mistress of the vatican.pdf - End Time Deception

Eleanor Herman
tions of heresy. The cardinal chairman of this congregation had a prison
in the basement of his palace where he incarcerated unabashed heretics.
Heresy was no recent phenomenon but was almost as old as Christianity
itself. Only twenty years after the crucifixion, Paul wrote the
Galatians, “Some people are throwing you into confusion and are
trying to pervert the gospel of Christ.” From the earliest times, many
converts had their own ideas about who Jesus was and what he meant.
Those ideas that were not accepted by the mainstream bishops were
labeled “heresy,” which comes from the Greek heresias, “choice.”
For the first three centuries of Christianity, heresy was punished by
excommunication, not death. Early Christians looked disdainfully at
Jews who stoned to death blasphemers; the followers of Jesus treated
their disgraced brethren more mercifully. It was only when the religion
became entwined with imperial power in the fourth century that disrespect
of the church meant treason toward the emperor and the state
and, therefore, merited death.
Ironically, heresy served as the impetus for the definition of orthodoxy.
Reacting to heresy, theologians performed mental gymnastics to
create new dogma. In doing so, they often went well beyond anything
stated in the Bible. Over time, these writings of the early church fathers
and the decrees of popes and church councils became accepted truth in
the same way the Bible was.
The church rationalized this acceptance of later doctrine by concluding
that divine revelation does not stop with Scripture. In John 16:12–13,
Jesus said, “I have much more to say to you, more than you can now
bear. But when he, the Spirit of truth, comes, he will guide you into all
truth.” In other words, God’s word is continuously revealed by the Holy
Spirit, inserted into the right time and place of the world’s historical
matrix. The Body of Tradition, as the church called it, added new layers
of thought in between the meat of Scripture, creating a kind of theological
lasagna.
The individual most responsible for slicing up the lasagna was a German
monk named Martin Luther. A slight man with bruising cheekbones,
a square face, and tiny blue eyes tucked beneath a Neolithic brow,
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