baptist Convention, since Baptists in the South were against abolition and black civil rights. At any rate, Christianity seemed to reach its full height in America during this period.

“The second Great Awakening had huge consequences for Christianity in the West, especially in the young American Republic.”

Says Professor Worthen.

“During the Revolutionary era, the American colonies were a minister’s worst nightmare; only a tiny minority of Americans went to church. It’s during the second Great Awakening that America really became Christian.”

It was in this period that church planting expanded across the western American frontier, with Baptists leading the way. In fact, the first generation of black leaders, or ministers, came out of the revival movement. The first black Baptist churches in South Carolina and Georgia were built during the height of the Revolution. And while the British still occupied Charleston and Savannah, black Baptists were springing up in the hundreds—sensational numbers would come after the Civil War, and emancipation, as we mentioned in episode 29 of this podcast series. During the second Great Awakening, leaders of new Christian denominations also emerged, leading to branches of the Babylonian arm that include the Mormons, Adventists, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and the Pentecostal movement.

We’ll be back with more exciting scriptural history . . . in a moment.

[MUSICAL INTERLUDE]

We now continue with our podcast.

While America was opening up and the country expanded westward, many Christians flooded west in search of opportunity on those new frontiers. When Joseph Smith established the LDS church, many of his followers flocked west in response to his purported revelations, and following his death, thousands more migrated to the Rocky Mountains to populate his proposed Zion on Earth.

Joseph Smith was born in Vermont in 1805, during the second Great Awakening. The Smiths were a hardscrabble farming family that was frequently on the move during his youth. Following major crop failures in 1816, the Smiths moved to western New York in search of better prospects. Joseph Smith, at the time, was swept up in the religious fervor that was prevalent at camp meetings, where Methodist and Baptist pastors delivered their most sensational fire and brimstone sermons. Wherever the people were, be it in the most remote regions, there Methodist preachers and Baptist ministers descended, and both movements grew tremendously as a result. Western New York was one locale these preachers frequented. According to the Joseph Smith Papers:

“Western New York was particularly noted for revivalism and acquired a reputation as the ‘burned-over district’ because the fires of revivalism and social activism had swept through so often.”

Presbyterian ministers tried to keep up, and it was amidst the religious jostling of these groups that Joseph Smith first entered the Christian arena at age twelve, when he developed an interest in such matters. His entire family had been swept into the revival movement, and both his parents and grandparents allegedly had visions and dreams they claimed were from the Most High. Smith, who practiced Christian folk magic—which was popular at the time—eventually started having strange visions of his own. While Smith seemed to lean more toward Methodism, he was not entirely sold on any of the Christian movements operating in his day. Besides Christian folk magic, however, Smith added other things to his religious background, all of which informed his particular theology.

“And yes, Joseph Smith, the founder of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints was a Freemason.”

Admits the LDS church itself in an official video release.

“Joseph Smith’s brother Hiram was also a mason, and a member of a lodge in Palmyra, New York. And their father, Joseph Smith, Sr., was also known to be a Master Mason in Canandaigua, New York as early as 1818. While prophet and president of the church, Joseph joined the Masonic lodge in Nauvoo, Illinois on March, 15, 1842, rising to the level of Master Mason just a day later under the recognized authority of the Grand Master of Illinois. Masonry wasn’t new to the thousands of Latter-day Saint converts already living in and around Nauvoo at the time. Although new to the faith, some members of the church, even those within the ranks of church leadership, were already masons. Eventually, over 1,500 members of the church were listed as Freemasons in Nauvoo alone, more than in all the rest of Illinois.”

They try to justify this by further stating:

“In towns across early America, many elected officials were masons: President George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, and many signers of the Declaration of Independence were also masons.”

Seeing it was founded during the period of slavery, the LDS church and its many members were a racist and bigoted bunch, and still are to some degree according to several sources. Brigham Young, who took over leadership of the LDS church and founded Salt Lake City, is said to have viewed slaves, the descendants of Jacob—who are from the line of Shem—as being under the curse of Ham. According to the book Race and the Making of the Mormon People by Max Perry Mueller, Young was a firm supporter of slavery and believed that blacks “lacked the right to self-rule.” Mueller further wrote that “Young called on the legislature to enact a bill that would codify in the law books the truth already written in the Bible: ‘[African] slaves serve their masters’ in perpetuity.’”

Mueller, in an interview with The Atlantic, also said as follows:

“Whatever you want to say about the origins of the Book of Mormon, it fits its time period really well. It’s very American. It tells a story of racial schism and how it came to be, dividing the world into a hierarchy of races, and that’s a standard American story—especially the idea that people born to a so-called darker-skinned race could not be redeemed.”

William Miller was another prominent religious leader who emerged from the Great Awakenings. Like many others in his day, Miller was a farmer, but he also served as deputy chief and justice of the peace, which demonstrates how respected he was in his local community. He fought alongside the 30th Infantry during the War of 1812, where he held the rank of captain, and he was eventually drawn to the Scriptures, which he began to study in great detail. Several years passed and, in 1831, Miller, then a Baptist lay preacher, started preaching at camp meetings, claiming that everyone had a little over a decade left before the Messiah would return a second time, between March 21, 1843 and March 21, 1844, at which point the world would end. This Miller based on a false reading of Daniel 8:13 – 14, which speaks of a temple cleansing he believed referred to the earth being cleansed by a consuming fire. The word “cleansed” in the KJV is actually a mistranslation of wanisdaq, since its root, word H6663, refers to “being in the right,” in the sense of “being justified.”

In 1833, Miller started to publish his views in the form of a pamphlet. In 1836, a book of lectures followed. Two popular publications became the driving forces of the movement: The Signs of the Times and The Midnight Cry. Miller himself estimated that between 50,000 and 100,000 people believed in his report, but many more probably expected the end to come when he proposed it would. Expectations were raised after a comet was sighted one night in March 1843. But Alas, the prophesied time came and went and Miller was forced to admit his error. Though he left the movement he had started, all was not lost … yet. One of Miller’s followers, Simon Snow, proposed a new date for the Second Coming, October 22, 1844, based on an interpretative tweak. This was called the Second Advent or the Great Anticipation.

When the Messiah did not return on the new date, the failed event was renamed the Great Disappointment. Despite the Second Advent not coming to pass, William Miller made his mark by introducing new doctrines to the Christian movement; doctrines that were largely adopted by his followers, who convened the next year at the Mutual Conference of Adventists to hash out problematic details in his overall theology. This led to the formation of the Evangelical Adventists, which was the foundation on which all modern Adventist churches were established. Among those who attended the conference were Joseph Bates, a revivalist minister, and James White and his wife Ellen White, who learned from Bates that the Seventh-day Sabbath was still valid according to Scripture.

Ellen White’s great grandson, Charles White, says of this period:

“Following the disappointment, they were part of that company that banded together … and Ellen White was given a vision….”

Not unlike Joseph Smith. And that vision involved the “Advent people,” as Ellen White called them, who were walking along a narrow path….

“… with a light behind them which represented what had happened to them in the past as having value and importance….”

Meaning that the Great Disappointment should be looked at another way. And so the early Advent believers did. Bates and the Whites agreed with Miller’s date for the temple cleansing, only they reestablished a basis for the date, saying that it was not the earth that was to be cleansed by a Second Coming of the Messiah, but the temple in heaven was being cleansed in an unseen act that involved an investigative judgment of mankind. After borrowing many of Miller’s teachings, and drawing many conclusions that he first drew, the largest proponent of the Advent believers adopted the Seventh-day as their day of worship, and, continuing in the spirit of William Miller, formed the Seventh-day Adventist church in 1863, with Ellen White as its prophet. Charles White goes on to say that, all told:

“Ellen White wrote over a hundred thousand pages … by hand—twenty-five million words—mostly with a quill pen. She wrote more books in more languages, circulated further than any other woman in history.”

That said, it has long come to light that—according to ex-Adventist, Walter T. Rea, a former pastor and author—between 80 and 90% of those prolific writings of White’s were plagiarized. Research for his book The White Lie reveals that White borrowed from about 75 books of other religious authors to write her own material.

Not all Adventist movements accepted Ellen White as their prophet. One group, which later became the Evangelical Adventist Church, ceased to exist by 1916, but two groups that later became the Advent Christian Church, exist to this day as a first-day denomination. Another group calling itself the Church of God (Seventh Day) split off from those who held to Ellen White, but two other groups split off again, one of which became the Worldwide Church of God, headed by the infamous Herbert Armstrong. Armstrong went so far as to sanction the Levitical feast days in addition to the Sabbath, but many of his other views were controversial and he was suspected of misappropriating church funds. For making predictions that never came to pass and holding to questionable doctrines, Armstrong’s writings were withdrawn from print by his own church (now known as Grace Communion International) and he was labeled a false prophet and heretic.

The second major church to emerge from the Millerite movement was the International Bible Students Association, which not only borrowed heavily from Miller, but from Adventists as well. It was founded by Pastor Charles Taze Russell in 1872, and after splitting into various groups following a series of internal controversies, the most well-known among them has come down to us as the Jehovah’s Witnesses. The movement is known for its many false predictions of the Second Coming and other events, which failed in the years: 1878, 1881, 1914, 1918, 1925, and 1975. Various problems have since plagued the organization, from racial discrimination to rampant child abuse, which the JW elders—according a former elder—consider a sin but not necessarily a crime, thus these matters are kept as quiet as possible.

But in short, the so-called Great Awakenings spawned many of the various denominations we see today, all of which are the polluted offspring of the mother harlot, Roman Catholicism, by way of other Protestant churches. The same is true of one of their most recent and popular entries, Pentecostalism, the charismatic religious movement that constitute denominations that sprang from the early Methodist and Baptist Holiness churches. Characterized by emotional religious expressionism, enthusiastic singing, spontaneous testimonies, and spirited sermons, Pentecostals regard Spirit baptism perhaps highest of all, signified of course by their misapplied “speaking in tongues.” They completely miss the point of Acts 2, which details Israelites who convened in one place but spoke different languages, in which case the Spirit of Yah allowed Peter to be heard in the languages they each understood, thus making his message discernable to all. This was a miracle of Yah. Pentecostals twist this to their detriment, speaking indiscernible gibberish as a sign of receiving or being filled with the Ruach.

While they claim to trace their roots to the Israelite emissaries of the first century, Pentecostals emerged during the Great Awakenings. The contemporary Pentecostal movement, however, with its emphasis on conversion, speaking in tongues, faith healing, and other beliefs, gained a foothold in the early twentieth century at a small religious school in Topeka, Kansas known as the Bethel Bible College. There, Charles Fox Parham—who was only one of many ministers fanning the flames of the contemporary Holiness movement—encouraged his students to undergo an Acts 2 experience by engaging in fasting and rigorous Scripture study.

On January 1, 1901, one of his students, Agnes Oznam, was the first to utter the now well-known glossolalia heard in Pentecostal churches. Other students were soon speaking nonsensical gibberish as well, and Parham chalked this up to a sign of the students having received the Spirit. He engaged in supposed faith healing shortly thereafter and, with these events, the flame of modern Pentecostalism was sparked. William Seymour, a holiness pastor and leader of the Apostolic Faith Gospel Mission, continued the trend. He was the man behind the Azusa Street revival that started in 1906. Seymour had been exposed to Parham’s teachings at a Houston Bible school and, continuing in his footsteps, he encouraged his congregants to practice speaking in tongues. Before long, rich and poor, white, black, Latino, and even preachers of other languishing ministries embraced the Pentecostal conversion experience.

After a time, a host of new Pentecostal church members were awaiting the latter rain prophesied by the Prophet Joel in the form of a full outpouring of the Spirit in preparation for the final judgment. It never came. Thus, history’s pages were filled with yet another false prophet entry, together with another leavened Christian movement. And so it shall be until the ultimate collapse of Babylon.

That wraps it up for this episode of Churchianity: Two Thousand Years of Leaven. A production of Kingdom Preppers.org, this episode was written, produced, and hosted by yours truly, Kingdom Prepper. All praise, honor, and glory are due to my boss, Yah Elohim, and to his right hand, Yahushua HaMashiach. You can access the transcript for this episode on our website. Yah willing, our history will continue in the next podcast. Shalom.

Keywords: the great awakening, age of enlightenment, age of faith, Tennent family, puritans, Congregationalists, Methodists, Separate Baptists, John Wesley, Johnathan Edwards, Christian denominations trace their roots back to Catholicism, Episcopalians, Quakers, LDS Church, Mormons, Seventh-day Adventists, SDA, Pentecostalism, churchianity, two thousand years of leaven, history of Christianity, church history, Hebrew history, kp, kingdom preppers

The harlot daughters of the mother church begin to spread across the American colonies and carve out individual paths to eventual separation from the old world. Slavery, meanwhile, thrives as a result of increased trade created in a new market system, which, with the establishment of the United States, gives rise to capitalism, a new and far-reaching religion.

Shalom, and welcome to our history podcast. This is a production of Kingdom Preppers.org. I’m your host, Kingdom Prepper, and you’re listening to: Churchianity: Two Thousand Years of Leaven. We continue with our history.

The American colonies were all commercial ventures on the part of England, intended to prop up their burgeoning empire through slave labor. To facilitate this expansive endeavor, forests were cleared, and the fields they yielded had to be tilled. That required settlers. Christians of various denominations were attracted to the new world and therefore migrated to different colonies, spreading their European culture and custom, which subsequently established the foundations of what would become America. The Quakers settled in Pennsylvania, the Catholics in Maryland, and the Dutch Reformed in New York. Lutherans from Sweden, Huguenots from France, Baptists from England, and Presbyterians from Scotland later settled the colonies as well. What is little discussed today is that each and every one of these Christian groups were steeped in the barbaric culture of colonial slavery. They each depended on Israelite slaves in order to eke out an existence or else thrive on American soil, including the Puritans, who sought to establish a “new Zion” in the New England wilderness, and failed.

With all of these various Christian groups clustered throughout the colonies, denominationalism began to emerge as a way to define the church as it then existed. The term denomination was popularized around 1740 at the time of the Evangelical Revival, spearheaded by men like George Whitefield and John Wesley, but the concept was well-cemented by Puritans of the mid-seventeenth century. The term differed from sectarianism, which implied that a particular sect was authoritative and enjoyed direct access to the Redeemer, and that sect alone. Sectarianism was exclusive, whereas denominationalism was inclusive. The argument that was eventually proposed (which amounts to conformity) was that a Christian group, being called by a particular name, was merely part of a larger group that comprised the entire church. And the church held all denominations. Of course, this view has since changed, and what Christianity has reverted to is sectarianism, even though each group still refers to itself as a denomination.

While Christianity was sorting itself out in the colonies, England was digging its heels into the slave trade and growing into a behemoth thereby. Author Gerald Horne wrote a book titled: The Apocalypse of Settler Colonialism: The Roots of Slavery, White Supremacy, and Capitalism in Seventeenth-Century America and the Caribbean. In that book, Horne wrote:

“[I]t is the seventeenth [century] that stands out conspicuously as the takeoff for London’s involvement in the nasty business of enslavement, which simultaneously delivered bounteous profits that set the stage for a racializing rationalization of inhumanity, while setting yet another stage for the takeoff of an enhanced capitalism. A recent study revealed that before 1581 there were no enslaved Africans brought to what was referred to as the ‘British Caribbean’ and ‘Mainland North America.’ From 1581 to 1640 there were scores brought to each. But from 1641 to 1700, 15,000 Africans were brought to North America and 308, 000 to the ‘British Caribbean.’ Similarly, trade from Dutch forts in Africa amounted to about 700 of the enslaved yearly between 1600 and 1644 but would increase sixfold by the late 1660s. Europeans generally enslaved some two million Africans during the seventeenth century, half of them from West Central Africa and most of the rest from the states abutting today’s Ghana and the Bights of Benin and Biafra.”

Highlighting the subtitle of his book, Horne makes a further point that what has been praised as modernity actually bears the stain of slavery, white supremacy, and capitalism. “The bloody process of human bondage,” he stresses, is “the driving and animating force of this abject horror.”

For many centuries, Christianity in its various forms was dearly held by commoners, nobles, and other elite citizens. But with the “discovery” of the new world, and the expansion of various empires to the Americas, trade and capitalism overshadowed the religious ideals of those in power. Political pursuits also ranked high among the leading colonists, who desired a new republic that was free of monarchs. And those monarchs were able to fill their treasuries with spoils from the new world. The Roman papacy too, which held the power to initiate the slave trade, and did, benefited greatly from slavery. In fact, between the years 1573 and 1826, publications that were critical of slavery were placed on the official List of Prohibited Books, or, as it is called in Latin, the Index Librorum Prohibitorum. Author John Francis Maxwell, who published his book, Slavery and the Catholic Church, in 1975, says that writers who were critical of slavery were placed on the index prohibiting their works without any particular errors being specified. All of their opinions were simply condemned.

While the Papacy and the Spanish Empire reaped rich rewards through slavery and their devastating conquests of the sixteenth century, England eventually superseded them both, not only in terms of conquest, but through their control and expansion of the slave trade as well. But this too would not last.

“London was a prime beneficiary of this [systemic] cruelty.”

Writes Gerald Horne.

“England had a 33 percent share of the slave trade in 1673 and 74 percent by 1683. Of that dreadful total, the Royal African Company, under the thumb of the Crown, held a hefty 90 percent share in 1690, but with deregulation and the entrance into this sinfully profitable market by freelance merchants, this total had shrunk to 8 percent by 1701. This political and economic victory over monarchy by merchants also undergirded the ‘popular’ politics they represented, which eventuated in a republicanism that scored its paradigmatic triumph in 1776.”

The colonists who desired a new “monarch-free” republic, in other words, established that very republic in opposition to Great Britain on the basis of commerce.

With the founding of the United States of America, world trade and commerce grew exponentially decade after decade, and the slave trade was used to increase the wealth of nations throughout the world. In fact, as monarchies weakened over time, merchants rose to prominence and amassed power and wealth through increased trade. The merchant class of England, comprised of both Catholics and Protestants, were opposed to the commercial restrictions imposed upon them by King James II, which primarily prevented the engagement of direct trade with North America. Growing opposition led to what is called the Glorious Revolution of 1688 resulting in King James II being deposed (not the King James known for the bible translation, but his grandson). Parliament also began to assume primacy over the Crown.

The spirit of revolution spread to the United States as well, when powerful colonists broke with the English monarchy and Parliament in order to trade with whomever they wished. This of course led to the historic events of 1776, when the American colonies severed political ties to Great Britain. Capitalism flourished thereafter. Of this, Gerald Horne writes:

“[A]s the religious conflicts that animated the seventeenth century began to recede—Christian vs. Muslim; Catholic vs. Protestant—as the filthy wealth generated by slavery and dispossession accelerated, capitalism and profit became the new [deity], with its curia in the basilicas of Wall Street. This new religion had its own doctrine and theologies, with the logic of the market and its ‘efficient market theory’ supplanting papal infallibility as the new North Star. Management theorists have sanctified capitalism in much the same way that clergymen of yore sanctified feudalism. Business schools are cathedrals of capitalism. Consultants are its traveling friars. Just as the clergy in the days of feudalism spoke in Latin to give their words an air of authority, the myrmidons of capitalism speak in a similarly indecipherable mumbo-jumbo. To this day, a Reformation—akin to Martin Luther’s of 1517—has been delayed in arrival. Actually, reducing the present to capitalism is somewhat misleading since today’s status quo represents a complex mélange of vestiges of slavery—the still exploited African population in the United States and elsewhere—capitalism, and the feudalism from which it emerged.”

This new religion of capitalism and profit, which saw money-worshippers catering to the whims of the worldwide market system—as they do to this day—speaks to Yeshua’s words in Matthew 6:24:

[24] “No one can serve two masters, for either he will hate the one and love the other, or he will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve Elohim and money.”

When we get to Revelation 18, which depicts the fall of Babylon and the end of the worldwide beast system which allowed her to live luxuriously, we see that the judgment meted out by Yah is largely aimed at the financial markets. These markets are fueled by merchants of the world, whose trade is disrupted, down to the efforts of the craftsman. Even mills are silenced, demonstrating the completeness of the demise of capitalism. And this corrupt financial system isn’t going to be replaced by another one, as part of a feared secular new world order; it will be replaced by Yah’s government and economy, as prophesied.

The seventeenth century, therefore, witnessed the rise of capitalism, which exists as the world’s most popular “religion” today, and others, beside Gerald Horne, are starting to realize that fact. The oldest continuously published weekly magazine in the United States, the Nation, had this to say of one such person:

“Eugene McCarraher’s new book, The Enchantments of Mammon: How Capitalism Became the Religion of Modernity, offers a different rendering of our modern age—one in which the mysteries and sacraments of religion were transferred to the way we perceive market forces and economic development. The new world that capitalism created, McCarraher argues, is characterized not by disenchantment but by a ‘migration of the [set apart]’ to the realm of production and consumption, profit and price, trade and economic tribulation. Capitalism, in other words, is the new religion, a system full of enchanted superstitions and unfounded beliefs and beholden to its own clerisy of economists and managers, its own iconography of advertising and public relations, and its own political theology—a view of history and politics that is premised on the inevitability of the capitalist system spreading across the world.”

We’ll be back with more exciting scriptural history . . . in a moment.

[MUSICAL INTERLUDE]

We now continue with our podcast.

The intimate relationship between capitalism and slavery was keenly examined by two editors, Sven Beckert and Seth Rockman. Their book, Slavery’s Capitalism, reveals that slavery, which was America’s main engine for growth, was foundational to our modern economic system. In other words, absent the brutal period of enslaved Israelites, the world we live in today would not exist. The book actually opens with the following:

“During the eighty years between the American Revolution and the Civil War, slavery was indispensable to the economic development of the United States. Such a claim is at once self-evidently true and empirically obscure. A scholarly revolution over the past two decades, which brought mainstream historical accounts into line with long-standing positions in Africana and Black Studies, has recognized slavery as the foundational American institution, organizing the nation’s politics, legal structures, and cultural practices with remarkable power to determine the life chances of those moving through society as black or white. An outpouring of scholarship on nineteenth-century public health, criminal justice, foreign policy, popular culture, and patterns of everyday life leaves little doubt that the new United States was a ‘slaveholding republic.’ In comparison, only a small segment of recent scholarship has grappled with the economic impact of slavery.”

Put another way, it was a widely accepted fact that slavery was an American institution which shaped its politics, laws, and culture, based largely on racial identity. But not until very recently has the impact of slavery included the formation of the modern economy.

“Only in the past several years has scholarship on finance, accounting, management, and technology allowed us to understand American economic development as ‘slavery’s capitalism.’ And only now is there enough momentum to leverage some basic facts—that slave-grown cotton was the most valuable export made in America, that the capital stored in slaves exceeded the combined value of all the nation’s railroads and factories, that foreign investment underwrote the expansion of plantation lands in Louisiana and Mississippi, that the highest concentration of steam power in the United States was to be found along the Mississippi rather than on the Merrimack—into a fundamental rethinking of American history itself.”

In our LKP Documentary, Salt of the Earth, I stated: “Like salt, Hebrew Israelites have long been the backbone of many economies, especially during slavery, where we were bought and sold, and produced to fuel economic growth as much as salt.” That is no exaggeration. Israelites were a collective commodity in those slaveholding days, even a kind of currency if you will. In America, the old historic narrative would lead many to believe that there was a sharp North-South divide that saw the North shunning the South over slavery and having nothing to do with the peddling of human flesh.

New York City, infamous for being an important component of the triangle trade, dug its heels into flesh-peddling in 1626, when 11 souls captured in West Africa were brought to New Amsterdam against their will in heavy irons and forced to clear land, construct roads and unload ships. The lot at 74 Wall Street, nestled between Water and Pearl Streets, is now home to a towering condominium, but it was once a key auction block. Slave ships used to dock in the East River, while slaves were sold in an open-air market on the corner of Wall and Pearl Streets. And New York became a port city for the trade of Southern agricultural goods derived from slave labor that were thereafter handsomely packaged and shipped throughout the world. In fact, slave capital financed the creation of the New York Stock Exchange, currently the world’s largest stock exchange in terms of market capitalization, which amounts to tens of trillions of dollars, all told.

Other northern states benefitted from the slave trade as well, particularly as concerns the slave-labor products that flowed north. Of this, Beckert and Rockman write:

“Advocates of national economic development presumed the reciprocal relationship of the slaveholding and nonslaveholding states, as well as the mutual interests of the slaveholder, manufacturer, and merchant. ‘On the White mountains of New Hampshire we find the sugar of Louisiana, and in the plains beyond the Mississippi the cotton cloths of Rhode Island are domesticated,’ explained the famed editor Hezekiah Niles in 1827. Abolitionists such as William Lloyd Garrison recognized the North as a ‘partner in iniquity’ and credited the Panic of 1837 with delivering a deserved ruin to those New York City mercantile firms engaged in commerce with the South. In turn, southern nationalists lambasted northern sanctimoniousness. ‘Many of the abolitionists of the present day affect to have such tender consciences, and to feel such abhorrence of slavery, that they declare they will not wear the cotton of the South, because it has been cultivated by slaves,’ observed the Baltimore minister Alexander McCaine, ‘yet, these extremely sensitive, and preeminently holy characters, feel no qualms of conscience, to sell Southern planters their boots and shoes, their negro cloth, and all the et cetera that make up a cargo of Yankee notions, and put the money, arising from the labour of slaves, in their pockets.’”

While the Virginia colony was among the first to exploit Israelites for slave labor, it was not the first American colony to legally sanction the cruel servitude. The Massachusetts Bay Colony holds that distinction, when in 1641 it published the document the Body of Liberties, wherein “lawful captives taken in just wars, and such strangers as willingly sell themselves are sold to us.” As seen in episode 24 of this podcast series, war had been the going pretext for enslavement since the infamous papal bull that gave the Portuguese the go-ahead to round up the descendants of Jacob from Africa’s west coast.

Protestant Boston, led by its clergy, would place profits above duty to the church by becoming a leading port in the slave trade, proving that the North aided in creating the thriving institution. In fact, all of New England saw great profits from slavery up until the American War for Independence. The year prior to the American Revolution, it has been learned that 5,000 souls had been enslaved in Connecticut—a paltry number compared to South Carolina or Virginia to be sure, but we’re talking about the North here. In the Preface of the book Complicity: How the North Promoted, Prolonged, and Profited from Slavery, the authors wrote:

“[T]he number shocked us. How could we not know this? How could we not know, for example, that in 1790 most prosperous merchants in Connecticut owned at least one slave, as did 50 percent of the ministers? The federal census clearly showed this.”

The authors of Complicity also expressed that slaves in Connecticut lived on large farms that equaled the size of those in the South, and could also be considered plantations. In effect, their book clearly shows how the North helped create, strengthen, and prolong slavery in America, contrary to popular belief. The institution of slavery was fundamental to the growth of capitalism. And capitalism, it should be known, first flowered in Europe, under the Roman Catholic Church. Historian Randall Collins has confirmed this in his book Weberian Sociological Theory, which asserts that capitalism began during the High Middle Ages between 1050 and 1300 CE (which is a period we covered in episode 21), and “at its heart was the organization of the Catholic Church itself.”

The ecclesiastical portion of the church, with its administrative functions and papal bureaucracy, was the forerunner of the capitalism we see today, which includes the monastic orders. Even the church’s canon law, Collins argues, acted as a model for capitalism. Collins writes:

“The rationalized capitalism that emerged was, above all, that of the dynamic monastic movements, and the appropriately regulatory bureaucratic state that went along with it was not the secular states but the papacy in the period when it made a bid for theocratic power over all of Christendom…. [T]he institutional preconditions for capitalism were developed in medieval Europe, not so much in the wider society as in one specialized part of it, the church.”

We can look at it another way. Power in those days was held in land, and the Catholic Church alone owned roughly a third of all the land on the European continent. In order to administer so vast a territory, canon law was rolled out across multiple jurisdictions within the empire, including European nations, individual baronies, bishoprics, various religious orders, chartered cities, and it even extended to guilds, confraternities, merchants, entrepreneurs, traders, and so on. The church oversaw local and regional affairs as well, having influence over jurists, arbitrators, negotiators, and judges. And binding all of this together was one language: canon law Latin.

When considering the ecclesiastical offices, clerical celibacy itself informed capitalism, given its clear distinction between the office and person of an individual. Family and property were no longer tied to one another either, unlike the feudal days of old, which relied on strategic marriages as well.

Monastic orders like the Cistercians—a strict branch of the Benedictines—broke away from feudalism as a collective and were early entrepreneurs. They followed a form of rational cost accounting, which they mastered, and invested profits back into other ventures. They moved capital around from venue to venue and cut losses where they could, while pursuing possible new opportunities. They had a virtual monopoly over iron production in central France and wool production in England. And as Catholics, “They had,” as Randall Collins writes, “the Protestant ethic without Protestantism.”

This was foundational to modern capitalism. But speaking of Protestantism, when we arrive at the new world, and the institution of slavery, it was Protestants who effectively took capitalism to new heights after breaking away from the mother church. Remember that these very Protestants were former Christians who hailed from various European nations, being essentially part of the beast with ten horns upon whom the prostitute church sat (see Revelation 17:3). Reaching down to verse 16, we see that the same beast, along with its ten horns, have a change of heart concerning their rider.

[16] “And the ten horns that you saw, they and the beast will hate the prostitute. They will make her desolate and naked, and devour her flesh and burn her up with fire.”

This reeks of the Protestant Reformation. Following that prophetic event, and the subsequent colonial enterprises that accommodated Protestant migration, Protestant America (made up primarily of former Europeans) declared independence and completely broke with Europe, which led to the American Revolutionary War. The result was a new nation that was patterned after those in ancient Europe, particularly Greece and Rome, and whose religion was akin to Roman Catholicism, being its direct offshoot. In a way, it was like a second beast power had emerged.

Capitalism grew out of slavery, and like the ancient Israelites, who “built for Pharaoh store cities, Pithom and Raamses”—according to Exodus 1:11—their descendants also built many historic structures and the American economy itself. Taking a page from the Egyptian playbook, American plantation owners were just as cruel to the Israelites of their day, in that “they set taskmasters over them to afflict them with heavy burdens” (also verse 11). In detailing the harsh plight of the ancient Israelites, verses 13 and 14 of Exodus 1 give us a glimpse into the fate of those who would survive the Middle Passage.

[13] “So they ruthlessly made the people of Israel work as slaves [14] and made their lives bitter with hard service, in mortar and brick, and in all kinds of work in the field. In all their work they ruthlessly made them work as slaves.”

Twice a phrase is mentioned: “they ruthlessly made the people of Israel work as slaves,” as though it would have a repeat history. And so it did, both in the physical Egypt as well as the spiritual Egypt that is America. Telling too is the growth of the ancient Israelites, whose numbers increased despite their great burden and oppression. One would think that such intolerable conditions would diminish their numbers.

“But the more they were oppressed, the more they multiplied and the more they spread abroad.”

This is true of those who were forcefully taken from the African continent as well. We currently fill the entire world, spread abroad like scattered seeds of Jacob. The ancient Egyptians bore witness to that miraculous increase of souls, for which “the Egyptians were in dread of the people of Israel.” Just as modern Gentile oppressors are in dread of their descendants, who seem to increase on a yearly basis despite their modern burdens.

While the people of the world are currently wrapped in the worship of capitalism, Yah is right now readying his final judgment against this beast system, which will ultimately end the rule of Babylon and free his beloved people. As written in Exodus 7:16, Yah is still pleading to the nations of this world:

“Let my people go, that they may serve me in the wilderness.”

That wraps it up for this episode of Churchianity: Two Thousand Years of Leaven. A production of Kingdom Preppers.org, this episode was written, produced, and hosted by yours truly, Kingdom Prepper. All praise, honor, and glory are due to my boss, Yah Elohim, and to his right hand, Yahushua HaMashiach. You can access the transcript for this episode on our website. Yah willing, our history will continue in the next podcast. Shalom.

Keywords: Evangelical Revival, John Wesley, denomination, bights of benin and biafra, list of prohibited books, Index Librorum Prohibitorum, Revelation 18, churchianity, two thousand years of leaven, history of Christianity, church history, Hebrew history, kp, kingdom preppers

European nations embark on an empire-building spree by founding new colonies in the new world, chief among them being the thirteen colonies established by Great Britain, which began with Virginia. Failed attempts at making the investment work eventually lead to the institution of slavery, which sees the first Israelites shipped to Jamestown in August of 1619. Millions more follow over time, fulfilling specific Scriptural curses and prophecies.

Shalom, and welcome to our history podcast. This is a production of Kingdom Preppers.org. I’m your host, Kingdom Prepper, and you’re listening to: Churchianity: Two Thousand Years of Leaven. We continue with our history.

While the sixteenth century saw the rise of the Portuguese and Spanish empires, which had divided new conquered lands and peoples between them, the seventeenth century was occupied with other European colonial powers building up empires of their own in the new world. France staked a claim to Quebec and settled it in 1609. The first Dutch settlement was established in the Americas around 1615 along the Hudson, near what is Albany, New York today. New Amsterdam, or the southern tip of Manhattan Island, came next. It served as the seat of the colonial government of what was then called New Netherland and became capital of the Dutch province by 1625. Great Britain, however, eventually eclipsed all European rivals in this new arena of overseas expansion. The thirteen colonies, which would later become the United States, were among its first enterprises.

Spain’s early conquests of the new world is often contrasted to that of Great Britain’s. The Spanish empire was able to exploit the vast riches of the Aztecs and Incas, and they forced large populations of natives to work the land. The British experienced none of this. The British had no hope of enslaving natives, who could flee into the wild interior to avoid capture. Instead, they looked to trade with the natives as a means of amassing wealth, but that was a bitter disappointment. Another solution was agriculture. Produce could be yielded from the land and exported to Europe to fill the coffers of the owners of the colonies. This initially required British indentured labor, since the land was owned by colonial companies and not free colonists at the time. But relying on white indentured servants was a problem.

“White servants had not yet been brought over in sufficient quantity.”

Writes Howard Zinn in his book A People’s History of the United States.

“Besides, they did not come out of slavery, and did not have to do more than contract their labor for a few years to get their passage and a start in the New World. As for the free white settlers, many of them were skilled craftsmen, or even men of leisure back in England, who were so little inclined to work the land that John Smith, in those early years, had to declare a kind of martial law, organize them into work gangs, and force them into the fields for survival.”

All around them, Native Americans were living off the same land, able to support themselves and were, in that sense, superior to the white settlers, who had better technology, but no means of creating enough food with it. The so-called savages had the advantage over the “civilized” invaders. It got to a point where white settlers deserted the colonists and joined forces with the natives. This frustrated the Virginians, who resorted to killing and torturing natives, and burning their villages and cornfields in a show of what they considered superiority. Regardless, their many failures forced them to look to yet another avenue for survival.

“Black slaves were the answer,” writes Howard Zinn. And the first of those slaves were twenty and odd Israelites who were captured in the Kingdom of Ndongo in Angola and brought to Jamestown aboard a British ship on August 20, 1619. Zinn goes on to say:

“And it was natural to consider imported blacks as slaves, even if the institution of slavery would not be regularized and legalized for several decades. Because, by 1619, a million blacks had already been brought from Africa to South America and the Caribbean, to the Portuguese and Spanish colonies, to work as slaves. Fifty years before Columbus, the Portuguese took ten African blacks to Lisbon—this was the start of a regular trade in slaves. African blacks had been stamped as slave labor for a hundred years. So it would have been strange if those twenty blacks, forcibly transported to Jamestown, and sold as objects to settlers anxious for a steadfast source of labor, were considered as anything but slaves.”

We discuss the ramifications of that 1619 event in our Scripture study video 400 Years: Sentence Served.

The enslavement of so-called blacks was prophesied in the Scriptures in several places. Jeremiah chapter 17 gives an interesting overview of the particulars of that national punishment, which, in the case of the tribe of Judah—the negroes and blacks who were a large percentage of the transatlantic slave trade—endured due to their sin and rebellion against Yah. Captivity and the loss of their heritage are two key circumstances they would suffer, as mentioned in the following verses:

[1] “The sin of Judah is written with a pen of iron; with a point of diamond it is engraved on the tablet of their heart, and on the horns of their altars, [2] while their children remember their altars and their Asherim, beside every green tree and on the high hills, [3] on the mountains in the open country. Your wealth and all your treasures I will give for spoil as the price of your high places for sin throughout all your territory. [4] You shall loosen your hand from your heritage that I gave to you, and I will make you serve your enemies in a land that you do not know.…”

Historian Howard Zinn adds:

“Their helplessness made enslavement easier. The Indians were on their own land. The whites were in their own European culture. The blacks had been torn from their land and culture, forced into a situation where the heritage of language, dress, custom, family relations, was bit by bit obliterated except for the remnants that blacks could hold on to by sheer, extraordinary persistence.”

This prophecy was slow in coming to pass, however, because for centuries, the people of Israel, having migrated south to other lands on the African continent, enjoyed prosperity following their assimilation into various national African cultures. While Europe was still discovering and inventing itself, the Israelites, as well as other African nations, had long found their footing. Timbuktu was one region Israelites were known to dominate, with one of our ancient communities being discovered in Mali as late as 1996. Part of the Songhai empire at the time, the land was only a portion of a vast region the Arab conquerors called bilād as-sūdān, or the lands of the blacks.

“The African civilization was as advanced in its own way as that of Europe. In certain ways, it was more admirable.”

Writes Howard Zinn.

“It was a civilization of 100 million people, using iron implements and skilled in farming. It had large urban centers and remarkable achievements in weaving, ceramics, sculpture. European travelers in the sixteenth century were impressed with the African kingdoms of Timbuktu and Mali, already stable and organized at a time when European states were just beginning to develop into the modern nation.”

But the prosperity would not last. Eventually the Gentiles would live out their role in fulfilling recorded prophecy, most strikingly in the Americas. When the British tried their hand at earlier colonial ventures, those efforts failed. Under Queen Elizabeth, Sir Walter Raleigh—for whom the city of Raleigh, North Carolina is named—was given the go ahead via royal charter to establish a colony in North America. The region was named Virginia in honor of the virgin queen, Elizabeth. Twice Sir Walter Raleigh tried at the colonial game, first in 1585 and again in 1587. The settlers of the first round simply returned to England after the failed attempt, but the second set disappeared in 1590. That group left behind no more than two clues: the words “Croatoan” carved into the gatepost of a fort and “Cro” etched into a tree. It is thought that they were either annihilated by disease or killed by Native tribes.

At any rate, earnest colonization would not take root until the spring of 1607, with the month of May seeing 105 new settlers landing near the mouth of a river they named James, in honor of the Scottish king who succeeded Elizabeth. Thus, the founding of Jamestown. While the venture was an economic one, the Virginia Company, which financed the voyage, claimed to be motivated by religion, in that it aimed to establish an arm of the Church of England in the new colony to minister both to the Natives and the English settlers. But no bishop was ever appointed in Virginia or any of the other thirteen colonies. The stockholders of the Virginia Company looked to trade with the Indigenous Americans and then to agricultural yields in the hope of a handsome return on their investment, as stated.

When the Virginia colony was founded, Puritan influence was at a high point in the Church of England, therefore the stockholders of the Virginia company, as well as many settlers, thought it prudent to allow the new colony to be ruled according to Puritan principles. Early laws, therefore, were of a strict religious bent, requiring settlers to attend worship twice daily, in addition to observing Sunday as the Sabbath and enduring punishment for dressing immodestly and using profane language. But the Puritan ideal never won out in Virginia. For one thing, King James denounced the Puritan way and refused to allow it in his colony. By 1624, Virginia was placed under his direct rulership and Puritan influence waned considerably. King Charles I, who succeeded his father James, followed the same course and was equally intolerant of Puritan views. In time, as Puritan preaching was restricted and ministers suspended from their posts or removed entirely, many Puritans considered emigrating and therefore looked to new American lands, namely New England, which, as author Wendy Warren writes in her book New England Bound, were:

“[A] cluster of colonies perched on the edge of England’s fledgling North American empire. Colonized in the early seventeenth century by stern people wearing black hats and somber clothes, the popular story goes, New England became an exceptional land of hard work and bountiful crops and thrift and curtness and fervent religiosity. Puritans, we call these fabled people, a sort of shorthand used to describe a motley array of Protestants interested in reforming a Church of England they considered too encumbered by vestiges of Roman Catholicism. Between the years 1620 and 1640 alone, more than twenty thousand English colonists emigrated to the northeastern coast of North America, where they founded in quick succession the colonies that would become jointly known as New England: in 1620, Plymouth (a colony that later joined with Massachusetts); in 1630, the Massachusetts Bay Colony; in 1636, the colonies of Connecticut and of Rhode Island; in 1637, the New Haven Colony (eventually joined to Connecticut).”

And so on. After the colonies were established and settled, they had to be made economically viable. For that, slavery was needed in all of them. The Virginia colony, which started as a marginal concern, soon achieved economic success in the tobacco trade, which took great labor to grow and export. Slaves were routinely acquired from Africa for that reason. Unlike the Spanish Catholics, who were ordered to baptize slaves even before they left the African coast (as seen in episode 24) the Christians of the Virginia colony were part of the Church of England, and did little to convert slaves to their religion. Part of the reason for this was the belief that Christians were not to hold other Christians in bondage, which stemmed from ancient principles.

To assure that the ancient principles were not violated by the modern custom, a law was passed by the Virginia Assembly on September 23, 1667 to settle the matter. It declared plainly that the spiritual condition of a slave did not change as a result of baptism. All black people (i.e., Israelites) who were baptized into the Church of England were not thereafter exempt from bondage. The great lengths that Christians went to in order to protect the property rights of Christian enslavers was a demonstration of the corruption that had been inherited from the mother church. But even after this law was passed, slaves were not put through the process of conversion and indoctrination, because enslavers believed an ignorant slave would be more submissive and provide better service.

We’ll be back with more exciting scriptural history . . . in a moment.

[MUSICAL INTERLUDE]

We now continue with our podcast.

In his book The Great Stain, author Noel Rae introduces his readers to the concept of a slave as follows:

“ ‘What is a slave?’ Asked William Wells Brown in a lecture to the Female Anti-Slavery Society of Salem, delivered on November 18, 1847. One of the abolitionist movement’s most effective black orators, Brown had himself been a slave, and knew what he was talking about.”

Brown went on to say:

“ ‘A slave is one that is in the power of an owner. He is a chattel; he is a thing; he is a piece of property. A master can dispose of him, can dispose of his labor, can dispose of his wife, can dispose of his offspring, can dispose of everything that belongs to the slave, and the slave shall have no right to speak; he shall have nothing to say.’ And what was a chattel? According to the then-current edition of Webster’s dictionary, ‘Chattels personal are things movable, as animals, furniture.’ The word chattel is derived from cattle. The word slave derives from sclavus, the medieval Latin word for Slav—probably because so many of that nation were enslaved by the Holy Roman Emperor, Otto the Great, in the tenth century.”

Colonial slavery was not the kind of slavery that was represented in the Scriptures. Slaves in those ancient times had many rights and limits on their terms of service for instance, whereas slaves in the Americas were rendered such for life, and had no rights whatsoever, as William Wells Brown explained.

Prior to colonial slavery, being a Christian meant that you were superior in society. But with some slaves having access to that leavened religion, a new standard of superiority had to be invented.

“[S]lave owners adapted.”

Writes Katharine Gerbner in her book Christian Slavery.

“They created the concept of ‘whiteness’ and revised their prerequisites for voting to exclude nonwhite Christians from enfranchisement. By the end of the seventeenth century, the term ‘white’ had begun to replace ‘Christian’ as an indicator of freedom and mastery.”

But believing that Christianity was central to the culture and faith of colonial slaves is a mistake, as many historians have done in the past. There were core Christian believers among enslaved Israelites, to be sure, and they preached that Yah would deliver them out of slavery as he had done in ancient Egypt. But the majority among them did not convert to Christianity until after the Civil War, and emancipation, which seemed to deliver on that promise. That’s when slaves began to convert in large numbers.

Daniel L. Fountain, an associate professor of history and author of Slavery, Christianity, and Salvation, found that there were many obstacles present in the life of colonial slaves that made mass conversion difficult, and if fact, unlikely. Evidence shows that they had infrequent access to religious instruction, and when they did hear the Christian message at all, that message was inconsistent, and thus colonial slaves had to carve out their own spiritual culture. What seemed to be a Christian bent among the converted, Daniel L. Fountain discovered, was actually a holdover of the ancient practices maintained during the African diaspora.

“West African religions contain many beliefs similar to those characterizing the evangelical Christianity that dominated the antebellum southern United States.”

Fountain writes.

“Among them, both African Traditional Religion and evangelical Christianity emphasize a single creator […], symbolic death and rebirth, water as a spiritual symbol, blood sacrifice, religious prayer and song, and belief in an afterlife. According to most interpretations of nineteenth-century slave religion, these similarities facilitated the conversion of slaves to Christianity by allowing them to incorporate familiar beliefs into their New World environment. This confluence resulted in a slave-created form of Christianity that reflected African as well as European Christian ideals.”

In other words, colonial Christians did not introduce Israelite slaves to a belief system that was completely alien to them. Christians essentially borrowed heavily from the ancestors of the slaves they held captive, then reintroduced to those slaves an Anglicized version of their own spiritual culture. But by the time Christianity was fully embraced by subsequent generations of these slaves, the brutal institution of slavery had wiped away the last vestiges of the ancient culture that was once their own, which cemented the loss of their true identity in fulfillment of prophecy. This was part of the punishment for the national sin of covenant-breaking on the part of true Israel, as recorded in the book of Deuteronomy.

Of course, the culture that was maintained following their expulsion from the Promised Land was already tainted, being a mixture of pagan practices coupled with their own Israelite heritage, as is seen in the ancient Israel of the Scriptures, who followed the custom of the nations around them. This was the idolatry that led to their expulsion; the aforementioned breaking of the covenant. But during the African diaspora, Israelites—some having assimilated into local tribes, others forming communities of their own—resettled new lands and continued along their tribal course.

“In fact, it was because they came from a settled culture, of tribal customs and family ties, of communal life and traditional ritual, that American blacks found themselves especially helpless when removed from this.”

Writes Howard Zinn.

“They were captured in the interior (frequently by blacks caught up in the slave trade themselves), sold on the coast, then shoved into pens with blacks of other tribes, often speaking different languages. The conditions of capture and sale were crushing affirmations to the black African of his helplessness in the face of superior force. The marches to the coast, sometimes for 1,000 miles, with people shackled around the neck, under whip and gun, were death marches, in which two of every five blacks died. On the coast, they were kept in cages until they were picked and sold.”

The slave trade became a thriving industry when other commodities joined tobacco, such as coffee, rice, cotton, and chief among them, sugar. The year 1515 recorded the first accounts of sugar being exported to the east from the Spanish West Indies. Yet 1518 marked the first recorded shipment of slaves westward from the African coast, to accommodate the new sugar industry. Sugar production is thought to have originated in northern India, and in time it spread to the Middle East, then to the Mediterranean—namely Cyprus, Crete, and Sicily—and again to islands like Madeira, Cape Verde, and the Canaries off the west African coast. The method of growing and refining sugar would cross the Atlantic after that and take on a new life with increased slave labor. European demand for the sweet crop fueled the increase of production and exports, and sugarcane byproducts, molasses and rum, were also in high demand.

“But raising sugar was labor-intensive…”

Writes Noel Rae.

“… [a]nd the work was so exhausting, the conditions so brutal, the birth rate so low and the mortality rate so high, that on average West Indian plantation owners had to replace one tenth of their workers every year. This may have seemed wasteful, but the planters had worked it out and the consensus among them was that it was ‘cheaper to buy than to breed.’ ”

As more and more Israelite slaves were forced to interact with whites, prejudice ripened. True Israel in this case became a nation of reproach in the eyes of even common-born European citizens. Of this Yah promised through the prophet Jeremiah:

[18] “I will pursue them with sword, famine, and pestilence, and will make them a horror to all the kingdoms of the earth, to be a curse, a terror, a hissing, and a reproach among all the nations where I have driven them, [19] because they did not pay attention to my words…”

Author Noel Rae adds:

“Unlike the aristocratic Portuguese adventurers, who waged war on Africans but did not despise them, the middle- and lower-class north Europeans were soon complaining about the innate vices of the people they were busy enslaving. According to John Barbot, the Yarays were ‘perfidious’ and ‘expert at stealing’; the Senegalese were ‘lazy to excess … knavish, revengeful, impudent, liars, impertinent, gluttonous, extravagant’; the natives of Guinea were ‘the greatest and most cunning thieves that can be imagined.’ … The Dutchman, Willem Bosman, writing of the Gold Coast, declared that ‘the Negroes are all, without exception crafty, villainous and fraudulent … These degenerate vices are accompanied with their sisters, sloth and idleness, to which they are so prone that nothing but the utmost necessity can force them to labour.’ ”

Among modern whites, many of these things are still being said about so-called blacks today. What is more, the Europeans who directed those accusations at slaves were themselves guilty of the very things they condemned: perfidiousness (or being untrustworthy), theft, laziness, vengefulness, impudence, gluttony, craftiness, villainy, and extreme fraudulence. These were people who owned vast tracts of land that was taken from native inhabitants through theft or trickery, which they refused to work themselves. Because Europeans were too lazy to cultivate their own fields, they turned to slave labor, using so-called Negroes—who did not see a slim dime from their grueling efforts—to do what they would not. Yet slaves were accused of being lazy.

That said, the low societal status of so-called blacks was prophesied from of old, being a result of our sin and rebellion against the Most High, who we swore we would serve through a ratified covenant. It is a plight we brought on ourselves as a people, in other words, but it is not one that will have to be endured much longer, per many other prophecies.

That wraps it up for this episode of Churchianity: Two Thousand Years of Leaven. A production of Kingdom Preppers.org, this episode was written, produced, and hosted by yours truly, Kingdom Prepper. All praise, honor, and glory are due to my boss, Yah Elohim, and to his right hand, Yahushua HaMashiach. You can access the transcript for this episode on our website. Yah willing, our history will continue in the next podcast. Shalom.

Keywords: New Amsterdam, New Netherland, Kingdom of Ndongo, Mali, Songhai empire, bilād as-sūdān, bilad as sudan, Sir Walter Raleigh, Croatoan, New England colonies, colonial slavery, sugar production, prejudice, nation of reproach, jeremiah 29 18, jeremiah 17 1-4, churchianity, two thousand years of leaven, history of Christianity, church history, Hebrew history, kp, kingdom preppers

While European nations are rejecting Catholicism far and wide on the grounds of theological disagreements, England finds fault with the mother church for political reasons. British succession to the throne draws the king of England into conflict with the papacy, forcing Henry VIII to split with the dominant religion and stand at the head of yet another branch of it. But opposition from Puritans further shapes the denomination.

Shalom, and welcome to our history podcast. This is a production of Kingdom Preppers.org. I’m your host, Kingdom Prepper, and you’re listening to: Churchianity: Two Thousand Years of Leaven. We continue with our history.

While Lutheranism was conceived in a monastery by a disillusioned Catholic monk, Anabaptist notions at a prayer meeting, and Calvinism at the desk of a traveling scholar, the Church of England was born largely out of political affairs. The crux of the problem was that of royal succession to the throne. Well, that was the first English Reformation at any rate, the constitutional one under Henry VIII, who would simply reject the authority of Rome and leave the nation’s doctrines virtually unchanged. Of course, this move became the standard and course of many nations. The second, theological reformation of England would come with the Puritans nearly a century later.

Unlike in other Protestant lands of the day, which had rejected Catholicism on the grounds of theology, England was not presently concerned with such things. The church of Rome and its repressive power over kings was at issue. The sixteenth-century state of affairs saw Scotland and France in close alliance, while England was an ally of Spain. Great Britain itself though existed as two British kingdoms at the time, divided between the Stuart kingdom in Scotland and England’s house of Tudor. Strong bloodlines ran between the two houses, but the intent was to unite the crowns at some point, though that would come during the reign of King James. During the sixteenth century, however, the British kingdoms were bitter enemies that were often at war. We discussed the reformation in Scotland at the end of the previous podcast, now we turn to the English reformation, which followed an entirely different course.

“Catherine of Aragon, daughter of Ferdinand and Isabella, came to England in 1501, aged sixteen, and married, on November 14, Arthur, aged fifteen, oldest son of Henry VII.”

Writes Will Durant in his book The Reformation.

“Arthur died on April 2, 1502. It was generally assumed that the marriage had been consummated; the Spanish ambassador dutifully sent ‘proofs’ thereof to Ferdinand; and Arthur’s title, Prince of Wales, was not officially transferred to his younger brother Henry till two months after Arthur’s death. But Catherine denied the consummation. She had brought with her a dowry of 200,000 ducats (around $5,000,000). Loath to let Catherine go back to Spain with these ducats, and anxious to renew a marital alliance with the powerful Ferdinand, Henry VII proposed that Catherine should marry Prince Henry, though she was the lad’s elder by six years.”

Then came the gross misinterpretation of Scripture by Catholic officials.

“A Biblical passage (Lev. 20:21) forbade such a marriage: ‘If a man shall take his brother’s wife it is an unclean thing… they shall be childless.’ ”

This of course refers to the case of representatives on all fronts, both brothers and the wife in question, being alive at the same time. A brother was in fact lawfully allowed to marry a deceased brother’s widow and raise up seed unto him, prolonging his name. The Catholics mistakenly thought that the first law was contradicted by this one:

“ ‘If brethren dwell together, and one of them die, and have no child... her husband’s brother… shall take her to him to wife’ (Deut. 25:5).”

Needless to say, this was all Israelite business anyway and had nothing to do with English kings or Catholic authorities. Regardless…

“Archbishop Warham condemned the proposed union; Bishop Fox of Winchester defended it if a papal dispensation could be obtained from the impediment of affinity. Henry VII applied for the dispensation; Pope Julius II granted it in 1503. Some canonists questioned, some affirmed, the papal power to dispense from a Biblical precept, and Julius himself had some doubts. The betrothal—in effect a legal marriage—was made formal in 1503, but as the bridegroom was still only twelve, cohabitation was postponed. In 1505 Prince Henry asked to have the marriage annulled as having been forced upon him by his father, but he was prevailed upon to confirm the union as in the interest of England; and in 1509, six weeks after his accession, the marriage was publicly celebrated.”

Seven months after this, Catherine would bear a child, which resulted in stillbirth. In another year, Henry rejoiced at the birth of a son, a promising male heir to the Tudor throne, but in a few short weeks the child died. Two more sons would suffer the same fate in 1513 and 1514, which urged Henry to consider annulling his marriage to Catherine. Not to be outdone, Catherine tried once more, this time giving birth to a girl in 1516. They named her Mary, and she would be a future queen. Henry was consoled by her birth and saw it as the promise of the sons he longed for, which would surely come now that one child had survived. But those heirs never came. The people of England were not thrilled with Mary’s birth either, since the previous queen stained her reign with bloody wars over royal succession.

In 1525, Catherine was well past her prime at 40 years of age, and the lack of male heirs caused Henry to believe that a curse had befallen him for marrying his brother’s widow—the aforementioned misapplication of Leviticus 20:21. He even questioned whether Pope Julius was in error for approving the wedding. And if the marriage was cursed, the sitting pope was to put it to an end. In 1527, Henry approached Clement VII to do just that. He wanted the dispensation for the marriage—which had lasted some eighteen years now—revoked, and declared invalid from the start via a new dispensation. Popes had granted such requests for kings in the past. The problem with Henry’s present situation, however, was Catherine’s family ties. She was the aunt of Charles V, the king of Spain and current head of the so-called Holy Roman Empire.

“Clement VII was in no position to defy the emperor Charles V.”

Says Professor Brad S. Gregory, who teaches history at Stanford University.

“In 1527, the emperor’s army had sacked and looted the city of Rome. And the pope became a virtual prisoner for the time being of the emperor, right at the time that Henry decides he needs his dispensation. Moreover, Charles V was the nephew of the English queen—of Catherine of Aragon. And a sudden invalidation of her longstanding marriage would have been a gross dishonor wrought on the family of Europe’s most powerful ruler. You can’t simply say that after almost twenty years this wasn’t a marriage after all, not to the house of Aragon, not to anything that touches the house of Hapsburg. It would have invited in other words retaliation against Henry VIII, and against the pope, from Charles V. So a political knot in addition to trying to overturn a previous papal dispensation stand in the way of the king and thwarts his wishes. Henry, however, like most kings—and in his case, even more than most kings—was not used to not getting his own way; to having his wishes frustrated.”

To complicate matters further, Henry had fallen for a woman named Anne Boleyn, the sister of a former mistress. A court advisor named Thomas Cranmer encouraged Henry to break with Rome by detaching the English church from papal control and folding it into the government as a new branch, which, as monarch, he would head. Henry heeded that advice and began to take matters into his own hands. He secretly married Anne Boleyn in January 1533 and had the English church court dissolve his marriage to Catherine in May. By September, he was the father of his first child from Anne, but it was another girl—to his dismay—who they named Elizabeth.

In retaliation, the pope excommunicated King Henry, which moved Henry to orchestrate a plan to fully overthrow the papacy. He was aware of the anti-Catholic notions that were stirring in England—many were embracing Lutheran principles for instance. With that in mind, Henry decided to strip away papal authority in his country via an obscure fourteenth-century law that banned dealings with foreign powers, which the papacy certainly was. On the strength of this recently-discovered old law Henry insisted that the clergy of the English church cease its dealings with the pope altogether. In another year, that being 1534, the Act of Supremacy was passed, naming King Henry, “The king’s majesty justly and rightly is and ought to be and shall be reputed the only supreme head in earth of the Church of England called Anglicana Ecclesia,” or the Anglican Church. From this denomination sprang the Episcopalian arm, which is in full communion with the See of Canterbury and the Archbishop of Canterbury, the so-called first among equals within the Anglican movement.

With the 1534 Act of Supremacy, the break with Rome was complete. King Henry was supreme head of his own church, his English subjects were to swear an oath of loyalty to him, and his marriage to Anne Boleyn was officially recognized. As head of his own church, however, he was not priest, thus, while he could appoint bishops, he could not consecrate them. Neither could he defend or formulate the faith of the church. Those tasks were directly overseen by the archbishop of Canterbury, a post that fell to Henry’s former court advisor, Thomas Cranmer.

“Henry was at best a reluctant Protestant.”

Writes Glenn S. Sunshine in his book The Reformation for Armchair Theologians.

“He took advantage of the change to close the monasteries and confiscate their property in the kingdom, yet in general his preference was to stay Catholic in every way possible, except with himself as head of the church. He savagely prosecuted and executed for treason anyone who expressed any doubts about his divorce, but at the same time he also executed mainstream Protestants as heretics. When he was in a reforming mood, he tended toward Lutheranism as less extreme than Reformed Protestantism, but he would inevitably lurch toward Catholicism pretty quickly, turning his back on reforms he had only recently instituted. His heart just wasn’t in it. But it wasn’t his heart that was driving his religious policy. This resulted in a wave of Protestants, known as the Henrician exiles, leaving the kingdom, typically heading toward Reformed territories on the Continent.”

Prior to closing the smaller monasteries (those earning less than two hundred pounds per year), Henry gave the unpopular monks a chance to relocate to other cloisters or enter secular life. Nearly half opted for worldly society over another monastery. By 1539, the crown was in possession of all monastic properties and monasticism was formally ended in England. The former holdings of monks, therefore, were absorbed by the realm and accounted for one-tenth of Britain’s wealth. With this move, Henry was suddenly supported by powerful barons and citizens of the highest social standing who were either gifted or otherwise purchased the properties.

With the banishment of Catholicism from the realm, a new translation of Scripture was needed for use in English churches. Upon Henry’s order, an English bible soon emerged. When Rome held sway over nations, they were not against Scripture translations based on a country’s native tongue, as long as those translations were not derived from the original Hebrew or Greek texts. The reason for this is that Rome had long used questionable Latin sources for its bible translations, which rendered certain words according to Catholic doctrine, rather than the original Hebrew concept.

One important example of this is the word metanoia, which in Greek means “repentance,” and signifies a deep transformation of one’s heart or mind, and a spiritual conversion wrought by their conformity to the Creator. This has as its Latin equivalent, agite paenitentiam, which translates to “do penance” in Catholic translations of Scripture based on Latin texts. For instance, the Catholic Douay-Rheims Bible, based on the Latin Vulgate, still translates the Greek term metanoia as the Latin “do penance” in Luke 13:3.

“No, I say to you: but unless you shall do penance, you shall all likewise perish.”

An English translation of Scripture that ignored the age-old Latin sources did not bode well for Rome or Catholicism. After Erasmus’s Greek New Testament was published in 1516, which featured a preface encouraging other translations in the common tongue of nations, new bible translations began to emerge in other languages, such as French, German, and English. Protestantism was fueled largely by these efforts.

We’ll be back with more exciting scriptural history . . . in a moment.

[MUSICAL INTERLUDE]

We now continue with our podcast.

“While King Henry had broken with the Roman Catholic Church—and had been duly excommunicated—nothing at all had changed yet in the Church of England.”

Writes Carlos M. N. Eire in his book Reformations.

“Its theology, rituals, and ethics remained exactly as before. Among the Protestant sympathizers who hoped to bring about change, the most highly placed were none other than the new queen, Anne Boleyn, and the archbishop of Canterbury himself, Thomas Cranmer. In addition, Anne Boleyn surrounded herself with chaplains deeply affected by evangelical ideas, one of whom, Matthew Parker (1504–1575), would become archbishop of Canterbury during her daughter Elizabeth’s reign. But none of Anne’s efforts mattered much to Henry. In a fit of jealous rage, the king accused her of adultery, and, after being tried and found guilty, Anne Boleyn was beheaded on May 19, 1536, two days after Thomas Cranmer had annulled her marriage to Henry.”

But since he still needed a male heir, the search continued, thus Henry married a third wife two weeks later.

“The bride this time was Jane Seymour, a former lady-in-waiting to the recently executed Anne Boleyn. And this time, Henry VIII finally got the male heir that he needed. In September 1536, four months into their marriage, Jane Seymour gave birth to a frail boy, Edward, but she died as a result of complications during the birth. Henry VIII had an heir to the throne, at last, but he was a widower once again.”

Failed marriages and the problem of royal succession continued to plague Henry’s reign. His son, Prince Edward, was a frail, sickly heir, and his two sisters, Mary and Elizabeth, were legally prohibited from inheriting the throne for a time—though both would later be crowned queens. Henry married three more times following the death of Jane Seymour, but not a single heir was produced from those unions. With his own death, in January of 1547, Edward, a mere nine years of age, inherited the crown of his father. Of course, this meant that true rulership lay with others, such as Edward’s uncle, Edward Seymour, the Duke of Somerset, who was named Protector of the Realm. The Archbishop Thomas Cranmer, whose hands were no longer tied by Henry in a religious sense, pushed a Protestant agenda. Several of Henry’s legislations were repealed, and Reformed preaching was promoted. Influential reformers were also granted professorships at prominent universities, like Oxford and Cambridge. By 1549, church ritual too was revised with the formation of the Book of Common Prayer. All churches in England were forced to do away with Latin and adopt English as their formal language.

But the sudden rise of Protestantism in England was put to an end with the death of the frail King Edward in 1553. He was succeeded by his sister Mary, the daughter of Catherine. Mary was extremely Catholic, and she attempted to shift England back toward Rome in every way. Hers was a bloody reign, and close to three hundred Protestants were killed as a result of her intolerance, including the powerful archbishop Thomas Cranmer, who was burned at the stake.

“Although Mary did not begin her reign by slaughtering her political rivals, she was less reluctant about executing other people.”

Writes Glenn S. Sunshine.

“Given that Henry had split with Rome so he could divorce Mary’s mother, Mary didn’t exactly have warm feelings toward Protestantism. So she began to arrest, prosecute, and burn alive any Protestants she found, particularly clergy and other leaders. This earned her the nickname “Bloody Mary,” making her the only English monarch with a mixed drink named after her. The renewed persecution caused a new wave of exiles to leave the country, known as the Marian exiles. Many of these made their way to Geneva and learned Calvin's more radical approach to Reformed theology and practice.”

It was this persecution that John Knox fled, as discussed in our previous podcast. He later founded the Church of Scotland, the Presbyterian branch of Christianity. Despite her bloodthirsty nature, no other English monarch of the sixteenth century aspired to the level of piety that Mary Tudor did. That bloodthirstiness, however, would be her undoing. By the middle of the sixteenth century, England had been free of Rome for nearly a generation, but the Catholic reign of Mary, and her subsequent marriage to Philip of Spain, another devout Catholic, was considered a betrayal by the people of England. Mary ended her reign in disappointment and died an agonizing death at age 42. Being childless, she was succeeded by her half-sister, who reigned as Queen Elizabeth I.

Daughter of the deceased Anne Boleyn, Elizabeth inherited the monarchy, and with it, control of the Church of England, which, during her reign, took on its distinctive Anglican characteristic. That said, the church still had Catholic leanings, with its apostolic succession of bishops, its adoption of the eucharist, its Catholic infused liturgy, etc. In 1563, Elizabeth’s doctrinal statement, the Thirty-Nine Articles, which were agreed upon by the Archbishops, Bishops, and the entire clergy within the Provinces of Canterbury, York, and London, held language that accepted both Roman Catholics and Protestants alike. The articles, which form the summary of the beliefs of the Church of England, were an obvious compromise, which later English churchmen would regard as the best of both worlds, calling it the via media, or middle way between Protestantism and Catholicism. This was also the culmination of the so-called Elizabethan Settlement, which was a response to the religious differences that threatened the stability of England during her ascension.

Elizabeth, who was skilled at avoiding open religious conflict, initially saw great success with the enforcement of the articles, which mixed Catholic traditions and Protestant thinking. But while much of England was happy with the outcome, those at the extreme ends of the spectrum were not pleased. Among the disgruntled were the Marian exiles who had been forced out of England during the reign of the previous queen. They returned to England when Elizabeth was on the throne and were not comfortable with the compromise, against which they cried out, seeking another reformation. These particular Reformers came to be known as Puritans, and they were largely Presbyterian.

“For many Puritans, episcopacy was now revealing itself as part of the problem, not the solution.”

Writes Diarmaid MacCulloch in his book The Reformation.

“[T]he obvious goal was to replace it with a Presbyterian system like Geneva.”

However:

“It is important not to fall into the trap of thinking that every Puritan was a Presbyterian (although there is no problem in identifying all Presbyterians as Puritans).”

Rebecca Fraser, in her book The Mayflower: The Families, the Voyage, and the Founding of America, adds:

“Puritans were Protestants who believed the English Reformation had not gone far enough. The Elizabethan religious settlement returned the Church in England from Roman Catholicism to the Anglicanism established by Henry VIII. Anxious not to offend the population—many of whom had been disturbed by the Reformation in the first place—Elizabeth’s government did not wish to make the new religious settlement too Protestant. But many of the English Protestant clergy who had been driven out by the Catholic queen Mary Tudor now returned from Geneva imbued with the ideas of important theologians of the sixteenth century, including Jean Calvin. Many of Elizabeth’s chief ministers were Calvinists in points of doctrine such as predestination. However, they took the position that the state must dictate the form of the church. Bishops were an essential part of that.”

The problem is, Calvin taught his followers the exact opposite, that the church was to be governed by church elders, or presbyters to use the Greek designation.

“How the church should be governed and how much it should be reformed became a running battle between the Elizabethan government and Puritan clergy.”

The Puritans also argued that bishops were not mentioned in the Messianic Writings, nor were traditions like making the sign of the cross, observing saints’ days, or (perhaps the greatest bone of contention among them) the wearing of priestly vestments. Carlos M. N. Eire confirms this in his book Reformations:

“It all began with vestments, and more specifically, with one piece of liturgical garb that Elizabeth’s Act of Uniformity required all clerics to wear during church services: the surplice (a white wide-sleeved gown). Reformed Protestants made an issue out of this requirement not just because surplices were unbiblical ‘popish’ remnants, but because they were an indifferent item, that is, totally unnecessary and unrelated to salvation.… Opponents of the surplice objected most strenuously to the way in which consciences were being forced, for requiring any Christian to observe some trivial ordinance was tantamount to raising human laws over divine commands.”

In short, Puritans wanted a church that did not include what they considered to be the unrighteous, which was pretty much all non-Puritans. Queen Elizabeth, her court ministers, and the church hierarchy rebuffed their efforts, and those with Puritan sympathies had to meet in secret. Despite their future expulsion, Puritans were patriotic Protestants. They merely wanted more church reform. Following Elizabeth’s death in 1603, James, son of Mary Queen of Scots, and great-great-grandson of Henry VII, acceded the thrones of Scotland, Ireland, and England, since Elizabeth died childless. King James, being born in Scotland, was a Presbyterian monarch, thus the Puritans felt he would surely support their Protestant cause, and their aim to rid the church of Elizabethan compromises. James actually became their antagonist. While a Presbyterian, James actually shored up the Church of England, which he inherited control of.

“A whole new set of ecclesiastical laws forced the more committed Puritans out of the Church of England and made them separatists.”

Writes Rebecca Fraser.

“James made it clear he would ‘make them conform, or I shall harry them out of the land, or do worse.’ ”

In all of this, note that the Anglican (and therefore the Episcopal) church did not emerge as a result of some noble spiritual ideal, but rather it sprang from the acts of an obstinate king—that being Henry VIII—bent on pursuing his overpowering lust. And successive monarchs did their best to protect the institution that grew out of that lust. Rebecca Fraser goes on to say:

“Canons of 1604 enforced conformity. All those who rejected the faith and practices of the established church were automatically excommunicated. Puritan clergy must go before the Courts of High Commission to swear to these new canons or they would have to leave their parishes ‘as being men unfit, for their obstinacy and contempt to occupy such places.’ And in the end, if you were a Puritan passionate about your religion, you left England. Otherwise you faced imprisonment or death.”

This led to their withdrawal from England in 1607, wherein the Puritans sailed across the English Channel and settled in the Netherlands, joining other separatists who had left in 1593. But the Netherlands soon grew too overcrowded and was rife with corruption. Hence the 1620 voyage of many Puritans to the new world to establish a new colony.

That wraps it up for this episode of Churchianity: Two Thousand Years of Leaven. A production of Kingdom Preppers.org, this episode was written, produced, and hosted by yours truly, Kingdom Prepper. All praise, honor, and glory are due to my boss, Yah Elohim, and to his right hand, Yahushua HaMashiach. You can access the transcript for this episode on our website. Yah willing, our history will continue in the next podcast. Shalom.

Keywords: Henry VIII, Catherine of Aragon, theological reformation, constitutional reformation, church of England, house of Tudor, Stuart kingdom, marrying a deceased brother’s widow, Thomas Cranmer, Anglican, Episcopalian, first among equals, Mary Tudor, Elizabeth I, surplice, via media, Elizabethan settlement, churchianity, two thousand years of leaven, history of Christianity, church history, Hebrew history, kp, kingdom preppers

Intent on passing through Geneva after a one-night stay, John Calvin is asked to join the reform movement there. His efforts and leadership in effect resulted in a third branch of Protestantism: Reformed Christianity. In the late 1550s, a militant version of this movement spreads beyond Geneva and draws a large number of converts. The denomination reached its height in Scotland and migrated to America after engulfing Europe.

Shalom, and welcome to our history podcast. This is a production of Kingdom Preppers.org. I’m your host, Kingdom Prepper, and you’re listening to: Churchianity: Two Thousand Years of Leaven. We continue with our history.

A reformer of what can be considered the second generation, John Calvin, a methodical thinker and systematizer of the sixteenth century, unified various Protestant theologies into a cohesive set of doctrines. While Luther was consumed by the Protestant theology of justification by faith, Calvin centered his focus on the sovereignty of the Most High and sanctification. At a time when Spain was at war with France, the young scholar was forced to end his studies in France and leave the country. He traveled through Geneva where he planned to lodge for a single night. The town’s reputation was not the kind that afforded solitude. It was a pleasure-loving city that was in the middle of an identity crisis, having rejected both secular and religious authorities, that being the Duke of Savoy and the Roman pope. Catholic masses were no longer held and citizens were hostile to the city’s bishop. A gaping vacuum was ready to be filled by an influential reformer who could infuse the city’s religious institutions with the spirit of the Reformation, as had been done elsewhere.

A local reformer named William Farel had preached his brand of reform in the city for four years prior to Calvin’s visit, but not to great effect. Farel was familiar with one of Calvin’s publications, and when he learned that Calvin was in town, he rushed to his inn and urged the young man to remain in the city and aid in establishing a powerful reform movement there. When Calvin insisted that he must leave to continue his studies, Farel warned that he was only following his own wishes and, if he didn’t help the reform effort, the Most High would punish him for seeking his own interests. Calvin, stricken with terror, yielded, and immediately threw in his efforts for the reform movement in Geneva. He would eventually rise to a leadership position in what he called “the game,” and his brand of reformation, which was the third iteration after Lutheranism and the radical reform of the Anabaptists. Calvin spearheaded what came to be known simply as Reformed Christianity, also termed Calvinism. John Calvin, then, is the root of all Presbyterian churches, a good deal of Baptist congregations—which moved away from their Anabaptist origins—as well as many Congregationalists, and the Dutch and German Reformed Churches.

The torch had been passed from Luther to Calvin one could say. But these were very different men with different approaches to the Reformation.

“Luther dreamed of good princes, disliked law on principle, and had little interest in institutions. As a result, Lutheran churches ended up with a mishmash of governing structures.”

Writes Alec Ryrie, in his book Protestants.

“Calvin, by contrast, had trained as a lawyer, knew that structures matter, and favored more participatory government. He insisted that pastors should never have control over money…. More momentously, he distinguished pastors, the ordained ministers who preach and celebrate the sacraments, from elders, senior laymen who would take charge of discipline, and who become the sharp edge of a cultural revolution. Calvin saw the church as a covenanted community, a new Israel in which all were bound to be their brothers and sisters’ keepers.”

Calvin, like many other Christian leaders, shaped his church and its doctrine on personal views, based on what was inferred from a reading of the Messianic Writings. While he took up Luther’s torch, Calvin’s reform efforts rather followed Zwingli’s in structure, and he was able to build on Zwingli’s work. Zwingli’s influence reached other reform leaders who sympathized with his view of the Reformation over that of Luther’s, thus Zwingli’s brand of reform was able to spread throughout and beyond Switzerland, reaching Strasbourg in Germany, where another reformer, Martin Bucer—third in importance in that country only to Luther and his successor Melanchthon—took up the cause of Zwingli. After Zwingli was killed in battle, however, his cause lost the impact it enjoyed under his direct leadership, thus the center of the Protestant Reformation moved to Geneva, the French-speaking Swiss city that benefited greatly from Calvin’s disciplined leadership.

Calvin—who was bound for Strasbourg, where he was prepared to study and write—was offered the position of Professor of Sacred Scriptures by Geneva’s city council, and in this office he dug his heels into the work of reform. A confession of faith was drawn up, which those residing in Geneva would have to accept. He also drew up plans for education reform, and insisted on excommunicating all who refused to adopt a certain spiritual standard.

“[B]ut the Genevans seemed to resist at every turn.”

Writes Carlos M. N. Eire in his book Reformations.

“The worst conflict was a power struggle between the clergy and the city council over the right of excommunication, which the ministers wanted to control, against the wishes of the magistrates. Having just rid themselves of what they viewed as an oppressive church, the elites of Geneva were not eager to see another one take its place. Unwilling to compromise, insisting on the clergy’s right to excommunicate, Calvin and Farel were expelled from Geneva in May 1538.”

Calvin took that as a sign from the Creator and gladly headed for Strasbourg, his original destination. He later confessed that the years spent in Strasbourg were among the happiest of his life. He had been liberated from the obligation of battling Anabaptists in the rebellious city of Geneva, whose citizens always saw him as an outsider. Strasbourg, on the other hand, was home to French refugees whom Calvin ministered to with ease. Strasbourg had also subdued the Anabaptists, and it was there that Calvin married one of their former members, a widow named Idelette de Bure. In time, Calvin also met up with influential reformer Martin Bucer, from whom he learned a great deal.

Calvin’s time in Strasbourg saw him achieve success as a teacher of Protestant theology; the city even honored him with the privilege of being its representative at religious conferences held in Germany, which were of some importance. But the happy, virtually carefree time in Strasbourg would be relatively short-lived, lasting from 1538 – 1541. Calvin’s main supporters in Geneva gained the upper hand in the city through favorable elections to the council, and they invited him back to continue his work of reform. Reluctantly, he returned to the burdensome city in September of 1541 and essentially picked up where he left off.

“His first task was the reorganization of the Reformed church.”

Writes Will Durant in his book The Reformation.

“At his request the small council, soon after his return, appointed a commission of five clergymen and six councilors, with Calvin at their head, to formulate a new ecclesiastical code. On January 2, 1542, the great council ratified the resultant Ordonnances ecclésiastiques, whose essential features are still accepted by the Reformed and Presbyterian churches of Europe and America. The ministry was divided into pastors, teachers, lay elders, and deacons. The pastors of Geneva constituted ‘The Venerable Company,’ which governed the church and trained candidates for the ministry. No one henceforth was to preach in Geneva without authorization by the Company. The consent of the city council and the congregation was also required, but episcopal ordinances—and bishops—were taboo. The new clergy, while never claiming the miraculous powers of the Catholic priests, and though decreeing themselves ineligible for civil office, became under Calvin more powerful than any priesthood since ancient Israel.”

This fourfold church government, or consistory, had only five pastors, who, not unlike the mother church in Rome, kept up the practice of administering sacraments, chiefly the eucharist. There were twelve lay elders, and since they outnumbered the pastors, they enjoyed the majority of leadership, yet Calvin’s authority and influence were such that the church government often yielded to him. For twelve years, the consistory, upon Calvin’s orders, sought to regulate the religious lives of Geneva’s citizens, who were also members of the Reformed church. Backed by the power of excommunication, the consistory ruled with an iron hand that created conflict with the secular government. But in 1553, Calvin’s strongest opponents rose to power once more and seriously challenged his authority in the city.

At that time, a brilliant but heretical Spanish physician named Michael Servetus, having fled Catholic persecutors in France, sought refuge in Geneva. As an escaped prisoner of the French Inquisition, once Servetus was recognized he was immediately arrested. Calvin personally drafted thirty-eight accusations against Servetus for views that were seen as heresies even among Protestants. Those who opposed Calvin came to Servetus’s aid and tried to convince the council of his innocence. In being tried as a heretic by Catholics, they reasoned, Servetus was therefore an ally of Protestants. The Genevan authorities sought the advice of leaders of the Swiss cantons and the view of the Protestant opposition was unanimously rejected. Servetus was sentenced to death by burning, since heresy at the time was a more serious offense than murder.

“That did not exactly end the Servetus affair, however.”

Writes Glenn S. Sunshine in his book The Reformation for Armchair Theologians.

“Some time earlier, a man by the name of Castellio had been a teacher in Geneva. He wanted to become a pastor, but due to a disagreement over how to interpret the Song of Solomon, Calvin opposed his ordination. Castellio, disappointed, left Geneva for Basel, carrying with him a very positive attestation from Calvin about Castellio’s abilities as a teacher. When he heard about the Servetus affair, Castellio was furious. Servetus wasn’t a dangerous heretic like Thomas Munzer or the Anabaptists at Münster, or even the Swiss Brethren, whose rebaptism of adults threatened the social fabric in the community. Rather, he was prosecuted simply for what he thought, for his ideas. Castellio wrote a book entitled On the Coercion of Heretics, in which he argued that prosecuting heretics was counterproductive. Servetus’s ideas would have sunk like rocks if Calvin hadn’t made a capital case out of them. In fact, because of what Calvin did, Servetus’s ideas were much better known than they would have been otherwise. If the person commits no physical crime, he should not be subject to prosecution, and thus heretics ought to be tolerated in society.”

The book angered Calvin and caused him to appeal to the city council to silence Castellio. It refused to do so. Therefore …

“Castellio would end up writing other books against religious warfare, and promoting peace, harmony, and other ‘outlandish’ ideas. But he was largely a voice in the wilderness. Very few other people in Europe were ready for arguments for toleration.”

While Calvin preferred that Servetus be beheaded rather than burned at the stake, since he led the Inquisition against him, he was seen as the one who had Servetus burned. Two years after the event, however, Calvin would be secure in his position and enjoy a largely unchallenged role in influencing the religious and moral affairs of Geneva. And, as Glenn S. Sunshine writes:

“Despite these controversies, Calvin’s ideas spread widely, and helped shape religious thinking in a number of areas in Europe.”

We’ll be back with more exciting scriptural history . . . in a moment.

[MUSICAL INTERLUDE]

We now continue with our podcast.

By placing the sovereignty of the Most High at the center of his theology, those who embraced Calvinism viewed the state in a different light. Luther considered the state to be the highest authority, which is why German Lutheran princes were afforded such power within his church. Calvin taught that no man on earth was to be imbued with unlimited power, neither king nor pope. In this way, he encouraged resistance to tyrannical monarchies. The church, Calvin taught, was to lead and guide the secular government in matters of morality and spiritual concern. Emboldened by this stance, Calvin’s followers went about threatening revolutions throughout Europe, and sought to overthrow suppressive governments or religious powers deemed false.

Geneva was viewed as the unofficial capital of this religious revolution, which the ardent followers of Calvin saw as a promise of the coming Kingdom. From Geneva, many of Calvin’s disciples returned to their European countries to spread his brand of theology, and thus Calvinism was able to break out of its original boundaries and become an international denomination. The movement started as a minor affair in France, but when influential members of the nobility were converted, all of that changed. Most notably, the Huguenots, who were French Calvinists that took Calvin’s words completely to heart, attempted to seize control of the French government. Thousands of them were butchered in 1572 on what is called St. Bartholomew’s Day. This put an end to their efforts to threaten the Catholic hold on that region, though they retained some influence in the country.

The spread of Calvinism to the Netherlands, which was being ruled by Catholic Spain, was a crucial moment in Christian history. At the time, Philip II sat on the Spanish throne, taking over from Charles V who had abdicated. Philip inherited all the provinces once held by Charles V, except those in Austria. In Philip’s possession were Spain, Milan, Sicily, Southern Italy, Mediterranean islands like Sardinia, as well as all the territories under Spanish control in the new world and Asia. He even inherited the nation that formed the Low Countries. In 1580, when the last of the Portuguese royal line died out, Philip annexed Portugal and seized its colonies in Asia, Africa, and the new world. Spain existed as the most powerful nation on earth, whose empire stretched worldwide.

“Curiously, despite this enormous empire and the influx of gold and silver from the new world, Philip’s finances were never particularly stable.”

Writes Glenn S. Sunshine.

“Spain was a rural country whose principal export was the wool of Marino sheep, the highest quality of raw wool available at the time, but hardly a major money-maker in the grand scheme of things. Further, of all the countries of Europe, Spain was probably the least prepared for the challenges of colonization. It had little skilled industry or manufacturing to provide the finished goods the colonists wanted in return for their gold and silver. As a result, the hard currency that flowed into Spain flowed right out again to purchase manufactured goods for the colonies, mostly to northern Italy and the Low Countries. To make matters worse, Spain was constantly involved in wars outside its borders. Philip was a devout, conservative Catholic who saw it as his duty to defend and promote the faith against both Muslim expansion and Protestant heretics, so he spent the majority of his reign fighting wars, mostly—though not entirely—over religion.”

It was largely because of Philip’s navy that the Ottomans were unable to expand their empire into the eastern Mediterranean region during his reign. He even took the side of Catholics in the religious French wars against the Huguenots and Calvinists in France that lasted till 1598—this was predicated on the spread of Calvinism in that country. Of all of Philip’s wars, however, the most prominent among them is the war that resulted from a Dutch revolt against his rule in the Netherlands, which also brought him into conflict with England. The Netherlands, or Low Countries, are known today as the Benelux countries, comprising Netherlands, Luxembourg, and Belgium. The nation was bursting at the seams with Protestants who had earlier ignored many of the edicts of its ruler Charles V, since he had declared Protestantism a religious and civil offense. Yet the Low Countries were the source of half of Charles’s revenue stream.

When Philip took the throne, he was viewed as a foreign ruler by those in the Low Countries, whose way of life he would never understand. The Low Countries were made up of republics that were governed by the highest rungs of the local citizenry who sought the protection of national privileges and rights. The region, which was also home to Catholics, Lutherans, Anabaptists, and Reformed Protestants (or Calvinists), saw no major conflict arise between these groups which were fairly moderate toward one another. That changed toward the end of the 1550s when the Protestants became more militant in their religious stance. This was due largely to Calvinists from France and Genevan missionaries who descended on the Netherlands with new views preached by John Calvin, which made them intolerant of the high taxes and persecution of Protestants being inflicted by the Spanish. In time, converts began to flock to their numbers. Glenn S. Sunshine adds:

“By 1561, they were numerous enough to hold a synod, adopt a Calvinist statement of faith known as the Belgic Confession, based on the 1559 French-Gallican Confession, and set up a church order paralleling that of the Huguenots.”

Indeed, Calvinists in the Netherlands would rise and fight against their oppressive Catholic Spanish rulers well into the seventeenth century. Calvinist pastors were among the first to migrate to the Low Countries and lead the resistance. This amounted to what would be considered freedom fighting or guerilla warfare today. A national party that was established in the northern province had as its leader William the Silent, who became a Calvinist in 1573, and in another decade, he would help create a Dutch republic, which united the provinces of the Low Countries and lasted until 1795. But the Low Countries was just one region among many to which Calvinists would spread.

Back in Geneva, John Calvin had bested his opponents and seized property from a powerful family among them. On this property he founded the Geneva Academy in 1559, where a preparatory school for youths and a seminary for pastoral training were established.

“Its first rector, the French émigré Théodore de Bèze (1519–1605), was Calvin’s right-hand man and anointed successor.”

Writes Carlos M. N. Eire.

“Under his direction, the academy quickly became a veritable factory of Reformed clerics, and especially of hundreds of French natives, who returned to their kingdom immediately. Full of zeal and well educated in Reformed theology, these missionaries trained at Calvin’s academy brought home with them the Genevan model, and set about creating throughout France a tight, growing network of Huguenot churches. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Geneva would thus play a role in French history more significant than any other French city, save Paris.

“Geneva would also figure prominently in the history of many other nations. In the 1550s, especially, Geneva became a truly international center of religious fervor, earning itself that title of the Protestant Rome: Italians, Spaniards, Germans, Scots, Englishmen, Netherlanders, Poles, Hungarians, Moravians, and others took up residence, or passed through. Those who returned home, like the French clergy trained in the academy, brought with them Calvin’s theology and his Genevan blueprints for reform.”

As Geneva grew in popularity, so too did Calvin’s fame rise. Even decades after his death, his theological views lived on in others, such as John Winthrop, the Massachusetts Bay Colony governor—and a disciple of Calvin’s—who sailed to the new world to establish a puritanical city. In fact, most of the Puritans were Calvinists, which speaks to John Calvin’s great influence and the heights it eventually reached.

Scotland illustrates this fact. This was a land that in the sixteenth century was home to subjects who were of one religion and a queen who was of an entirely different one. Mary Queen of Scots married into French royalty at a young age, leading the Scots and the English alike to fear that Scotland would soon become a possession of France. Out of this tense situation emerged John Knox, a preacher and activist who had fled persecution in Catholic England to deliver his brand of Calvinism to the Scots. Within his message was the idea that the queen could be challenged by her subjects.

“Scotland was a latecomer to the Reformation.”

Writes Alec Ryrie.

“In 1559 – 60, an inchoate evangelical movement fused with nationalistic resentment to spark a rebellion against the pro-French Catholic regime. The man who crystalized this movement was John Knox, a disciple of Calvin’s, who lacked his master’s subtlety and made up for it in zeal. He had seen the future as a refugee in Geneva and wanted to make it work in Scotland. Above all, he was entranced by the idea of spiritual equality. In a series of polemics in 1558, he warned his fellow Scots that they could not shirk their responsibilities to reform the church simply because they were commoners.”

Knox assured them that, in the Creator’s eyes …

“… ‘[A]ll man is equal; equal not in rights, but in responsibilities. If you lived in a land of idolatry, it was your duty to demand reform, and to take action to separate yourself from the sin around you.’ … After a decade of confusion, Scotland’s Protestants succeeded in deposing their Catholic queen, Mary, and replacing her with her infant son, now King James VI.”

But after going through all the trouble of ridding the realm of a Catholic ruler, they were reluctant to submit to a king of their own choosing. Alec Ryrie goes on to say:

“James was raised Protestant, but spent his adult life in a running battle with Protestant churchmen who would not accept his power over them in any meaningful sense. They wanted a church that elected its own leadership, so-called Presbyterianism, from the Greek word for elders. The king wanted the church to be governed by bishops, partly for tradition’s sake, but mostly so that he could appoint them himself. Worse, like the true Calvinists they were, the Presbyterians wanted comprehensive moral discipline, and to be able to haul even the king before church elders.”

All of this was ignited by the efforts of John Knox, who had elaborated on Calvin’s original view of Protestantism and stressed the right of commoners to resist, by force if necessary, their overbearing monarchs. The Scottish nobility was drawn to this enticing notion, and so was the public at large. Civil war erupted in the country in 1559, and by the summer of the next year, the country’s capital, Edinburgh, was in Calvinist hands. John Knox personally drafted the articles of religion, which parliament adopted for Scotland. This meant the end of Catholicism in that country. When the queen finally returned to her kingdom in 1561, she was a nineteen-year-old widow forced to witness a Calvinist takeover.

Scotland stood as the embodiment of the Reformation with its decisive Catholic versus Protestant conflict; the lowly preacher and his common followers pitted against the powerful highborn queen, her court, and the mother church. The dynamic would shift in Knox’s favor, however, and even Mary’s descendants would fail to slow the progress of Calvinism in the country. In fact, Scotland came to be the most Calvinistic of all countries in the world. And when John Calvin met his end in 1564, Calvinism had spread throughout Europe and would soon storm America. Thus, many labored tirelessly to ensure that Calvinism would not die with its founder.

That wraps it up for this episode of Churchianity: Two Thousand Years of Leaven. A production of Kingdom Preppers.org, this episode was written, produced, and hosted by yours truly, Kingdom Prepper. All praise, honor, and glory are due to my boss, Yah Elohim, and to his right hand, Yahushua HaMashiach. You can access the transcript for this episode on our website. Yah willing, our history will continue in the next podcast. Shalom.

Keywords: William Farel, Geneva, justification by faith, sanctification, Presbyterian, Dutch Reformed, German Reformed, Congregationalist, John Calvin, Martin Bucer, Strasbourg, Strassburg, Michael Servetus, Huguenots, Philip II, Belgic Confession, churchianity, two thousand years of leaven, history of Christianity, church history, Hebrew history, kp, kingdom preppers

Due to his outlaw status, Martin Luther is forced to remain in the shadows of the Reformation while others assume leadership positions in his church, which quickly develops into an institution. Meanwhile, Ulrich Zwingli, a prominent Swiss reformer laboring apart from Luther, spearheads an important reform movement in the Swiss Confederacy that gives rise to radical Protestants who create yet another denomination: the Anabaptists.

Shalom, and welcome to our history podcast. This is a production of Kingdom Preppers.org. I’m your host, Kingdom Prepper, and you’re listening to: Churchianity: Two Thousand Years of Leaven. We continue with our history.

Martin Luther had led the Reformation movement in Germany for years, but in 1530, there were many prominent Reformers who had risen to leadership positions, filling a space that Luther could no longer occupy. A summit conference held that year in Augsburg was convened without Luther’s presence, because he was still considered an outlaw. The purpose for the conference—which was even attended by Lutheran princes—was to present a clear statement of faith, or confession, for what had come to be known as Lutheranism, and the man at the helm was a young Wittenberg professor named Philip Melanchthon. Like Catholicism the Augsburg Confession proclaimed that the Lutheran church held the power and authority to excommunicate members who rejected any fundamental Lutheran doctrine.

While Charles V did all he could to prevent the spread of the movement, which was deemed heresy, it thrived. In defense of the new denomination, Lutheran princes joined forces and fought intermittent battles in what was basically a civil war from 1546 to 1555. Peace was later reached through compromise, and the princes were left to decide the religion of their lands, which they all insisted be Lutheran, to the exclusion of all other Protestant movements that had lately emerged. Former Catholic bishops had to divest themselves of all property received from the church as well. After a time, Lutheranism became the state religion throughout much of the empire, and spread from Germany to Scandinavia.

Despite the popularity of this new Protestant belief, however, some felt there was need for a reform within the reform. They were considered radical Protestants. While Luther was spearheading the Reformation in Germany, a Swiss Reformer working apart from him was spearheading a similar movement in Zurich. His name was Ulrich Zwingli.

“Luther might have sparked the Protestant Reformation, much to everyone’s surprise, but he was far from alone, and not even the first in his generation to challenge Rome.”

Writes Carlos M. N. Eire, in his book Reformations.

“The Swiss city of Zurich is 468 miles southwest of Wittenberg. There, in Zurich, before Luther took on Johann Tetzel, another young cleric had been challenging the whole of the Catholic tradition for a few years. In some ways, he was far ahead of Luther when it came to envisioning a thorough reform of the Christian religion. His vision was more systematically consistent and less paradoxical, and focused on a different set of theological issues. Most significantly, his reforming vision involved symbols and rituals at its very center, and linked this concern to a conception of church/state relations very different from Luther’s. This Reformation tends to get second billing, largely because of chronology and of its initial impact. The Reformation led by this Swiss cleric, Ulrich Zwingli, progressed more slowly and cautiously on a smaller stage, almost as if hidden from view by the towering Alps.”

Neither did Zwingli’s protestations erupt with the kind of fire that ignited Luther’s. Zwingli never stood before the emperor at an Imperial Diet, nor was he whisked away by prominent nobles to live in disguise while enjoying sanctuary in a castle. The Swiss Reformation never gained the international acclaim that Luther’s did, nor did its writings reach as wide an audience. It also failed to mature as much or survive as long as Luther’s movement did.

“But being the first to bolt from the starting gate, or having the larger, splashier stage setting, or the wide readership, or the longer life does not necessarily mean all that much in terms of the eventual unfolding of history.”

Writes Carlos M. N. Eire.

“The Swiss Reformation proves this to be true, several times over, for when all is said and done, this Reformation would end up affecting a greater array of countries and a larger number of people than Luther’s ever did.”

A year before Martin Luther burst onto the scene with his ninety-five theses, Zwingli was already laboring in Switzerland to bring reform in the Catholic church. After 1517 he was often compared to Martin Luther, or mistaken for one of his followers, despite the fact that he preceded Luther, and in fact sharply disagreed on many theological points. So much did the two dislike each other that Luther himself was offended whenever someone suggested that Zwingli was his disciple. The two men were born six weeks and about 330 miles apart, but aside from being ordained Catholic priests who had become disillusioned with their religion and took pains to reform it in their own way, the two had little else in common.

Ulrich Zwingli was born to a peasant family in the village of Wildhaus, located in the mountainous county of Toggenburg—part of the Swiss confederacy. Being typical Swiss citizens of the day, the Zwingli family was devoted to their land, and they treasured the independence of their region, for which they were willing to fight. Self-sufficient, military-minded, and defiant against the nobles who lorded over them, the peasants, who had formed Swiss cantons—or administrative communities—won independence from the Holy Roman Empire in the previous century, though that independence had gone unrecognized by the emperor. Thus, their independence was de facto, not de jure—they were independent in fact, but not by law. Regardless, the Swiss were military experts who were seasoned in warfare, so they were a formidable foe best left to their own devices. This also meant that they could be hired out as mercenaries throughout Europe at a good price—hence the pope’s Swiss Guard, originally a mercenary force founded by Pope Julius II on January 22, 1506.

The Swiss Reformation, which was by all accounts an urban one, was spearheaded by a man who grew up tied to rural land and surrounded by rustic settings that would figure prominently in his sermons and theological writings as metaphors. During Zwingli’s day, the Swiss Confederation was a unique entity, comprised of several mini states or cantons, each governed by secular councils. These secular councils, however, also decided religious matters, which is a key to how Zwingli, an Erasmian at heart, rose to a leadership position within the Swiss reform movement.

“A powerful and a persuasive preacher, Zwingli gains a significant following, and he grows popular in the first few years in Zurich.”

Says Professor Brad S. Gregory, who teaches history at Stanford University.

“He moves from Erasmus’s strong emphasis on Scripture, to the view that all preaching and worship must be based exclusively on the bible. It’s a subtle but an important difference: from an emphasis to saying exclusively on the bible. And this mandate—that all preaching be based on Scripture—is a mandate that is laid down and established by the city council of the city of Zurich in 1520. Now this is a crucial point: Zwingli’s reforms in the 1520s—beginning right here and going through the essential completion of them in 1525—Zwingli’s reforms are the story of a kind of symbiotic cooperation and negotiation between a preacher, theologian, and reformer on the one hand, and the political authorities in the city on the other.”

Of note, Zwingli was personally awarded a seat on the city council in 1521, which gave him daily access to its members. By the next year, he began denouncing various Catholic traditions in his sermons, which he felt did not line up with the Scriptures.

“The city council decides his—that is Zwingli’s preaching—was Scriptural, and that all disputed religious issues were to be decided on the basis of Scripture.”

Says Professor Gregory.

“Now note: this is the city council making this decision. This amounts to political authorities making decisions, not only about religious policy, but indirectly about religious content too. In effect they’re claiming that Catholic claims to religious authority in the city are no longer going to be acknowledged. A political decision about religious content.”

The city council then, existing as the lay oligarchy with complete rule over cities like Zurich, would use its civil powers to not only approve the Reformation in the Swiss Confederation, but through this and other acts it would in effect abolish the old Catholic religion, with its devotion to idols and relics, and establish a whole new one, together with a new societal structure. Other Swiss cities would follow Zurich in abolishing Mass and idolatrous practices. In the city of Bern, zealous mobs tore through the city’s churches and destroyed the religious art and ritual objects they housed. While the mobs sacked the churches, children sang in the streets of being saved from the baked deity, meaning the idol at the heart of the eucharist, which they no longer had to partake in. The very next day, Zwingli praised the rioting and considered the Reformation a triumph, saying, “Victory has declared for the truth.”

More mobs eventually stormed other towns in other Swiss cantons, sparked by the actions in Bern. Wagons loaded with rubble from the destruction were carted away to be burned, while precious items like gold and silver were melted and jewels safely stored. The wealth that was not distributed among the poor went into the town treasury. Indeed, over the next few years, much of northern Switzerland would witness the burning of many idols and images, with the approval of the city councils that governed the various localities. But as each city and town moved to destroy its idols and sack its churches, conflict arose and tensions mounted throughout the confederacy. Those who clung to the old Catholic traditions in some areas exacted violence on those who had abandoned the religion. Given these sharp religious differences, there was soon talk of civil war in Switzerland.

“The Reformation had split the confederation and seemed destined to destroy it.”

Writes Will Durant in his book, The Reformation.

“Bern, Basel, Schaffhausen, Appenzell, and the Grisons, favored Zurich; the other Cantons were hostile. Five cantons—Lucerne, Uri, Schwyz, Unterwalden, and Zug—formed a Catholic League to suppress all Hussite, Lutheran, and Zwinglian movements in 1524. Archduke Ferdinand of Austria urged all Catholic states to united action, promised his aid, and doubtless hoped to restore the Hapsburg power in Switzerland. On July 16, all the cantons, except Schaffhausen and Appenzell, agreed to exclude Zurich from future federal diets. Zurich and Zwingli responded by sending missionaries into the Thorgau district to proclaim the Reformation.”

One of the missionaries was arrested, but friends came to his rescue, and shortly thereafter led another wild mob in the sacking of another monastery and several churches, which saw their images and idols burned and looted as well.

“Three of the leaders were executed, and a martial spirit rose on both sides.”

Writes Will Durant.

“Erasmus, timid in Basel, was alarmed to see pious worshippers, aroused by their preachers, come of church ‘like men possessed with anger and rage painted on their faces … like warriors animated by their general to some mighty attack.’ Six cantons threatened to leave the confederation if Zurich were not chastised. Zwingli, enjoying his new role of war leader, advised Zurich to increase its army and arsenal, to seek alliance with France, to build a fire behind Ferdinand by fomenting Revolution in Tirol, and to promise Thorgau and Saint-Gall the properties of their monasteries in return for their support.”

Zwingli offered the Catholic League peace as well, but on conditions they could not agree to, thus, Zurich ordered that the abbey in Saint-Gall be seized, which caused the league to yield. Zwingli’s influence was strong at this point, but by January of 1525, a new movement would spring from two of his former supporters.

We’ll be back with more exciting scriptural history . . . in a moment.

[MUSICAL INTERLUDE]

We now continue with our podcast.

While Ulrich Zwingli had disagreed with Luther on various theological points, in Switzerland, as pretty much everywhere else in Christian Europe at this time, infant baptism had been the norm. A few men in Zurich held strong reservations against this particular custom, however. Two of their leaders, Conrad Grebel and Felix Manz had that day been ordered to cease teaching bible classes. Four days before that, the council had told hesitant parents to see to the baptism of their infants within eight days of their births or suffer banishment from the region.

In response to these measures, around a dozen men made their way to the house of Felix Manz in the dark of night during that cold winter month. There, they would decide on the next steps they needed to take. That night, the men shared rumors and reports that had recently circulated, and to quiet their fears, they bowed their heads in prayer. When they rose from that moment of supplication, Christianity would have a new Protestant denomination. Though they were baptized Catholics, all those who were gathered decided to be baptized again that night. Thus, they were later called Anabaptists by their Christian enemies, a word meaning rebaptizer (that is, to be baptized again). This label marked them as heretics and brought severe persecutions from their rivals. Anabaptists did not, however, consider themselves to be rebaptizers, since they rejected the sprinkling they received from Catholic priests in infancy. They preferred to be called simply Baptists, and that is the name that eventually stuck. Some of their foundational beliefs also remain with us to this day.

Of all the Christian sects of the sixteenth century, the Anabaptist reformers were the most radical. However …

“There were sects within this sect.”

Writes Will Durant.

“Most Anabaptists adopted a puritan severity of morals, and simplicity of manners and dress. Developing with rash logic Luther’s idea of Christian liberty, they condemned all government by force, and all resistance to it by force. They rejected military service on the ground that it is invariably sinful to take human life. Like the early Christians, they refused to swear oaths, not excepting oaths of allegiance to prince or emperor. Their usual salutation was ‘The peace of the Lord be with you,’ an echo of the Jewish and Moslem greeting, and a forerunner of the Quaker mode.”

The Quakers (who never referred to themselves as Quakers, but the Society of Friends) in a way descend from the Anabaptists, as do the modern branches of the evangelical Protestant church that call themselves Baptist, whether Northern or Southern. The Mennonites, as well as their orthodox offshoot, the Amish (named for their founder Jacob Amman), are also Anabaptist sects. Like all Protestants, the Anabaptists arrived at their beliefs and convictions through their personal study of Scripture. Luther and other leading reformers had taught that believers had the right to search the Scriptures for themselves, and so the Anabaptists did, but they failed to find evidence for the existence of a church and state alliance, or the justification for Christendom itself. They saw in the Messianic Writings that the assemblies established by the twelve emissaries were merely close communities of like-minded believers who had chosen to serve and follow the Messiah.

To the sixteenth-century Christian, this was a revolutionary concept. While Luther preached about believers having personal spiritual experiences, the Lutheran denomination was not a far cry from Catholicism. They were an established institution with a clerical hierarchy of ordained men. More than that, the clergy, as well as Lutheran princes, considered the citizenry of entire territories members of the Lutheran church. Salaries and protection were also provided to the Lutherans by the state, thus Protestantism, in an official capacity, differed little from the mother church it sought to reform, and from which it had split.

The Anabaptists were intent of redressing all of that, but it meant a radical approach that would extricate them from society on a whole, which they viewed as inherently wicked.

“Agreeing with Luther’s view that the secular state was little more than organized banditry, they concluded that Christians should therefore have nothing to do with it.”

Writes Alec Ryrie, in his book Protestants: The Faith That Made the Modern World.

“They should obey its orders, but not swear its blasphemous oaths, serve on juries that hang the hungry for stealing bread, or fight in armies that plunder the innocent. Perhaps, they should not even pay taxes that funded such things. All they should do is live their lives in peaceful separation, and prepare for the persecution that these rejections would inevitably bring down on their heads. The most enduring strand of Anabaptism was marked by pacifist withdrawal from a corrupt world.”

The Anabaptists were radical in the extreme. During the mid-1530s, they were seen as a real threat to both Catholics and Lutherans, particularly with the Münster rebellion. Münster was an independent episcopal city in Germany’s Westphalia region, not far from the Netherlands. By 1532 the Reformation reached Münster, and the Lutherans established a strong center in the city. Soon, others immigrated to the region, Protestants who were disciples of a charismatic figure named Jan Matthijs. These disciples spread fanaticism to the Lutheran leadership, teaching an older doctrine that the kingdom of the world was to submit to the Kingdom of the Messiah, but the aim was to forge an alliance between the two so that the violent nature of the worldly kingdom could be used to force the establishment of the Heavenly Kingdom.

That apocalyptic view had been the brainchild of an Anabaptist preacher and nemesis of Luther’s named Thomas Müntzer.

“Müntzer tried to turn the peasant rebellions of 1524 – 25 in this direction to no avail.”

Writes Alec Ryrie.

“But the idea did not die with him. It was taken up most notoriously in the Western German city of Münster. When the city’s pastor and several of its leading citizens were converted to apocalyptic Anabaptist doctrines in 1532, Anabaptists from across the region converged there, and succeeded in throwing out the bishop and taking over the city’s government.”

Jan Matthijs, a Dutch baker who had gathered followers by claiming to have received visions from the Creator, prophesied that the city of Münster was the New Jerusalem mentioned in the Book of Revelation, to which the Messiah would soon return. Surprisingly, many believed this report, and …

“Over a thousand adults accepted baptism. They began to muster an army. They expelled bishop-raised forces too and laid siege to the city in 1534. Matthijs was killed in a suicidal sortie early in the siege. But one of his comrades, a tailor named Jan Bockelson, was now proclaimed king, and the successor of King David.”

Yes … yes. You heard that right. Alec Ryrie goes on to say:

“Within his besieged Jerusalem, he abolished private property. All goods were held in common. Notoriously, he legalized polygamy, taking sixteen wives for himself. We are told that when one of them crossed him, he beheaded her himself in public. The Kingdom of Münster ended as violent apocalyptic cults usually do. After a yearlong siege, the city was overrun. Bockelson and his fellow prophets were tortured and executed. The gibbets on which their bodies were displayed still hang from the cathedral tower.”

Münster was seen as an atrocious city rife with infamy. Fears of Anabaptist fanaticism spreading throughout Christendom were rampant, and that growing apprehension created a sharp divide among Protestants in this period.

“Protestants who wished to claim respectability now scrambled to distance themselves from the radicals. They distinguished radicals sharply from so-called magisterial Protestants, those who sought reformation in alliance with existing princes, magistrates, and other secular powers.”

Those who aligned with state representatives still harbored radical sentiments, however, disagreeing with the idea of infant baptisms, swearing oaths, and paying church taxes. So Anabaptist beliefs were deeply held by many who did not proclaim to be part of the denomination outright. These particular Protestants, who depended on princes, magistrates, and other civil authorities, were called Magisterial Anabaptists, and figured in what was the Magisterial Reformation. These Protestants even employed intellectuals known as magisters, who were university-trained teachers, or masters, to teach their rituals and doctrines to the masses who lived within their given territories. These Protestants also depended on the civil arm to enforce those teachings. Radical Protestants, however, who did not align with the civil powers, rejected all aspects of the Magisterial Reformation, being true nonconformists.

There were other branches within the Anabaptist movement as well, including the Hutterites, who were founded by Jacob Hutter in 1527, emerging within the Radical Reformation. This particular group took to heart what they read in the book of Acts, chapter 2 verse 44:

“And all who believed were together and had all things in common.”

“This remained a point …”

Says Professor Brad S. Gregory.

“… their insistence on communal ownership of goods that not only distinguished them, but also divided the Hutterites from other Anabaptist groups who were quite critical of this practice.”

The Anabaptists can be seen as the forerunners of the Congregationalist church, in that there was no ecclesiastical oversight in the form of priests and bishops. Each congregation was self-governing, with decisions being made by the membership as a whole. The more radical Anabaptists were also the first in modern history to preach and hold staunchly to the separation of church and state, which gave rise to notions of religious liberty. For many Anabaptists, however, persecution snuffed out their zeal to evangelize, and taking flight in an effort to survive as disparate communities became paramount. Their legacy became that of being skilled farmers, and quiet people on their lands. The Mennonites and Amish continue in this mode today. But while the Anabaptist fervor died out, other movements within the leavened Christian religion took root and made their spread throughout Europe and beyond.

That wraps it up for this episode of Churchianity: Two Thousand Years of Leaven. A production of Kingdom Preppers.org, this episode was written, produced, and hosted by yours truly, Kingdom Prepper. All praise, honor, and glory are due to my boss, Yah Elohim, and to his right hand, Yahushua HaMashiach. You can access the transcript for this episode on our website. Yah willing, our history will continue in the next podcast. Shalom.

Keywords: Augsburg Confession, Melanchthon, Lutheran, Ulrich Zwingli, Wittenberg, Wildhaus, Toggenburg, Swiss cantons, Swiss Reformation, Erasmus, Zurich, Anabaptists, Mennonite, Amish, Baptist, Quakers, Münster, Thomas Müntzer, Jan Matthijs, Jan Bockelson, Jacob Hutter, Hutterite, churchianity, two thousand years of leaven, history of Christianity, church history, Hebrew history, kp, kingdom preppers

Martin Luther lived through a series of pivotal historic movements, and he charted a course that saw him leave his own indelible and prophetic mark, that being the Protestant Reformation, which he is considered to have fathered. Abhorred by the selling of indulgences, Martin Luther begins his attack on the church with a series of influential writings, which leads to his excommunication. But the Reformation could not be stopped.

Shalom, and welcome to our history podcast. This is a production of Kingdom Preppers.org. I’m your host, Kingdom Prepper, and you’re listening to: Churchianity: Two Thousand Years of Leaven. We continue with our history.

At a time when priests, cardinals, bishops, and other clerics were living in open sin and rebellion against their own Catholic laws, such as that of celibacy—and countless Scriptural precepts besides—certain clerics who aspired to something more pious were aggrieved enough to act upon their strong convictions. One such cleric was Martin Luther, a local preacher and respected university professor of theology, who dared to challenge the corrupt establishment. He lived in a time when Catholic men bought their ecclesiastical office—a practice called simony; when popes flaunted and openly supported illegitimate children; when convents and monasteries were leisure dens, over which monarchs and Catholic noblemen appointed their unqualified sons and daughters as abbots and abbesses. But author James Reston, Jr. in his book, Luther’s Fortress, also states that:

“The period of 1483 to 1546, Luther’s lifespan, was an era of giants: Henry VIII in England; Francis I in France; Charles V, the Holy Roman emperor presiding over most of Europe; the Medici popes, Leo X and Clement VIII in Rome; and Suleyman the Magnificent in Constantinople. It was a time of conflict between Charles V and Francis I in Italy, the sack of Rome in 1527 by Protestant forces from Germany, and the siege of Vienna by Suleyman in 1529 and 1532, when the Ottoman sultan threatened to spread the dominion of Islam all the way to the Rhine River. It was the time of Christopher Columbus and the opening of the New World, of Vasco da Gama and the opening to India, and of the Renaissance with its luminaries: Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, Raphael, Albrecht Dürer, and Machiavelli.”

It was also the time of Israelite slavery and oppression at the hands of Hamite Africans and Gentile Portuguese and Spanish explorers, who were vested with authority by the Roman papacy. Martin Luther lived through all of these moments, and would himself add a memorable page to the annals of history. Luther was born in Eisleben, Germany in 1483. His father, a Saxon, was himself a man of peasant stock who earned his living as a miner but later owned several foundries, or copper smelters. Luther’s parents were austere in the extreme, a fact he complained of in his later years. He was often punished severely as a child, which left him in states of depression and anxiety. Despite a slow academic start, in that he was caned excessively for not preparing his Latin lessons correctly, Luther later aspired to become a lawyer, at the urging of his father.

Those plans changed in 1505, however, when, at nearly twenty-two years of age, he was struck by a bolt of lightning while walking toward a village in a thunderstorm. He had been knocked to the ground, and in terror he cried out to the Catholic patroness of miners and protector from storms, an apocryphal woman known as St. Anne—this was a holdover from Greek mythology and ancient pagan religions that appointed a deity over agriculture, another over the weather, and different deities over various aspects of nature and life in general. Well, St. Anne was supposed to protect miners, mining being the business Martin Luther was born into. This deeply rooted superstition compelled him to beg the supposed saint—believed to be the mother of Mary—to save him from death, a favor he would return by becoming a monk. Seeing he was still alive after two weeks, Luther, to his parents’ regret—and somewhat to his own—kept his word by selling many of his books and walking into an Augustinian monastery at Erfurt to become a monk.

By his own admission, Luther was no common monk either. “I kept the rule so strictly,” he said, years after the experience, “that I may say that if ever a monk got to heaven by his sheer monkery, it was I. If I had kept on any longer, I should have killed myself with vigils, prayers, reading, and other work.” A life of austerity, shaped through days of fasting and sleeping in the freezing cold without the protection of a blanket, along with many acts of penance, was an outflow of the misery Luther suffered while he lived as a monk. During one of his confessions, he was told to love the Creator, to which he replied in a burst of emotion, he did not love him. In fact, he hated him.

It was not until he came across a Latin Vulgate translation of the bible that Luther began to experience a change of heart. In his day, the Scriptures were not readily available to the masses—not even to monks—as Drs. Paul Maier, Joel Biermann, and Ken Schurb, explain:

“He had heard readings from the bible before but never realized they all even came from the same book. Because in those days the bible was regarded as a very dark and obscure document which only the clergy could properly interpret.

“Now remember, Luther is born right at the advent of the printing press’ discovery, but it was still in its infancy and books were still rare. If you had a book it meant somebody had to hand copy that book. And so bibles, they were very expensive because you had to copy every single line of every single bible by hand, but in Luther’s time growing up, there were bibles that were very rarely found.

“Luther was very much aware, as were all Christians at the time, that the church said, ‘Now, you need our help in order to be able to understand this. You need guidance, expert guidance to interpret this very mysterious book.’ ”

Despite becoming an ordained priest in 1507, Luther’s many doubts remained, and to counter this, the vicar general of the Augustinian order encouraged him to pursue academic work. In this way, Luther encountered the Scriptures for himself after he was appointed to the chair of biblical studies at Wittenberg University, which had recently been established. Reading the words for himself removed the veneer that overlaid the beliefs he had been instilled with by the church. So alluring was the veneer that, on his one visit to Rome as a young man in 1510, just two years before, all the “vermin and vileness” he witnessed, along with the general dysfunction of the city, was not enough to have him call the sanctity of the church or its leaders into question. Not yet at least.

With the election of Leo X, who became pope in 1513, Luther would begin to see the papacy, as well as the church and its many doctrines, in a whole new light. Leo X had been born into the powerful Florentine banking family the Medici, and was the first among them to become pope. He inherited the papal chair of Julius II, who had waged devastating wars during his reign. Leo, in typical Medici style, instead focused on the Renaissance art, literature, and science of the day, which infused his pontificate. Leo lived like a secular king rather than a spiritual figure, and his lavish lifestyle was full of excesses that invited controversy.

“Inevitably, the extravagance of Leo’s luxurious lifestyle taxed the Vatican’s coffers.”

Writes James Reston, Jr.

“To make matters worse, France invaded Italy in 1515, taking possession of Milan and threatening the independence of the papal dominion in central Italy. Within two years the Vatican’s savings were squandered, and Leo became more and more obsessed with money. How was he to wage war and finance Raphael’s work and the construction of St. Peter’s, stage his lavish banquets and offer indiscriminate donations to artistic flatterers and hangers-on? He turned increasingly to bankers, borrowing enormous sums at 40 percent interest. To address his deficits, Leo X turned to the dubious practice of selling cardinalates and archbishoprics for enormous prices. On July 31, 1517, he created thirty-one new cardinals and received 300,000 ducats (or around $50 million in today’s dollars) for the appointments.”

After securing this huge sum of money, Pope Leo was heard saying of the Messiah, quite cynically, “How well we know what a profitable superstition this fable of Iesus Christus has been for us.” The corruption did not stop there, however. Those who bought the expensive ecclesiastical offices had to borrow heavily in order to pay for them. One German, Albrecht of Brandenburg, purchased from Leo the archbishopric of Mainz, which cost 21,000 gold ducats, or $3.3 million dollars in today’s currency. A powerful bank in Germany, the House of Fugger, loaned Albrecht the funds, but he needed a viable way to pay back the debt. The papacy allowed the German archbishop to raise funds via the sale of indulgences, which was the perceived spiritual relief from various sins. A sinner would pay Albrecht a high fee to lessen or cancel time spent in the fictitious purgatory. The purchase of indulgences signified repentance on the part of sinners. Pope Leo himself engaged in the sale of indulgencies to finance construction on St. Peter’s Cathedral, to the tune of 60,000 ducats, or $10 million dollars per year.

Martin Luther came to abhor the sale of indulgences, and being able to read the Pre-Messianic Scriptures and Messianic Writings for himself, he was shown that man’s salvation rested with the Messiah, who had the power to forgive sin; therefore, the intercession of earthly Catholic priests was unnecessary. The practice of selling indulgences to gullible Christians began during the crusades, but it continued unabated up to Luther’s time, and it would be the main vice of the church that would propel his rebellion in Germany.

Armed with this new outlook on the church and its problematic doctrines, Martin Luther began to compose and deliver weekly sermons that were highly critical of the institution to which he still belonged. In 1517, he was further provoked by the actions of a Dominican preacher named John Tetzel, who campaigned through Germany in attempt to raise additional funds to further the construction of St. Peter’s basilica. Tetzel was bold in promising prospective donors that any money they contributed would result in an indulgence that would extend beyond the grave and allow them to skip purgatory. He even recited a catchy mantra to sweeten the proposal, which went:

“As soon as the gold in the casket rings
“The rescued soul to heaven springs.”

This vile action drove Luther to draw up ninety-five theses (or propositions) for a spirited debate, which he posted on the wooden door of the Imperial Church in Wittenberg, according to the custom of his university. From there, his fame spread, and the Protestant Reformation was underway.

“So, Luther first emerges in the public eye in late 1517.”

Says Professor Brad S. Gregory, who teaches history at Stanford University.

“As a university professor and a monk, protesting against indulgences on the basis of Scripture, his publicity comes above all at this point through circles of humanists; humanists who see in his theses common points with many of their own concerns—about the importance of Scripture; about the renewal of religious life. The theses are translated into German without Luther’s consent, and they’re published in multiple editions. Humanists are the ones who see to this above all. Within months, this obscure monk is known throughout Germany and Switzerland, all the way from Amsterdam in the north, to Berne in Switzerland in the south. The humanists are essential then in making the ninety-five theses more than simply a narrow matter for academic debate. They give Luther his first real public exposure.”

We’ll be back with more exciting scriptural history . . . in a moment.

[MUSICAL INTERLUDE]

We now continue with our podcast.

Luther’s theses stressed that indulgences could not remove a sinner’s guilt. They only created false hope in those who paid for them. The public was stirred by this argument. Luther’s opponents, the German Dominicans, denounced him for preaching doctrines they deemed dangerous. The Vatican responded by issuing counter-theses, warning anyone who dared to speak ill of indulgences that they were in danger of being heretics. Luther was unshaken in his convictions, insisting that he be proven wrong from Scripture alone. In 1519, during a debate against a theologian named Johann Eck, Luther stated, “Neither the church nor the pope can establish articles of faith. These must come from Scripture.” It was evident that Luther, who already learned that salvation comes through the Messiah alone, now added to his belief that Scripture was the measure of faith and the guideline to a spiritual life, not the pope, the church, or its councils.

Refusing to be outdone, Johann Eck moved against Luther after the debate by trying to convince Rome to formally condemn him of heresy. Luther, for his part, took his case to the people, by publishing various pamphlets that were distributed throughout Germany. He even made an appeal to the German nobility, requesting that princes put an end to the abuses of the church leadership by removing them from their positions and appropriating their wealth. After Luther mounted relentless attacks on the church, decrying its sacraments and false doctrines, Leo at last issued a papal bull condemning him on June 15, 1520, and threatening excommunication unless he recanted his heresy within sixty days.

The first line of the bull was a plea to the Almighty by Pope Leo, which addressed him in Latin, stating: “Arise o Master” …

“[Exsurge Domine], and judge thy cause, the wild boar from the forest seeks to destroy your vineyard.”

Martin Luther was that wild boar. Author Carlos M. N. Eire, in his book Reformations, adds that:

“[T]his document listed forty-one ‘ancient’ errors that Luther had revived in Germany, like some ‘restless evil, full of deadly poison.’ This wording was standard procedure against all heretics, for the accepted thinking on theological error was that it had but one source, the devil, and was also of one piece, linking all heretics together. Luther and his followers were interpreting the Holy Scriptures ‘just like heretics have done since ancient times,’ charged Leo, ‘inspired only by their own sense of ambition, and for the sake of popular acclaim.’ The bull roared against Luther and anyone who agreed with him.”

The church itself did not possess the authority to apprehend so-called heretics, neither did it have the means to; only the secular powers claimed that right. In light of this, Leo wrote to a German prince, Frederick the Wise—a supporter of Luther—to try and convince him to seize the rebellious monk. But Luther had gathered quite a following across the German landscape at this point, and received the support of many nobles who pledged to stand with him in his fight, not just Prince Frederick.

Indeed, Luther was seen as a local hero in the eyes of the German people, one who fought for their liberty. His new theological views excited them, but so too did his stance against Rome, which was now perceived as an enemy of Germany.

“And it was not just nobles who had been won over by Luther.”

Writes Carlos M. N. Eire.

“Burghers in the cities and students had also joined his camp. Those carrying the bull Exsurge Domine to Saxony were supposed to publish it in every city and town where they stopped and to see to it that Luther’s texts were burned. The two men chosen for this task, Girolamo Aleandro, former rector of the University of Paris, and Johann Eck, Luther’s debating nemesis, encountered stiff resistance nearly everywhere in Germany, especially from students, who rioted and threatened them with physical violence, or burned anti-Lutheran works rather than those of Luther.”

Insulated by this protection, Luther was able to focus on his writing, and he published more works that marked a complete split with the Roman Catholic Church. Three of his treatises, written in haste while the sixty-day deadline to recant loomed, expressly called for church reform. Luther effectively took up the torch passed to him by Wycliffe and Huss and carried their efforts even further, in large part because of the overwhelming support he was afforded at the time.

Luther also wrote a letter to the pope himself, in which he expressed his sincere respect for Leo the man, though his office and the Roman curia itself, Luther felt, stood condemned through corruption. Luther deemed the See of Rome more corrupt that Babylon and Sodom. The Roman See, in his words, was “characterized by a totally depraved, hopeless, and notorious wickedness. That see I have truly despised. The Roman church has become the most licentious den of thieves, the most shameless of all brothels, the kingdom of sin, death, and hell.”

Not all were on Luther’s side, however. In cities such as Meissen, Merseburg, and Brandenburg, Luther’s opponents—Johann Eck among them—were successful in proclaiming Pope Leo’s papal bull of excommunication against him. In Ingolstadt, his books were seized, and in Cologne, Mainz, and Louvain they were burned according to Leo’s order.

“But at Leipzig, Torgau, and Döbeln the posted bull was pelted with dirt and torn down.”

Writes Will Durant in his book The Reformation.

“[A]t Erfurt many professors and clergymen joined in a general refusal to recognize the bull, and students threw all available copies into the river; finally Eck fled from the scenes of his triumphs a year before. Luther denounced the ban in a series of bitter pamphlets, in one of which he fully approved the doctrines of Huss. About August 31, 1520, as ‘a single flea daring to address the king of kings,’ he appealed to the emperor for protection; and on November 17 he published a formal appeal from the pope to a free council of the church. When he learned that the papal envoys were burning his books, he decided to reply in kind. He issued an invitation to the ‘pious and studious youths’ of Wittenberg to assemble outside the Elster gate of the city on the morning of December 10. There, with his own hands, he cast the papal bull into a fire, along with some canonical decretals and volumes of Scholastic theology; in one act he symbolized his rejection of canon law, of Aquinas’s philosophy, and of any coercive authority of the church. The students joyfully collected other books of the kind, and with them kept the fire burning till late afternoon. On December 11 Luther proclaimed that no man could be saved unless he renounced the rule of the papacy. The monk had excommunicated the pope.”

In January of 1521, Pope Leo published another bull of excommunication against Luther that held no limits and was not left to debate. Any region that supported Luther in his rebellion would be placed under immediate interdict, wherein its priests would not be allowed to perform Catholic sacraments. Luther was officially declared heretical and expelled from the Catholic church. That absolved the Roman curia of Luther, which meant he was now the problem of the emperor, Charles V, who, as a Christian sovereign, was sworn to defend Catholicism and rid her of heretical enemies. Luther was called to appear before the king at a Diet (or imperial assembly) in Worms where he was promised a fair hearing, for which he would be given twenty-one days of safe conduct. Upon appearing, Luther again refused to recant his positions on the church, stating that only the Scriptures could prove him wrong, and it was to that authority that his conscience was captive.

Charles V was not swayed by Luther’s words, and in fact deemed him an outlaw, who he called “a devil in the habit of a monk.” Luther, Charles proclaimed, “has brought together ancient errors into one stinking puddle, and has invented new ones. He denies the power of the keys and encourages the laity to wash their hands in the blood of the clergy. His teaching makes for rebellion, division, war, murder, robbery, arson, and the collapse of Christendom.” Though Luther’s adversaries had tried to convince Charles V to cancel his safe conduct, as Sigismund had done with John Huss more than a century earlier, Charles remembered the disgrace Sigismund suffered for betraying Huss; therefore, the monk was given another twenty-one days of safe passage to return to Wittenberg, after which sentence could be passed against him. Luther managed to escape the king’s justice with the help of his friend and supporter, Frederick the Wise, the prince of Saxony. Luther received sanctuary at Frederick’s castle in Wartburg, where he disguised himself as a noble and spent the year translating the Messianic Writings into German.

Years later, Charles V would regret his decision, stating:

“I did wrong in not killing Luther then and there. I was under no obligation to keep my word. I did not kill him, and, as a result, this mistake of mine assumed gigantic proportions. I could have prevented this.”

What he meant to prevent was rebellion and open revolt the likes of which the church had never seen. In Rome, priests and town officials tore down church statues and did away with mass. Radical reformers sprang up seemingly overnight and more nobles—dukes, princes, and electors among them—threw in their support for Luther and his protestant movement. After a year of tireless translating, Luther returned to Wittenberg to implement a nationwide reform of Christianity. Among his first reforms was getting rid of the office of bishop, for which he saw no basis in Scripture. And, after being exhorted by Luther, a large number of ministers in Saxony and surrounding regions stopped being celibate. A spate of marriages between monks and nuns occurred at this time. Luther himself, living up to his own words, took a wife as well. He married a former nun named Katherine Von Bora, and later remarked that there was a lot to get used to during the first year of marriage.

From there, Luther’s influence would spread far and wide, largely through the dissemination of his literature.

“Printing fell in with his purposes as a seemingly providential innovation which he used with inexhaustible skill.”

Writes Will Durant.

“He was the first to make it an engine of propaganda and war. There were no newspapers yet, nor magazines; battles were fought with books, pamphlets, and private letters intended for publication. Under the stimulus of Luther’s revolt, the number of books printed in Germany rose from 150 in 1518 to 990 in 1524. Four-fifths of these favored the Reformation. Books defending orthodoxy were hard to sell, while Luther’s were the most widely purchased of the age. They were sold not only in bookstores but by peddlers and traveling students. Fourteen hundred copies were bought at one Frankfurt fair. Even in Paris in 1520, they outsold everything else. As early as 1519, they were exported to France, Italy, Spain, the Netherlands, England. ‘Luther’s books are everywhere, and in every language,’ wrote Erasmus in 1521. ‘No one would believe how widely he has moved men.’ The literary fertility of the Reformers transferred the preponderance of publications from southern to northern Europe where it has remained ever since. Printing was the Reformation. Gutenberg made Luther possible.”

That wraps it up for this episode of Churchianity: Two Thousand Years of Leaven. A production of Kingdom Preppers.org, this episode was written, produced, and hosted by yours truly, Kingdom Prepper. All praise, honor, and glory are due to my boss, Yah Elohim, and to his right hand, Yahushua HaMashiach. You can access the transcript for this episode on our website. Yah willing, our history will continue in the next podcast. Shalom.

Keywords: Martin Luther, Eisleben Germany, Erfurt monastery, St. Anne, patronnes of miners, protector from storms, Greek mythology, pagan religion, Johann Eck, Frederick the Wise, Exsurge Domine, Wittenberg, churchianity, two thousand years of leaven, history of Christianity, church history, Hebrew history, kp, kingdom preppers

After gaining maritime knowledge, the Portuguese embark on explorations that lead to the discovery of islands that become their new outposts. In search of gold, they reach the west African coast and instead create a new slave market by enslaving and trading descendants of ancient Israelites. Meanwhile, Spain finances Columbus’s first voyage to the New World—mistaken for the East Indies—which touches off the European age of “discovery.”

Shalom, and welcome to our history podcast. This is a production of Kingdom Preppers.org. I’m your host, Kingdom Prepper, and you’re listening to: Churchianity: Two Thousand Years of Leaven. We continue with our history.

While the Renaissance was flourishing within Italy, and in fact reaching its height on the peninsula, the Portuguese were expanding their empire into the Atlantic. They looked to establish new trading routes, and thus settled Madeira in 1419, the Azores in 1427, and the Cape Verde Islands in 1450. This allowed for the establishment of important trading posts along the African coast. While their primary pursuit was gold, this was not easy to come by, therefore slaves took precedence since they were easier to acquire. The already booming trans-Saharan slave trade allowed the Portuguese to branch off into a distinct market, but, being Catholics, they first needed the approval of the pope.

The justification for that approval came on the basis of war, or to be more precise, a crusade. The people on whom the Portuguese had set their sights were descendants of ancient Israelites, who had established settlements in West Africa and other territories after fleeing Jerusalem and its surroundings during the Roman siege of 70 CE, and the failed Bar Kokhba revolt of 135 CE. In 1452, Pope Nicholas V issued a bull to Alfonso V of Portugal titled Dum Diversas. That bull allowed the king to launch a crusade on Saracens and pagans—namely Israelites—and, in conquering them, submit them to perpetual slavery.

“Dum Diversas regarded the enslavement of Africans to be part of the Holy War of Reconquest.”

Writes Katharine Gerbner, in her book Christian Slavery: Conversion and Race in the Protestant Atlantic World.

“It also granted the Portuguese Crown the authority to act as the head of the Church in Africa and, later, in Brazil, a right known as the padroado real. In 1454, Nicholas V reconfirmed his support for Portuguese expansion in the brief Romanus Pontifex. Later Popes reiterated the grants in 1456, 1481, and 1514.”

Those popes were Calixtus III, Sixtus IV, and Leo X—three popes of the Renaissance—and they reiterated the grants of the papal bulls on the cusp of the Protestant Reformation, which would act as a judgment of the church while existing as a fulfillment of prophecy. The Portuguese eventually formed alliances on the African coast and set up colonies there. In 1483, they arrived at the mouth of the Congo River and discovered that the vast land beyond, and all its territories, was ruled by Nzinga a Nkuwu, who held the title mani kongo, meaning “king.”

In the hopes of accessing distant Ethiopia by sailing the Congo, the Portuguese maintained good relations with the mani kongo and his subjects. An agreement was soon reached that left four Portuguese in Congo, while four Africans were taken to Lisbon to experience court life. When they returned, reports of the pleasant treatment they received and the splendors of European civilization they witnessed were enough to convince the king to make Portugal his ally. This eventually led to baptisms, and the king and his heir naming themselves after Portuguese kings. Portuguese missionaries were able to labor in the Congo freely and thus a church was formed, complete with a bishop who was the son of the next Congolese king.

Relations deteriorated after a few decades, however, and the Portuguese looked to new lands south of the Congo. Now known as Angola, these lands were a rich source for slaves. Unlike the Congo, where the mani kongo controlled the slave trade, the Portuguese were free to use force in Angola and establish another important colony, and also lay claim to vast lands stretching well into the interior, which were another source for slaves.

Slavery had been practiced in Africa for centuries prior to the arrival of the Portuguese, and it took on a new life after other European kingdoms crossed the Atlantic. African elites were able to supply the Europeans with slaves from their territories, and many of these slaves were the descendants of the ancient Israelites. The Kingdom of Ghana for instance, once ruled by Israelite kings, eventually collapsed, forcing its Hebrew subjects into other African territories ruled by various tribes. Arab chronicler al-Zuhri wrote of the Barbara and Amīma people, who were frequently captured as slaves. In his book African Dominion: A New History of Empire in Early and Medieval West Africa, Michael A. Gomez writes concerning these peoples:

“It is not clear who the Amīma and Barbara were (possibly ‘Bambara,’ also ambiguous), though the latter were regarded as strong, ‘impetuous,’ ‘brave,’ and ‘skilled in war,’ the ‘most noble and aristocratic of men’ to whom ‘the amīr’ of Ghana was related.’ Said to inhabit ‘the middle of the desert,’ they may have been a branch of the Soninke. The Amīma, on the other hand, are identified as impoverished Jews who ‘read the Torah’ and were involved in the import business.”

These readers of the Torah, captive Israelites no less, bore a similar skin complexion to native Africans, which is primarily why they were able to assimilate into various tribes and adopt their culture. And many African tribes were comprised of ancient paganized Israelites from the northern kingdom who had fled the Assyrians in the seventh century BCE. As to the Portuguese, they were not satisfied with Africa’s west coast. Their initial aim was to circumnavigate Africa entirely in search of a route to the Far East, since the Muslims controlled all the land routes between Europe and the Orient. In their quest, the east African coast was also subjugated. All the while, Portuguese priests were dispatched to Africa’s interior on missions to convert more African kings to Catholicism.

On the heels of the Portuguese voyages to and beyond Africa, other explorers sought to make their fortune on a grand expedition of their own. One such explorer was Christopher Columbus. Born in Liguria, a region in northwestern Italy, the experienced ship captain was well-traveled, having sailed to the Greek Aegean, the waters of west coast Britain, and even the west coast of Africa by his early twenties. But since then, many other voyages were made as part of his occupation, that of a trade agent for Genoese merchants. But he personally participated in trade of a different kind as well. Christina Snyder, assistant professor of American studies and history at Indiana University, says of this:

“Columbus, even before he came to the Americas, he had participated in the African slave trade. This was a trade that people in Spain and Portugal in particular had started engaging in in the fifteenth century. He and his father were both participants, and had bought and sold West Africans in Europe.”

So, being a seafaring captain, Columbus was knowledgeable about North Atlantic trade winds, and their clockwise rotation. He would use this to his advantage and plot a southerly course upon departure for the Far East, keeping the trade winds at his back.

He had experience, he was chockful of knowledge on navigating the ocean, and he had a grandiose plan. All he needed was a rich court to finance his expedition, which was expected to yield tremendous riches by opening up direct trade to the Far East, a region known for its prized Chinese silks and spices. To this end …

“… Columbus had conducted a long dalliance with King John II of Portugal, whom he nearly succeeded in convincing.”

Writes Thomas Cahill, in his book Heretics and Heroes.

“He sought out financial power brokers in both Genoa and Venice but came up short. He sent his brother Bartolomeo to Henry VII of England with the astounding proposal. Henry, father to Henry VIII and founder of the Tudor dynasty, whose claim to the throne was quite shaky, said he would think about it. He thought and thought but had nothing more to say (at least not till it was too late). Meanwhile, Columbus found himself at the Spanish court, spending nearly six seemingly sterile years in the attempt to lure the monarchs into financing his scheme.”

Ferdinand and Isabella’s decision to support the expedition was an auspicious one for Spain, and indeed for Europe. Columbus had raised nearly half of the needed funds through the support of Florentine bankers. It was believed that, because Spain’s treasury had recently been drained by prolonged military campaigns of the successful Reconquista, Queen Isabella was forced to publicly donate a portion of her jewelry in the hopes that members of the Spanish nobility would be moved to match her efforts. But this is now thought to be a myth based on a rumor that was spread in the sixteenth century. The Spanish crown in fact used very little imperial funds to sponsor the voyage. Advisers convinced Isabella to conscript two fully equipped caravels (the Pinta and the Niña) from the Spanish city of Palos as a penalty for past sea crimes. Palos is also the city from which Columbus would set sail. Other ideas on ways to raise funds were put forth as well, and the financing goal was soon met.

The crew set sail on August 3, 1492, but by the next month they were stationed in the Canary Islands, at the port of San Sebastián, where they restocked and made necessary repairs prior to sailing into the unknown. On September 6, the day they set sail, the Tenerife volcano erupted behind them like a portent from Heaven. Columbus took his fleet toward what is now called the West Indies, a name that stuck because it was mistaken for the Spice Islands of the East Indies, which is Indonesia today. Land had not been sighted since they left familiar shores thirty-one days before, and tensions began to rise. On October 10, 1492, the sailors threatened mutiny and conspired to toss Columbus overboard for leading them on an endless journey. But finally …

“On October 12, 1492 … land was sighted from the deck of the Pinta by a sailor named Rodrigo de Triana.”

Writes Thomas Cahill.

“The time was 2 a.m. The sighting came not a moment too soon for Columbus. They had sailed for five weeks and were beginning the second day of their sixth week. The crew, among whom served a sprinkling of convicts with little to lose, were growing nervous about the unlikelihood of their return if their outward voyage should continue to drag on. Columbus, though a charismatic leader, could not have commanded their compliance much longer.”

The land they spotted was an unknown island in the Bahamas, but they would not walk it until the morning of the next day. Upon reaching land, everyone fell to their knees in prayer, grateful to have made it ashore. Columbus immediately named the island—which was already inhabited—San Salvador, meaning “Set Apart Savior.” He thereafter claimed the land in the name of the Catholic king and queen of Spain by reciting language that was incomprehensible to the natives. Then he presented the naked inhabitants with “little red caps and glass beads which they hung around their necks, and other things of slight worth, which they all valued at the highest price.”

The inhabitants were Tainos, a member of the Arawak people whom Columbus would encounter again and again, not only in the Bahamas, but also in Cuba, Puerto Rico, and Hispaniola (home to the Dominican Republic and Haiti). Tainos are thought to no longer exist, having been decimated by Spanish invaders, though people of mixed descent still carry traces of their blood. For roughly the next 150 years, in what is considered the age of “discovery,” Europeans would spread their colonies throughout the Americas and establish new trade routes to the Far East, where its riches could be directly enjoyed. During this 150-year period, the church would dispatch Jesuit priests as well as friars and monks from the Franciscan and Dominican orders to carry out missionary work while living among the natives who inhabited the colonies. In contrast to the monks and priests, Christian conquerors forced many natives to convert via the point of a sword.

We’ll be back with more exciting scriptural history . . . in a moment.

[MUSICAL INTERLUDE]

We now continue with our podcast.

In his book The Civilization of the Middle Ages, author Norman F. Cantor says of the burgeoning European age of “discovery”:

“When Christopher Columbus, flying the Spanish flag, landed in the islands off the coast of America on October 12, 1492, Spain possessed only the Canary Islands and the remnants of the Mediterranean empire of Aragon. Within a few decades it had the largest overseas empire among the European states. At the moment when the economy of the Mediterranean world was entering its last decades of prosperity, Spain was in the forefront of the expansion of Europe into the unknown lands of America and the Orient.

“Spain’s only rival was Portugal, which had survived the unification of the Iberian Peninsula to remain an independent state. Portugal had spent the last half of the fifteenth century exploring the west coast of Africa. The original impetus given to Portuguese exploration by Prince Henry the Navigator had made Portuguese seamen the most advanced in geographic and maritime knowledge in Europe. Soon after Columbus landed in America, Vasco de Gama rounded the Cape of Good Hope and completed the voyage to India by the eastern route. His successors established the Portuguese empire.”

By the end of the fifteenth century, all the necessary steps had been taken by the two Iberian empires to allow for the further expansion of European interests throughout the entire world.

“The location of the Iberian Peninsula and the policies of the strong monarchies that developed in Spain and Portugal placed these states in an ideal position to exploit the new opportunities.”

Both the Portuguese and Spanish empires are considered to be the first truly worldwide empires in scope and scale. In fact, following Columbus’s so-called discoveries, the two empires were colonizing lands in their maritime quests at such a rapid rate that tensions developed, therefore Pope Alexander VI published a bull that divided the New World between them. The pope decreed that all lands situated west and south of a meridian line 100 leagues west and south of the Azores and Cape Verde islands belonged to Spain by right. But since the decree failed to specify the lands on the other side of the line as possessions of Portugal, the two empires eventually signed several treaties that created an official line of demarcation. This divided rights of trade and colonization for newly discovered lands; those situated to the east belonged to Portugal, while lands to the west belonged to Spain. This is why Brazil speaks Portuguese and Spanish is the language of Latin America. Other European countries were excluded from the treaties and bulls, but in time, nothing would keep the Dutch, English, French, or Germans from entering these divided territories and staking their own claims.

The papacy also commissioned the monarchs of Portugal and Spain to evangelize the people of the lands they conquered. These kings were expected to send missionaries to their new territories and appoint bishops over newly converted Christians among the native inhabitants. It was made a high priority to Catholicize Central and South America, and the Caribbean therefore, and intermarriage between Spaniards and Native Americans occurred in these regions as a result, which gave rise to Mestizos, who are people of mixed European and Indigenous American descent. Missionaries had less success in Africa and Asia, however.

Spain was at the very forefront of colonization and enslavement in Central and South America, and they made their push into North America as well. In addition to their conquest of the Aztec, Inca, and Maya civilizations, which were decimated, the Spaniards battled the French—who were protestant Christians by then—for possession of Florida. The Spaniards then moved on to what are now Georgia, the Carolinas, and Virginia. Other European powers, such as England, showed a keen interest in the New World as well, attracted by Spain’s success. They would use Spain as a benchmark and model for their own colonization and enslavement enterprises, and slavery would be used to expand and enrich these colonizing nations. Professor Snyder says of this period:

“Slavery itself is on the go, it’s dynamic, and it’s really colonialism that creates the Atlantic Slave Trade which is what we typically think of as the prototypical form of slavery—that is the kind that was practiced in the South and the Caribbean in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. But that took a long time to evolve. On the eve of colonialism, Europeans had relatively limited experience with slavery, and they each brought their own experiences and understandings into the colonial context. And, when we think about major colonizing powers in North America, three of the most important are Spain, England, and France. And out of these, especially in the early colonial period, the Spanish are really the most important, because they’re the first colonizers, and partially because other colonizers look at their experiences as they form their own colonial policies.”

As staunch Catholics, the Spanish invaders felt entitled to the newly conquered lands and far superior to its native peoples by right of “discovery,” and this sense of entitlement was supported by papal policy.

“Christianity and the kind of legal doctrines that are developed around colonization have a really strong role in the invasion of North America and also on ideas about slavery.”

Says Professor Snyder.

“This doctrine of discovery is basically a legal notion that’s supported by the Catholic church that decrees that only Catholic powers should colonize North America, and that essentially indigenous people only had use rights; that is, it really didn’t recognize indigenous territorial claims as being legitimate in European eyes.”

Emboldened by the church leadership, Spanish expeditions of the new world were carried out with barbaric violence, not unlike what was seen during the crusades. Yet, the violence exacted on natives of the new world was fueled by centuries of warfare with Muslims—called Moors by the Spanish—who ruled the Andalusian portion of the Iberian Peninsula. Arab-Berber encroachment into Christian Spain had created a fanatic bloodlust in the Spaniards, and a disdain for non-Christians, which did not abate following the defeat of the Moors. Professor Snyder adds to this by saying:

“You know, 1492 is when Columbus sets sail, but it’s also the year that marks the end of the Reconquista, which is Christian Spain’s centuries-long fight to claim all of the Iberian Peninsula for the Christian kingdoms, and those Christian kingdoms eventually become what we now think of as Spain. And ideas that had really propelled the Reconquest were based on an intolerance of non-Christian people, and as part of that, there are these germs of ideas about race that are articulated during the Reconquest, and the Spanish referred to these as notions of blood purity; and that is that, you know, Christians had this pure blood. They also have an anti-black bias against sub-Saharan Africans during this time.”

That anti-black bias against slaves, the descendants of ancient Israelites taken from sub-Saharan Africa, would be shared by all the colonizing European nations. Not only would those slaves be forced to work on plantations throughout Central and South America and the Caribbean, they would also be forced to accept and practice Catholicism. This policy was enacted via the issuance of papal bulls by Pope Alexander VI, who, in addition to conferring upon Portugal the padroado real in West Africa, also conferred upon Spain the similar patronato real in the East Indies for the same reason: to grant the Spanish monarchy the power and right to establish and oversee a new branch of the Catholic church in the new world.

The Spanish were thereafter afforded the unquestioned right to build churches, appoint their clergy, collect funds, and apply their own ecclesiastical laws as they saw fit. This power of course encompassed slavery in the new world, and the Spanish monarchs sought to enforce the evangelization of slaves.

“The Iberian monarchs decreed that Africans should be baptized before they arrived in the Americas, but it was unclear exactly when and how they should be introduced to Christianity.”

Writes Katharine Gerbner.

“Charles V commanded that Africans should be baptized before they left the African coast, but even when priests did perform baptisms (which was only occasionally), there was rarely any instruction in Christian doctrine. In 1545, the Spanish Crown issued a new set of ordinances for the governance of Africans in the New World that emphasized both Christianization and Spanish language acquisition. All slave owners were commanded to baptize newly arrived slaves, provide chapels on their estates, and allow their slaves to hear Mass.”

The Spanish slave owners, particularly those in possession of larger plantations, initially resisted the command of the monarch. They felt that allowing the slaves to attend Sunday services would slow productivity in the field. The Portuguese forced their slaves to work their Brazilian cane fields on Sundays for the same reason. And rather than provide the slaves with food, the slave owners expected their field hands to keep small plots and produce their own crops to sustain themselves. A few slave owners were brought to court over the matter after receiving heavy criticism by Jesuit missionaries. And as time passed, both enslaved and free Israelites embraced Christianity and interpreted the belief system in their own way, while infusing it with their own worship rituals. They even had their own chapels and performed baptisms themselves. Then there was the establishment of Israelite confraternities, the so-called black brotherhoods, which would see enslaved and free Israelites alike forming their own little religious communities where leaders were elected from within.

“Both the Church and the Crown supported the establishment and growth of black confraternities.”

Writes Katharine Gerbner.

“In 1576, the Portuguese king ordered that tithes collected from baptized slaves should be used for black churches, lay brotherhoods, and other spiritual affairs. In the late sixteenth century, Pope Gregory XIII declared that black brotherhoods could help to indoctrinate newly converted slaves.”

Of course, that was the whole point: to get Israelites to indoctrinate themselves. And so it has been with the Christian movement, well into the Protestant era and up to the present day. Israelites, as dictated by the algorithms set forth in prophecy, would lose their national identity through the actions of enemy nations. The Psalmist Asaph wrote of this passionately, imploring Yah Elohim to not keep silent on the matter; to not hold his peace or be still.

[2] “For behold, your enemies make an uproar; those who hate you have raised their heads. [3] They lay crafty plans against your people; they consult together against your treasured ones. [4] They say, ‘Come, let us wipe them out as a nation; let the name of Israel be remembered no more!’ ”

That wraps it up for this episode of Churchianity: Two Thousand Years of Leaven. A production of Kingdom Preppers.org, this episode was written, produced, and hosted by yours truly, Kingdom Prepper. All praise, honor, and glory are due to my boss, Yah Elohim, and to his right hand, Yahushua HaMashiach. You can access the transcript for this episode on our website. Yah willing, our history will continue in the next podcast. Shalom.

Keywords: Amīma, mani kongo, Bambara, Angola, Kingdom of Ghana, Judahite, Portuguese, Dum Diversas, Romanus Pontifex, padroado real, Nzinga a Nkuwu, Prince Henry the Navigator, Vasco de Gama, Moors, blood purity, churchianity, two thousand years of leaven, history of Christianity, church history, Hebrew history, kp, kingdom preppers

While the Great Schism of the papacy played out following the Avignon period, the glories and excesses of the Renaissance were being realized. Painters, sculptors, artists, and poets—by blending paganism and Christianity—sought to capture the essence of Greek and Roman splendor as expressed through art and literature. Amidst the creative explosion, the popes sought to elevate Rome to new heights and restore her former glory.

Shalom, and welcome to our history podcast. This is a production of Kingdom Preppers.org. I’m your host, Kingdom Prepper, and you’re listening to: Churchianity: Two Thousand Years of Leaven. We continue with our history.

In the midst of the pre-Reformation movement was the European Renaissance—also called the Italian Renaissance—which covered the fourteenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth centuries, and ushered in the modern era. In this cultural period, politics incorporated the custom of diplomacy, while science relied more on observation and induction, where conclusions were drawn from a part to a whole, or from particulars to generals. This was also a period of education reform, and in the arts, particularly oil painting, natural realism was the new aim, therefore new techniques were developed to achieve it. Accomplished artists such as Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo soon emerged and helped define the Renaissance.  

While the period has its origin in fourteenth-century Florence, it soon spread to other Italian city-states, such as Genoa, Milan, Venice, Bologna, and Rome, among many others. Later, the culture flooded into western Europe. Of course, there was no true nation of Italy at the time, nor an Italian language; those would come centuries later, along with the recognized territorial boundaries featured on modern maps of the peninsula. So, in referring to Italy, I do so merely to frame a historic region and period for the contemporary mind. That said, the Renaissance witnessed the revival of antiquity, wherein Latin manuscripts were copied and circulated. And, after the fall of Constantinople to the Ottoman Turks in 1453, exiles from Byzantium fled to Italy and filled the country with classical Greek literature. This literary awakening eventually spread to Europe as well. Scholars began to focus on humanism, which is what we call the humanities today—otherwise known as liberal arts. The term humanism has been used to encompass a spate of activities and ideas, but during the Renaissance, it had two important, harmonious meanings:

“First, there is social (sometimes called civic) humanism, which describes the outlook of the upper middle class in the Italian cities during the Renaissance.”

Writes Norman F. Cantor in The Civilization of the Middle Ages.

“The upper bourgeoisie, glorying in its new political power, expressed its independence by placing great emphasis on human autonomy and on the value and grandeur of the city-state. The new class imitated the French aristocracy of the thirteenth century, taking up the aristocratic education, style, and courtly life that they considered suitable to their own emancipation and to their equality with the northern aristocrats. Social humanism inspired a passionate civic patriotism, a belief that all urban resources should be applied to the defense and beautification of the republican commune.

“The second major aspect of humanism was the intellectual movement, based on Platonic philosophy, which emphasized the primacy of human values and individual creativity over feudal and ecclesiastical traditions and institutions. Humanist philosophers believed that the human mind was capable of deciding for itself without relying on traditional authority. In both its social and intellectual aspects, humanism drew strength and inspiration from the Greek and Roman classics, which taught the value of the city-state and its self-governing urban elite and upheld the critical powers of the individual human mind.”

Humanists in Italy focused on the study of Scripture using their newfound philosophy, which they mingled with notions from secular classical literature. Many humanists were dedicated Christians, yet, like the Neoplatonists and Gnostics before them, Christian humanists of the Renaissance sought to infuse their religion with pagan philosophy and mysticism. Despite these leanings, Rome—seat of the mother church—was in fact the spiritual and intellectual center for these humanists. More to the point, several popes were humanists as well, hence their full support of the arts during the Renaissance.

Humanism at the time did not merely denote the philosophy and intellectual bent of the Italian nobility, where the sole focus was the humanities as it is today; humanism also emphasized the so-called “genius of man,” and in fact praised the ability of the human mind, which was considered to be “extraordinary.” This kind of man-worship was at the heart of humanism, while its proponents looked back to the literature, language, and values of ancient Rome and Greece, as these were viewed as the twin epitomes of man’s great achievements.

What shaped the Italian Renaissance was fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Italian culture itself. The wealth of the Italian elite and the structure of society in the city-states, with their unique political systems, saw to the development of the Renaissance as a full-blown cultural movement, rather than a passing expression of ideas and art from a scant few. Europe would look to Italy as the forerunner of cultural rebirth as it emerged from the feudal despotism of the middle ages. Italy was able to do this via its vast wealth, together with the political structure of its powerful city-states. Unlike the antiquated feudal economy that was tied to land …

“By the latter part of the thirteenth century, Italy had a money economy based on trade and finance.”

Writes Norman F. Cantor.

“The late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries saw the rise of the great banking houses. The pope was the bankers’ largest single customer in Europe, since he needed an agency for the deposit and transfer of vast church funds. Money was lent in sometimes staggering sums to kings and merchants and nobles.”

In this way, the city-states of northern Italy were a collective superpower, which Europe looked to and emulated during the Renaissance. While kingdoms and principalities still existed in southern Italy, the politics of the northern Italian city-states differed from other states in Europe, in that many of those Italian governments were not under the control of kings, emperors, or longstanding oligarchs belonging to old aristocracies. Government control rotated in northern Italy, and those governments were more autonomous, with wealthy commoners among the new elite holding high office. This had been the case since the city-states gained independence in the eleventh century following the collapse of imperial power on the peninsula.

Professor Jennifer McNabb, who teaches history at Western Illinois University, adds:

“These political and economic realities helped to create a group of elites not found elsewhere in Europe: a community of citizens, drawn from the successful mercantile interests and the nobility, who, in northern Italy, began making cities rather than country estates their home. These citizens—in many of the northern states bound together by common interests, rather than divided as elsewhere in Europe, between different concerns and visions of authority in countryside and city—forged a new type of self-government: the commune. The elites in these flourishing cities seized political control of their governments. And, by the early twelfth century, the roster of communes included Lucca, Milan, Parma, Rome, Pavia, Pistoia, Verona, Bologna, Siena, Florence, Pisa, Genoa, and Venice.”

And it was in some of these powerful city-states—beginning with Florence—that the revival of antiquity emerged, which saw Italian poets like Petrarch, as well as painters, sculptors, and even architects reaching back to the classical era of pagan literature and art for inspiration. And these they interspersed with Renaissance Christianity. The renewed interest in classical knowledge was further fueled by Johann Gutenberg’s movable-type printing press, which he invented in 1439. That innovation, which revolutionized communication between peoples, would be used to even greater effect some 80 years later, during the Protestant Reformation. That would mark the beginning of the masses at last having direct access to the Scriptures in various translations.

The wealth of the Italian city-states during the Renaissance also financed the erecting of great buildings, which were adorned with art commissioned by the bourgeoisie; and that art did not magnify or exalt the Creator so much as human grandeur. Employing paint and stone, painters and sculptors sought to capture past Greek and Roman representations of human glorification, which was interrupted by the invasion of the barbarians and the coming of the Dark Ages. The Renaissance, therefore—a word that is of French origin, and which means, a new birth, or revival—was seen as a rebirth of the glories of classical antiquity. So, in a way, it was also a period of worship of the ancients. But while it was seen as a time of prosperity and great artistic achievement, it was also a time of turmoil.

During the late middle ages, political intrigue plagued the papacy, and that intrigue surmounted during the so-called Babylonian Captivity of Avignon prior to reaching its zenith in the Great Schism, wherein three rival popes claimed to be the legitimate pontiff. Italy was deeply affected by the battles for papal dominance, which dragged a great deal of Europe into the conflict and saw European republics and noble houses swinging their support from one corrupt candidate to the next. We covered this topic in episode 21 of this podcast series.

“What was to become known as the Great Schism was ended only by a series of general councils of the Church.”

Writes Alexander Lee, in his book The Ugly Renaissance.

“But even this caused massive problems. In the wake of the Schism, a group of churchmen known as conciliarists had come to believe that it was simply too dangerous to give the pope too much power. Instead, they wanted a kind of ecclesiastical parliament, convened at regular intervals, to have the final say in matters of great importance. The problem was that this was the exact opposite of what the popes wanted. After the Schism had been healed in 1417, Martin V and his successors wanted to take up the reins of power without any interference, least of all from a council filled with rustic clerics from all over Europe. Mutual loathing between the two camps threw the papacy into yet another bout of internecine warfare.”

The papacy would emerge triumphant in its war against the conciliar movement and popes would retain the supremacy in ecclesiastical matters. Despite this, a succession of popes would continue to prove corrupt, through acts of simony, nepotism, debauchery, and many other evils. Within this period of intrigue and treachery, upheaval, and the lofty Renaissance ideal the papacy would deteriorate as it moved into the Reformation era.

We’ll be back with more exciting scriptural history . . . in a moment.

[MUSICAL INTERLUDE]

We now continue with our podcast.

Among the first popes of the Renaissance to embrace the movement was Eugene IV, also known as Eugenius. During his reign, he sought to beautify and embellish Rome by inviting artists Fra Angelico and Donatello to the languishing city. Pope Eugene was also instrumental in helping to end the conciliar movement, but through forced concessions to European princes, which left the papacy relying more heavily on revenues from the Papal States. Pope Eugene IV was a nephew of a prior pope, Gregory XII, which speaks to the prevalent nepotism of the tainted pontificate. And Eugenius was himself guilty of nepotism in helping to establish quasi dynasties in the papacy. As a case in point, Thomas F. X. Noble, professor of history and chair of the Department of History at the University of Notre Dame, tells us that:

“Paul II, Pietro Barbo, was a nephew of Eugenius IV. Alexander VI, Rodrigo Borgia, was a nephew of Calixtus III. Pius III, Francesco Todeschini, was a nephew of Pius II. Julius II, Giuliano della Rovere, was a nephew of Sixtus IV. And finally, the Medici family produced two popes in this period: Leo X and Clement VII.”

To clarify, prominent Roman families did not produce more than one or two popes since power had to rotate between various noble houses. It was generally accepted that the reign of one or two popes was all that was necessary for a particular family to benefit greatly from that pope’s favoritism and bestowal of patronage to family members. Professor Noble goes on to say.

“Now another way we can look at the kind of dynastic politics of Renaissance papal Rome, Eugenius IV named six nephews cardinals. He married his nieces and nephews into some of the great families of Rome and of Italy. He made his favorite nephew, Giuliano—who later became Pope Julius II—get this—archbishop of Avignon in Bologna, bishop of Lausanne, Coutances, Viviers, Monde, Ostia, and Velletri, and also Abbot of Nonantola and Grottaferrata. This is probably the biggest case of pluralism in the entire history of the church. This one man had all these positions.”

It was the role of the cardinals to elect the pope. By naming six of his nephews to the cardinalate, Eugenius—along with successive popes who would follow suit—was able to secure power and steer the election of a future pope, thus keeping the papal throne in the family until another noble house seized power. Whoever controlled the cardinals, therefore, controlled the most powerful clerical body in Christendom.

Successive popes would follow in Eugene’s footsteps in other ways too, by commissioning established Renaissance artists and architects to not only embellish existing buildings with grand works of art, but also to erect new palaces, monuments, and churches that reflected papal grandeur, such as the Sistine Chapel. The papal library was also expanded with literature from the period. In all, vast sums—mostly culled from church revenues—were expended in this colossal undertaking, which culminated in the erection of the famed Saint Peter’s Basilica. But church funds would not be enough. To raise new streams of revenue, one pope, namely Julius II, would wage war.

“Julius wanted a nation-state of his very own.”

Says Professor McNabb.

“[A]nd to get it, he put into place many of the same initiatives that propelled monarchs elsewhere in Europe to new levels of centralization and authority. But fueling those other state-building programs were revenues. And so, the Renaissance papacy too needed to become an institution growing ever more creative in its strategies for meeting its ever-expanding financial needs. This was part of the reason Julius exercised military might in expanding papal claims to the lands of the central Italian Peninsula. The Papal States, over which the pope could exercise direct authority as secular lord, were simply needed to pay the bills.”

But Julius II was one of the later Renaissance popes. Immediately following Pope Eugenius IV was Nicholas V, who ruled from 1447 – 1455. Pope Nicholas sought to be a true Renaissance pope by dedicating most of his pontificate to trying to establish Rome as the dominant political city-state in all of Italy. More than that, he wanted Rome to act as the intellectual center of Europe itself, and to further that aim, he tried to attract the greatest living Renaissance authors and artists to his city. It was said that Nicholas V possessed the greatest personal library in all of Europe, but he was not merely a patron of the arts and literature; Nicholas was an exacting pope who did not tolerate those who opposed him. Many were executed during his reign. Yet, he is also the pope who witnessed the fall of Constantinople, and whose call for a crusade to capitalize on the consequential event was ignored. Nicholas also issued a papal bull that permitted the sitting Portuguese king to round up descendants from the tribe of Judah as slaves, as mentioned in our documentary, A History of the True Hebrews.

The successor of Nicholas V was the first of the Borgias—the Spanish noble family—to rule as pope. He took the name Calixtus III and is noted for attempting his own failed crusade against the Turks. Calixtus even sold his possessions to secure and equip a fleet for the endeavor, but the people of Europe did not back him in his cause. Nepotism ran high in the papal court of Calixtus, who appointed his nephew Rodrigo to the college of cardinals, cementing his future election as Pope Alexander VI. Calixtus is also the pope who established the custom of ringing the midday church bell, which was initially meant to remind Christians to pray for crusaders.

Following Calixtus, Pope Pius II occupied the papal throne. He ruled from 1458 – 1464, and was the final Renaissance pope to attempt church reform. Pius is singular also in the fact that he did not use his papal position to amass power or benefit family members to the extent of other Renaissance popes. Pope Pius’s attempts at reform came to nothing due to great opposition from the corrupt cardinals and other clergymen. And their corruption and sinfulness during the Renaissance was hard to disguise.

“[T]he papal court thronged with rich, powerful churchmen who were utterly devoted to greed, gluttony, and lust.”

Writes Alexander Lee.

“The magnificent halls of their palaces buzzed with every variety of sin, giving the Curia a very bad name, especially among humanists like Bartolomeo della Fonte who came to Rome to pursue their art. Vicious invectives were launched against the lifestyle of Renaissance cardinals by various learned litterateurs. Even among the ordinary people of the city, the court earned a rotten reputation, and despite the magnificence of curial palaces the very word ‘cardinal’ became a term of abuse….”

And with each succeeding pope, the corruption and sinfulness of the papal court of the Renaissance seemed to worsen. Pope Paul II, who ascended the papal throne in 1464, was an obese glutton and sodomite given to violent bouts of debauchery and drunkenness that often left him vomiting. His aim, for which he expended great wealth and attention, was to restore Rome’s pagan glory through grand building projects.  A few of his contemporaries wrote that he died of apoplexy, which was doubtless due to a life of excess.

In 1471, Sixtus IV was elevated to the papal throne after being elected by a conclave of eighteen cardinals, whom he bribed with many gifts. Noted for his famed project the Sistine Chapel, which is named after him, Pope Sixtus is also responsible for endorsing an assassination plot against the rival Medici family and dragging Italy into war for the sake of his nephews. In fact, enriching his family was a high priority for Pope Sixtus, and he appointed several family members, particularly his nephews, to the college of cardinals, which came with grants of land and other benefices.

“Since he was absolutely determined to make the comparatively obscure della Rovere one of Italy’s foremost noble families …”

Writes Alexander Lee.

“… Sixtus IV’s propensity for elevating his relatives to the Sacred College surpassed that of even his most nepotistic predecessors. As Machiavelli recorded, he was ‘a man of very base and vile condition … the first to show how much a pontiff could do and how many things formerly called errors could be hidden under pontifical authority.’ No fewer than six direct kinsmen were elevated in the space of just under seven years and accounted for almost a quarter of the cardinals present at the conclave after his death.”

Prior to being elected, the next pope in line, Innocent VIII, who ruled from 1484 – 1492, vowed to refrain from appointing more than one family member to a high ecclesiastical office. Following his election, Innocent broke his promise on the grounds that, as pope, he was now imbued with power that did not bind him to past oaths, particularly oaths he was forced to make in order to secure votes. Innocent VIII is unique in that he was the first pope to not only acknowledge his illegitimate children (which a pope was forbidden to have) but he also showered them with riches and high honors. Simony too was his order of business, as indulgences were routinely sold for profit, under the careful management of a trusted son. During the first year of his pontificate, Innocent VIII set his sights on suspected witches, and issued a papal bull that touched off a literal witch-hunt that was fueled by moral panic. Hundreds of women, who had nothing to do with witchcraft, were murdered as a result. Those suspected to be witches or who were labeled heretics were usually burned at the stake, on the misguided presumption that the bodies of those who were burned could not be resurrected in the judgment.

“After Innocent’s death, the most decadent of all of the Renaissance popes came to power, shortly after the fall of Granada in 1492.”

Says Professor McNabb.

“Spaniard Rodrigo Borgia, or—to use his regnal name—Pope Alexander VI. Alexander represents the zenith of papal self-involvement and corruption. The enhancement of the papacy wasn’t his primary drive. The ultimate object of his concern was his own family. Alexander had no interest in pretending to celibacy….”

The pope’s many concubines, who were the legal wives of men serving in his court, bore him several children whom he claimed openly without shame. Cesare Borgia, the most well-known of his illegitimate children, was appointed to the cardinalate and was in fact the first person to resign. Pope Alexander placed Cesare in command of the papal army and, after allying with the French, Cesare engaged in war to recapture papal states in Central Italy, one of which was carved out as his own for a brief period. Alexander VI, whose pontificate was occupied with every manner of sin, died suddenly, and his son, Cesare suffered the same fate not long after. A new pope was elected therefore, Pius III, who was set on reforming the church and bringing peace to Italy. But he would be pope for a mere twenty-six days before death came calling.

“… Giuliano della Rovere was one of the strongest personalities that ever reached the papal chair….”

Writes Will Durant in his book The Renaissance, in speaking of our next pope in line, that being Julius II.

“[T]his is the man who for a decade kept Italy in war and turmoil, freed it from foreign armies, tore down the old St. Peter’s, brought Bramante and a hundred other artists to Rome, discovered, developed, and directed Michelangelo and Raphael, and through them gave to the world a new St. Peter’s and the Sistine Chapel ceiling, and the stanze of the Vatican.… [H]e reached the cardinalate at twenty-seven, and fumed and fretted in it for thirty-three years before being promoted to what had long seemed to him his manifest due.”

That of being pope. Yet the regnal name he chose linked him not to a deceased Christian or Biblical figure as with other popes, but to a Roman pagan: Julius Caesar. And upon assuming the papal chair, Will Durant writes that …

“He paid no more regard to his vow of celibacy than most of his colleagues…. Julius was stern, Jovian, passionate, impatient, readily moved to anger, passing from one fight to another, never really happy except at war…. [T]he sexagenarian pope became a soldier, more at ease in military garb than in pontifical robes, loving camps and besieging towns, having guns pointed and assaults delivered under his commanding eyes.”

In 1513, however, death would claim Julius and end his many pursuits. The pope who succeeded him was Leo X, a member of the powerful Medici family. During his pontificate, Leo would be consumed with the arts, to the neglect of his papal duties. So consumed was he in fact that he sought to complete the famed St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome, which he partially financed by selling indulgences. This particular sin would provoke the protest of Martin Luther. Thus, Leo X would occupy the papal chair as the glories of the Renaissance waned and the Protestant Reformation erupted around him.

That wraps it up for this episode of Churchianity: Two Thousand Years of Leaven. A production of Kingdom Preppers.org, this episode was written, produced, and hosted by yours truly, Kingdom Prepper. All praise, honor, and glory are due to my boss, Yah Elohim, and to his right hand, Yahushua HaMashiach. You can access the transcript for this episode on our website. Yah willing, our history will continue in the next podcast. Shalom.

Keywords: Johann Gutenberg, Petrarch, humanism, liberal arts, city-states, Renaissance, despotism, nepotism, Pope Julius II, Giuliano della Rovere, Medici, Borgia, papal court, churchianity, two thousand years of leaven, history of Christianity, church history, Hebrew history, kp, kingdom preppers