Qoheleth and the Quester: Thy Will (to Power) Be Done, Part 4

Written by Bert Montgomery

Friday, 07 May 2010 06:33

Introduction: The following is PART FOUR in a six part serial. To read the first three installments, follow the links at the end of this story.

When we last saw our Quester, he had just barely escaped death in a riot between the Protestants and Catholics outside of Pennsylvania in what was – literally – a Battle for the Bible.

Jim takes me to other places and introduces me to all kinds of people. Ulrich Zwingli. John Calvin. Erasmus.

I hear how the Reformation becomes an endless series of divisions and divisions within divisions within further divisions. I watch as Martin Luther's hope for Church becomes countless Protestant movements that are still splitting and fracturing all over the place today.

Jim “pipe-smokes” us back in time to the German town of Münster in the year 1534. I witness Catholics and Lutherans stop slaughtering each other long enough join forces and slaughter renegade Anabaptists who had first marched into Münster and slaughtered Catholics and Lutherans because the Catholics and Lutherans were first persecuting and slaughtering Anabaptists.

He takes me to England and shows me the conflicts between Catholics and Protestants every time a new monarch takes the throne. We watch the Wesleys attempt to renew the spirit within the Anglican Church, a movement which eventually becomes the Methodists.

We sit in hostile American meetings of Presbyterians and Baptists as they each split internally over slavery. We “smoke” into El Salvador and note the tensions between local Catholic priests and nuns, who work on behalf of the peasant people, and the Catholic officials, who buddy up with the violently oppressive and politically corrupt regime.

He takes me back to the fundamentalist/moderate feuding at the 1985 Southern Baptist Convention in Dallas, Texas, which amounted to brutal assassinations and molotov-cocktails being thrown … well, brutal character assassinations and molotov-cocktails in the bureaucratic form of career annihilations.

I break down. I've had all I can take.

“Where, pray tell, is the purpose and meaning in all of this? Voldemort . . . Nietzsche . . . Are they right after all? Is there no God? No good nor evil? Is there really only power and those too weak to seek it? All of this . . . Just inside ‘the Church’ . . . Take me back home! Just let me go home!”

“No. There is one more stop we must make” Jim answers assuredly. “Come along now. This’ll be fun, I promise!”

I surrender to the pipe smoke and am carried away.

Photo Credit

***********

The Quester's Odyssey continues next week with …
Part V – “Religious Laity of the World, Unite!”
in which we might hear Karl Marx say,“I'd like one glazed and two chocolate eclairs, please.”

Catch up on the first three installments here:

I – The Nature of the Quest

II – The Protestor in the Pub

III – Rioting for Jesus

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