Friday, December 16, 2016

#neighborology and the other side of the Anabaptists || John Pesebre


While many in recent memory, especially progressivist, postmodern evangelicals have attempted to whip on Protestantism with a moral argument such as this one, these arguments serve as propaganda and characterizations that are ill-informed or even motivated to show the entire picture.

The old Anabaptists were not your typical helpless old widow in one corner.

One of them Thomas Muntzer wrote to Martin Luther, "I would like to smell your frying carcass." Dr. Peter Hammond writes,
"In 1525, Muntzer was successful in rousing up many of the peasants of central Germany in the bloody, so-called Peasants Revolt, which it should be noted attracted several nobles to his side. "Let your swords be ever-warm with blood!" Muntzer exhorted his faithful followers. Muntzer's army of Anabaptists struck terror throughout the countryside, robbing, burning and destroying the property of the faithful, killing many thousands."

In the _Socialist Phenomenon_, Igor Shaferavich writes,
"Armed Anabaptists broke into houses and drove out everyone who was unwilling to accept second baptism. Winter was drawing to a close; it was a stormy day and wet snow was falling. An eyewitness account describes crowds of expelled citizens walking through the knee-deep snow. They had not been allowed even to take warm clothing with them. Women carrying children in their arms, old men leaning on staffs. At the city gate they were robbed once more."

So if ever you would see people such as those belonging to the postmodern wing of Philippine evangelicalism like #neighborology issue a moral argument such as this one, ask him, "Are you presenting the entire picture or are you characterizing based on selective information?"

Also, if one would allege that the Anabaptist deaths were carried out by Protestants, one would have to account why many of them perished under King Ferdinand of Austria who was a Holy Roman Emperor.

In his book Mennonites in Europe (Amazon), John Horsch writes,
[Ferdinand] commissioned a company of executioners to root out the Anabaptist faith in his lands. Those who were overtaken in the highways of fields were killed with the sword, others were dragged out of their houses and hanged on the door posts. Most of them had gone into hiding in the woods and mountains. In a forest near Lengbach seventeen were put to death. 
In the province of Swabia, in South Germany, four hundred mounted soldiers were, in 1528, sent out to put to death all Anabaptists on whom they could lay hands. Somewhat later the number of soldiers so commissioned was increased to eight hundred, and then to one thousand.
In various provinces an imperial provost marshal by the name of Berthold Aichele, with his assistants, put many Anabaptists to death. On Christmas day, 1531, he drove seventeen men and women into a farmhouse in Württemberg and burned the building together with the inmates. 
Three hundred and fifty Anabaptists were executed in the Palatinate before the year 1530.  
At Ensisheim, "the slaughterhouse of Alsace," as it was called, six hundred were killed within a few years. 
Within six weeks thirty-seven were burned, drowned, or beheaded at Linz, in Austria. 
In the town of Kitzbüchl in the Tyrol, sixty-eight were executed in one year.  
Two hundred and ten or more, were burned in the valley of the Inn River. 
The number of Anabaptist martyrs in the Tyrol and Görz, was estimated at one thousand at the end of the year 1531.

for more information on this go to "Were Anabaptists Persecuted for Their Faith" by Dr. William Hammond

No comments:

Post a Comment

Sagot sa Probability na Bersyon ng Problem of Evil, Part 2 | John Ricafrente Pesebre

This is now part 2 of our our response to the probability version of the problem of evil na nagsasabi: Nagpapatunay daw po ang ating mga kar...