Download PDF | Michael Hoffman - The Occult Renaissance Church of Rome-Independent History and Research (2017).
636 Pages
Introduction
This is a book consisting of neglected sources pertaining to the Neoplatonic syncretism of the Renaissance pontiffs, as well as their HermeticKabbalistic theology, their usury and institutionalized subterfuge, which formed a hidden concordance within what had once been Jesus Christ’s Catholic Church, but which had, by the early sixteenth century, been transformed into the Church of Rome, in the course of a little over one hundred years. We should not marvel at the speed with which the revolution was accomplished, in view of the fact that centuries later the public emergence of the usurper Church was made manifest in something approximating half the time (1965-2015).
Charity and justice necessitate stating from the outset this writer’s observation that it would seem that the Holy Spirit guided many thousands of parish priests and many more laity throughout the Renaissance and postRenaissance era, and that this guidance was also reflected in the lives of some bishops and cardinals. We cannot account for this supernatural mystery in terms of theology, except in the realm of the miraculous. We acknowledge that the Church of Rome in America in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries continued to produce Christians of exemplary character, such as Fr. Pierre De Smet and Fr. Joseph Cataldo in their work defending the American Indian; Providence nun Mother Joseph of the Sacred Heart, who founded twenty-nine charity hospitals, schools and orphanages; Fr. Charles Coughlin, Dorothy Day, Flannery O’Connor, and many more Catholic servants of God like them,who managed through grace, to preserve and personify the essence of the root Church of Jesus Christ that had been the Catholicism of old. Moreover, the mostly Irish-American and Italian-American Catholics with whom we were raised in the 1950s and early 1960s, had their faults certainly, but in the main were decent, honest and upright people with whom as a child and adolescent, we were fortunate to associate, and who to this day we recall fondly. In view of their kindness and dedication to God, some were surely saints, if known only to Him.
[Introduction Page 9]
In the United States, in terms of Protestant adherence to the Natural Law, America became great as a result of that adherence, and much of the persecuting spirit of post-Renaissance Catholicism was vitiated by Catholicism’s American sojourn (we note that even before they arrived on these shores, Irish-Catholics had little of the inquisitorial spirit, having been for centuries the object of inquisition by the British Crown). The unique situation of the Church in America having planted roots in a Protestant nation in the nineteenth century, is marked by the freedom of worship which Catholics enjoyed; and more than mere tolerance, the American experience was also unique for the freedom of opportunity it afforded. In 1831, President Andrew Jackson appointed a Roman Catholic, Roger B. Taney, as Attorney General of the United States. One does not shrink from terming it miraculous that five years later Taney became the fifth Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court: the highest justice presiding over the nation’s highest court was a member of a minority religion who decided the law in a majority Protestant land. !
! Cf. Hoffman, “Chief Justice Roger Taney, A Profile in Courage,” in Revisionist
History no. 44.
It seems miraculous too that at the parish level so much that one can describe as the good spirit of immemorial Catholicism remained present in the pews, up to the 1960s, and in some cases even beyond that notorious decade. The Church of Rome being a hierarchical organization, it would be understandable to believe that it was the hierarchy of the Church that was responsible for the fine moral character of many Catholics, prior to the “postConciliar era,” which became, in the wake of Vatican Council II in the pontificates of Paul VI and John-Paul II, the penultimate revolutionary dissolution (after five centuries of spasmodic moral and ethical subversion and degeneration at the top). It is at this juncture that we encounter yet another apparent miracle: the faith of the people somehow preserved many of them from complicity in the depravity to which the post-Renaissance hierarchy had sunk over hundreds of years, not the least of which was the secret and widespread, systematic molestation of children, enabled by bishops, cardinals and pontiffs.
The United States of America’ premier campaigner for social justice and peace between nations in the years from 1932
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through the early 1940s, was a Catholic priest who had a radio audience of nearly one-third of the entire country (a listenership estimated at 50 million, at a time when the population of the United States was some 132 million). This was the aforementioned Fr. Coughlin, who was eventually silenced and nearly completely suppressed by order of Pope Pius XII; a subversive diktat to which Coughlin subserviently submitted, to the detriment of the cause of world peace. This is merely one instance of the obstruction of the implementation of Christ’s Gospel which obedience to the disaster-producing clique of popes has wrought.
The vast majority of the Catholic people and their parish priests, along with a tiny handful of prelates such as Cardinal McIntyre in Los Angeles, would never have dreamed of trading the Mass of the Council of Trent, itself only a slight revision of the Mass of the High Middle Ages and hence of European civilization at its zenith, for the New Order of Mass of Pope Paul VI of 1969, subject as it was to novelties and revisions of phenomenal mediocrity. Yet they did so out of “obedience.” Of King George III, Thomas Paine wrote in 1776, “The sovereignty of a despotic monarch assumes the power of making wrong right, or right wrong, as he pleases or as it suits him.” It would be a blasphemous lie to assert that Jesus Christ come to earth to enable a ministry of totalitarianism by “infallible” dictators, such as Paul VI. The very notion of such power being invested in one man bearing the title, “Supreme Pontiff,” in connection with the Gospel of our Lord, is a mockery.
Much of the usury, deceit and occult ideology inflicted on the Church of Christ, beginning mainly in Italy in the fifteenth century, was due to the failings, incompetence or outright betrayal by various, nearly all-powerful human beings leading the Church and usurping the Petrine ministry. When in the nineteenth century Lord Acton departed the Church of Rome in the wake of the declaration of papal infallibility at Vatican Council I, he did so having pronounced a fundamental truth with regard to the fallen nature of every human being: “Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” This book is a chronicle of that corruption.
Jesus promised never to abandon His ecclesia (“assembly of the ones who have heard the call”), so that the “gates of hell shall not prevail against it.” The perception, however, that His ecclesia is directed by the cabal of Pharisaic-occult usurers and
Judases who have occupied Rome for more than five hundred years, is among the queerest we can imagine.
One need not be in Holy Orders in order to be qualified to opine that believers who endeavor to uphold Scripture, and the Tradition of the Early Church, and those examples directly and unwaveringly conforming to those twin sources of divine direction, with faith in Jesus Christ as our Savior, and hope in His promise of eternal life, will never be abandoned or disappointed.
His will is done on earth as it is in heaven, even at the beginning of this third millennium. Jesus is the very spirit of Truth, and where there is Truth there He is. Consequently, the true Christian welcomes and embraces the truth without fear. It is in the camp of the Adversary where dwell those who are fact-averse, and who call a man-made cult of Renaissance provenance, “The Faith.”
What this book is not
Alexander Hislop was a Scottish Presbyterian minister who had very little (that we can locate) to say about the recrudescence of the religion of ancient Babylon within the creed of Orthodox Judaism. While the charge of Judaizing is generally a blanket condemnation falsely laid at the door of Martin Luther, it can be stated with accuracy that among the later Protestant fundamentalist sects of the eighteenth and following centuries, this Judaizing was a common feature. Hislop penned a pamphlet in 1853, The Two Babylons: Their identity and the Present Antichrist Also the Last. ?
2 Edinburgh: W. Whyte & Co.
In 1858 he enlarged it into a volume of more than 300 pages, bearing the title The Two Babylons; or the Papal Worship Proved to be the Worship of Nimrod and His Wife, which sold many tens of thousands of copies and has never been out of print. Between 1862 and 2015 The Two Babylons was reprinted at least forty-three times. Its thesis is common to the Protestant Fundamentalist sects and those that deny the divinity of Jesus, such as Jehovah’s Witnesses: that the Catholic Church from the time of Emperor Constantine in the fourth century onward, became the Antichrist, and rapidly degenerated into a form of propitiation of pagan deities. The Church that fought the
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usurious Money Power to a standstill, the Church of Pope Gregory the Great, St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas; the Church of Saxon England and King St. Edward the Confessor, is alleged to have been a sinkhole of heathen sorcery. Lest we imagine that such dementia was limited only to Protestant Fundamentalists of the most marginal sort, it was also reflected in the theology of the Rev. Charles Spurgeon, among the most influential of the English Victorian preachers of London, whose voluminous writings are revered by numerous schools of contemporary, conservative Protestant-Reformed thought.
Like Hislop, who not only paid no attention to rabbinic blasphemy and Kabbalistic paganism, but incorporated some of Judaism’s occult traditions into his book, 3
3 Cf. Ralph Woodrow, The Babylon Connection? (2004), pp. 26-27. Woodrow errs
when, in considering the significance of the incorporation of the pagan symbolism
represented by obelisks, he dismisses it as a mere peccadillo. His mistake however, does not reduce the credibility of much of the rest of his refutation of Hislop’s falsehoods and non-sequiturs.
Spurgeon believed that Judaism was superior to Catholicism, repeating the old chestnut that no Jew could be blamed for shrinking from horror at converting to Christ when confronted by the “superstitions of Rome.” It seems that Rev. Spurgeon was somehow abysmally ignorant of Judaism, even though Dr. Alexander McCaul, the eminent Anglican Professor of Hebrew and Rabbinic Literature at King’s College London, had penned an extensive treatise, The Old Paths / Talmud Tested, which had been prominently published in England in several printings, demonstrating that rabbinic Judaism was a system of magic and delusion founded not upon the Old Testament, which it nullified, but upon the Babylonian Talmud.
Spurgeon’s folklore concerning Orthodox Judaism is so far off the mark as to be humorous, were it not for the fact that the conversion of precious Judaic persons is of signal importance for the salvation of souls. Indeed, the greatest liberator of Judaics in the Church age was the Roman Catholic itinerant preacher St. Vincent Ferrer. Spurgeon would have us believe that the many thousands of Judaic persons who Ferrer brought to Christ were worse off than when they bowed their knees to the “sages” of the Talmud, and the cadavers of rabbis in Judaic cemeteries every bit as relic-ridden as any Renaissance-
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Catholic basilica. We quote from a sermon by Spurgeon which is reprinted in his Works:
“The blood of Israel hangs in great clots upon the skirts of Rome and will bring down upon that thrice-accursed system the everlasting wrath of the Most High! Did they not grievously oppress the Jews in Spain and every other Catholic country — remorselessly hunting them down as if they were unfit to live — torturing them in ways that it were impossible for us to describe, lest your cheeks should blanch as you heard the horrible story? The men that were of the same race as the Christ of God were so hated by the professed followers of Jesus that no indignities were thought to be great enough, and no severities to be fierce enough for execution...”
Notice the carnal emphasis in Rev. Spurgeon’s talk on the significance of the victims being (supposedly) members of ethnic Israel: “...the same race as the Christ of God...” Here is the special prerogative of race-obsessed Judaism from a race-obsessed Protestant “Reformer.” If these victims had not been of the same race as Christ, would the Inquisition have been somehow less criminal? It is a lacuna of history that the Inquisition was to some extent, in lands such as Spain, in the hands of crypto-Judaics and their gentile Romanist agents, who employed it to crush conservative Catholics who sought to restore the Church to its pre-Renaissance mission, which included bearing witness to the evils of the occult, and the rabbinic counterfeit of the Old Testament.
The Protestant Isis
What does Spurgeon have to say about the atrocities Jews instigated against the Catholic Christians in the early centuries A.D., and of the “remorseless hunting” and “torturing” of English recusant Catholics in the reign of Protestant Queen Elizabeth I? The Queen’s Torturer was the sadistic psychopath Richard Topcliffe:
“It was over the next decade (1578-1588) that he (Topcliffe), built the reputation that lasts to this day, both as an exponent of inquisition, and more generally as a hunter, snuffling out Catholic(s)... When we think of torture under Elizabeth it is the rack that first comes to mind, and there is no doubt that
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Topcliffe was a master of its tensions and pressures. He was inventive in his cruelties, too, with all the thoughtful ingenuity of an artist perfecting his technique: the impact of a session on the rack could be magnified by placing a stone beneath the victim’s spine, for example...
“Who authorized Topcliffe’s work? Most obviously the Privy Council and, in particular Lord Burghley — and later his son Sir Robert Cecil. But there is no avoiding Elizabeth’s complicity in such matters either, and she seems to have retained faith in his services until the end of her reign, despite the vicissitudes in his reputation... As for Topcliffe, he certainly felt confident enough to address at least one letter to Elizabeth as his ‘goddess.’ This was, of course, the routine iconography of the court and there are many examples of such rhetoric from Hatton, Raleigh and others. But for Topcliffe to be drawn into such a circle, a man whose sole political worth derived from his apparent talent and enthusiasm for torturing those considered enemies of the state, tells us something about Elizabeth’s relationship with him...” 4 4 Matthew Lyons, “Richard Topcliffe: The Queen’s Torturer,” June 25, 2013. https: / /mathewlyons.wordpress.com/2012/06/25/richard-topcliffe-the-queenstorturer /
In comparison to “Bloody Mary,” her half-sister and predecessor on the throne, it was Elizabeth who deserved the stigma of “Bloody.” Mary ought to more accurately be known as “Fiery,” since her crime was the burning of Protestant dissidents, not butchering dissidents, as Elizabeth did. If these distinctions appear trivial, consider that a whole universe of informationwarfare turns on them. In The Myth, Tudor Queen Mary I becomes the cruelest sort of prototypical Roman Catholic fiend, while Queen Elizabeth I is showcased as a paragon of humane liberalism, as historian Paul Johnson has the chutzpah to proclaim on p. 341 of his book Elizabeth I (1974): “For the first twenty years of her reign (1559-1579) Elizabeth refrained from virtually any form of state action against those who declined to accept the form of religion laid down by parliament. Even those who made no secret of their religious beliefs, and felt unable to take the oath to the Queen, were left unmolested, provided they expressed no ostensible disloyalty to the regime... She ‘would not have any of the
[Introduction Pag.15]
consciences unnecessarily sifted, to know what affection they held for the old religion.”
This stance, if it were an accurate appraisal, would reflect a policy light years ahead of the attitude of the Catholic “Bloody” Mary. Johnson makes it look as though a hapless Elizabeth was forced into acting against Catholics due to their treason and disloyalty, otherwise she respected the sovereignty of their consciences. This is the universal virus of deception that attends the account of the reign of “Good Queen Bess.” Queen Mary I is made the hideous Catholic foil to the liberated Protestant Elizabeth I. This fraud is repeated in virtually every Hollywood movie produced about Elizabeth up to the year 2016, as well as most of the leading biographies and histories published in English. The truth is very different, however. In 1559, in the first year of her ascension, Elizabeth enacted The Act of Uniformity, which massively violated the conscience of every Catholic in her realm, i.e. a slight majority of the English people at that time. Here was a law that was not only despotic, it was also undemocratic in the extreme. It directs that the Catholic Mass, which had existed in England for eleven hundred years, will be immediately outlawed. Only Church services based on the state-mandated, Protestant Book of Common Prayer were to be permitted: “And further be it enacted by the queen’s highness, with the assent of the Lords and Commons in this present Parliament assembled, and by authority of the same, that all and singular ministers in any cathedral or parish church, or other place within this realm of England, Wales... or other the queen’s dominions, shall... be bounden to say and use the Matins, Evensong, celebration of the Lord’s Supper and administration of each of the sacraments, and all their common and open prayer, in such order and form as is mentioned in the said book (the Book of Common Prayer).”
The penalty for the failure of a clergyman to conform to the Book of Common Prayer, or to adhere to the liturgical services in England as they had existed for eleven centuries and offer the Mass, rather than the official Anglican service, was the loss of office and income, and imprisonment for six months (for a second offense one-year imprisonment was stipulated; for a third offense the penalty was imprisonment for life). If any
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English man or woman were to speak against the Book of Common Prayer or in favor of the Catholic Mass, for a third offense the penalty was also life in prison. Anyone who sought to stay at home on Sunday and “having no lawful or reasonable excuse to be absent,” refuse to attend the Protestant-Anglican
service on Sunday, was subject to a fine. ° ° Cf. Elizabeth’s Act of Uniformity (1559), 1 Eliz. Cap. 2 in Henry Gee and William J. Hardy, Documents Illustrative of English Church History (1896), pp. 458-467.
Life imprisonment for speaking against the Book of Common Prayer was “moderation”? This coercion of the consciences of her subjects was enacted by the authority of Queen Elizabeth, that reputed Protestant free-spirit so vastly superior to the repressive Catholic Queen Mary. What a farce. When the chasm between fact and fiction is as gaping as this, one wonders how the historians who peddle the legend of Elizabeth’s religious tolerance can live with themselves. Twenty-four years after Johnson, the agit-prop was maintained by another author of consequence, Alison Weir, in Elizabeth the Queen (1998; p. 335), who writes that in 1581, “Both Parliament and the Council had repeatedly urged the Queen to take stern punitive measures against the Catholic recusants... Although... she had hitherto preferred to act with moderation... she now recognized... that harsher sanctions were called for.”
Elizabeth’s murder of the Jesuit poet Rev. Fr. Edmund Campion, who had not at any time engaged in any conspiracy against her, is an indelible proof of her harrowing inquisitorial cruelty. ©
6 Cf. Michael Hoffman, “Edmund Campion’s Jesuit Challenge to Bad Queen Bess,” in
Revisionist History, April-May, 2016. Pleas to the queen to spare Campion came from
surprising quarters, including at least one principled Protestant. John Foxe possessed a humanity and decency like that of Campion. He was the author of the Acts and Monuments of the Latter and Perilous Days, known popularly as Foxe’s Book of Martyrs, an encyclopedic account of — among other acts of persecution —the episodic Catholic killing of Protestants. Foxe was the leading Protestant martyrologist in the English-speaking world and it was Foxe who interceded for Campion. The noble Foxe believed that ‘When men of false doctrine are killed, their error is not killed; nay it is all the more strengthened, the more constantly they die.” It has taken Christendom many centuries to apprehend that wisdom.
Campion was no Jew however, and does not seem to have elicited the sympathy and indignation toward his plight from Spurgeon and reformers like him, concerning the horrible
[Introduction Page 17]
abuse Campion suffered under a Protestant English government which, with the poet Edmund Spenser, viewed Queen Elizabeth I as the “New Isis.”
Where, pray tell, came this Protestant-Elizabethan identification of the female head of the Church of England with Isis? Papists will imagine it came from some Protestant source. The cult of Isis was in fact transmitted into Christendom by the Neoplatonic-Hermetic papacy which, from Pope Alexander VI onward, adored the “cunning one,” she “who tricked Ra by sending a serpent.” 7
7 Patricia Turner and Charles Russell Coulter, Dictionary of Ancient Deities (2000), p. 243.
What was this serpent? At the time that Pope Alexander established the cult of Isis in his private papal apartment, the Catholic school of nominalism was replacing the warrant of Scripture with the aggiornamento of equity.
The troubadour of the cult of Queen Elizabeth I was Spenser. In his Faerie Queen he associated Elizabeth’s cultus with Isis, and in particular with a certain attribute of the cunning one:
“His wife was Isis, whom they likewise made
A goddess of great power and sovereignty,
And in her person cunningly did shade
That part of justice which is equity.” ®
8 “The Faerie Queen” in The Poetical Works of Edmund Spenser, vol. III (Little Brown, 1842), Canto VU, p. 321.
Equity is situation ethics by another name. By equity law, God’s Word is “made of none effect” through the circumstances of the particular era in which man finds himself in history. Convoluted pretexts are put forth to justify this
nullification. Equity has always bedeviled the Church, but it came boldly into its own with the rise of the Catholic nominalist school of
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theology. ? 2 “Ockham and Scotus in the Middle Ages... postulated the view that any ‘good’ is nominal, i.e., it is what it is only because God regards it as good. This was opposed to the ‘realist’ view that God wills a thing because it is good... Situation ethics, at the level of human value judgments, is likewise nominalistic... The whole mindset of modern man, our mindset, is on the nominalists’ side... (the) flat assertion that there are no intrinsic values and that value exists only ‘in reference to persons.’ Martin Buber is... plain about it; he says that ‘value is always value for a person rather than something with an absolute, independent existence.” Joseph Fletcher, Situation Ethics: The New Morality (1966), pp. 57-58. On the Catholic nominalist school that adopted the equity of usury in the fifteenth century, cf. Hoffman, Usury in Christendom, pp. 162-173.
Before John Calvin became a Protestant, he was a precocious Catholic youth at the papist College de Montaigu, where he came under “the influence of the celebrated nominalist theologian, John Mair, regent at Montaigu from
1525-31.” 1° 10 Guenther H. Haas, The Concept of Equity in Calvin’s Ethics (Paternoster Press,
1997), p. 7.
After his father’s death in 1528, Calvin was admitted to the Catholic law school at Orléans: “Calvin came to embrace the humanist approach to legal studies at Orléans His circle of friends remained those sympathetic to
humanism.” !! 11 Tbid., pp. 8-9.
He subsequently transferred to the Collége Fortet, where he studied under the Catholic nominalists Francois Vatable and Pierre Danés, and encountered the leading law tome of French jurisprudence, the Annotationes in quattuor et vigintt Pandectarum libros (1508) of Guillaume Budé, who: “deals with equity in Annotationes in Pandectarum libros. The fundamental principle of legal interpretation is that equity... is that which remits from the law.” !?
12 Tbid., pp. 36-37.
“The function of Equity is the correction of the (civil or common) law where it is deficient by reason of its... tendency to establish rules without
exceptions.” 13 13 Howard L. Oleck, “Historical Nature of Equity Jurisprudence,” Fordham Law Review, vol. 20, no. 1 (1951), p. 23.
Equity may be applicable and desirable in those cases entailing upon the laws of man; when applied to the laws of God however, equity is rebellion.
Calvin never repudiated the epikeia he imbibed from the Church of Rome’s lawyers and theologians in France. After Protestants had been schooled in Catholic nominalist equity, some of them established their own version of it, supposedly
[Introduction Page 19]
“independent of popery,” after which equity could be openly embraced by Protestants while concealing its papist roots, just as Isis had been imported from Rome to London. When Spurgeon and Hislop and their innumerable followers hold aloft their “Reformed faith,” derived from Calvinism, as the preeminent godly antidote and polar opposite to Rome’s theology, they are perpetrating a fraud on the public, which is only exceeded in the depths of its brazen disregard for the facts of history, by the Right-wing Catholic campaign to brand equity-nominalism’s situation ethics as a uniquely Protestant abomination, free of any Catholic origin or culpability.
The application of equity in both papal and Protestant theology arose mainly from the devil’s desire to unchain the Money Power, previously bound in law and practice by the Catholic Church. This diabolic objective succeeded, as we Shall see in a subsequent chapter, first by its rise within the papacy, over the strenuous protests of Martin Luther at a time when John Calvin was a child — and then, following suit, within the Reformed Church itself in so far as it heeded Calvin (and since he was not a pontiff, many Calvinists ignored or defied his nullification of the Biblical law against usury). Calvin had grudgingly permitted usury on grounds similar to those of the nominalist Catholic Johann Eck, Luther’s theological nemesis, who had justified it on behalf of the Catholic usury bank of Fugger, although Calvin did not admit of this antecedent.
It may come as a shock to conservative Reformed Christians that Calvin, the celebrated champion of sola Scriptura, is: “not a Biblical literalist... Calvin’s response is that the prohibitions against usury in the Old Testament are part of the civil legislation of the Jews. These laws were binding on the Jews in their society, but they are not for us today... (Calvin wrote), follows that usury is not unlawful, except in so far as it contravenes equity... I therefore conclude that usury must be membership in the Christian congregation. When he was pastor in Geneva all profits on loans were banned and many capitalist businesses which we take for granted nowadays as supposedly benign and ethical, were severely restricted. Calvin regarded usury as a sometimes necessary but generally (with some exceptions), moral evil. Cf. this writer’s Usury in Christendom: The Mortal Sin that Was and Now is Not (2012), pp. 186-187, 207-208 and 259-261. The Renaissance Church of Rome and its latter-day pontiffs maintained an elaborate pretense with regard to the dogma on usury, while redefining it in accordance with nominalism and equity, and then claiming that nothing had changed. A Conservative Catholic former professor at Notre Dame University contested our statements about the popes and usury by contending that the papist laws contra usury are still on the books. Actually, they are not, having been removed from canon law, but even if the assertion were true, what exactly would that signify? The Communist Party’s laws guaranteeing freedom of speech were never formally removed from the Soviet Constitution, yet the significance of those laws for the Russian and other captive peoples, was near zero. In fact, the disparity between what is on paper and what is actually forbidden or permitted in real life, compounds the corruption.
What bragging rights do Protestants possess over papist Catholics when the former resort to John Calvin as a faithful guide in the application of God’s Biblical commands and standards on usury, when he permits lawyers’ rules of equity to trump the statutes and commands in the Word of God? Some conservative pastors of Reformed churches have derogated the exigent question of how the love of money has come to be weaponized in Christendom, on the basis that the provenance of the weaponization is not clear, or that the law of God in the matter of profit on loans is a source of some confusion. What is confusing about Luke 6:30-36? Since the Word of God proclaims that the love of money is the root of all evil (I Timothy 6:10), should there not be a greater sense of urgency among the Reformed in resolving this alleged “confusion”?
It is important to make note of the fact that Calvin’s statements on his permission for usury were put forth unadorned by duplicity, however. His equity was a fact he stated plainly and without circumlocution. He wrote of his preference for epikeia above the Logos, though not in those terms. His candor is found in all of his writings which we have reviewed, public and private. He had nothing to hide because
[Introduction Page 21]
he was so steeped in the Church of Rome’s modernizing legal philosophy that he could not see the Scriptural nullification at the heart of it (we are not excusing his faith in Catholic nominalist economic theory). Truly he was blind in this matter. But since he concealed nothing, then the case, pro or contra his position, can be argued on its merits and demerits without begging the question.
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