Western civilization on the table

“If Peter stood right here today, the ‘first pope,’ he would tell you to follow Paul, not him. That’s how you know any church built on Peter is a hoax, because they don’t follow what Peter tells you. Try that one on for size sometime.”—Richard Jordan

From today’s news: “Pope Leo fought back tears during the Mass when he was handed the ring that formally marked the beginning of his papacy.

“The pontiff appeared to choke up as Cardinal Luis Tagle slipped the Fisherman’s Ring onto his finger before the estimated 250,000-strong crowd gathered in the Vatican’s St Peter’s Square.

“The ring, which becomes Leo’s official seal, harks back to Jesus’ call to the apostle Peter to cast his fishing nets. The ring authenticates the Pope’s role as the leader of 1.4 billion Catholics worldwide and was named in honor of Saint Peter, the first pope, who was a fisherman by trade.”

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We live in an era where this whole issue of the Bible being in the language and the hands of common people is on the table, warns Jordan.

The great genius of putting the Word of God in the hands of the people is what produced Western civilization, but that’s all pooh-poohed today. When you hear people talk about how they hate America, it’s Western civilization that they’re really talking about.

Western civilization is really the spiritual and economic and social and cultural witness to the freedom that the Word of God and the gospel of grace bring to people.

No other religious concept is built on freedom. We have a wonderful song in the book, “Glorius Freedom.” We love to sing that. Why? There’s the other song: “Stand fast in the LIBERTY where Christ hath set you FREE.”

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I’ve tried to make the point that the 500 years of influence of the Protestant Reformation, really the Protestant Revolt—only Catholicism thinks of it as a reformation--is over.

It wasn’t long after that thing got going with Martin Luther that it was clear they weren’t going to reform anything; they were going to revolt against, and what the Protestant Revolt did was it broke the back of the power of the Roman Church and really caused the Reformation to be a revolution.

The social, economic, spiritual impact on literature, culture, every part of life—all of what we call Western civilization came about as a result of the Protestant Revolt and that cycle has now really come to an end.

What was a revolt that had a blazing history has smoldered out into nothing. We’re going to live now, going forward, in the absence of what for 500 years controlled Western history.