This is Mark Shoberg, from Speech class a few years ago and formally of the ASG senate.  I wanted to respond to Andrea Hawkins piece on “Who Should Rep. Christians?”

She claimed, “Protestants don’t alter the bible in any way?”  Which bible is she talking about?  The King James Bible of 1611 has had over 100,000 alterations in the last 400 years.  The NIV has had some 25,000 alterations.   You can google any bible and find tens of thousands of alterations of the bibles that both Protestants and Catholics read.

Hawkins goes on to say: “Catholics, however, believe in not only the Bible, but tradition.”  She is sorely mistaken if she thinks the Protestant church and its 35,000 denominations is a church based in anything other than tradition.  The current Protestant setup for church is based from Calvin’s church system which he built in Geneva in the 16th century.  Does your pastor stand up and preach to a congregation?  that was a product of Protestant traditions.  Do you sing three songs at the beginning of the service and then say a quick prayer and listen to a sermon for 25 minutes?  Most do and it is based in Calvin’s idea of how a church should be run.  The “pastor” is an invention of the Protestant faith.  The early church relied on prophets, apostles, teachers, pastors, and evangelists.  Not until the 16th century, under Protestantism, did the Pastor take on the sole role of leader of the congregation.

Want more Protestant tradition?  Try the Rapture theory; it was constructed in the 18th century by evangelists like Darby, Whitefield, and followers like Margaret McDonald.  There is no record in all of Christian history of the rapture before the late 17th century.  It is a new tradition or interpretation of several scattered and pieced together scriptures, but none of the Church fathers ever mentioned it.  They believed Christ was coming to return to the earth to establish the kingdom of God on earth “as it was in heaven”.  They did not believe the ChProxy-Connection: keep-alive
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ch would flee the earth and fly away.

Want more Protestant tradition?  Try Calvin’s views on nearly everyone being damned to eternal Hell; or Luther’s views on Jews: he hated them and wanted them rounded up and burned at the stake.  Hitler followed Luthernism and its traditions to their logical end.  He said so himself.

My point: I could go into a thousand different forms of Protestant tradition (I really could if you want to get into it) that you failed to mention.  I am a Protestant, but an educated one.  So much of what Hawkins has to say is religious rhetoric with no basis in fact.  I know her piece is an opinion piece, but much of it is diatribe and I thought someone should speak out against her apparent bias.  She should at least appear informed.

Mark Shoberg

Senior (history major)