INDEED.
SAD, THOUGH.
Folks tend to pigeon hole others hereon rather harshly because of various beliefs and posting styles.
Some of us tend to collect more personal attacks than reasonable rational meaty replies.
I’m used to folks having little to say in response to my assertions. People have responded to me with speechlessness more or less all my life in a variety of situations. LOL.
With the RC’s it seems to be !!!!TRADITION!!!! to respond with a personal assault vs even more idiotic blather.
With the REPLACEMENTARIANS . . . sometimes I wonder who’s worse at such games—them or the RC’s. Sigh.
I don’t really have any apology for writing fiercely about the outrageous blasphemous assaults on The Bible and God’s priorities. SOMEBODY needs to stand up and let loose about how the cow ate the cabbage on such important and outrageous examples of doctrines of demons and from hell.
You do such an excellent job. And, you get to be so mild mannered in the process! Congrats!
I’ve been wondering if some of the shrillness is because of
1. Conviction of Holy Spirit is being turned up somehow.
2. Folks are realizing that their cosmologies, constructions on reality and other theological notions just don’t hold as much water as they have long thought.
and/or
3. The END TIMES STUFF in daily life is parallelling THE BIBLE SOOOOO CLOSELY—and increasingly so—it’s starting to rattle folks.
In any case, they haven’t seen anything yet.
I have just posted a new thread on Jim Tetlow’s
101 Last Days Prophecies
here:
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-religion/2815836/posts
Thanks tons for all you do for the Kingdom, Dear Sister in Christ.
May He make your body every bit whole . . . may ever moment of struggle and suffering bring rich dividends to you here and to your Heavenly account.
Amen.
Martin Luther’s Preface to the Revelation of St. John (1522)
About this Book of the Revelation of John, I leave everyone free to hold his own opinions. I would not have anyone bound to my opinion or judgment. I say what I feel. I miss more than one thing in this book, and it makes me consider it to be neither apostolic nor prophetic.
First and foremost, the apostles do not deal with visions, but prophesy in clear and plain words, as do Peter and Paul, and Christ in the gospel. For it befits the apostolic office to speak clearly of Christ and his deeds, without images and visions. Moreover there is no prophet in the Old Testament, to say nothing of the New, who deals so exclusively with visions and images. For myself, I think it approximates the Fourth Book of Esdras; I can in no way detect that the Holy Spirit produced it.
Moreover he seems to me to be going much too far when he commends his own book so highly [Revelation 22]—indeed, more than any of the other sacred books do, though they are much more important—and threatens that if anyone takes away anything from it, God will take away from him, etc. Again, they are supposed to be blessed who keep what is written in this book; and yet no one knows what that is, to say nothing of keeping it. This is just the same as if we did not have the book at all. And there are many far better books available for us to keep.
Many of the fathers also rejected this book a long time ago; although St. Jerome, to be sure, refers to it in exalted terms and says that it is above all praise and that there are as many mysteries in it as words. Still, Jerome cannot prove this at all, and his praise at numerous places is too generous.
Finally, let everyone think of it as his own spirit leads him. My spirit cannot accommodate itself to this book. For me this is reason enough not to think highly of it: Christ is neither taught nor known in it. But to teach Christ, this is the thing which an apostle is bound above all else to do; as Christ says in Acts 1[:8], “You shall be my witnesses.” Therefore I stick to the books which present Christ to me clearly and purely.
The 1522 “Preface to the Revelation of St. John” in Luther’s translation of the New Testament. Pages 398-399 in Luther’s Works Volume 35: Word and Sacrament I (ed. E. Theodore Bachmann; Philadelphia: Fortress, 1960).