Bible-Burning

In the summer of 1848, a Roman Catholic priest in Germany committed an act that would ignite transatlantic controversy: he burned a Protestant New Testament in the town square. The spectacle drew crowds, the press, and eventually John C. Miller, a Methodist minister who delivered this fiery sermon in response. Miller doesn't merely condemn the burning; he unpacks what it represents: a clash over who controls access to sacred text, who interprets it, and what happens when religious authority meets the printed word. This is religious polemic at its most visceral, written when Bible-reading was a politically charged act and when the boundary between Catholic and Protestant worlds was still being negotiated in blood and ink. For readers interested in 19th-century religious history, the roots of evangelicalism, or the long shadow of conflicts over who gets to read what, this sermon offers a window into a world where burning a book was also a declaration of war.