Martin Luther #2 (His Teaching)

Welcome again everybody to greatbiblereset.com this we believe is our only hope for defeating the great economic reset of the globalist cloche swap. We need a covenant renewal because God deals with mankind by covenant both individually and corporate and we look in the Old Testament there's basically two kinds of covenant first we observe a series of covenants that God makes with man that do not supersede each other but rather they expand on each other something like a flower blossom that gradually opens its unfolding petals. We've got the Adamic covenant, the Noahic covenant, the Abramic covenant, the Mosaic covenant and the Davidic covenant and then second we've got a series of man-initiated renewals of the covenant that we see at various points of repentance and return to the law of God or law of nations as it was originally given to Moses by God on Mount Sinai and especially as it's summarized in Exodus 20 through 24, Exodus 20 being the Ten Commandments followed by three chapters of the ordinances that define the Ten Commandments. Now examples of these second kind of covenant are 2 Kings 23.2 where it says the king stood by the pillar, he made a covenant before the Lord to walk after the Lord to keep his commandments and testimonies and statutes with all his heart and all his soul and the people stood to the covenant. Then another example is Nehemiah 11.29 that you can check out and there's many others but these national covenants are typically ignored by evangelical pastors and theologians and even reformed covenant theologians but it's very very important I believe at this point in our history and this is what America desperately needs at this point when the judgment of God rests so heavily on our nation but the problem is most Americans including American Christians believe that we are innocent victims of an elite band of globalist conspirators a new world order cabal that has stolen the privileges that belong to us by some kind of inalienable right and all we gotta do is reassert these rights and get enough people informed and return to the original intent of the US Constitution and everything will be fine because we outnumber these globalists and folks I believe that this is a deadly trap that we've fallen into. It's a fatal error that dismisses the critical ingredient of repentance and covenant commitment before God that is our only defense. Returning to the example of Daniel 7 Daniel confessed both the sins of the nation and his own sins. We've got to come before God with an attitude of repentance and abandon this spirit of American individualism and independence. American Christians are blind to the extent to which we have made an idol of the US Constitution. We've excused the obvious fact that the Constitution elevates itself above the higher law of God by omission and brazenly replaces the governing authority of God with the humanistic shibboleth of we the people it may have a Republican skeleton but it's got a humanist heart that controls it. The question of why the Roman Catholic Church had grown so corrupt prior to Luther's Reformation is not an easy one to answer. It's complicated it's well known that Luther objected to the idea of salvation for sale in the indulgences which were being hawked by the monk Tetzel in Germany and that was a primary reason that Luther and his students burned the Pope's writ of excommunication. As we have seen the Church of the Renaissance had grown corrupt with the Pope constrained to raise money by selling indulgences to fund extravagant building projects in Vatican City. Martin Luther, a German monk, labored under this system of works righteousness until God graciously opened his spiritual eyes to the truth of Romans 117, the just shall live by faith. And armed with the assurance of his salvation Luther then nailed his famous 95 thesis to the door of the Wittenberg Chapel. But how did they get to that point? Because Luther also burned a copy of the canon law which was the law of the church that had developed from the Justinian code in the universities of the papal revolution some 500 years earlier. Its counterpart in the civil sphere was a common law of England based primarily on the old German folklore of Germany and Normandy. The common law was summarized in Glanville's treatise of the laws and customs of the kingdom of England in 1187 and the canon law was summarized in a much more elegant Gratian's concordance of discordant canons. Both had developed with only passing reference to the biblical law following the papal revolution. And this was the tragedy of Canossa. Prior to the papal revolution of 1075 to 1122 church and state had existed as one unified Christendom with the king at its head. In a struggle to free the church from the yoke of state control Pope Hildebrand went too far by insisting on church control over the state. He wanted to turn the tables completely. And this failure to adopt a biblical church-state balance of essential separation and equality under God's law had devastating repercussions because after Canossa, church and state went their separate ways into 50 years of warfare with both of them essentially divorced from the law of God. This was aggravated and reinforced by the new approach to scripture that was initiated by Saint Anselm. Prior to the papal revolution the Bible was for the most part the unquestioned authority over all of life. And this is referred to as Christendom of the early Middle Ages also known as the early feudal period which had more of a local structure. There was legal order but no formal legal system with law schools extensively written law codes or legal professionals that kind of thing. After Canossa and during this 50-year investiture struggle of warfare from 1075 to 1122 the church became in effect a secular government. It controlled a large swath of land in northeast Italy known as the Papal States. It hired mercenary troops under Roger II of southern Italy to fight its battle against the Holy Roman Empire. The first crusade of 1195 was another part of this foreign policy of military adventurism. So what was it about the canon law that got Luther so upset? Well it was this new legal system encoded in Gratian's concordance of discordant canons of 1114 that developed in the Bologna Law School apart from the Bible out of the Justinian the old Justinian Roman code to corrupt both church and state. It was based on many written sources in addition to the Bible including enacted positive law, customary law, church law, human law and above all that Justinian Roman law all integrated by fallen human reason and conscience to produce so-called natural law. Customary and church law that did not conform to this natural law of reason and conscience was gradually weeded out. And so these canonists combined the Greek capacity for philosophy and logic with the Roman capacity for law. And this created a sophisticated legal science in the West apart from or in addition to the perfect law of God's liberty because anything other than a perfect justice of God's law is by definition injustice and thus an unlawful use of law as noted in First Timothy chapter 1 verses 8-12 where it says we know that the law is good if anyone uses it lawfully and it goes on to make a list of the lawful uses of God's law in the civil sphere. And so the church was seduced into following this ancient era of Omri and Ahab in which the statutes of Omri and all the works of the house of Ahab are observed and in their devices you walk therefore I will give you up, therefore I will give you up for destruction says God in Micah 6.16. And so we have all these devices that have been added during this this era apart from the simple law of God. It's so simple that even children were required to listen to it and could understand it. Some were wise enough to forbid the church, some kings were wise enough to forbid the church from owning or inheriting property in accordance with God's prohibition in the Pentateuch. But the scholastics and the universities invented various legal devices to skirt around these prohibitions, things like trusts and corporations and foundations and things like that. So Luther denounced the concept of a visible corporate church united by law and that's why he burned the books of the canon law to symbolize his belief that the true church can have no legal character whatsoever that it is an invisible communion of the faithful. The Babylonian, what is known as the Babylonian captivity of the church began when Pope Boniface VIII issued a papal bull or a formal commandment in 1303 to the effect that all kings had to acknowledge his authority over even their own kingdoms, a challenge that he issued in response to the to the taxes that the kings livid on church property. So in this he repeated the error of Pope Hildebrand in 1075 by refusing to acknowledge an essential equality or partnership of church and state both accountable to God's law while working together in partnership to lead the culture into obedience and blessing. But Luther threw the baby out with the bathwater to use a cliche by failing to hold the magistrate fully accountable to the law of God. Natural law and equity have value for Luther primarily in order to accomplish a number of specific social purposes such as maintaining public peace and order so that justice may be secure. According to Thomas Pearson in the Journal of Lutheran Ethics quote, and this is a quote, Luther treats natural law as a manifestation of human affective states in the mind, implemented in us by creation to which mosaic law must conform if the latter is to be authoritative in Christian life. End of quote. Well that's a huge problem because Luther fell victim at that point in the civil realm to the very epistemology or theory of knowledge that he was battling in the realm of soteriology or salvation. He failed to apply sola scriptura consistently. And in America this has created a swath of socialism in a tier of northern states from New York to Minnesota to Washington state. So it's a huge problem that's worked itself out in history and we'll explore that in more detail tomorrow. It's been called the two kingdom perspective and it's poisoned Lutheran social theory to the present day paved the way for radical biblical criticism in the 19th century Germany and national socialism in the 20th century. Where the lordship of Christ is allegedly denied the brutal lordship of the man must eventually move in to fill that vacuum. In the words of the great legal theorist Harold Berman Again a quote, this Lutheran skepticism made possible the emergence of a theory of law legal positivism which treats the law of the state as morally neutral a means and not an end, a device for manifesting the policy of the sovereign and for securing obedience to it. End of quote from Law and Revolution page 29. Well thank you for being here today. You can learn more about this in Keys to the Classics, A History of the Decline and Fall of Western Civilization my book at kingswayclassicalacademy.com bookstore where 15% of your purchases fund scholarships for low-income students and also the 60-day longevity store at boomers-alive.com So come back tomorrow, same time, and we'll be looking at Martin Luther's teaching in more detail. you