Crusader War College

Link: http://www.rantburg.com/poparticle.php?ID=230238&D=2008-02-26&SO=&HC=2

The link is to a topic at Rantburg that cites the Turks re-looking at the validity of the hadiths, or sayings of Mohammed. G(r)omgoru, a regular at rantburg, had commented thusly to my comments at 8 and 9:

Reformation Ptah, the key word is reformation = return to Old Testament.

I had failed to come back and look for responses. On the off chance that a rantburg regular comes by, here's what would have been my response to G(r)omgoru's comment.

Ah, I see. I failed to emphasize the "Reformation" aspect of Christianity.

However, in a way, I did address it: the Protestant Reformation was not a return to the Old Testament by overlooking the New Testament, but a return to the New Testament that demanded that the Church abandon centuries of accumulated opinion that forced a specific interpretation of the New Testament. One of those abuses of interpretation was that the Church replaced Israel and that its role was to rule in the governmental realm as if it was Davidic Israel. (One thing I didn't know until recently was that Martin Luther the Reformer opposed the Crusades, but not from the point of view of being pacifistic: he objected to the Church using its power to make decisions about war and using religious extortion to force secular rulers to fight the battles. His position was that the Church should make its case for getting pilgrims free access to the Holy Land from the point of view of the pilgrims being the subjects of the rulers being petitioned. They, in turn, would decide whether to obtain that free access, and how to accomplish that free access if they decided that it was worth working toward, either by paying tolls on behalf of the pilgrims, negotiation of treaties, or making war to force the making of a treaty or to take over the Holy Land. He was not as much pacifistic as insisting that those sorts of decisions were exclusively Caesar's, not the Church's.)

That's not theology. That's HISTORY.