Does Evangelical Theology Stand on A Firm Foundation?
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The Stoning of Steven
What
if most of what you have been taught about the Bible is wrong?
Could it be true that in many cases you have been taught to
believe exactly the opposite of what the Bible really teaches?
Asked another way, how do you know that what you have been
taught is the truth? Could you pick up a Bible and defend your
beliefs? How do you know that you have not been deceived? ONCE DELIVERED WHEN
There
is woeful lack of Bible study among those today who profess to
be Christians. Much of what many call ‘Bible Study’ is nothing
more than ‘devotionals’ which contain little or no doctrinal
depth, or study of what others have written about the Bible
instead of Bible study itself. Even in such cases, most of what
is written today by evangelical Christian authors is simply a
rehash of what others have written in the past. The issue here is not whether Darby, Scofield and Larkin were correct in their conclusions. The issue is that most Christians today accept these evangelical teachings as divinely sanctioned doctrinal fact without even the most cursory investigation. However this example serves only to indicate a much greater problem, namely that most if not all present-day evangelical teaching is accepted by the overwhelming majority of Christians without even rudimentary study. As my own personal study of the Bible continued, and as my personal investigation led me further and further away from those doctrines which I had been taught to accept, it did occur to me that others would surely accuse me of having apostatized or abandoned the ‘faith once delivered to the saints’. Even today this seems to concern others with whom I have shared my beliefs. However, the more I studied, the more I could not help but be struck by the fact that the ‘faith once delivered to the saints’ when applied to modern-day evangelicalism is nothing more than a tragic fallacy. The large wealthy denominations of today may hold positions of esteem; they may be popular and exert great influence, but they clearly do NOT represent the ‘faith once delivered to the saints’. This prideful smug, arrogant attitude that consigns anyone who dares question the teaching of modern evangelical theology to the category of ‘apostate’ completely ignores the fact that this world endured 1000 years where Christian thought and freedom were suppressed to near non-existence by the most cruel methods imaginable. The ‘faith once delivered to the saints’ was forced underground during these ‘dark ages’ and the records of those minute groups who did dare question the Roman Catholic authority during that time, as well as what they believed, are scant to say the least. Almost all major denominations today have their roots in the protestant reformation that began in approximately 1500 AD. This of course is 1450 years too late to have anything to do with the ‘faith once delivered to the saints’. With the invention of the printing press in 1456 Bibles steadily began to become more available to the common man. As a result of the proliferation of Bibles and a renewed zeal for study, the reformation was born. But consider for a moment that the very fact and necessity of
the reformation necessarily implies that something had gone very
wrong in ‘Christendom’. The reformation was supposed to be an
attempt to recover the truth that had been lost and buried by
centuries of tradition, greed and church abuses. The ‘faith once
delivered to the saints’, if it was to be located at all, would
only be found through careful and lengthy study of God’s Word,
and by the prayers of those who yearned to know the truth at any
cost. Clearly though, the truth was in need of a recovery as it
did not come through the dark ages completely intact. DOCTRINAL HYPOCRISY
The
battle cry among evangelicals is their supposed stand for the
verbal inspiration of the scriptures and their conviction that
all beliefs must be based solely on them and not man-made
tradition. This of course is a premise in which I stand in
perfect agreement. If the truth is to be known at all, it is to
be known only by divine revelation, of which the scriptures are
the only current source extant. But does evangelical theology
really represent sound Biblical teaching? Evangelical apologists couch their
arguments in language that leads one to believe that their
beliefs alone stand on a firm scriptural foundation, while all
other groups, which they consign to the category of ‘cult’ or
‘sect’, supposedly arrive at their belief systems only through
human ingenuity or a ‘twisting’ of the scriptures. While this
type of language may impress those who are looking for security
and for a voice of authority to tell them that what they believe
is the truth, thoughtful unprejudiced investigation tells an
altogether different story. When the evangelical doctrines of
today are examined, it can be shown rather easily that in every
way in which they accuse others of ‘twisting the scriptures’,
they themselves are equally as guilty, and in many cases, more
so. Take for example the doctrine of the
‘trinity’, which is considered to be the central doctrine of the
‘Christian Faith’. This doctrine more than any is used as a
spiritual litmus test in determining which groups can be
considered ‘evangelical’ and which are ‘cults’. Not only is
there no clear statement of this doctrine in scripture, but
there was no formal affirmation of this doctrine until the
council of Nicaea in 325 AD. Even then it was only accepted
through much controversy and protest. Because the language of
the Nicene creed has much more in common with Greek philosophy
than anything in the New Testament, it is absolutely naïve to
think that anyone who knew nothing of Christianity, if given
only the New Testament to read and study, would formulate this
doctrine by himself or herself. Yet to deny this doctrine in
evangelical or fundamental circles means to brand one’s self a
cultist! The Encyclopedia Britannica states:
Neither the word Trinity nor the
explicit doctrine appears in the New Testament, nor did Jesus
and his followers intend to contradict the Shema in the Old
Testament: “Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God is one Lord”
(Deuteronomy 6:4)… The
doctrine developed gradually over several centuries and through
many controversies. Initially, both the requirements of
monotheism inherited from the Old Testament and the implications
of the need to interpret the biblical teaching to Greco-Roman
religions seemed to demand that the divine in Christ as the
Word, or Logos, be interpreted as subordinate to the Supreme
Being. An alternative solution was to interpret Father, Son, and
Holy Spirit as three modes of the self-disclosure of the one God
but not as distinct within the being of God itself. The first
tendency recognized the distinctness among the three, but at the
cost of their equality and hence of their unity (subordinationism);
the second came to terms with their unity, but at the cost of
their distinctness as “persons” (modalism). It was not until the
4th century that the distinctness of the three and their unity
were brought together in a single orthodox doctrine of one
essence and three persons. The
Council of Nicaea in 325 stated the crucial formula for that
doctrine in its confession that the Son is “of the same
substance [homoousios] as the Father,” even though it
said very little about the Holy Spirit. Over the next half
century, Athanasius defended and refined the Nicene formula,
and, by the end of the 4th century, under the leadership of
Basil of Caesarea, Gregory of Nyssa, and Gregory of Nazianzus
(the Cappadocian Fathers), the doctrine of the Trinity took
substantially the form it has maintained ever since. It seems to me the height of absurdity to
claim that this doctrine which only arose over many centuries
and through much controversy should be used as the ultimate test
of what is ‘orthodox’ and what is not. But this is precisely
what is done in evangelical circles today. In many other cases, the clearest statements of scripture are explained away when they clash with an accepted evangelical doctrine. Many times these glaring contradictions are brushed off in ways that, to thinking people. border on the ridiculous. Take for example the following verse:
Our evangelical leaders assure us with the
utmost confidence that this statement cannot be taken at face
value, and that these words do not at all mean what they so
clearly seem to teach. In fact, we are instructed to believe
just the opposite; that David is in fact in heaven despite the
most emphatic statement that he is not! Evangelicals must resort
to their own ingenuity to explain away this clear Biblical
statement, even though this is precisely what they accuse the
‘cults’ of doing. Quite often it seems that evangelicals are the
ONLY ones who seem to buy some of these explanations. The explanation given here is, of course, that David himself ascended into heaven, but that his body is not there yet. But who would ever deduce such a thing from the text itself unless you approached it first with the pre-conceived idea that David MUST be in heaven because nineteen centuries of 'Christian theology' say he is! Yet another example of this same type of
reasoning can be found in the following verses:
Again, neither of the above verses is in any way ambiguous, yet we are informed that they do not mean what they explicitly say! Quite to the contrary we are told that the dead are really more alive than ever, and that the faithful dead now praise God day and night in heaven. Consequently these verses must be ‘explained away’. We are informed once again that these verses refer only to dead bodies, although such an explanation reduces these verses to obvious meaninglessness. But, should non-evangelicals resort to such tactics in order to 'explain away' such explicit passages of scripture they would immediately be accused of twisting the scriptures to suit their own interpretations. Yet another example will serve to show that
many times the evangelical criticisms of ‘cult teachings’ are
simply not valid at all. Consider the following verse as it
stands in the King James Bible:
Many students of the Bible have pointed out
that they do not agree with the punctuation of the last verse
and that it should instead be read as:
Evangelical leaders and apologists howl in
protest that those who read this verse in such a way have
‘changed the Bible’ or ‘twisted the scriptures’ to teach what
they do not say. But is this criticism even valid? Anyone who is familiar with the Greek
language in which the New Testament was originally written knows
that punctuation did not exist in the original text. Therefore,
those who would read this verse in a different way by changing
the punctuation have certainly NOT ‘changed the Bible’ or
twisted anything at all! In fact, because the punctuation was
not part of the original inspired text, it would be just as easy
to say that it is the evangelicals that are twisting the verse
to suit their needs! Evangelicals will sometimes point out that there is ‘not one eminent recognized scholar who believes that the punctuation of Luke 23:43, as it stands in the King James text, is in error’. But once again, this argument means absolutely nothing. Actually there is no shortage of scholars who believe that the comma in Luke 23:43 is in the wrong place (Rotherham, Bullinger, etc.). What the Evangelicals really mean, is that they do not accept any scholar who happens to disagree with them! I remember listening to one popular syndicated radio broadcast where the speaker pointed out how a certain 'cult' had 'changed the Bible' by moving the comma at Luke 23:43. This man was of significant learning and reputation and almost certainly knew that he was not telling his listeners the whole truth. You cannot 'change the Bible' by moving punctuation, because there was no punctuation in the original text. This speaker was clearly counting on the ignorance of his audience in order to prove his point. Is this honest? Isn't this exactly what this man was accusing the 'cults' of doing? In still more instances Evangelicals will
freely quote their own erroneous interpretations of the Bible as
if they were actually quoting from the Bible itself. A few of
examples of this are:
“Jesus talked about hell more than
heaven”
“Jesus said that hell is a place of
weeping and gnashing of teeth”
“Paul said ‘To be absent from the
body is to be present with the Lord’”
“The Bible says that hell is a lake
of fire” "The rapture precedes the seven year tribulation" None of the above phrases is correct from a
truly Biblical perspective although most evangelicals will swear
that they are. All of these statements are derived from certain
pre-conceived ideas and assumptions which evangelical theology
brings to the Biblical text. But nowhere does the Bible
explicitly teach any of these. This betrays a lack of serious
Bible study, but once again, isn’t this precisely what they
accuse the 'cults' of? So we see from the examples above; the
doctrine of the trinity which one must profess to be considered
orthodox, clear verses concerning the state of the dead which
flatly contradict the current evangelical teaching, the
punctuation of Luke 23:43 where the protests of ‘twisting the
scriptures’ are simply invalid, and ‘scriptural' statements
which are simply not correct, that evangelicals simply do not
tell the truth when they state that only their beliefs
are based on the Bible. The cases discussed briefly above are by
no means isolated examples and such cases could be easily
multiplied. The sad fact is, that in almost every way the evangelicals today criticize those who do not agree with their teachings, they also indict themselves. They may have convinced themselves and their followers that their teachings are based on sound scholarship, but the facts tell an entirely different story. It is time that Christians begin to wake up and see that in many cases they have been deceived into believing exactly the opposite of what the Bible teaches! To abandon these teaching is not to abandon the 'faith once delivered to the saints' but to free oneself from an apostate system which will be held accountable to God for its unbelief and which stands in danger of severe judgment. Evangelicalism has become the most
prominent, visible manifestation of ‘Christianity’ in our time.
It is a system that over the past century has erected an
enormous monstrosity of conflicting doctrines whilst all the
while vehemently proclaiming it’s self to be ‘the faith once
delivered to the saints’. Is it any wonder that many in our day
reject Christianity entirely? If, as most evangelicals teach, we are truly living in the last age just prior to the return of Jesus Christ, then each of us should be even more driven to make certain that those things which we have been taught for so long are true. None of us will be able to plead ignorance before the judgment if we let our Bibles collect dust while simply believing everything we were told. The Bereans were considered more noble because they searched the scriptures to make sure that what they were being taught was the truth. Can we say that we have truly done the same thing? The Harvest Herald is simply an invitation and a challenge to all Christians to dare to think differently, and to have enough courage and faith in God to believe that He can guide you into all truth. If we can be of any help at all in your personal search for Biblical truth, please let us know. |