I like to connect dots. Fill in blanks. If we don’t know how we got where we are today in the Church, we can’t see the full picture and therefore can’t make good decisions going forward. I liken what we are experiencing to the call for parents to get their kids out of public schools. Home school, Christian school, whatever you can do. I’m thrilled that my daughter is doing that next year with my young grandchildren. I take them to museums and talk to them about history and current issues. They are able to handle it, and they are no longer exposed to Woke propaganda.
I think things are much the same way with churches today. Look, I don’t make blanket statements. There are plenty of great churches and courageous, biblical pastors out there.
By and large though, the “Big Box” churches, those from the Church Growth Movement, are, at best, “recreation centers,” as a pastor friend likes to say. He’s spot-on. Further, they are not just soft on biblical issues—they are unbiblical.
So it is that I want to talk this week about how we got to be where we are: grotesque “drag queen” “services” in churches across the country. Or from the pulpit, messages that attack Christ’s divinity. Tony Jones at Fuller Seminary years ago saying that he rejected the doctrine of Original Sin. Henry Ward Beecher in the 19th century claiming hell is a myth. (He found out.)
In Genesis 3, we read about enmity—Total War—that God declared between Satan and Jesus Christ. An age-old war that will culminate in Armageddon, and later, when Satan is thrown into the lake of fire. Everything today has flowed from Genesis 3. I’ll also discuss the scourge of anti-Semitism in the Church today. Here we go.
I trace the modern problems we have to the 19th century. There are differing views of origins, but I believe Genesis exactly as it’s written. It reads like a news article. We are told where we came from, why we’re here, and where we’re going. These themes are repeated through the rest of the Bible.
During the Enlightenment however, the 16th to the 19th centuries, certain men in Europe thought they were too cool for school. They dismissed the “idea” of God as primitive myth. By the middle of the 19th century, German scholars in seminaries were openly declaring that much of the Bible is myth or Hebrew legend. The Exodus was questioned. Noah’s Flood. Did Abraham really exist? They had no real proof of their claims (check out books by Drs. Robert Dick Wilson and Henry M. Morris for brilliant refutations of the liberalism of this period). Yet these attacks on the Bible took root.
In 1902, German scholar Friedrich Delitzsch gave an address in Berlin (in the audience was the Kaiser), “Babylon and the Bible,” in which he alleged that the Bible was influenced by Sumerian myth rather than the other way around. This stunning attack on Scripture has directly led to where we are today, which is apostasy sweeping across the American landscape.
This concept had been brought out into the open 50 years before with the “Higher Critical” methods of biblical scholarship flourishing in German seminaries. And then…then came the publishing of On the Origin of Species by Charles Darwin. That spawned Darwinian philosophy (and it is philosophy, a big key to understanding the teaching). It is documented that monsters like Mao, Stalin, and Hitler all embraced the tenants of evolution. In Germany, Darwinian philosophy married Luther’s Jew-hatred to bring about a situation where the Old Testament was virtually ignored in the German churches (primarily Lutheran and Catholic). In this way, German officers were able to slaughter Jews by day and read the Christmas story to their children at the holidays in the evenings.
Now, this might surprise you, but what really jazzed British and American clergy in the last half of the 19th century was Darwin. In fact, it’s almost as if American preachers were waiting for him. When Beecher became enamored of the social Darwinism teachings of Darwin’s colleague, Herbert Spencer, he brought the dour bachelor to the United States for a lecture tour! This happened in 1882.
(Interestingly, this happened at exactly the same time Palestine was seeing a large influx of Jewish immigrants, which was the beginning of the fulfillment of the great prophecies of the ingathering of the Jewish people. So, what was happening in reality was subtly challenged by evolutionary theory and the “myth-makers” in the seminaries.)
You are probably already ahead of me. What I’ve outlined briefly above is the path that has brought us to widespread Jew-hatred in the 21st century. And I’m just talking about anti-Semitism in the Church. When I was growing up, Bible prophecy and loving the Jewish people were in the air of churches. Conferences, weekly sermons, and resources celebrated the obvious, spectacular prophecies being fulfilled. The Return of the Jewish people is the greatest and biggest prophecy of the last 2,000 years. It is astonishing.
Yet it is not obvious to most professing Christians today. Think about it. My childhood denomination, The Southern Baptist Convention, has been hijacked by Reformed guys that hate prophecy and Israel. Even the Assemblies of God, the other large denomination that was pro-Israel, is slipping, now infiltrated by leftists. Pro-Israel support is slipping dramatically across the board.
It got this way because of the constant attacks on Scripture by millennia-old enemies.
I believe every word of the Bible is true. From the first letter to the last. I believe it by faith, but I have also lived long enough to see it defended successfully time after time. There is limitless evidence that the Bible is true and that the God of the Bible is all-powerful, fully sovereign.
But these beliefs are not shared widely today. Isn’t that wild? It’s incredible! And I mean, in the Church. Read the polling data. A shocking number of pastors and congregants no longer believe in the physical Resurrection. Or the Atonement. Or the Virgin Birth. The list goes on.
Pastors from Beecher to Harry Emerson Fosdick, Norman Vincent Peale, and Robert Schuller heavily influenced what would become the Church Growth Movement (or, if you prefer, Seeker-Driven, launched in 1975 in Chicago by Bill and Lynne Hybels). In the last 30 years, congregational Bible reading is out the window. “Teaching” is choked off by an almost total reliance on books and resources by celebrity pastors (I can’t think of one nationally that I’d endorse). When you have 45,000 SBC churches taking deep dives into The Purpose-Driven Life, you’re not getting much Bible teaching. Does this make sense? In such settings, you also swim in anti-Bible prophecy propaganda. Etc.
Right now, the Church Visible in America is an enemy of the Cross of Christ. I remembered this phrase from a sermon I read by T.T. Shields, a Canadian pastor in 1935. He said that about Fosdick, at the time perhaps the most famous pastor in America, from his New York City perch. Fosdick was even writing children’s books that pulled kids away from simple belief in the Bible.
(In 1925, the infamous Scopes Trial in Tennessee helped mainstream the teaching of evolution in public schools. It took 40 more years to get prayer out of public schools, but this is the progression of progressivism.)
You have Andy Stanley literally attacking the Bible, but crickets from famous pastors. Warren completed his takeover of Evangelicalism, and few people are aware—though Bible-believing Christians are aware that something is off. Read Noah Hutchings’ superb treatment of this, The Dark Side of the Purpose-Driven Church. I also highly recommend Paul Smith’s New Evangelicalism.
Smith’s book, in particular, will answer many questions you have about the state of the American Church now. The brother of Calvary Chapel founder Chuck Smith, Paul, went to the source material, and he exposes the great evil that has crept into the Church (see the book of Jude).
Well, I’ve given you enough to chew on for now. We’ll pick this up again soon.
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The post Apostasy in the Church: A Brief History of the Destroyer :: by Jim Fletcher appeared first on Rapture Ready.
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