holocaust

PROTESTANT REFORMATION = HOLOCAUST?

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Really? If Hitler wasn't in Hell, methinks (to use one of Spurgeon's Anglo Saxon words) that I can hear the Little Corporal laugh. I had tweeted Parton to clarify what "the reformation" means. As yet I have no direct reply, but he has seen and tweeted about  the Stuff Fundlies Like article and hasn't clarified anything to make us suppose that he refers to nothing less than the Protestant Reformation. Whoever schooled him in Church History is either to blame or must be wondering how someone who sat under him could tweet such a thing.

Here's my few thoughts on his thesis i.e. that the Reformation has done as much damage to the Church as the holocaust to the Jewish people. 

1) This man's website statement re: the King James Bible is as follows:  

I believe that the 66 books that comprise the King James Version Bible are the verbally inspired Word of God, inerrant and infallible, and the guide and final authority in matters of faith and day to day life, interpreted by the Holy Spirit to each individual believer 

Where did Evangelist Parton get this "King James Version Bible" (his description)? From God? Doubtless so, but God used means, did He not? The commonly used title of this version gives us a clue. To cut to the chase, we got our KJV (under God) from a group of Protestant and Calvinist scholars who met (at King James wish) between 1604-1611. If Protestants translate the Bible from the Hebrew and Greek, then you have a Protestant translation of the Bible. By the same rule, if the IFB's do something similar next year, then we will have an IFB translation of the word of God. So the same rule stands for all. Under God, we have a Reformation Protestant version, that bears some of the hallmarks of the Anglican translators who spent several years in its translation. As far as the version goes, it is the product (if Parton be right) of the ecclesiastical equivalent of the murder and butcher of six million Jews. Wow! Even repeating his words here (and that to repudiate and abominate them completely) puts a knot in my stomach.

2) I am unsure of what camp of #IFB this man comes from. I have done battle with not a few on Twitter. I have seen the "Protestants are daughters of the Whore of Babylonian Whore" propagators at work. OTOH, I have seen where men like Jack Hyles (I'm not a fan) could happily preach:

 "The Presbyterian seminaries say, "The Bible is not the Word of God," but John Calvin believed it, and they had the fire! John Knox and others believed it" 

I don't know whether this man has a library or not when he prepares his sermons. I wonder what books are in it if he does? If he has the standard authors that grace the libraries of all Christians in general, then he will have books that breathe the very air of the said Protestant Reformation and its proud sucessors. I capture the thought here.  

This man is a million miles away in his whole thought pattern from other Non Calvinist Baptist or Baptist types like BH Carroll, John R Rice, HA Ironside, AW Tozer, who would likewse abominate his words. 

3) Maybe it hasn't even crossed Parton's mind that it might possibly be wrong on this one. And I don't mean merely the extent to which he pours out his obvious hatred. (BTW: I don't use the word hatred lightly. I am not that type of person who reaches for it the first time I meet disagreement but it really is warranted in this case.) The fact that he despises the Reformation at all has consequences. Let us suppose (as the names linked to above obviously do) that the Reformation was, by and large, a great move of God. John R Rice was prepared to write:

"God raised up Luther, Calvin and others and turned literally millions of people to personal faith in Christ and to a knowledge of salvation by faith, in Germany, the Scandinavian countries, Scotland and England, and parts of many other countries."

Rice looked at the Protestant Reformation and could hear the singing of literally millions of redeemed souls. Parton looks at the same period in the history of the church of Jesus Christ and hears the curses of SS guards and the screams of 6,000,000 gassed Jews. Again, suppose Parton is wrong? Suppose God took him as representative of His people on earth? Why would God send us a great revival as many of us hope and pray for if a previous one is so despised? Does this Evangelist preach these things round the places where he goes? Is that helping the cause of God and truth? 

4) Last point. Relatively minor compared to previous ones, but important nevertheless. The Holocaust was such a crime that to liken anything to it invariably detracts from it.  There are many other ways to express your disagreement with some doctrines than to invoke the horrors of Treblinka and Auschwitz.  Parton's planned attack on the godly men who preached Christ and whose labours brought us (under God) the Wycliffe, Tyndale, Geneva and ultimately the King James Versions of the Bible is really a kind of (unplanned) attack on the skeletal victims and survivors of the Nazi death camps. He has, IMO, managed to downgrade the seriousness of those crimes for which Nuremberg Trials were set up so long ago and where the criminals who masterminded such genocide were justly punished. 

I'm glad this post is over.  It has brought me no pleasure to write it, but really to read such things as Parton wrote above demands that you raise your voice in protest.

Lest the LORD see it, and it displease him... 

 DEDICATING THIS POST TO ALL REFORMATION LOVERS EVERYWHERE 

THE END 

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