3], and God's commandment says, "You shall
not put the Lord your God to the test" [Matt. 4].
"But," they say, "this way you condemn all of Christendom which
has always maintained this - until now." I answer: I know very
well that the priests and monks seek this cloak for their
blasphemies. They want to give to Christendom the damage caused
by their own negligence. Then, when we say, "Christendom does not
err," we shall also be saying that they do not err, since
Christendom believes it to be so. So no pilgrimage can be wrong,
no matter how obviously the Devil is a participant in it. No
indulgence can be wrong, regardless of how horrible the lies
involved. In other words, there is nothing there but holiness!
Therefore to this you reply, "It is not a question of who is and
who is not condemned." They inject this irrelevant idea in order
to divert us from the topic at hand. We are now discussing the
Word of God. What Christendom is or does belongs somewhere
else. The question here is: "What is or is not the Word of God?
What is not the Word of God does not make Christendom.
We read that in the days of Elijah the prophet there was
apparently no word from God and no worship of God in Israel. For
Elijah says, "Lord, they have killed your prophets and destroyed
your altars, and I am left totally alone" [I Kings 19]. Here King
Ahab and others could have said, "Elijah, with talk like that you
are condemning all the people of God.
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