Nailed to the Church Door of Christianity
On the eve of October 31, 1517 Martin Luther nailed his 95 Theses to the door of Castle Church in Wittenburg, Germany and thus gave birth to what is called the Protestant Reformation. This historical fact is well known in our day, at least among Christians. What is not so well known is the difficulty Luther faced in organizing his adherents into a church. On the one hand, Luther wanted a believer's church where Christian conduct was expected and discipline exercised; on the other hand, he wanted an inclusive church, a church for the masses, with a loose attitude toward conduct and no discipline.
Leonard Verduin, in The Reformers and Their Stepchildren, put it this way: "Luther...tried to meet the New Testament's ideal, that of a believer's church, with the formula of an ecclesiola in ecclesia, a little church of true believers, apart from, but not separate from, the Church of the masses." Here are Luther's own words in this regard, written in 1526, almost ten years after the Reformation began: "Those who seriously want to be Christians and want to confess the Gospel in word and deed, these ought to inscribe their names in a book and assemble in a house by themselves for purposes of prayer, the reading of Scripture, the administration of baptism, the reception of the sacrament and to engage in other Christian activities..."
But Marty had a little problem.
He continues, "...but I neither can nor may as yet set up such a congregation; for I do not as yet have the people for it." Luther acknowledged to a friend, "...genuine Christians are not yet too common. I'd love to see two of them together, but I don't know where I could find so much as one." He even went so far as to state that administering the communion elements in the inclusive Church was "not very unlike chucking them down the gullet of a sow."
Martin Luther's attempt to establish a believer's church failed, by his own admission, for want of genuine converts. Did you get that? The father of the Protestant Reformation, the progenitor of modern Evangelicalism, acknowledged that his teaching failed to produce authentic Christian disciples. Hello? Do you want to know why modern Christianity is nothing but an insipid, shallow, weak, weightless, worldly and wretched mess? You just read the answer. If the root of the tree is rotten, how can the branches be anything but likewise rotten?
The great "hero" of the magisterial Reformation lost his objective from the very outset. He simply did not perceive that his result could never possess what his presuppositions did not own. It was Martin Luther's starting point, his doctrine (more specifically, his soteriology and ecclesiology), which foiled his attempt to establish an authentic Christian order. And it is precisely that very same starting point, Luther's doctrine of sola fide, which has yielded the superificial, shabby and spurious Christianity that now pervades the entire Western world. Luther divided what God had joined together and thereby forfeited, right from the first swing of the axe, any hope of raising up from the dead wood of Romanism a genuine Christian brotherhood. In his own words, "Doctrine and life are to be distinguished, the one from the other. With us conduct is as bad as it is with the papists. We don't oppose them on account of conduct. Hus and Wyclif, who made an issue of conduct, were not aware of this...but to treat of doctrine, that is to really come to grips with things." Luther frankly acknowledged that "among us there is no betterment of life."
It is astonishing to realize that the very place where Luther stood most boldly and confidently was ground that yielded him nothing but weeds. His noble intention was frustrated in the first place by his insidious "faith alone" doctrine. Though Luther sought with all earnestness to recover genuine Christianity, he failed for want of faithfulness to God's Word. The great irony of the Reformation is that its unflinching champion of truth was really the architect of compromise and the exponent of expediency. How can one be lauded and lifted up as the servant of God who clipped an entire book out of God's authoritative Word? James did not fit into Luther's theology and so Luther summarily dismissed the book of James from the canon of Holy Scripture! He was hermeneutically forced into that inexcusable measure because he arrogantly wrested a Pauline phrase in Romans completely out of its redemptive-historical context. When Paul wrote that justification was "apart from works" he meant apart from works of the Mosaic Law in particular, not apart from obedience to God in general. And so Luther's reformation house was built on the sand of false doctrine from the very beginning. Later, when he threw in with the local magistrates, without whom his reformation project was dead in the water, Luther completely sealed himself off from the faith of Jesus Christ and the Way of His Kingdom.
Now, the "faith alone" doctrine of Martin Luther produced nothing but weeds in the 16th century and it's still producing nothing but weeds. What goes by the name Christian in the year 2005 AD is a complete travesty and an unmitigated sham. Evangelicalism is a complete and thorough counterfeit of the New Testament Faith. Authentic Christianity is not only dead in the Western world (and has been for some time), but its prospects for recovery are more bleak now than they were on October 31, 1517. Luther faced only one Pope. Today, there are a zillion popes, one in every pulpit in America, all of whom were generated by Martin Luther's doctrine of sola fide and his political compromises with State authorities. So, far from serving the interests of the Lord Jesus, Martin Luther's reformation precipitated the division of Christ's church into a thousand denominations of wrongheaded, misguided, aberrant, and worthless Christianity.
Consider what Christianity is comprised of today:
1. Dispensationalists--these guys are modern Judaizers. They carry God's special and unique redemptive purpose for Israel over into the New Covenant and insist that the Jews will be saved in a different epoch or way than the one presently open through the Gospel. They chop up the Scripture as if it were two (or is it 4-5) different, independent stories of redemption. Dispensationalists have been claiming that we're in the "last days" now for more than a generation. Every radio preacher out there manipulates the public with ridiculous end times scenarios and tribulation forecasts. Nevermind that it all took place long ago in 70 AD. This teaching has been a literal plague on Christianity, a wasting disease on an already weak and enfeebled church.
2. Reformed and Presbyterians--these guys hold to Covenant theology and deny that the New Covenant is New at all. For them the New Covenant is merely a new administration of the Old Covenant, and they recognize no essential difference between the Mosiac Covenant of Law and the New Covenant of Grace. So apparently Paul was wrong to call the Old Covenant a ministry of condemnation! These guys are also modern Judaizers. They carry the Decalogue over into the New Covenant and bind Christians with the Ten Commandments instead of the comandments of Christ. And this theology leads directly and inescapably to Reconstructionism, which the overwhelming majority of Presbyterians do not have the courage and honesty to admit and own. Those that do have the courage want adulterers and homosexuals stoned to death on the testimony of 2-3 witnesses. And they want this in the New Covenant era!
3. Pentecostals and Charismatics--these guys actually think their mono-syllabic, non-sensical utterances are the New Testament gift of tongues and that God will make you fabulously wealthy if you'll only believe Him for it. What a joke. They have actually turned the tables on God. The Almighty has become the servant of their most luxuriant desires while they offer to God the most carnal worship going. They have single-handedly destroyed the simple worship of God in song. Now, if there is not a performance team, drums and a base guitar, if there is not mindless repitition of effeminized lyrics, and if there is not an emotional catharsis of the soul, then it's not Spirit-filled worship. Look carefully, the drummer has 6 ear rings! Like I said, what a joke.
4. Southern Baptists and Independent Baptists--these guys actually think they serve God and His Kingdom through the Republican political agenda, even though Christ said His Kingdom is not of this world. They are modern day Constantinians who will send their children off to war to kill the enemy, though Christ calls His disciples to love their enemies. They have confused family values with Kingdom values and substituted nationalism for loyalty to the King. Baptists are also the greatest purveyors of cheap grace and easy believism in the land. They are the modern day Pharisees, carrying out their agenda within the American system and thoroughly programmed by the American Matrix.
5. Liberal Mainline Christians--these folk actually think they serve God and His Kingdom through the Democratic political agenda. They really don't care what Scripture says at all, unless they can somehow wrest it to suit their political purposes. They will support abortion, homosexuality and women in the ministry, all in the name of equality, even though they have to trounce and amend God's Word in the process. Liberals are not even trying to preach the Gospel to the lost. They don't believe in hell so who needs saving Grace? These are the modern day Sadducees.
6. Anabaptists and Mennonites--these folk come from a different stream of the Reformation, but have nevertheless been withered by the influences of Protestant Evangelicalism. They actually think they serve God by withdrawing from the world to raise their families in the hinterlands. Imagine! Christ came into the world to save the world, to lay down His life for the world, and these Anabaptists, who fancy themselves the genuine disciples, run away from the world because it is too sinful and too dangerous for their families. Some followers of Jesus they turn out to be! Talk about hiding light under a bushel! They are modern day Essenes and idolaters no less than the Protestants.
7. Roman Catholics and Greek Orthodox--these messes are not attributable to Martin Luther and remain nearly as void of true religion as they were in Luther's day. It's all about empty ritual and showing up at a Mass on Sunday, like high-schoolers who always get themselves to homeroom lest they be marked absent for the day. After God counts heads it's back to real life, completely oblivious to God's Word and His will. The bread and the cup have magic powers. Somehow eating and drinking will save them, irrespective of how they live. Looks like they picked up something of Marty's sola fide after all.
This is the sorry sum of modern day Christianity. If the Lord came to visit these groups tomorrow He would not recognize any of them as even remotely approaching what He deposited in the world in the first century AD. And the fact of the matter is that most of these spurious and worthless counterfeits of Christianity would attempt to crucify Him all over again, so little do their agendas comport with His own. If Jesus came preaching today the very same things He did in Judea and Galilee, I sincerely believe that modern Christians would disown Him, just like the original Pharisees, Sadducees and Essenes, and put Him to death.
The modern church is in bondage to idolatry. Christians of all stripes have created their own versions of Jesus to bless their own self-interested programs and carefully crafted theologies. The truth is that no genuine church exists at all in the modern West. Reformation is not possible at this point because there is nothing sufficiently valuable left to reform. Christians, their doctrines and their ways, are now fully in charge of and fully responsible for today's Christianity. Ladies and gentlemen, God has left the building. In fact, Christians have run the real Jesus out of the camp. Christians still call upon the name of Jesus, but they have actually ousted the Head of the church. They read His Word, but they read into It whatever they please or whatever their particular tradition demands. The Kingdom of Christ has been hi-jacked, if it were possible. Christians have subverted the cause of the King and taken over His assembly. There's been a mutiny on dry land in America.
The only hope now is for a Heaven-sent counter-revolution, a separation of consecrated souls from the idolaters and a new union of holy warriors distinguished by their zeal for the honor of God.
Exodus 32:21-29 And Moses said to Aaron, "What did this people do to you that you have brought a great sin upon them?" And Aaron said, "Let not the anger of my lord burn hot; you know the people, that they are set on evil. For they said to me, 'Make us gods, who shall go before us; as for this Moses, the man who brought us up out of the land of Egypt, we do not know what has become of him.' And I said to them, 'Let any who have gold take it off'; so they gave it to me, and I threw it into the fire, and there came out this calf." And when Moses saw that the people had broken loose (for Aaron had let them break loose, to their shame among their enemies), then Moses stood in the gate of the camp, and said, "Who is on the LORD's side? Come to me." And all the sons of Levi gathered themselves together to him. And he said to them, "Thus says the LORD God of Israel, 'Put every man his sword on his side, and go to and fro from gate to gate throughout the camp, and slay every man his brother, and every man his companion, and every man his neighbor.'"
Any Levites out there?
Are there any who are on the LORD's side?
Leonard Verduin, in The Reformers and Their Stepchildren, put it this way: "Luther...tried to meet the New Testament's ideal, that of a believer's church, with the formula of an ecclesiola in ecclesia, a little church of true believers, apart from, but not separate from, the Church of the masses." Here are Luther's own words in this regard, written in 1526, almost ten years after the Reformation began: "Those who seriously want to be Christians and want to confess the Gospel in word and deed, these ought to inscribe their names in a book and assemble in a house by themselves for purposes of prayer, the reading of Scripture, the administration of baptism, the reception of the sacrament and to engage in other Christian activities..."
But Marty had a little problem.
He continues, "...but I neither can nor may as yet set up such a congregation; for I do not as yet have the people for it." Luther acknowledged to a friend, "...genuine Christians are not yet too common. I'd love to see two of them together, but I don't know where I could find so much as one." He even went so far as to state that administering the communion elements in the inclusive Church was "not very unlike chucking them down the gullet of a sow."
Martin Luther's attempt to establish a believer's church failed, by his own admission, for want of genuine converts. Did you get that? The father of the Protestant Reformation, the progenitor of modern Evangelicalism, acknowledged that his teaching failed to produce authentic Christian disciples. Hello? Do you want to know why modern Christianity is nothing but an insipid, shallow, weak, weightless, worldly and wretched mess? You just read the answer. If the root of the tree is rotten, how can the branches be anything but likewise rotten?
The great "hero" of the magisterial Reformation lost his objective from the very outset. He simply did not perceive that his result could never possess what his presuppositions did not own. It was Martin Luther's starting point, his doctrine (more specifically, his soteriology and ecclesiology), which foiled his attempt to establish an authentic Christian order. And it is precisely that very same starting point, Luther's doctrine of sola fide, which has yielded the superificial, shabby and spurious Christianity that now pervades the entire Western world. Luther divided what God had joined together and thereby forfeited, right from the first swing of the axe, any hope of raising up from the dead wood of Romanism a genuine Christian brotherhood. In his own words, "Doctrine and life are to be distinguished, the one from the other. With us conduct is as bad as it is with the papists. We don't oppose them on account of conduct. Hus and Wyclif, who made an issue of conduct, were not aware of this...but to treat of doctrine, that is to really come to grips with things." Luther frankly acknowledged that "among us there is no betterment of life."
It is astonishing to realize that the very place where Luther stood most boldly and confidently was ground that yielded him nothing but weeds. His noble intention was frustrated in the first place by his insidious "faith alone" doctrine. Though Luther sought with all earnestness to recover genuine Christianity, he failed for want of faithfulness to God's Word. The great irony of the Reformation is that its unflinching champion of truth was really the architect of compromise and the exponent of expediency. How can one be lauded and lifted up as the servant of God who clipped an entire book out of God's authoritative Word? James did not fit into Luther's theology and so Luther summarily dismissed the book of James from the canon of Holy Scripture! He was hermeneutically forced into that inexcusable measure because he arrogantly wrested a Pauline phrase in Romans completely out of its redemptive-historical context. When Paul wrote that justification was "apart from works" he meant apart from works of the Mosaic Law in particular, not apart from obedience to God in general. And so Luther's reformation house was built on the sand of false doctrine from the very beginning. Later, when he threw in with the local magistrates, without whom his reformation project was dead in the water, Luther completely sealed himself off from the faith of Jesus Christ and the Way of His Kingdom.
Now, the "faith alone" doctrine of Martin Luther produced nothing but weeds in the 16th century and it's still producing nothing but weeds. What goes by the name Christian in the year 2005 AD is a complete travesty and an unmitigated sham. Evangelicalism is a complete and thorough counterfeit of the New Testament Faith. Authentic Christianity is not only dead in the Western world (and has been for some time), but its prospects for recovery are more bleak now than they were on October 31, 1517. Luther faced only one Pope. Today, there are a zillion popes, one in every pulpit in America, all of whom were generated by Martin Luther's doctrine of sola fide and his political compromises with State authorities. So, far from serving the interests of the Lord Jesus, Martin Luther's reformation precipitated the division of Christ's church into a thousand denominations of wrongheaded, misguided, aberrant, and worthless Christianity.
Consider what Christianity is comprised of today:
1. Dispensationalists--these guys are modern Judaizers. They carry God's special and unique redemptive purpose for Israel over into the New Covenant and insist that the Jews will be saved in a different epoch or way than the one presently open through the Gospel. They chop up the Scripture as if it were two (or is it 4-5) different, independent stories of redemption. Dispensationalists have been claiming that we're in the "last days" now for more than a generation. Every radio preacher out there manipulates the public with ridiculous end times scenarios and tribulation forecasts. Nevermind that it all took place long ago in 70 AD. This teaching has been a literal plague on Christianity, a wasting disease on an already weak and enfeebled church.
2. Reformed and Presbyterians--these guys hold to Covenant theology and deny that the New Covenant is New at all. For them the New Covenant is merely a new administration of the Old Covenant, and they recognize no essential difference between the Mosiac Covenant of Law and the New Covenant of Grace. So apparently Paul was wrong to call the Old Covenant a ministry of condemnation! These guys are also modern Judaizers. They carry the Decalogue over into the New Covenant and bind Christians with the Ten Commandments instead of the comandments of Christ. And this theology leads directly and inescapably to Reconstructionism, which the overwhelming majority of Presbyterians do not have the courage and honesty to admit and own. Those that do have the courage want adulterers and homosexuals stoned to death on the testimony of 2-3 witnesses. And they want this in the New Covenant era!
3. Pentecostals and Charismatics--these guys actually think their mono-syllabic, non-sensical utterances are the New Testament gift of tongues and that God will make you fabulously wealthy if you'll only believe Him for it. What a joke. They have actually turned the tables on God. The Almighty has become the servant of their most luxuriant desires while they offer to God the most carnal worship going. They have single-handedly destroyed the simple worship of God in song. Now, if there is not a performance team, drums and a base guitar, if there is not mindless repitition of effeminized lyrics, and if there is not an emotional catharsis of the soul, then it's not Spirit-filled worship. Look carefully, the drummer has 6 ear rings! Like I said, what a joke.
4. Southern Baptists and Independent Baptists--these guys actually think they serve God and His Kingdom through the Republican political agenda, even though Christ said His Kingdom is not of this world. They are modern day Constantinians who will send their children off to war to kill the enemy, though Christ calls His disciples to love their enemies. They have confused family values with Kingdom values and substituted nationalism for loyalty to the King. Baptists are also the greatest purveyors of cheap grace and easy believism in the land. They are the modern day Pharisees, carrying out their agenda within the American system and thoroughly programmed by the American Matrix.
5. Liberal Mainline Christians--these folk actually think they serve God and His Kingdom through the Democratic political agenda. They really don't care what Scripture says at all, unless they can somehow wrest it to suit their political purposes. They will support abortion, homosexuality and women in the ministry, all in the name of equality, even though they have to trounce and amend God's Word in the process. Liberals are not even trying to preach the Gospel to the lost. They don't believe in hell so who needs saving Grace? These are the modern day Sadducees.
6. Anabaptists and Mennonites--these folk come from a different stream of the Reformation, but have nevertheless been withered by the influences of Protestant Evangelicalism. They actually think they serve God by withdrawing from the world to raise their families in the hinterlands. Imagine! Christ came into the world to save the world, to lay down His life for the world, and these Anabaptists, who fancy themselves the genuine disciples, run away from the world because it is too sinful and too dangerous for their families. Some followers of Jesus they turn out to be! Talk about hiding light under a bushel! They are modern day Essenes and idolaters no less than the Protestants.
7. Roman Catholics and Greek Orthodox--these messes are not attributable to Martin Luther and remain nearly as void of true religion as they were in Luther's day. It's all about empty ritual and showing up at a Mass on Sunday, like high-schoolers who always get themselves to homeroom lest they be marked absent for the day. After God counts heads it's back to real life, completely oblivious to God's Word and His will. The bread and the cup have magic powers. Somehow eating and drinking will save them, irrespective of how they live. Looks like they picked up something of Marty's sola fide after all.
This is the sorry sum of modern day Christianity. If the Lord came to visit these groups tomorrow He would not recognize any of them as even remotely approaching what He deposited in the world in the first century AD. And the fact of the matter is that most of these spurious and worthless counterfeits of Christianity would attempt to crucify Him all over again, so little do their agendas comport with His own. If Jesus came preaching today the very same things He did in Judea and Galilee, I sincerely believe that modern Christians would disown Him, just like the original Pharisees, Sadducees and Essenes, and put Him to death.
The modern church is in bondage to idolatry. Christians of all stripes have created their own versions of Jesus to bless their own self-interested programs and carefully crafted theologies. The truth is that no genuine church exists at all in the modern West. Reformation is not possible at this point because there is nothing sufficiently valuable left to reform. Christians, their doctrines and their ways, are now fully in charge of and fully responsible for today's Christianity. Ladies and gentlemen, God has left the building. In fact, Christians have run the real Jesus out of the camp. Christians still call upon the name of Jesus, but they have actually ousted the Head of the church. They read His Word, but they read into It whatever they please or whatever their particular tradition demands. The Kingdom of Christ has been hi-jacked, if it were possible. Christians have subverted the cause of the King and taken over His assembly. There's been a mutiny on dry land in America.
The only hope now is for a Heaven-sent counter-revolution, a separation of consecrated souls from the idolaters and a new union of holy warriors distinguished by their zeal for the honor of God.
Exodus 32:21-29 And Moses said to Aaron, "What did this people do to you that you have brought a great sin upon them?" And Aaron said, "Let not the anger of my lord burn hot; you know the people, that they are set on evil. For they said to me, 'Make us gods, who shall go before us; as for this Moses, the man who brought us up out of the land of Egypt, we do not know what has become of him.' And I said to them, 'Let any who have gold take it off'; so they gave it to me, and I threw it into the fire, and there came out this calf." And when Moses saw that the people had broken loose (for Aaron had let them break loose, to their shame among their enemies), then Moses stood in the gate of the camp, and said, "Who is on the LORD's side? Come to me." And all the sons of Levi gathered themselves together to him. And he said to them, "Thus says the LORD God of Israel, 'Put every man his sword on his side, and go to and fro from gate to gate throughout the camp, and slay every man his brother, and every man his companion, and every man his neighbor.'"
Any Levites out there?
Are there any who are on the LORD's side?
posted by conrad grebel at 12:00 AM
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