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| Valleskey pleaded for everyone to spoil the Egyptians, to grow figs on thistles. Behold! the fruits of that growth program - they are prickly but sterile. |
Why has Lutherdom welcomed the influence of Calvinism, so much like turning away from a home-cooked banquet to eat a Swanson TV Dinner? (Long ago, Bill Clinton bought the Swanson House in Fayetteville, Ark, for his lovely wife. Swanson was the inventor of TV dinners.)
Historically, the Prussian Union forced a merger of Lutherans and Calvinists, with Calvinism winning the doctrinal battle.
LCMS-WELS propagandists would like everyone to believe they formed their sects as a protest against this Calvinist-Lutheran union, but the LCMS-WELsians were just the opposite - rationalistic Pietists glowing from the influence of Halle - their Mecca, their Bethlehem, their spotless Paradise before the Fall.
Anyone can see this influence in each issue of Calvinist News, misnamed Christian News, nee Lutheran News.
Hardly anything reflects Biblical, Lutheran doctrine in CN. As I wrote earlier, using control-f to locate
- Justification by Faith (found in the Bible, unlike Objective Justification),
- Efficacy of the Word (an entire word-group in the New Testament), or
- The Means of Grace (a frequent Book of Concord term)
will be almost fruitless.
The Preus Crime Family found it useful to use the Calvinist Battle for the Bible to unite Missourians and see their OJ.
Fundamentalism was not the backwoods, moonshine-inspired, tongue-speaking movement of illiterates, but a series of Calvinist pamphlets sponsored by a wealthy Calvinist.
The project was initially conceived in 1909 by California businessman Lyman Stewart, the founder of Union Oil and a devout Presbyterian and dispensationalist. He and his brother Milton anonymously provided funds for composing, printing, and distributing the publication. The project had three successive editors: A. C. Dixon, Louis Meyer, and Reuben Archer Torrey. The essays were written by sixty-four different authors, representing most of the major Protestant Christian denominations...
The volumes defended orthodox Protestant beliefs and attacked higher criticism, liberal theology, Roman Catholicism (called Romanism by many Protestants of the time), socialism, modernism, atheism, Christian Science, Mormonism, Millennial Dawn (whose members were sometimes known as Russellites, but which later adopted the name Jehovah's Witnesses), spiritualism, and evolutionism.
Calvinism relies on rationalism to prove its dogmas, which is appealing to Lutherans untrained in the efficacy of the Word. The entire "science proves Creation" business is a racket where the obvious revelation of God is replaced by a "proof" they can see and touch.
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| Calvinist cat - "Mission accomplished." |
