JANUARY 8 "PROTESTANTISM VS. CATHOLICISM?"

One of Wycliffe’s followers, John Hus, actively promoted Wycliffe’s ideas: that people should be permitted to read the Bible in their own language, and they should oppose the tyranny of the Roman church that threatened anyone possessing a non-Latin Bible with execution. Hus was burned at the stake in~1415, with Wycliffe’s manuscript Bibles used as kindling for the fire. The last words of John Hus were that, “in 100 years, God will raise up a man whose calls for reform cannot be suppressed.” Almost exactly 100 years later, in 1517, Martin Luther nailed his famous 95 Theses of Contention (a list of 95 issues of heretical theology and crimes of the Roman Catholic Church) into the church door at Wittenberg. The prophecy of Hus had come true! Martin Luther went on to be the first person to translate and publish the Bible in the commonly-spoken dialect of the German people; a translation more appealing than previous German Biblical translations. Foxe’s Book of Martyrs records that in that same year, 1517, seven people were burned at the stake by the Roman Catholic Church for the crime of teaching their children to say the Lord’s Prayer in English rather than Latin. Today we hear the cry, the call to Ecumenical Teachings that the Catholic and Protestants Churches all be one, that we are all really the same in theology and faith.  This is an outcry from the blood of the those that were martyred in the “Protestant Reformation”. This is an outcry from the blood and sacrifice of John Hus, John Wycliffe, William Tyndale and Martin Luther who gave up their lives to lead us out of the false teachings of the Catholic Church and many burned at the stake for doing so, if not exiled to other countries. The worse ignorance in man can be the ignorance of History, because we know that the man who is ignorant or forgetful of his history, is likely to error of fall into the same traps as his predecessors.