"BACK TO THE NEW TESTAMENT" - Rolfe Barnard

"Recently I read a book on 'The Radical Reformation' - a tremendous book - 'The Radical Reformation,' in which the battle between the 'Magisterial Reformers' - Calvin, and Zwingli, and Luther - the battle that raged between them and the 'Radical Reformers' - Huss, and Hubmair, and Menno Simons - and all of that long list of men and women who absolutely forced Calvinists, Lutherans, and Catholics to kill 'em. Somebody tore up the little common place that a certain spirit of a certain age will martyr a reformer. That's not so! But a reformer that God's using so conducts himself that his age has to kill him! He creates the atmosphere of his own martyrdom. And every person hearing me tonight, your spiritual ancestors were that kind of people, whose blood in Europe stained God's earth at the hands of Lutherans, Calvinists, and Catholics, because they were extremists.

Now you'll get in a lot of trouble reading history if you claim kin with folks too quickly. But there was one thing about the precursors of our brand of Baptist life today - we've about run out of it - but they were our precursors. Whatever they believed - they believed all over - and they believed it with such a terrible intensity, that they were drowned, they were quartered, that their tongues were pulled out, so moved that they literally watered Europe with their blood. And it's some comfort to a people like us that you can find ten thousand things wrong with the theology and the practice of every one of 'em, but you can find ONE THING dead right: they didn't want to stop with Calvin, and Luther, and Zwingli and their immediate successes, they wanted to get clear BACK TO THE NEW TESTAMENT."

- Evangelist Rolfe Barnard (1904-1969)

"BACK TO THE NEW TESTAMENT" - Rolfe Barnard

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