25 Now many crowds were going along with Him, and He turned and said to them, 26 “If anyone comes to Me, and does not hate his own father and mother and wife and children and brothers and sisters, yes, and even his own life, he cannot be My disciple. 27 Whoever does not carry his own cross and come after Me cannot be My disciple. 28 For which one of you, when he wants to build a tower, does not first sit down and calculate the cost to see if he has enough to complete it? 29 Lest, when he has laid a foundation and is not able to finish, all who observe it begin to ridicule him, 30 saying, ‘This man began to build and was not able to finish.’ Luke 14:25-35 (LSB) Read verses 31-35 on the site.
When I was in High School a movie came out that was pretty popular and I have seen several times. It is supposedly based on the last few years of the life of Thomas More. The movie was “A Man for All Seasons.”…
The way the story line of the movie goes, you are supposed to view Thomas More as a victim of the conflict between King Henry VIII and the Roman Catholic Church. Actually, the movie paints More as a heroic person caught in an impossible situation. He must make a choice of his being faithful to his Catholicism or to his King. As I said, I saw the movie several times, but all of those times were before God had mercy on me in 1986, effectually calling me to faith in my Lord Jesus Christ. I have not seen the movie since, but I have read a great deal about Thomas More in research for books, articles, and these posts. The movie is very one-sided and leaves out a side of Thomas More that would destroy that persona of him being that heroic victim.
Thomas More was one of the 16th Century’s most promising scholars before he became one of Henry VIII’s men. He was friends with Erasmus. These two Roman Catholic apologists would write enlightening works and were, therefore, allowed access to the higher echelons of society and the church. They would defend the Pope and the Roman Church with vigor, but in private they would write letters to each other making jokes about the corruption in the monasteries and with the Pope himself. To them, Christianity was all about religion not about faith. The Church was their means to their scholarly pursuits. More had a certain nobility of character that opened doors to wealth and power. When he was young he wrote his first book, Utopia, with Erasmus in mind. It was published in 1516. In it, he gave notice that there was a great humanistic scholar in England. He had graduated from Oxford and thereby became a Latin and Greek scholar. He had the tools to become a great Biblical apologist. However, his rise to power in English society took him down another path. He was knighted in 1521. He became Speaker of the House of Commons in 1523 because Henry VIII favored him. He became Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster in 1525. <Continue reading post>