Needed: A New Way to Meet #1: History of Church Meetings – Why Do We Meet This Way?

Have you ever watched or seen a map of where the Reformation took place? Well, take that map, flip it over, and compare it with the Roman Empire, and it will be almost identical. Everything outside the Roman Empire became Protestant. Everything within the Roman Empire stayed Roman Catholic. Folks, you’ve got cultural problems here. This is the difference between the barbarians and the Latins. Wherever you have a mixture of the barbarians and the Latins, you will invariably have a place where the Protestants and the Catholics are either fighting one another or learning how to live compatibly. Belgium is a perfect example. Northern Belgium, Dutch breed. Southern Belgium, Latin breed; cut right through the middle. Northern Switzerland is Germanic. A little bit of the French Switzerland gets free. They’re faced with thousands of very big, empty cathedrals. They’re turning out theological papers by the hundreds.

First, please understand that the Reformation was primarily theological. These thinking men, these professors of theology, were thinking in terms of the Roman Catholic Church being corrupt, and we have got to show what the proper teachings of the New Testament are and what the proper teachings of classical Aristotelian dialectics really would show of the New Testament. A theological philosophy. A philosophical theology. These men, like Erasmus, who learned Greek from the Arabs or from Renaissance influence, are titanic theologians and philosophers with rich philosophical backgrounds, and they are turning out what is primarily intended for the head. Intellectualism…and it’s still just a few people.

Luther could hardly comprehend the peasant, and the peasants made up most of the people. You know he came out against the peasant revolt. It never got down among the people. That later spread among the Germanic people through culture, not conversion. They developed a new culture. People came over from England to the wilderness, and a new culture was born. Martin Luther created a new theology and a new way of worship, and a new culture began to be born. Culture took care of evangelism, not so much the gospel.

Now, these are hard facts to face. The people are living in darkness. They are not well educated. Superstition is rampant. Well, the Reformation is going on at the intellectual level, and man alive, we have an intellect to deal with. I would say the two greatest minds of the Western world that I’ve ever heard of, post-Christian minds that I’ve ever heard of, would be Leonardo da Vinci, and you want to try to fill in the other blank? This is my personal opinion. Thomas Aquinas. I’ll make three blanks there. Fill in another one. You’re right. Absolutely.

You want to try to fill in the third one? Got to be one of the most brilliant minds that ever existed. I’ll give you a hint. It’s not Martin Luther, although he was brilliant. John Calvin. I suppose the only man who ever explained everything.  Calvin’s Institutes stand as one of the great wonders of the world. Don’t think that changed northern Switzerland or western Switzerland. It did not. That was written for the theologically minded people, those who could read and write, and that was a very minor group of people.

Now, you may not like my interpretation of history, but I can back it up to the hilt. This is a theological, an intellectual movement. Now, I want to tell you something else. They didn’t have you and me in mind. They couldn’t conceptualize us any more than you can conceptualize the people living 500 years from now. Who knows that I might say something today that will start a tradition people will never turn loose for the next thousand years? I can’t believe that’s happening today. I couldn’t, but John Calvin was made a hero. Luther was made a hero, and Zwingli was made a hero.

Go to Zurich, Switzerland, and see where Zwingli preached. They have a nice, beautiful velvet rope keeping you out of his pulpit. I was in there one day when no one was present, but my wife and I stepped over the rope. I walked up into his pulpit and stood there. As I stood there, I recognized once more that he was part of a world that should not have been frozen in time and given to you, to me, and to all of Christendom. But it was.

Luther gave us the pulpit. Luther gave us a pastor. Luther gave us the Protestant funeral. I’ll eat this entire book if you can find a Christian funeral in the New Testament.  There’s no Christian funeral. No one goes out and visits old ladies. No one prays over a gladiator contest. Nobody’s mounting a pulpit to preach at 11 a.m. on Sunday. All these traditions came out of Wittenberg, Germany, around 1540 A.D. You tell me what’s wrong with the Christian faith. Where is the root problem of the Christian faith? That those things never get questioned.

You tell me what’s wrong with you and me living almost in the twenty-first century, with people going to the moon and sending objects to Mars, who will stand in the midst of traditions that have nothing to do with Scripture and institutionalize them forever. Tell me why we will walk into a church building, never wondering where it came from.  Tell me why sending our children to Sunday school is sacrosanct. Tell me why we have Greco-Roman orations delivered to us today in the tradition of Diocletian and John Chrysostom on Sunday morning, in the name of preaching the word of God. That is Roman Greek rhetoric, built on the concepts, teachings, and science of Greek-Roman oratory, with nothing to do with the church of the living God. You tell me why we’re still having costumed clergymen 500 years after the Reformation.

I’m not asking you why we’re doing it; I’m asking you why you and I never think about it. My question is not about the problems. My question is: why do we walk into the church and accept it all? If you ask the Baptist why he’s doing this, he’ll turn and look at you and say, “The Bible says, ‘forsake not the assembling of yourselves together.’” If you took that verse away from the Baptist, if the guy in Hebrews had never written that thing, the Baptist church would probably never exist.

These men were used to prayer books; they were struggling to break free, but please understand, they are reforming the Catholic Church. They are not provoking a revolution. A man named Conrad Gable wanted a revolution. He died at 29, I believe, maybe 27. Everyone in the Anabaptist movement of northern Switzerland died horrible deaths, with one or two exceptions, most of them before they ever saw their 40th birthday. They were the Radical Reformation. They wanted a revolution. They wanted a total break and to start all over again…and they did not get it.

Probably the largest number of Christians in the history of the Christian church, outside the organized church, were in the period right after the Reformation. Those people were summarily killed in a slaughter that has been estimated at something like five million…and mostly by Protestants, that is correct, although the Catholics were in there helping. I read the original documents of a man who has a diary. He rode from someplace through Holland; it was a trip of several hundred miles, I believe – I may be incorrect in the distance of it. He said he never saw a tree, but what it had was the dead body of an Anabaptist hanging from it. It’s funny, I’ve read that, but I have never seen it in a history book, and I’ve wondered why historians have so neglected the recording of that slaughter. Again, how can we get so attached to our traditions? It’s unbelievable. We are attached to them. I hope that I can show you just how attached you are to them.