IDOLATRY

Enthusiasts

Radical anabaptist leader Thomas Muntzer boldly challenged Martin Luther asserting his superiority through a higher word of divine revelation the transcends mere rhetoric that beats the air.

Referred to by the Reformers as Enthusiasm, Muntzer’s approach placed an inner spiritual revelation over the authoritative external word of Scripture.

Looking at 2 Corinthians 3:1-6 Paul’s contrast between letter and spirit delineates (describes precisely) the law’s role apart from the gospel as a ministry of death. And the gospel which serves as the spirits means for justifying and regenerating sinners.

Despite Paul’s intended contrast, Gnostics, Enthusiasts, and mystics across generations misinterpreted his terminology, positing a division between the text of Scripture (letter) and esoteric inner spiritual knowledge (spirit).

This was not just a phenomenon of the Reformation, from our vantage point we know enthusiasm has never gone away. It just keeps reinventing itself.

Enthusiast (EN-THUS) = The God Within

spirit within us that helps us know the truth of the world around us.

Martin Luther said Adam & Eve were the first enthusiast.

Seeking outside the WAY.

Enthusiast are always looking for God apart from Christ.

95% of American adults for truth turn within.

77% of American regular church attendees turn within for truth.

Making the internal battle the external.

Ontological dualism

“In these matters which concern the spoken external word it must be firmly maintained that God gives no one His Spirit or His grace apart from His external word which goes before. We say this to protect ourselves from the enthusiast that is the spirits who boast that they have the spirit apart from and before contact with the word.

On this basis they judge, they interpret, and they twist the Scripture or oral word according to their pleasure. Who set themselves up as shrewd judges between the spirit and the letter without knowing what they say or teach. The papacy is also purely religious raving and that the Pope boast that all the laws are in the shrine of his heart and that what he decides and commands in his church is supposed to be spirit and law even when it is above or contrary to the Scriptures or the spoken word.

All this is the old devil and old snake that has turned Adam & Eve into enthusiast and lead them from the external word of God into spirituality and their own presumption.” - Martin Luther

With Enthusiast - my interpretation becomes authoritative.

Enthusiast always come back to Paul’s contrast of letter vs. spirit in 2 Corinthians 3:1-6

2 Corinthians 3:1–6 (NET 2nd ed.)

Are we beginning to commend ourselves again? We don’t need letters of recommendation to you or from you as some other people do, do we? You yourselves are our letter, written on our hearts, known and read by everyone, revealing that you are a letter of Christ, delivered by us, written not with ink but by the Spirit of the living God, not on stone tablets but on tablets of human hearts. Now we have such confidence in God through Christ. Not that we are adequate in ourselves to consider anything as if it were coming from ourselves, but our adequacy is from God, who made us adequate to be servants of a new covenant not based on the letter but on the Spirit, for the letter kills, but the Spirit gives life.

Enthusiast collapse the Holy Spirit into their spirit.

Paul in 2 Cor. 3:1-6 is talking about the Old Covenant vs. New Covenant.

The law APART from the Holy Spirit is crushing (damaging).

Contrasting the blessings that are conditional under the Sinai covenant with the blessings that are a pure gift under the New Covenant.