Truth Really Matters

Lyrica to buy
155. 1/1/21 Stalin: The Most Influential Political Figure of the 20th and 21st Centuries
156. 2/1/21 Truth is its own proof
157. 3/1/21 The Sorcerer’s New Apprentice
158. 4/1/21 Our Post-Christian Culture
159. 5/1/21 How to start a new religion: The life of Alexander Campbell
160. 6/1/21 The Rise and Fall of American Fundamentalism
161. 7/1/21 The War that Decides It All
162. 8/1/21 Game of Gods: Part 1
163. 9/1/21 Game of Gods: Part 2
164. 10/1/21 A Shining Star: The Life of Peter Cartwright
165. 11/1/21 One Way to Have a Good Day
166. 12/1/21 Aspiring Little gods

Uithoorn
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155. Stalin: The Most Influential Political Figure of the 20th and 21st Centuries
January 1, 2021

After World War 2 ended, someone asked Stalin whether Hitler was a lunatic or an adventurer.  He replied, “I agree that he was an adventurer but I can’t agree he was mad.  Hitler was a gifted man.  Only a gifted man could unite the German people.  Like it or not . . . the Soviet Army fought their way into the German land . . . and reached Berlin without the German working class ever striking against . . . the Fascist regime.  Could a madman so unite his nation?”

Stalin was right.  Hitler wasn’t insane – he was evil.  As was Stalin.  Of course, evil cannot be perpetrated on a massive scale unless there are many lesser evildoers in partnership.  Hitler himself did not build and operate the concentration  camps.  Neither did Stalin personally build and oversee the Soviet Gulag, or personally – on the ground – enforce the policies that starved millions of peasants in Ukraine, or torture, imprison, and execute multitudes of supposed political enemies, yet (what became known in modern times as) the KGB was completely under his authority, and responsibility.

Stalin accomplished far more evil than Hitler did, both indirectly and directly.  Karl Marx, in the 19^th century, provided a pseudo-intellectual cover, a philosophy that supposedly exalted the worker class and prophesied an inevitable turn of history toward a classless society.  Lenin took Marx and conned the Russian people into believing that they could trust the Bolsheviks to forcibly and brutally establish an equable ‘dictatorship of the proletariat.’  (See my essay on Lenin.)  But of course the Bolsheviks replaced the czar and his oppressive apparatus with a more vicious Party of their own.

Lenin died young, but Stalin had learned from his mentor, building the most authoritarian and oppressive regime in world history.  What makes Stalin the most malevolent ‘dark star’ of the last 200 years is that he enabled Mao to conquer China.  Mao’s oppression and brutality in China eventually exceeded that of Stalin’s in the Soviet Union and Communist Eastern Europe, but Mao would have lost his civil war without Stalin’s help.  (See my essay on Mao.)  Furthermore, Mao couldn’t and wouldn’t have enabled Kim Il Sung without Stalin’s help.  And the Korean people would not be suffering the way they have for the last 70 years.  Additionally, Stalin’s legacy persists in the ways that government is practiced in today’s Russia, China, North Korea, and Cuba.  The Marxist left in the West, especially the United States, owes its heritage and support to Stalin and his Stalinist successors.  Academic leftists in America were already established, with Stalin’s support, in the 1930s.  Today they are widely supported, including with financial incentives, by today’s Chinese Communist Party.

Russia and China foment trouble in the Middle East and Africa.  Russia is engaged militarily and politically to recapture Ukraine.  China threatens to conquer Taiwan and the South China Sea . . . I could go on for quite a while.  Stalin led the way.

The anecdote I opened with is gleaned from Stalin:  The Court of the Red Tsar, an excellent biography by Simon Montefiore.  If you’re interested in the subject, this bio is an insightful look into what has made Russia into what it is over the last 100 years . . . and how the West should interpret Marxist / Leftist / Democratic Party politics, both outside and inside our own nation.

Lenin, Stalin, Mao, the Castros, and the Kim dynasty have much in common, including a commitment to atheism and persecution of Christians.  Hitler also persecuted Christians, but his inner circle were more into the occult than into atheism per se.

Mao learned much from Stalin, including what he visited upon China during the so-called Cultural Revolution, with quasi-religious meetings where even Party leaders had to confess their ‘sins’ against the Revolution.  It wasn’t enough with both Stalin and Mao to be loyal; you had to be loud and boisterous in your devotion and more ruthless than your peers in persecuting political enemies.  American activists today emulate these practices with such slogans as ‘silence is violence’, along with forced confessions of white privilege and white supremacy during mandated corporate or government employee ‘training sessions.’

Stalin and Mao ended their lives miserably, paranoid, continually distrusting those closest to them, even to the extent of torturing and executing Party members who had been loyal for decades.  Don’t be tempted to pity, though, for these cohorts of evil.

Montefiore records that the rest of Stalin’s inner circle were complicit in the liquidation of two of their fellow inner circle members, Molotov and Mikoyan.  “Stalin was old, raging, vindictive, paranoid and in a hurry.”  Stalin’s “unpredictable fury, frantic hastiness and implacable paranoia ironically drove the magnates closer together.”  Lavrenti Beria, Stalin’s KGB chief and perhaps one of the most evil individuals who ever lived, thought that he had the inside track to the throne as Stalin neared death.  But Khrushchev outmaneuvered him, along with Zhukov (the WW2 hero and head of the Army), and had Beria shot.  The accounts remind me of the medieval English kings, whose average lifetime was rather short because of continual plots against them . . . if just one plot succeeds, the king’s life is terminated.

In 1959 Nikita Khrushchev, Stalin’s successor, addressed the United Nations and prophesied, “Your children’s children will live under communism.  You Americans are so gullible.  No, you won’t accept Communism outright, but we will keep feeding you small doses of socialism until you will finally wake up and find you already have Communism.  We will not have to fight you.  We will so weaken your economy, until you will fall like overripe fruit into our hands.  The democracy will cease to exist when you take away from those who are willing to work and give to those who would not.”

So, is Stalin’s legacy relevant today?  We’re living it, as government expands to control every aspect of education and health care, dominates the media with socialist propaganda, and despises individual liberty, especially as practiced by Christians.

As Stalin died in 1953, Beria was exultant:  “That scoundrel!  That filth!  Thank God we’re free of him!”  And reversing his former sycophancy:  “He didn’t win the war!  We won the war!”  Or, “We would have avoided the war!”  He  ascribed Stalin’s success to “the cult of personality,” in denouncing his former boss.

Stalin, like Mao, yearned for adulation, even worship.  The Kims are more blatant about such worship in their kingdom.  It speaks to the unbeliever’s desire for autonomy from God.  The lost man wants to be a god, to do his own thing.  But the end of the road for those who lust for autonomy is to have the power to tell everyone else what to do, to be God himself.

Stalin greatly expanded the Soviet Union, conquered Germany, occupied Eastern Europe, captured Japanese islands at the end of WW2, and led an international communist organization and movement.  Yet his most loyal inner circle feared and hated him.  And he died lost, his future in the Lake of Fire guaranteed.

I believe that Satan always has candidates available to fill the position of the Antichrist, not knowing when God will pull the trigger on the Rapture and usher in  the Tribulation and the rule of the Antichrist.  Stalin was certainly a candidate in his day.   As we study his life, we can see how Satan drives his chief servants in this world, and as Christians, we should discern what lies beneath the political games played for the media.

Khrushchev called Stalin “a man of many faces.”  His Georgian temper was almost uncontrollable at times, nearly ending his career and life prematurely by unleashing it at Lenin’s wife.  Hyper-sensitive, high-strung, he reveled in his own drama . . . it was all about him.  Stalin had terrific self-esteem.  Isn’t it wonderful that our educational systems, along with the rest of our culture, work so hard to promote maximal self-esteem in our young people?

He was extremely intelligent and read literature and history throughout his life, always learning.  He talked constantly about himself.  He ruined every relationship in his life on the altar of ‘political necessity,’ but perhaps more often out of paranoia or cruelty.  He was lonely but sociable.  His inner circle was perpetually forced to endure long drunken feasts in the evening where the real business of the empire was conducted.  Trained by priests, he was a committed atheist and Marxist.  Montefiore:  “His fanaticism was semi-Islamic, his Messianic egotism boundless.”  Indeed, he was a suitable candidate for Antichrist, especially after Lenin died.

Expelled from seminary in 1899 he became a professional revolutionary, joining the Russian Social Democratic Workers’ Party.  The only job he ever had was a brief stint as a weatherman before becoming one of the rulers of Russia in 1917.  Like Lenin, like Mao, like the Kims, and like Bernie Sanders or any of the professional polticians of our age, what could they possibly know of the life of a working man or woman?

Stalin loved the revolutionary life with its intrigues, plots, secrets, ideological wordplay, phony scholarship, sexual immorality, and self-righteous violence.  Under the Czar’s reign Stalin was always the committed Marxist, although he was happy to betray socialist colleagues to the Okhrana, the Czar’s secret police.

In 1918 when the Bolsheviks were still trying to consolidate power, Stalin insisted on assuming control of the Army, superseding Trotsky who had created the Red Army with the help of experts, ex-Czarist officers.  Stalin distrusted the professional military and shot the ‘experts’ whenever convenient.  Years later he had Trotsky assassinated after exiling him.  Stalin once said, “Death solves all problems . . . No man, no problem.”  All tyrants love this principle.  Give the Marxists control in America and they will gleefully embrace it.

Stalin attempted economic rule in the Soviet Union via Five-Year Plans, which were consistently out of touch with reality.  The initial Plan demanded a 110 percent rise in productivity which Stalin insisted was possible because everything was possible!  Laggards or those in opposition to the impossible demands would be beaten or imprisoned or shot . . . which tended to increase the challenge.

In 1930 Molotov planned the destruction of the kulaks, the peasants and villagers who supported themselves, resistant to absorption into state collectives.  There were three categories:  first, those who would be shot immediately; second, those imprisoned in concentration camps; and third, households to be deported.  The three categories totaled perhaps seven million people.  But exactly where does one draw the line on what is a kulak?  Even Stalin once scribbled, “What does kulak mean?”  Lenin had said, “A revolution without firing squads is meaningless.”  Lenin regularly praised the Terror of the French Revolution, explaining that Bolshevism is “a social system based on blood-letting.”

Within two years about 1.7 million people were deported to camps in the east and north.  Over 2,000 local rebellions ensued, involving over 800,000 people.  Stalin and his cohorts crushed the rebellions with troops, killing, beating, and confiscating food and grain, resulting in mass starvations.

One young activist, Lev Kopelev, wrote, “I took part in this myself, scouring the countryside, searching for hidden grain . . . I emptied out the old folks’ storage chests, stopping my ears to the children’s crying and the women’s wails . . . I was convinced I was accomplishing the great and necessary transformation of the countryside.”

Some estimate that the total death count due to Stalin’s policies was 60 million.  By the way, America’s holocaust – abortion on demand – now exceeds that.

Evil and self-righteousness work together.  The riots in American cities are perpetrated by the most self-righteous ‘do-gooders’, those with the highest self-esteem, trained by the Marxist educators that have infested our public schools since Khrushchev’s day.

The death toll of the famine in Ukraine was between 5 and 10 million, “a tragedy unequalled in human history except by the Nazi and Maoist terrors.”  Lenin had once said, “The peasant must do a bit of starving.”

Present-day Marxists in the West – those in positions of power – enjoy the privileges that they work to deny to the rest of us.  They enjoy armed guards while working to destroy our 2^nd Amendment rights to defend self and family.  They drive limousines while over-taxing gasoline for working folks.  They destroy our national borders while living on estates guarded by high walls.  They enjoy heated swimming pools, multiple estates, and private jets while preaching that we should restrict A/C, use mass transit, and abhor plastic straws.  I’ve observed that over the last century, Marxists have been quite willing to kill for their cause, and many have been willing to die for their cause.  Modern Marxists, however, are not willing to suffer a mote of inconvenience on their road to power.

Stalin regularly took holidays to plush villas in the countryside or on the Crimean coast, requiring a train full of provisions.  If luxuries ran short, telegrams were sent to ship more.  Holiday homes were renovated and stocked “as if ready for a great party” with every imaginable fruit.  Mikoyan wrote about one holiday, “Molotov and I ride horses, play tennis, skittles, boating, shooting – in a word, perfect rest.”  All this while multitudes starved or were sent to the Gulag.

The group-think we observe in the media and in academia was fully developed by Stalin’s machine.  One veteran Communist wrote that a Bolshevik was not someone who merely believed in Marxism, but “someone who had absolute faith in the Party no matter what . . . A person with the ability to adapt his morality and conscience in such a way that he can unreservedly accept the dogma that the Party is never wrong – even though it’s wrong all the time.”  But never, never, never admit that you’re wrong.  No matter the consistent despair, poverty, and perversity of Democrat / Marxist rule in American cities for the last 60 years, they never admit corruption; they never admit that their policies are the cause.

Stalin boasted:  “We Bolsheviks are people of a special cut.”  No lack of self-esteem there, either.

In our day we see political correctness morphed into ‘cancel culture,’ and draconian rules attached to art, movies, comedy, and literature.  You must have blind faith in wokeness or you are cancelled.  There are no debates anymore, no discussions.  Just kneel.  Affirm your white privilege . . . loudly!  Silence is violence!

In 1932 Stalin made art and literature part of his Five-Year Plan, placing Soviet literature under the Russian Association of Proletarian Writers, charged to harass and attack “any writers who did not depict the Great Turn with ecstatic enthusiasm.”  Stalin bribed the famous author Maxim Gorky to promote a new Soviet literature, with gifts and a large salary on top of the millions he already made in royalties.  Mao followed Stalin’s lead in his Cultural Revolution, destroying independent thought and creativity throughout China, forcing conformity of thought and speech.  Modern leftists in America follow Mao.

The ultimate source of lying evil is, of course, Satan, the “father of lies,” as the Lord Jesus put it.  Why does Satan promote lies?  When truth is forsaken and reality is denied, people suffer.  Satan hates God’s image-bearers.  Why do Satan’s disciples and minions perpetrate such pain?  They, like their Master, want to enjoy godhood, no matter the price.

As opposed to the Biblical principle of love for other Christian brothers and sisters, evildoers do not love other evildoers – they might envy them and they certainly compete with each other.  In Satan’s system, Stalin and Hitler were both energized and controlled by demons, yet allowed to compete, going to war against each other, maximizing death and suffering among God’s image-bearers.  On June 30, 1933, Hitler, newly elected Chancellor of Germany, slaughtered his rivals and enemies within the Nazi Party, in the ‘Night of the Long Knives.’  Stalin was fascinated.  “Did you hear what happened in Germany?” he asked Mikoyan.  “Some fellow that Hitler!  Splendid!  That’s a deed of some skill!”

In 1934 Stalin used the assassination of a Party official to launch a terror without even the pretence of a rule of law.  Within three years another two million people were executed or committed to labor camps under his edict.  Many years later, Khrushchev admitted that Stalin himself had ordered the assassination in order to blame it on Party leaders out of favor.  On a smaller scale, so far, we see incidents in this country blown out of proportion to provoke riots and unjust prosecutions.  Montefiore:  “The Bolsheviks always regarded justice as a political tool.”  So do the modern Bolsheviks on the American Left.

Communist incompetence and corruption made life miserable in many ways.  In 1934, for example, there were 62,000 accidents on the railways.  Rather than fix the rail systems and train the mechanics and operators, “saboteurs” were blamed and political enemies were arrested.  In the summer of 2020 wildfires raged in California, Oregon, and Washington, after 40 years of neglect of the forests by the woke leadership, failing to do controlled burns, failing to root out the accumulating underbrush and dead trees, allowing millions of tons of kindling to build up.  The California governor immediately announced that Global Warming was to blame and that he would allow no discussion on the subject.  Since reality is denied, the problem cannot be solved.

When enemies were purged their wives were also imprisoned and their children taken away.  In the purge of July and August, 1937, a million children were consigned to orphanages.  Many did not see their mothers for twenty years.  Stalin viewed the wives of Party members as hostages.  Beria said, “No one who contradicts Stalin keeps his wife.”  Stalin didn’t trust women.  Montefiore has an extended account of the friction and tension between Stalin and his wife, Nadia, who eventually committed suicide out of despair.  Stalin saw this as the ultimate betrayal because, of course, all human interactions were about him.

One of Stalin’s obsessions was to force his political enemies to sign elaborate confessions of outrageous crimes before they died.  His purges included large numbers of NKVD (now KGB) officers and high ranking officers in the military.  One reason that the Soviets were so ill-prepared for war against Germany is that Stalin had executed the most talented Russian generals and colonels of his generation.  Regional leaders took advantage of Stalin’s purges to round up their local political enemies.  Arrest quotas were established in Moscow and regional Party leaders would arrest whomever they wanted to be rid of.  Mostly, they killed the wrong people.  As Stalin came to understand this, he had those ruthless Party leaders executed in turn.  It was a death cult.

At the top of the Party’s elite, for those who weren’t purged, the children recall a time of great joy and energy.  Jazz was sweeping the country.  Musicals and dance halls occupied the privileged youth of the Party’s princes.  One wrote, “It was truly a time of huge hope and joy for the future.  We were perpetually excited and happy – the new Metro opened with its chandeliers, the giant Moskva Hotel, the new city of Magnitogorsk, and all sorts of other triumphs.”  The propaganda machine exalted heroes of mining, aviation, and exploration.  Another wrote, “Yes, it was an age of heroes!  Life was full – I remember smiling faces and climbing mountains, heroic pilots.  Not everyone was living under oppression.”

Yet many children couldn’t help but notice when uncles and family friends disappeared.  The physicist Andrei Sakharov remembered, “The reluctance to reveal one’s thoughts even to one’s son was the most haunting sign of these times.”  This is the end of the road of Political Correctness.  The seeds sown and watered in America today will ripen fully under the Antichrist during the Tribulation.

Stalin and his nation were not ready for Hitler’s invasion.  He had plenty of warning, far more than America had regarding Pearl Harbor.  But he rejected the warnings of his generals, his diplomats, and his spies.  His denial of reality cost his people millions of casualties when war broke out.  Of course, Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union insured his own destruction, a few years later.

Amazingly, while the Russian people fought Germany for their very existence, Stalin’s repressions continued within the country.  Millions of slave laborers in the Gulag were used to build Stalin’s weapons and railroads.  Perhaps a million such laborers died during the war, worked to death.  Hitler used his own concentration camps for slave labor, as does the Chinese Communist Party today.  Disgustingly, American corporations and sports ‘heroes’ benefit financially from such cheap labor.

I’ll repeat a fairly obvious point in closing this brief review of Josef Stalin’s life.  He couldn’t have done evil on such a massive scale without the direct activity of Satan and his devils, along with the willing and eager partnership of thousands who enjoyed the power and perks of the ‘establishment,’ the Soviet Communist Party.

Yet ‘good men’ could have stopped this evil if they had acted with courage.  For example, the American President Woodrow Wilson, in partnership with Great Britain and France, could have supported the Russian counter-revolution after WW1 and strangled the Bolsheviks in their infancy.  Similarly, Britain and France could have easily stood up to Hitler in the 1930s and deterred WW2.  During and after WW2, Presidents Roosevelt and Truman could have prevented the enslavement of Eastern Europe by the Soviets.

Furthermore, Truman abandoned China to Mao’s revolution and billions have suffered since.  Truman additionally could have deterred or quickly won the Korean War and Kennedy could have saved Cuba from communism.  Johnson and Nixon failed, through lack of political will, to prevent the communists from conquering Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia.  Millions died there.  More recently, Clinton, Bush, and Obama enabled the Chinese Communist Party to build an economic powerhouse which fuels their ambitions for global power, while tyrannizing their own people.

A notable exception to the pattern . . . I had the privilege of being part of President Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative (‘Star Wars program’), an element of his efforts that resulted in the dissolution of the Soviet Empire.

The troubles and destructive trends in our nation over the last few decades are easy to see, the causes evident – for which there are no political solutions.  Very, very few see that.  Yet individuals can still be saved, their souls and their lives.  Any Christian can offer the Gospel lifeboat to those around him.  If a few hundred thousand Christians made the effort, consistently, revival on a national scale just might be possible.  But that won’t happen.  Most Christians care far more about politics and sports than about the Great Commission.

Go ahead – be the exception.  The Lord Jesus will certainly notice and walk with you as you work with Him.

• drdave@truthreallymatters.com

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156. Truth is its own proof
February 1, 2021

It’s as if a major tennis tournament were held, the ultimate grand slam event of the ages.  Roger Federer in his prime has entered . . . but the other 127 players are novices or worse, crippled, barely able to hold the racquet.  The tournament’s outcome is certain, of course.  Astonishingly, though, multitudes wager against Federer.  Some bet on the awkward novice.  Others bet on the player with crutches.  Yet others bet on the blind man.  A few do, indeed, bet on the champion and are rewarded with prizes beyond their grandest dreams.

In the Tournament of Worldviews, where the stakes are life or death . . . eternal life or eternal death . . . one Player stands in a class of His own.  The Gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ answers all of the desperate hopes of humanity, all of the vital questions of existence, and singularly delivers meaning and purpose to life.

Man is no mere machine.  The essences of our lives are neither found in the molecular stuff of our possessions nor in the fragile tissues of our bodies.  The vital issues of life include love, hope, meaning, purpose, justice, honesty, compassion, kindness, and beauty.  We are soulish creatures, spiritually made in God’s image, enabling reason, logic, common sense, and moral discernment.  Accordingly, we know we need forgiveness from sins against God and offenses against others.  Only the Gospel satisfies.  Only the sinless Son of God satisfies ultimate justice via the Cross and demonstrates victory over death through His resurrection, giving us an assured hope for eternal life.  Only this Gospel is rooted in the true history of life on Earth recorded in the Bible.

All of creation declares Biblical truth, from the Milky Way’s delicate spiral structure to our sun’s carefully balanced radiant heat output, to the Earth’s water systems and atmosphere.  Yet we see judgment in the miles-thick sedimentary rock layers laid down in the Flood of Noah’s day, continental in scope, burying trillions of creatures recently discovered as fossils.  All of life, whether extinct or extant is arrayed in distinct kinds, just as God said.  Every cell on Earth, whether bacterial or as part of our own bodies, displays nanotechnology far beyond the abilities of scientists to produce.  And even in this fallen world, the design and resilience of Earth’s ecosystems are marvelous testimonies to God’s brilliance.

Gospel truths are rooted in hundreds of fulfilled prophecies.  Evidence that we are in the last of the last days includes the rebirth of Israel, the explosion of information technology, the apostasy of the churches, immorality that rivals the days of Noah, and the foreshadowing of the events of the Book of Revelation in wars, earthquakes, plagues, and other ‘natural’ disasters.

The Bible is true.  The Gospel is not just man’s only hope, but yours and mine, individually.  No other religion, no other worldview, belongs in the same ‘tournament.’  The Gospel answers the big historical questions, the big scientific questions, the big questions of daily life, and the ultimate personal questions – Why am I here?  Where did I come from?  What will happen to me?  What should I do?!?

………………………………..

In the aftermath of the penultimate climax of, perhaps, the best science fiction series ever written, we see the Boskonian Empire’s fleet utterly defeated, allowing Civilization to reign throughout both galaxies.  Our hero, Lensman Kimball Kinnison, is certain the ‘war to end all wars’ is over.  The big job remaining is to consolidate, to encourage the multitudes of Boskonian star systems to accept not merely the laws and practices of Civilization, but to embrace the core principles of liberty, freedom, and individual responsibility.

In Book 5 of the 6-book Lensman series*, Kinnison swipes the identity of a captain in the Palace Guard of the Tyrant of Thrale, then works his way up to eventually overthrow him, establishing himself as the new Tyrant,  in command of a galaxy-wide despotic military and political system.  Along the way he carefully chooses twelve highly capable and ruthless co-conspirators from within the Boskonian establishment, and installs them as his new cabinet immediately upon assuming power.

Taking personal command of the Boskonian fleet, he insures its defeat, but sends a report of complete victory, before returning to Thrale at the head of Civilization’s fleet.  At his palace he confronts his cabinet, emerging from his armor “with a Lens glowing upon his wrist.”  Their world turned upside down, the twelve despots in training are sure that they will be dead within minutes.

But Kinnison challenges them:  “You are the twelve strongest, the twelve ablest men of the planet, perhaps of your whole dark culture.  Will you help us to rule according to the principles of Civilization that which has been the Boskonian Empire or will you die?”

Their spokesman, Lanion, responds coldly, “We are fortunate at least, Lensman, in that you do not torture.”  A moment later he continues, “Do you think for a second that your therapists can fit us into the pattern of your Civilization?” . . . anticipating some form of coercive brainwashing, perhaps.

Lanion threatens to kill himself rather than serve Civilization, certain that no method in the Lensman’s power could alter that determination.  Although Kinnison knows that with the Lens’ power, he could remove Lanion’s fixation, he says nothing, since he wants Lanion and his comrades to convert willingly.

Kinnison and his fellow Lensmen go on to educate the twelve on the true history, philosophy, and virtues of Civilization, overturning the misinformation and misconceptions that pervaded Boskonian culture, and infected the minds of these twelve capable men.  He challenges the twelve:

“The whole proposition can now be boiled down into one clear-cut question . . . Would you, Lanion, personally, prefer to keep on as you have been, working for personal power, or would you rather team up with others to work for the good of all?”

Lanion responds, “You mean actually – personally – apart from all consideration of your so-called altruism and your other infantile weaknesses?”

“Exactly,” Kinnison assured him.  “Which would you rather do?  Which would you, personally, get the most good – the most fun – out of?”

The bitter internal conflict raged until, finally, “Well . . . I’ll . . . be . . . damned!  You win, Lensman!”  And the ex-Boskonian executive held out his hand.

Those twelve, with all of their abilities and intimate knowledge of the Boskonian culture and bureaucracy, go on to exceptional service to integrate their star systems with Civilization.

So . . . I see a number of metaphors in this tale, spiritual metaphors correlated with the real, the actual war of good vs. evil, described in the Biblical record, especially relevant for the moment in history we live in, just moments before the events described in the book of Revelation, along with the prophecies of the Lord Jesus in the Gospel accounts, plus those found in the Old Testament prophets.

When we share the Gospel with a lost fellow, we are in sync with Kinnison’s approach:  no coercion, no trickery.  Non-Biblical (and therefore, false) religions commonly use coercion or cultural intimidation.  Islam has, through the ages, used the sword to spread.  Christians are, even today, severely persecuted where Islam rules.  Christian converts are kicked out of families, beaten, even murdered throughout the Middle East and Africa.  You should consider subscribing to the monthly newsletter, Voice of the Martyrs, to learn how tough it is be a Christian outside of the West.  (You’ll also be encouraged, strengthened, and find worthy additions to your prayer list.)

Within America, converts to the Biblical Gospel are often estranged, against their will, from their Mormon or Roman Catholic or Orthodox Jewish families.  But then, across the world, it seems that the most virulent persecution is directed from any non-Christian faith or worldview (including Marxism, Hinduism, and Buddhism) toward the Biblical Christian.  False worldviews cannot compete in a fair match against Biblical Truth.

By the way, you can be a practicing Muslim by submitting to coercion, and you can be a practicing Roman Catholic despite being an agnostic at heart, as my dad was.  But you cannot be a true Bible-believing, born again Christian without a free will conversion of heart, mind, and conscience.

Regarding trickery or manipulation, there are multitudes of evangelicals and fundamental Baptists who have been manipulated into a “sinner’s prayer” and become reasonably faithful church-goers, without being born again.

Yet the Gospel is conveyed properly by clear communication, by contrasting what salvation is from what it isn’t, by distinguishing repentance and faith in the Lord Jesus from whatever worldview or non-saving religion the unbeliever holds onto.

God designed Truth to be recognized.  God designed us to recognize the Truth.  Our God-designed conscience is the high-tech spiritual sensor that lights up when Truth strikes.  The Creator and Saviour, the Lord Jesus, is the Way, the Truth, and the Life (John 14:6).  We find eternal life by finding Him, personally . . . “And this is life eternal, that they might know thee, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom thou has sent.”  (John 17:3)

The Gospel of John was written specifically for us to recognize Truth when we hear it.  “But these are written, that ye might believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God; and that believing ye might have life through his name.”  (John 20:31)

And so we preach the Gospel.  We tell it, explain it, answer sincere questions, and help the interested in any way we can.  We don’t dialog it, debate it, argue it, or defend it.  Now, I love apologetics.  I’ve written much on the subject that you can find on this site.  This site contains a library full of evidence that supports Biblical creation, as opposed to evolutionary fantasies.  But apologetics is useful to help the interested.  It’s also useful to challenge the recalcitrant, especially if there might be some interested who are listening in while you’re challenging the obstinate.  But that challenge should be declared, not mumbled, not caveatted.

If you’re unsure of this in our snowflake culture that despises boldness, just consider how the prophets, the apostles, and the Lord Jesus, Himself, declared Truth to others.  Isaiah 58:1 is illustrative.  Teach, educate, and declare the Gospel, with compassion, yes, with kindness, yes, but above all with confidence and boldness.

Our part is essential.  God has given to us the ministry of reconciliation (2 Corinthians 5:18-20).  Accordingly, we work hard to explain Truth well.  If saving grace were irresistible and given to only a few selected before the foundation of the world, and given only at a particular God-specified moment, then the quality of our work is utterly meaningless.  I have noted some laziness in Calvinist evangelistic presentations, I suspect because of a reliance on their false doctrine.

Back to the Lensman saga . . . How did Kinnison go about picking the twelve?  It is evident that the Lensman’s telepathic powers, amplified by his ‘lens,’ enabled him to find men who have a core in touch with reality, a conscience not entirely seared, and minds that can evaluate truth and overrule a wicked heart.

Is E. E. “Doc” Smith deliberately drawing a parallel with the twelve disciples, making Kinnison a Messiah-like figure?  I don’t know.  Smith certainly wasn’t a Christian, but the Lensman series does reflect Biblical virtues  in many ways, including chivalry and the virtue of withholding sex until marriage – elements not found in modern sci-fi.  But then he wrote within an American culture that was still coasting on a Christian heritage.

The evangelism metaphor is evident.  When we share the Gospel we trust that the Holy Spirit works on the conscience, the mind, and the heart of the hearer, and that He guides us to those whose conscience is still somewhat sensitive. In practice, we give tracts to and engage in 121s with everyone we can, since we cannot  ‘see’ the hearts.  But then we also trust that the Holy Spirit draws on everyone.  See John 12:31, 1 Timothy 2:4, and 2 Peter 3:9.

In the evangelism / discipleship metaphor, the Boskonian twelve, because of their ‘worldly’ talents and experience, are well-suited to transform their culture, to enlist and train more ‘disciples.’  The message will be received more effectively by the masses due to their conversion testimonies.  They will ‘preach’ Civilization’s virtues  more compellingly because they are convinced of the Truth.  Similarly, and amazingly, God gives to us saved sinners the privilege of reaching other sinners.  God does not write the Gospel in blazing letters in the sky every morning.  Neither do angels preach the Good News . . . not until Revelation 14:6-7 do angels help out so directly.

Why isn’t Book 5 the ultimate climax of the series?  At the end of Book 4 Kinnison and the Galactic Patrol, the military instrument of Civilization, believe they have defeated Boskone when they destroy the home planet of the Eich, a vicious but brilliant race led by a council of 9.  It’s interesting to me that ‘9’ is a key occultic number regarding groups of demonic entities.  But it turns out that Thrale and its Tyrant represent the powers behind the Eich.

What Kinnison and the Galactic Patrol admirals don’t know, and will never know, is that there is a super-race of aliens, the Eddorians, who are at the pinnacle of the principalities, the powers, and the rulers of Boskonian cultural and spiritual darkness.  The metaphor relates to Ephesians 6:12.  The Eddorians are essentially a power-mad demonically evil race, far more capable in mental and technological prowess than humans or our friendly alien allies.  Fortunately(!) the Arisians, described in the beginning of Book 1, are an equally capable benevolent race, who occasionally guide and equip humanity during its development.  The Arisians, then, are the ‘good’ angels.  Or, you can consider Arisians and Eddorians to be gods without an ultimate God above.  I do note that there is an occasional, but obscure reference to an ultimate God in Smith’s saga, but only such as a deist would be content with.  Smith’s God doesn’t seem to get involved.  (In Klingon theology, at least, there is a definite afterlife, with a Heaven and a Hell that shows up explicitly, and it matters how you behave in this life!)

How can humanity, with only a little help from Arisia, defeat Eddore?  Well, it can’t.  Just before the fleet vs. fleet battle in Book 5, Kinnison battles an Eddorian personally, mentally, not knowing his true nature, supposing that he is a renegade, ‘mad’ Arisian.  (A ‘fallen angel,’ as it were.)  Kinnison wins, not knowing that an Arisian assisted in the critical moments.  Accordingly, we are no match for the demonic hosts, but rely on the Holy Spirit to sustain us.

Book 6 is entitled Children of the Lens.  It will be up to Kinnison’s five children, who are the culmination of a genetic heritage guided by the Arisians, the beginning of a new immortal race with the potential to go far beyond the talents of Arisia and Eddore.

“Doc” Smith ends the series with a sci-fi vision of a secular man-centered intergalactic Paradise . . . with no God in charge.  It’s about as optimistic as deistic or atheistic sci-fi can hope to achieve.  Most sci-fi, especially over the last couple of generations, is determinedly anti-Christian and pro-immorality, with no hope for an afterlife, no purpose in an allegedly evolving, mechanistic universe.  Why do sci-fi good guys risk their oh-so-brief lives when they have no hope for a New Heaven and a New Earth?  For that matter, why would an atheist join the military or a police force in today’s world?

Science fiction, along with other art forms and the academic discipline of secular philosophy, seems to be in a never-ending quest for a worldview that has some hope . . . but never finds it.  Of course.  What can overcome individual, personal death in a materialistic worldview?

The anti-Christian rulers of this world are always hopeful . . . incredibly . . . that they can establish a utopia with them in charge and God banished.  World War 1 was the ‘war to end all wars’ and culminated in a League of Nations to insure unity and peace.  World War 2’s death count and atrocities far exceeded the previous apocalypse, producing the United Nations that continues to be anything but.  Wars between and within nations, along with state-sanctioned atrocities and genocide, continue to rage all over the globe.   The last century has seen over 100 million deaths from war and tyranny, and the last 50 years has seen over a billion abortions.  Many within America work hard today to establish tyranny and oppression under the phony guise of ‘social justice.’  Those that declare, “Black lives matter!” care not at all about the abortion-murders of over 23 million black infants since 1973.  In fact, they target black neighborhoods with their abortion clinics.

God laughs at man’s defiance, explicitly in Psalm 2.  Only the Lord Jesus Christ can and will establish peace on Earth.  The events of the book of Revelation will, tragically yet necessarily, precede His return to establish His kingdom, wherein dwelleth peace and righteousness.  Man claims to want peace, but despises righteousness, particularly the Source of righteousness.  The Communist Soviet Union always claimed to be an advocate for world peace, but the Communist Party has always been explicit that peace is achieved only when the Party is in global control.

Well, that will happen, under the Antichrist.  But nobody is going to enjoy that.

America rejoiced in its part in ending WW1 and gloried even more in its decisive victory in WW2.  America sees itself as the victor in the Cold War.  Yet Americans, especially American Christians, have allowed the same despotic and wicked enemies to take control of its educational system, its entertainment, and its political establishment.  American Christians allow the public school systems and social media to shape the worldview of their children, and 90% grow up to reject the Gospel, to grow up ignorant of history, and to follow the political manipulators who will surely end American liberty.  The ‘seeker-friendly’ megachurch culture has produced an entire generation of professing Christian snowflakes, passively attending ‘the show’ each Sunday morning, uninterested in learning, and unaware of their responsibility to contend for the faith.

We are certainly close to the Rapture and the Tribulation.  But we’re still on the battlefield . . . which is spiritual.  The real enemies, the ‘Eddorians,’ are the principalities and powers that work to snatch Truth away from the minds of those who need it most.  The souls of individual men, women, and children still hang in the balance.  And it’s easier than ever to find lost people, whether churchgoers or not, to share a Gospel tract with, to engage in conversation on the ultimate Truth of salvation.  While we still have that liberty, let’s be about it.**

• drdave@truthreallymatters.com

*The Lensman series, by E. E. “Doc” Smith, Book 5, Second Stage Lensmen, published 1953.

** Honor Harrington’s signature call to action.

 

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157. The Sorcerer’s New Apprentice
March 1, 2021

Yearning for meaning, for the transcendent in life, is universal.  Many seek God through a plethora of man-made religions, tragically.  Some find God, along with salvation, an assured hope of eternal life, and day-to-day guidance in this present life, via repentance and faith in Jesus, who is both Creator and Savior.  Many yield to a materialist worldview, imagining that we are all just clumps of molecules in motion, with no purpose, no hope, such imaginings merely the product of random brain chemistry.  Some devote their lives to politics, fantasizing a godless utopia on Earth, if only every individual will recant their individuality and accept a groupthink dictated by the elites.

Many explore the New Age, or magic / sorcery / the occult, or psychotherapy, or techniques in mind control, or attempt to find the ‘god within.’  Some eagerly search for ‘spirit guides,’ who are supposedly extraterrestials or extradimensional beings far above us in evolutionary development.  The consensus for thousands of years is that spirit beings are, indeed, behind magic and sorcery.  Magic – not sleight of hand, but operations that truly defy the laws of physics.

In the West, especially in America, more people than ever play the sorcerer’s apprentice, not realizing the dangers and ignoring the simple Biblical explanation that Satan and his fallen angels work to deceive, bind, and destroy God’s image-bearers to keep us from finding hope . . . and Heaven.

This essay serves as a prequel to my 2/1/2019 review of Peter Jones 2015 book, One or Two.  Peter Jones’ report on the New Age and all of its ancillary threads is startling, yet simply the result of the trends exposed by Dave Hunt and T.A. McMahon in their 1988 book, America:  The Sorcerer’s New Apprentice – The Rise of New Age Shamanism.

Hunt observes that there is nothing ‘new’ about New Age, which includes such trends as herbal or ‘traditional’ medicine, holistic health and vegetarian diets, self-hypnosis, reincarnation, spirit guides, pyramind power, Yoga, TM, and other forms of Eastern meditation.  These are, Hunt points out, ancient religious practices, but are now “passed off as new advancements in science, medicine, and psychology.”

Some modern gurus admit they are promoting “ancient wisdom.”  Even Shirley MacLaine admits, “This stuff has been around for 5,000 years.”  Timothy Leary, LSD and drug-promoting high priest of the hippie culture (1960s), explained the continuity:  “All through the dark ages there were the Sufis, the Kabbalists, the Brotherhoods and Sisterhoods and the witchcraft groups and the Knights of Malta, and the Masonic orders . . . The spirit of humanism . . . the belief that it’s all within and you’re going to find God looking into the eyes of your lover, we didn’t invent that . . . it’s been going on forever.”

Hunt cites a 1986 New York Times column on “alternative thoughts” and practices and training in the corporate world, to enhance  competitiveness, derived from exploding interest in metaphysical religions, the occult, psychic healing, Satanism, and spirit guides . . . “they are ushering in what they call a New Age of understanding and intellectual ferment as significant as the Renaissance.”

In the 1920s and 30s, Hunt notes, a huge occult resurgence in Europe, and especially in Austria and Germany, laid the groundwork for Germany’s buy-in of Nazism.  Some historians call Hitler the “Occult Messiah.”  The Nazi Party under Hitler was inspired and motivated by occult practices, quite brazenly.  Hitler confided in one of his regional governors:  “I will tell you a secret.  I am founding an Order . . . the Man-God, that splendid Being, will be an object of worship.”  The modern offer to mankind is the same as the serpent suggested to Eve – that man can become as God, accountable only to himself.

Another Nazi insider’s analysis of Hitler:  “One cannot help thinking of him as a medium . . . possessed by forces outside himself.”  Himmler’s SS spent more money on occult investigations and geneological research than the Allies invested in developing the atomic bomb.  The mission of the SS?  To usher in a New Age, a New World inhabited by a New Man.

Hollywood is strongly invested in the New Age.  One report in the 1980s indicated that at least 1000 “channels” practiced in the Los Angeles area.  For example, a notable channel of the period, Jach Pursel, consulted with Lazaris, “a disembodied intelligence . . . who claims to be the consummate friend of mankind.”  And then there was Mafu, “a highly evolved entity from the seventh dimension.”

Helen Shucman was an atheist psychologist who took dictation from a voice who claimed to be Jesus, filling 1100 pages that other psychologists acclaimed for its ‘brilliant insights.’  Yet this Course in Miracles, supposedly from Jesus, contradicts everything the Bible teaches about Jesus.  No surprise there.

It took many years for Whitley Strieber, a best-selling author, to admit his bizarre encounters with “intelligent nonhuman beings.”  He could never determine whether they were from another planet, or another dimension, or perhaps even from his own mind, but he felt violated and angry.  “The visitors marched right into the life of an indifferent skeptic without a moment’s hesitation.”  At first he thought he was going crazy, but passed examination by multiple psychologists and psychiatrists who declared him ‘normal.’

Edgar Mitchell, Commander of Apollo 14, attempted telepathy experiments during his moon mission.  He reported a mystical experience of “cosmic consciousness,” similar to altered mind states others have found through drugs or yogic trances.  Mitchell left the space program to establish an institute in psychic research.  Russian cosmonauts had similar experiences.  A common theme is that their inner voices insist that mankind must tap into its infinite human potential via exploration of “inner space.”  Peace and disarmament are typical goals, consonant with New Age philosophy.

The Beatles were evangelists for the New Age.  The album Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band was a thinly veiled promotion of LSD.  Jimi Hendrix declared, “Through music, you can hypnotize people . . . And when you get them at their weakest point, you can preach into the subconscious minds what we want to say.”  He admitted, “Definitely I’m trying to change the world.”  Crosby, of Crosby, Stills, Nash, & Young boasted, “We figured that the only thing to do was to steal their kids . . . I’m not talking about kidnapping . . . but about changing young people’s value systems.”

John Lennon described his own “inspiration” process:  “It’s like being possessed – like a psychic or a medium.”  Jim Morrison of The Doors  was described on the back cover of his biography as the “obsessed disciple of darkness who rejected authority in any form.”  Morrison called the spirits that possessed him “The Lords.”  Keith Richards of the Rolling Stones:  “The Stones’ songs came spontaneously like an inspiration at a séance . . . as if the Stones as songwriters were only a willing and open medium.”

Little Richard confessed:  “I was directed and commanded by another power.  The power of darkness . . . The power of the Devil.  Satan.”  Joni Mitchell’s creativity came from her spirit guide “Art.”  Jimi Hendrix believed he was possessed by some devil he had no control over, who tormented him.  Elvis Presley was immersed in drugs and the occult.

Satan has a full quiver of arrows.  Not just drugs and music, but Eastern mysticism can also produce altered mind states.  Hindu evangelists invaded the west, at the invitation of the Beatles, to sell Transcendental Meditation (TM), a marketing label for ancient pagan practices.  What is rarely reported are the frightening spiritual side effects, including insanity and suicides.  Hunt notes that the repetition of a secret word (in the mantra) is literally a call to an entity to possess the meditator.

Eastern meditation practices invoke gods, masters, teachers, and guides who occasionally manifest themselves during trances.  Users of the Tibetan Book of the Dead have been initiated into TM by “spirit entities” while on a drug trip.

By the 1980s the New Age had generated a multi-billion dollar industry, with books, products, seminars, and corporate training for self-improvement.  Training sessions include inducing a trance-like state.  Some fear brainwashing, which seems consistent with the 21^st century emphasis on groupthink.  In  some corporate training sessions participants have reported harmful influence from “spirit entities.”  Some have had out-of-body experiences, others have been thrown across the room by an unknown force, and some have encountered very real alien entities who attempt “possession.”

One medical doctor, who had also become an Eastern-style guru, admitted:  “Tapping these energies is fire, and the consequences . . . can be psychosis, aggravation of neuroses, acceleration of disease processes, and suicide.”

The “science” of psychology is in bed with shamanism / nature religion / witch doctoring.  Psychotherapy uses historical shamanistic practices.  An ad for a psychology conference states, “An unforgettable opportunity to learn from some of the most important healers and spiritual leaders in West Africa and Brazil – Journey into altered states of consciousness where one can meet one’s higher spirit teachers and the ‘gods’ themselves . . . Topics include Ritual, Meditation . . . Shamanism and Spirit Healing, Mediumship . . .”

One expert admitted, “Indeed, the shaman, or medicine man, can be viewed as an early psychotherapist.”

Napoleon Hill, with his 1930s book, Think and Grow Rich, was the founder of the enormous industry of motivation / success / positive-mental attitude training and seminars.  Hill professed  that his “guidance” came from a spiritual dimension, from a disembodied emissary that entered his study, declaring, “I come from the Great School of Masters.  I am one of the Council of Thirty-three who serve the Great School and its initiates on the physical plane.”  The “Supreme Secret” the entity revealed?  “Whatever the human mind can believe, it can achieve.”  This, of course, is the central theme of the positive-attitude gurus who continue to bilk and endanger multitudes.  (Not to mention much of Christendom, at least the name-it-and-claim-it crowd.)

Famous psychiatrist Carl Jung attempted to give a scientific veneer to occultic techniques, but he also admitted to acquiring his “discoveries” from a spirit guide.  Jung grew in popularity while Freud, the determined atheist / materialist, is increasingly discredited.  Toward the end of Jung’s life, he suspected that the spirit entities he communicated with were more than “archetypes” of human consciousness, but rather hostile beings independent of human consciousness.

Jung consulted with “spirits of the dead” on many occasions, who taught him on the nature of God, the universe, and man.  Millions today have communed with dead souls, they believe, including many who did not believe in life after death before their experiences.

In so-called “dream analysis,” Sigmund Freud believed he had discovered an unconscious side to consciousness.  The idea of the unconscious permeates our culture and our language to this day, despite no evidential ground for it.  Carl Jung, with help from his spirit guide, Philemon, decided that all minds were a part of the collective unconscious and that we could tap its mystical powers.  The human potential movements owe much to this fantasy.  Self-improvement gurus tell us to look within ourselves to discover all truth, knowledge, and power.  Altered states help, whether from drugs or meditation.  You might even discover that you are God!  Mystic Jon Klimo wrote that “we are evolving toward an eventual reunion with the one God, which is the underlying identity of All This Is . . . Enlightening involves . . . awakening to the oneness of all.”

Even Hallmark ‘family movies’ have deteriorated into repetitive themes of self-love, self-acceptance, self-worth, self-esteem, self-ad nauseaum.  Self-centeredness used to be considered a human failing . . . indeed, sin.  Sin is the true root of man’s troubles.  More self, more sin, is not the solution.  In our current generation, strong feelings justify all manner of havoc, generating  accusations of micro-aggressions, hate speech, and a pervasive cancel culture.  How one ought to feel has no meaning, because God’s laws on how to treat each other are despised.  Rather, whoever gets offended first, and shouts the accusation, wins.

Interestingly, many New Agers believe we are in the midst of a universal spiritual awakening that may be associated with “the Last Days.”

The environmental movement is thoroughly invested in what they see as a spiritual consciousness, “in which the individual feels embedded in nature and the cosmos.”  Some see shamanism as a way to establish “forgotten connections with the powers of nature.”  And so the New Age can be described as a return to the “nature religion” – paganism / idolatry – that is repudiated so clearly in the Bible, because its source is found in lying demons.  It has been observed that shamans separated by thousands of miles and by significant cultural differences, isolated for up to thousands of years, yet practice the same techniques with the same results.  That cannot be coincidence.

Whether it’s shamanism or success / motivation training, occult techniques share a common purpose:  “to invoke and / or manipulate a natural force innate within the cosmos in order to achieve health, wealth, or success, or to bring a curse upon one’s enemies.”  Of course there is no such natural force.  God cannot be manipulated – the techniques of many Pentecostals to coerce God are akin to occultic rituals.  So when these rituals actually work, the source of strength is clearly in the demonic realm.

Philosopher Herbert Schlossberg points out the amorality of shamanism, analogous to the amorality of a materialistic worldview:  “Animals do not act morally or immorally; they only act naturally.  A system of ethics that says human beings ought to base their behavior on nature therefore justifies any behavior, because nature knows no ethic.”  But when we see nature as creation designed by the brilliant, personal Creator described in the Bible, it is evident that morality is written in our hearts, in our God-given conscience.  Human  beings are not ‘natural,’ but rather immortal beings made in God’s image.  We ought to behave accordingly.

A quick aside . . . It is clear that the horrific wildfires of the Summer and Fall of 2020 on the west coast arose as consequences of a nature-worshiping environmental movement, that for decades has avoided controlled burns, allowing megatons of brush and dead trees to accumulate.  When governmental policy is controlled by pagan anti-reality religion, people suffer, animals suffer, and the creation is damaged.  Biblical stewardship would have saved those forests and avoided the terrible consequences, including air pollution far beyond anything America has experienced for decades.

Doug Glover, who came out of the New Age movement, concluded that all of the techniques (rebirthing, Yoga, TM, visualization, inner guides, etc.) “have an intrinsic power in themselves.  They work because they are designed specifically to blow open doors and knock down barriers that God has placed in the human spirit to prevent a takeover by demonic beings that I came to realize are real and very destructive.”

Hunt reports that (in the 1980s) there were an estimated 500,000 followers of voodoo in New York alone.  Santeria grows prolifically in southern California, including doctors, lawyers, business execs, and blue collar folks.  A police officer said he knew of officers in Miami, Chicago, and Los Angeles who were into Santeria.

A gang task force leader in the Los Angeles PD calls Santeria “a satanic cult,” declaring, “I believe occult religions like Santeria help certain gang members commit criminal acts . . . They believe their demon god protects them from any harm, even bullets.  With that kind of belief, they do things they wouldn’t normally do.”

In closing, I recommend both Hunt’s and Jones’ books.  It is clear that this world’s system is infested with satanic influence, in popular music and entertainment media, in politics and the news media, in sports and education.  Demonic entities have six thousand years of experience in manipulating, deceiving, addicting, and oppressing God’s image bearers. They are smarter than people and ruthless beyond our imagination.  God allows them to run amok for a time.  That time is running out, though, provoking the Adversary to escalate evil and chaos on a scale this world has never before seen.

The child of God, indwelt by the Holy Spirit, is shielded from attack (see Ephesians chapter 6), but only as he deliberately puts on the whole armor of God, his feet shod with the preparation of the Gospel of peace, and wielding the sword of the Spirit, the word of God, in taking the message of salvation to the lost around us.

As you review Ephesians 6, you’ll see no armor for the warrior’s back.  So move forward continually, relentlessly.  Play offense.  Today.  Hand a tract to someone.  Speak compassionately and boldly.  Pray that you walk with the Lord in His work.  And repeat tomorrow.

• drdave@truthreallymatters.com

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158. Our Post-Christian Culture
April 1, 2021

I was a university professor in Michigan’s UP at the turn of the century, and marveled at how post-modernism prevailed, not just in academia, but throughout the culture, in politics, in religion, in the media, and in the arts.  Something dramatic occurred on 9/11/2001 – culturally.

Postmodernists believe that we construct reality in our mind, in our culture.  There is no such thing as objective truth!  “But those planes flying into those skyscrapers, taking everyone by surprise, were no mental construction.  Nor were the deaths of three thousand victims.  Nor was the heroism of the firefighters, police, medics, and ordinary people caught up in the horrors of that day.  This was all objectively real.”

So writes Gene Edward Veith, Jr., in his 2020 book, Post-Christian:  A Guide to Contemporary Thought and Culture.  Veith recalls conversations at the time, everywhere, that were distinctly non-postmodern.  The terrorists were certainly not relativists, nor were they evaluated relativistically.  They had done evil and the first-responders who ran into collapsing buildings to rescue people were good.

A spirit of national unity erupted, and people started to consider eternity more poignantly.  For the next several months a partner and I set up inside a mall to survey people, asking whether they were more or less concerned about their own spiritual condition, and then sharing the Gospel with them.  For about two months we saw a lot of “traction” – most were quite open to listen to truth, some for the first time in their lives.  But after about two months, almost everyone was back to “normal.”  My wife and I saw a similar effect in 2008 after the school shooting at Northern Illinois University, wherein 6 were killed and 17 wounded.  For about two months a poignant moral sensitivity reigned on campus, and we found that spiritual conversations were easily enjoined.  After two months – back to “normal.”

After 9/11’s initial shock, Veith reports, moral and cultural relativism surged back, but with a difference.  “Before, all religions, in elite opinion, were considered to be equally good.  Afterward, all religions were considered to be equally bad.”  Furthermore, Islam wasn’t to blame, only religious fundamentalism.  Even our President insisted that Islam is “a religion of peace.”  But since fundamentalism is bad, then Christian fundamentalists are evil, too.

At the time, and ever since, you will find much evil ascribed to Christian fundamentalists, but what journalists, pundits, or academics would dare to say anything negative about Islam?  I’m just asking.

Postmodern atheists assert that God is merely a cultural construction.  But the so-called New Atheists launch moral criticisms against God, arguing that Christianity is the chief cause of the world’s problems.  God might argue that sin is the real problem.  After all, if we all loved others as we love ourselves (the 2^nd greatest commandment, as cited by the Lord Jesus), every societal problem you can think of would disappear.  Our culture, you may have noticed, incessantly whines that we should love ourselves above all.

Veith argues that postmodernism hardened with the fall of the World Trade Center.  It is now virulently political, dogmatic, and intolerant.  I recall having a friendly discussion with two college students around 2003, on the grounds of a Lutheran college(!)  As I shared with the two what the Bible says about salvation, a third student walked over and got in my face, angrily declaring that he hated intolerant people like me.  I asked him if he couldn’t see the irony of his intolerantly angry demands that I stop talking to his classmates, who were perfectly content in the conversation up to that point.

The phony lip service about tolerance in the late 20^th century, in my opinion, was aimed at turning Christians and conservatives into wimps.  Christians who preach what they claim is truth were intolerant!  Secular conservatives like Rush Limbaugh who claimed a difference between truth and lies were to be shunned!  So now that the culture has shifted again, and the Marxists, the control freaks, have gained power throughout the society, good vs. evil has flipped upside down and the atheist Left has become uber-dogmatic.  Disagree and you’re evil, immoral.

The irony seems lost on almost everyone.  In an atheistic / materialistic worldview, there is NOTHING other than atoms, molecules, and the laws of physics.  In the Periodic Table there is no justice, mercy, love, hope, or meaning.  In the laws of physics there is neither soul nor spirit, no logic, no rationality, no purpose, and no PERSONS.  What “you” claim you “believe” is just brain chemistry, random processes.

Back to Veith . . . who observes that Kant is erroneously credited with doing for philosophy what Copernicus did for astronomy.  Kant suggested that the historic approach to make our minds and language conform to objects, to observables, should be reversed.  Instead, we should assume that objects must conform to our cognition.

What Copernicus did was to reverse Ptolemy, who put man at the center of the universe.  Copernicus put us in touch with reality, with the sun at the center of the solar system, and us in constant motion, spinning, hurtling through space.  Kant, however, would have us go back to Ptolemy, insisting that man decides reality.  The Christian, in touch with reality, admits that this is God’s creation – we don’t whimsically get to change the rules.  When we try, it hurts.

Nietzsche, then, “stressed the creative power not just of the intellect, but of the will.”  Worse, the will to power, which is where our current dogmatic, intolerant postmodern culture has brought us.

Exaltation of the self “led to the attempt to study human beings scientifically” – psychology.  For the masses, we have the social sciences.  Beliefs, customs, and worldviews arise as a bundle of social constructions.  Social constructivism was, of course, weaponized by Karl Marx and his followers, right up to the present day.  The dominant social class enjoys the privilege of oppressing other groups.  Methods include identity politics and critical race theory, woven into coursework from Kindergarten through graduate school, in corporate “training programs,” and in “sensitivity” sessions throughout the military, too.

What are the vital “truths” now?  Whites oppress blacks.  Men oppress women.  Heterosexuals oppress homosexuals and transgenders.  “Intersectionality” unites all the victim groups against their enemies.  The chiefest of the enemies are whites, white men, conservative white men, and most evil of all, Christian conservative white men.

The glorious future envisioned comes from “deconstructing” these power relationships.  Deconstruct marriage, the nuclear family, sexual morality . . . ultimately, anything that is correlated with God’s reality, as described in Scripture.

“Rejecting God, human beings are attempting to place themselves in His role as creator, lawgiver, and savior.” – Veith

Veith has an interesting perspective on the history of technology, which compensates for our limitations, but also underscores those same limits.  We are weak, an easy prey, so we invent weapons.  Constrained by time, we invent ships and cars and planes to compress travel.  Life is short so we invent medicine to extend it.  Our greatest thinkers die, so we preserve their writings.  But we still grow old and die.

Once upon a time, most people never heard a great musician, but now we have recordings and streaming services.  Veith remembers as a child how his parents had friends over to sing, gathered around mom’s piano, with people bringing other instruments for accompaniment.  Not much of that going on anymore.  Even churches, Veith notes, have moved to a “listening-to-a-performance” approach to music.  Our default is to listen, not to make music ourselves.  Life is, accordingly, not richer.

Plugged into entertainment, many are under constant stimulation, which makes us susceptible to paralyzing boredom.   This is addiction.  Veith cites Ken Myers who “shows how pop culture creates a self-centered, please-me sensibility” that even permeates the church.

One of Veith’s major themes is “The End of Sex.”  In God’s created reality, explained in His word, sex is inextricably connected with marriage, a one-flesh union meant to be permanent – until death do we part.  The “one flesh” idea is about relationship, especially the physical expression of love within the marriage.

In the post-Christian world, though, the ‘sexual revolution’ took off when God got kicked out.  Easy birth-control launched the ‘revolution’ in the 1960s when it detached sex from conceiving children.  The pill supposedly “liberated” women from the responsibilities of marriage, child bearing, and child raising.  In reality, Veith notes, the pill “liberated” men.  No more consequences for promiscuity.  “In the 1960s, as women went to consciousness-raising groups, men were enjoying Playboy magazine.”

People still got married, but it was much more about romance or, rather, romantic fulfillment.  Self-fulfillment replaced love and responsibility to family.  The divorce rate soared.  National demographics are now dominated by single-parent families, fatherless children, loneliness, depression, poverty, and drug addiction.

Male and female have been redefined ad nauseum.  Pornography enables sex with one’s self, detaching sex from relationship completely.  “Sex as a created reality is repudiated at every level.”

Sex and its distortions have taken over everything, including politics.  Political issues used to include economic policies, international relations, etc.  Now, elections turn on abortion rights and transgenders choosing bathrooms.  I won’t comment on it, but Veith has an insightful section on the transgender issue.

Veith has noticed something that I have, too.  A lot of young people brought up in church have rejected their faith, “not so much because of the arguments of an atheist professor but because they want to plunge into the sexual debauchery of the campus culture.”  I’ve met many such students on campus and shared the Gospel with them.  It becomes evident that they see the sense of the Gospel, but are so addicted to fornication and / or pornography that they close their hearts to what their minds know to be true.

There have been a number of notable atheists, by the way, who have confessed that the primary motivation for their God-rejecting worldview has been their desire to engage in sex with no boundaries, no guilt.

Veith observes that in the beginning of post-modernism, its advocates challenged the so-called scientific rationalism of the modernists by extolling the importance of culture.  The postmodernists repudiated religion, although all cultures have communal, institutional religions.  They celebrated anything-goes sex despite all cultures having sexual taboos.  They deconstructed the family which is the foundation of all cultures.

In short, they actually despise every aspect of functional cultures.  Today what they focus on, interminably, exhaustively, and depressingly, is race, which is exactly what the American civil rights movement worked against.  See Martin Luther King’s most famous speech, regarding content of character as the issue, not color of skin.

Veith:  “Racial diversity is not cultural diversity.”  University campuses are on an expensive, debilitating, never-ending quest to promote diversity of skin colors, while everyone thinks and speaks in exactly the same mind-numbing way.  In truth, thoughts and values are at the center of culture and choice in thoughts and values is the prerequisite for freedom and for intellectual and spiritual growth.  What the leftist tyrants are attempting is to destroy all cultures that deviate from theirs.

The virtual village has greatly reduced interaction with flesh-and-blood human beings, Veith notes.  He cites sociologist Robert Putnam’s book (2000), Bowling Alone:  The Collapse and Revival of American Community.  Once upon a time, bowling leagues abounded.  I recall as a child that our whole family came along with dad on bowling league night.  It was an event!

Today, most people bowl alone.  Putnam also detailed the decline of involvement in civic organizations (Lions clubs), altruistic groups (food pantries), and informal groups (bridge clubs, hobbyists).  In 1961, for example, one out of every four American adults was a member of a bridge club.  Now, bridge and other card games are played mostly in senior centers.

The very existence of communities depends on personal bonding over shared values and missions.  The temptations and ease of the internet have crushed a local sense of community.  Putnam notes that in online bridge, the focus is on the game, while personal interaction is scant.

Need I discuss disembodied Facebook “friends”?

Real-world social groups, Putnam insists, involve interactions with people different from oneself.  The bowling league might include factory workers, business owners, Republicans, and Democrats.  You learn how to get along, compete fairly, and enjoy the fellowship.

Online communities, in contrast, tend to consist solely of people with the same views and “will often define themselves by their opposition to other groups.  This is a formula for social discord.”  People in opposing groups can be treated as abstractions, which can be hated and insulted with no social consequences.  Once again we have in operation principles directly opposed to Biblical reality, wherein we are commanded to love our neighbors.

Marshall McLuhan (“the medium is the message”) wrote that the printing press was an information technology that enabled extended thought, linear logic, and complex ideas that could be developed over hundreds of pages.  Reading required education, a long attention span, and practice in internal reflection.  Modern media are image-intensive, not language-centric, evoking emotions, not ideas.  Modern culture has thereby moved to a more primitive, anti-intellectual level.

Where language is still featured Twitter, for example, limits to 280 characters.    The optimum Facebook post, sized to generate more “likes,” is about 40 characters.  No wonder that internet interactions are rife with insults and snappy comebacks.

In 1994 Veith published his book Postmodern Times.  His present book was originally intended to be an update, but things had changed so much.  In the 90s, he writes, people were saying things like, “That might be right for you, but it isn’t right for me:”; “No one has the right to impose their morality on anyone else”; and “Everybody is free to choose their own values.”

But now, dogmatism is back.  Condemnation is certain for anyone daring to question abortion, the LGBTQ agenda, or any aspect of ever-shifting woke politics.  Any moral principle derived from the Bible is evil.  If your skin is shaded too white, you must affirm your vile racism.  No discussion allowed.   Obey and submit.  Woke for the Left is akin to being born again for a true Bible believer.  But woke religion has the sword-wielding character of historic Islam . . . submit and recite the politically correct mantra if you want to survive.

The term political correctness, Veith notes, is derived from the Communist Party’s insistence that all discourse from party members must be in lock-step with Party orthodoxy.  The rules and speech codes are intended to be divisive, “designed to identify enemies.”

When the Left wins, it’s not enough.  “Our current identity politics – that is to say, tribal politics – seeks not only to win at any cost but to punish the losers.”  This is happening across America today.

In every major institution that has power (government, political parties, education, news media, entertainment, corporations across the economic spectrum), Christianity is dead and politics has filled the void.  Woke politics defines what is morally acceptable.  The words liberal and conservative have become meaningless.  What’s liberal about massive government control over every aspect of life?  What’s conservative about trying to break the monopoly of the public schools and giving parents some choice?  The real issue is tyranny vs. freedom.

(Veith has an interesting footnote about Republicans preferring “working class products” like Chevys and Wrangler jeans, while Democrats favor high-status name brands, like imported cars and designer clothing.)

Today’s post-Marxists have replaced Marx’s theme of competing economic classes by invoking clashes of identity – groups defined by sex, gender, race, ability, any distinction real or imagined that can divide to facilitate power grabbing by those who best can lie and stir up anger.  Like old-fashioned Marxists, those that rule our culture work to create conflict.

This rebellion against the supposed privileged is, with horrific irony, perpetrated by the most privileged in our society – the academics, the tech companies, the media corporations, the politicians, the corporate CEOs.  Accordingly, the middle class has been gutted.  One of the goals is obviously for everyone to work for government or for Amazon or for WalMart or in the sweat shops that produce consumer goods . . . unless all manufacturing has been outsourced overseas.

Post-Marxists are quick to become oppressors themselves, Veith notes.  And they love to punish their opponents,  claiming that justice must be served.  But justice requires absolute morality, completely anathema to the post-Marxist worldview.  Bah, who cares about logic?

Furthermore, if there is no objective morality or objective truth, then “what is there to teach?  What is there to learn?  Schools instead can indoctrinate.  Schools can teach students to construct their own truths.”  But only woke truths are acceptable.

Veith cites test scores in the U.S.  Only 37% of 4^th graders and 32% of 8^th graders are proficient in reading.  In math, proficiency declines from 40% to 33% in those four years.  I have noticed in talking to college students, especially to philosophy and psych majors, that seniors are dumber than sophomores – they’ve learned so many things that just aren’t so.

Indeed, quantitative studies in critical thinking among university students show that they are less skilled in reasoning upon graduation, than when they entered.  On average undergraduate students spend, per week, about 11.5 hours studying.  Half of students, Veith reports, say they have taken no course that requires a substantial amount of writing.  A third say that no course required reading more than 40 pages per week.  Students spend 7% of their time studying and 51% socializing.

The campus culture, of course, promotes partying, substance abuse, and sexual debauchery.  The postmodernist worldview that permeates the campus can only encourage a ‘whatever’ attitude.  Veith observes that, just like in Soviet and fascist universities, faculty and students must obey speech codes or risk discipline, expulsion, and careers ruined.

In literature courses, great authors are “interrogated” to uncover their crimes of racism, sexism, or homophobia, Veith notes.  Even in the sciences, we find feminist critiques that objectivity is “masculinist” and the scientific method represents a mind-set of dominating or raping “mother nature.”  There are debates about whether scientists, past or present, who might be sexist, should even have their work cited.

The culture wars are over.  The Christians have lost.  Veith cites Rod Dreher, who is Orthodox, who recommends that Christians “strategically withdraw” from the culture:  “turn your home into a domestic monastery.”  He calls for churches to become close-knit communities.  He’s not totally isolationist, in that he hopes that Christians will work at the local level in government to, hopefully, “rebuild civilization from the ground up.”

But withdrawal is anathema to the Great Commission.  We still have the Gospel lifeboat and today, just like for the last two thousand years, we can offer that lifeboat to every individual we cross paths with.

Dreher advocates home schooling.  Amen.  Totally agree.  How can any Christian put her child into the Devil’s school system?  Don’t imagine that your little child will be a missionary within that philosophical snake pit.  It’s your job to be the missionary to your community!  One ray of sunshine from COVID-19 is that many parents have pulled their kids out of the system and begun homeschooling.  The government and the culture will work hard to squash this movement . . . just watch.

Veith has a great chapter on modern spiritual movements including how New Age ideas have swept the culture, infiltrating the churches, including the evangelical.  He hopes that when the travails of life test these pseudo-spiritualities beyond their ability to help, that some will turn to God.  I see that happening in the Tribulation, but not before then, for most.  Yet individuals can be saved, and so we should try to reach them.  Made any efforts this week?

Veith pleads that post-Christian Christianity needs to be desecularized.  He hopes that Christians from the rest of the world, suffering and even thriving under intense persecution and privations, might carry some life into the “exhausted West.”  From what I can glean from various sources, God is saving souls throughout the third world, but not much is going on in the West.  My opinion is that the timing of the Rapture and the Tribulation is far more dependent on the Gospel outreach efforts of Asians, Africans, and Latin Americans than on anything happening in America, not to mention Europe.

American Christians are still devoted, or addicted to politics and sports.  Perhaps God has allowed COVID and the recent elections in part to provoke a cold-turkey change of perspective in Christian hearts.  I hope so.  My only and focused prayer regarding the events of the last year is that God use them to save souls and to provoke Christians to . . . save souls.  And to let me be part of that.

In the last chapter Veith offers a variety of hopeful anecdotes.  Here are a couple:  While visiting Scandinavian youth ministries, he lectured at an apologetics conference in Finland and was astonished at the energetic faith he witnessed.  He heard about the conversion of many Muslims who, historically, are the most resistant of all religions to the Gospel.  A Danish worker told him how three immigrants showed up at a Mission house on a Wednesday night asking about Jesus.

“The next week, ten showed up.  Then twenty.  Then so many that the house could hardly hold them all.”  This began to happen throughout Scandinavia.

At the Finnish Bible College Veith learned that the Finnish Outer Mission had sent missionaries to Afghanistan for years, with little to show for it.  The effort ended when several missionaries were killed.  But because of that work, the Mission has staff that know the Afghan languages.  “We worked for so long in Afghanistan.  But now God is sending the Afghans here!  In the very chapel where we honor the missionaries who died trying to bring the Gospel to Afghanistan, Afghans are being baptized!”

So maybe something is happening in Europe.  Would that God would do the same in the U.S.  Let’s do our part.  Perhaps we’ll be visited with similar grace.

• drdave@truthreallymatters.com

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159. How to start a new religion: The life of Alexander Campbell
May 1, 2021

Alexander Campbell (1788 – 1866) was one of the most famous and most widely traveled men of 19^th century America.  His legacy continues to this day within American Christendom, although greatly watered down and with little awareness of the historical roots.

Campbell’s life quest was to restore “the ancient gospel and ancient order of things,” to unify the churches, and to stir up America as an instrument of God to usher in the Millennium.  He had no lack of self-esteem and he was as serious and sincere as any man could possibly be.  Yet he serves as a cautionary tale for those who dream of heading a new movement, or a new denomination, or a cult, or even for those who lust to be the preeminent one-man-super-senior-pastor of a local church.

In Douglas A. Foster’s A Life of Alexander Campbell, published in 2020, the biographer reports the good, the bad, and the ugly of the principal founder of what are now at least three daughter denominations, the Disciples of Christ, the Churches of Christ, and the so-called Christian Churches (which include quite a number of megachurches).  It was not Campbell’s intent to simply establish a new association of churches or a new denomination.  He passionately desired to unite all of Christendom.

Foster reports that as early as 1825 Campbell expressed frustrations at critics who dismissed his efforts by suggesting that we should just wait until the Millennium to resolve the churches’ divisiveness.  He abhorred such apathy:  “I reply that it will be by the correction of these errors that the millennial day will be ushered in.”  No small ambitions motivated his work!  He simply expected that as people heard Biblical truth, uncorrupted by vain philosophy, sectarianism would disappear.  A united Christendom would convert the world and the Lord would return to establish His millennial reign.

In an 1830 speech in Pittsburgh, Campbell treated his audience to his view of history, praising the United States for freeing its people from Europe’s political and religious tyranny.  But this must be a mere precursor to a more glorious revolution, to emancipate the human mind from the chains of superstition and sectarian tyrannies.  Only the “true gospel” could effect this final revolution.

Campbell:  “Divest it (the gospel) of all the appendages of human philosophy, falsely so-called, and of all the traditions and dogmas of men; and in its power it will pass from heart to heart, from house to house, from city to city, until it bless the whole earth.”

Well, of course, that was the New Testament plan from the start, which has been corrupted time and time again by ‘traditions and dogmas of men.’  Yet Campbell believed it was his calling to, finally, get it done right.  There were many things Campbell failed to understand, not least that Biblical prophecy is clear that the last days before the Lord’s return will be filled with apostasy, iniquity, and coldness in men’s hearts.  Also, that there would  be many false teachers and false christs.  He became one of them.

In later years his vision of America leading the way toward the Millennium, on a foundation of Christian unity, faltered.  After the war with Mexico ended in 1848, he admitted publicly that “the American nation, as a nation, is no more in spirit Christian than were Greece and Rome when the Apostles planted churches in Corinth, Athens, or in the metropolis of the empire, with Caesar’s household in it.”

Regretting that he had not spoken out against the war, he exclaimed, “War is not now, nor was it ever, a process of justice.  It never was a test of truth – a criterion of right.  It is either a mere game of chance or a violent outrage of the strong upon the weak.”

As late as 1852 he still preached postmillennialism, on America’s destiny and God-given abilities to usher in “the blessed age.”  But in 1858 he published a refutation, admitting that too many prophecies had yet to be fulfilled, including the return of the Jews to their homeland.  As a postmillennial he also believed that peace must spread throughout the world and that the multitudes of “wild, untaught, and unchristianized barbarians” must be civilized.  It was clear that the trends opposed this dream.

The outbreak of the Civil War crushed Campbell’s hopes.  He had prayed and hoped for decades that wise leaders would bring slavery to a gradual end.  But now the nation was divided, with Americans “glutting their wrath and vengeance on one another, with all the instruments of murder and slaughter . . . caps the climax of human folly and gratuitous wickedness . . . civilized America gluttonously satiating your furious appetites for fraternal blood.”

As the war raged on, compounded personally by tensions within his own family, Campbell withdrew from his public role.  He still taught a bit in the college he founded, Bethany College, now in West Virginia (the state split from Virginia because of the war).  But he was close to the end of his life.

But let’s move back to the beginning of Alexander Campbell’s story, before we finish the end of it.

He was born in County Antrim in what is today Northern Ireland.  His father, Thomas, was a Scotch-Irish Seceder Presbyterian minister, while his mother, Jane, was of Huguenot Reformed descent.  Foster lays out the history of the Protestant tensions of the previous two centuries which I won’t detail here.  But he was a product of his times with his faith formed under his father’s tutelage.

Alex was ten years old in 1798 when the United Irishmen’s rebellion began.  That group called for Irish home rule and full political rights for Catholics, alarming Protestants who feared what a Catholic majority might do to them.  The British crushed the rebellion.  Several battles occurred within miles of the Campbell’s house.  After victory the British army carried out brutal reprisals against suspected rebels, including indiscriminate execution of men, boys, and women.

Thomas Campbell and his church were under suspicion because some Presbyterians had sympathized with the rebellion.  A British cavalry unit arrived during a service and its captain stalked fiercely up the aisle.  Thomas quoted the 46^th psalm and launched into a long and fervent prayer, with content that assured the captain, who had bowed his head, that no rebels were present there.  He strode off and took his unit to look for rebels elsewhere.  In fact, Thomas Campbell had consistently taught against membership in any society that encouraged rebellion and violence.  This attitude likely informed Alexander’s desperate and hopeless attempts to find a neutral ground between North and South during our Civil War, in the hope that Christian unity would overcome political disagreements.

In the years following, Thomas worked hard to establish a union of Irish and Scottish Reformed churches for the purpose of supporting missionaries.  His efforts largely failed.  Thomas’ health was failing in 1807 when he decided to sail to America to work with Presbyterian churches in Pennsylvania, amidst Irish settlers the Campbells knew.  He fell out with some church leaders over his conviction that “where the Scriptures speak, we speak; and where the Scriptures are silent, we are silent.”  But that seemed to cast doubt on infant baptism.

In 1808 Alexander set out to join his father, but after a local shipwreck, detoured for a year to study at the University of Glasgow.

The independent Presbyterians split from the Church of Scotland, in part, because the denomination had no interest in evangelizing Scotland and actually opposed the use of lay preachers to carry the Gospel to the streets and to the villages.  Through Campbell’s relationships with the Independents, he absorbed and developed convictions that became lifelong commitments regarding the ‘restoration of the pure gospel,’ strict views on the primacy of Scripture over creeds and traditions, separation of church and state, local church autonomy, weekly Lord’s supper, and simple worship.  Postmillennialism and Christian unity also became part of Campbell’s package.

Alexander finally made it to America in 1809.  Landing in New York and surveying the city, his first impressions led him to the idea that America was God’s “Chosen Land.”  He found his father in Pennsylvania and joined him in the work.  His father set up preaching opportunities for him, despite his lack of ordination.  This contributed to Thomas’ rejected application for affiliation with the Synod of Pittsburgh of the Presbyterian Church in the United States of America (PCUSA).  So, they set up their own church and their own association, the “First Church of the Christian Association” in 1811.  Thomas solved the ordination problem by ordaining his son.

Their task, as they saw it, was to clear away obstacles and teach only the New Testament as the constitution for each church.  Sounds good.  Can’t disagree with the intent.  But how faithful would they be to a sound interpretation of the New Testament?

Campbell learned to preach in an extemporaneous style, a departure from the classical Presbyterian manner, with carefully prepared and memorized manuscripts.  His speaking resonated well with “the American fondness for plain speaking and confrontation,” as Foster put it.

In 1810 he discovered the power of the pen, writing a series of anonymous essays for the local paper, attacking the uneducated and rude social behavior of the area’s youth.  Young women at parties, for example, he likened to a flock of geese that chattered simultaneously and incessantly.  Females showed small minds and young men had irrational souls.  Campbell saw social gatherings as having value only if important topics were discussed, topics to nourish one’s soul rather than for “giddy dissipation, in thoughtless mirth, in needless festivity.”  Before long he would begin his own publishing operation, writing books and journals to propagate his reform crusade.

Foster believes that Campbell lived with a severe tension between his love, on the one hand, for an America where “I have had my horse shod by a legislator, my horse saddled . . . by a senator.  Here is no nobility but virtue; here there is no ascendance save that of genius, virtue, and knowledge.”  On the other hand he agreed with Thomas Jefferson that the best form of government  is that which provides for the selection of ‘natural aristocrats’ into the offices of government.  Campbell wanted to unite the common people in a unified Christianity, yet he looked down upon those not well educated, not sophisticated.

When Alexander’s first child was born, he had to face up to the controversy of infant baptism, a practice with no Biblical precedent or support.  He and his father had been tolerant of the practice, but now it was personal.  After intense study, he left Presbyterian (and Roman Catholic) practice behind and decided that Scripture prescribed baptism by immersion only for repentant believers.  He doubled down by submitting himself to baptism by immersion at the hands of a local Baptist pastor.  His basis was that he made a simple profession of faith in Christ as the Son of God and Savior, which he saw as the same basis as that of 1^st century saints.  The rest of his family and a few other church members were baptized at the same time.

Campbell engaged in many serious disputes and debates, both oral and written, during his life.  In 1820 he debated Presbyterian minister, John Walker, on baptism.  Campbell’s position included some standards, distinguishing circumcision from baptism, one conveying blessings to the Jews while the other illustrates, as a figure, the forgiveness of sins and the gift of the Holy Spirit.  Circumcision is for males only, but clearly female converts are to be baptized.  And there is no Biblical authorization for replacing circumcision with baptism as a sign of God’s covenant.  At this point Campbell was much in sync with Baptists.  At this point he taught that immersion represented one’s faith in the death, burial, and resurrection of Christ, along with our obligations to live a new life in Him.  He believed that as soon as a person trusts Christ, he or she is saved, sealed with the Holy Spirit.  This position would change, influenced by other writers, into that which is characteristic of the denominations he founded, that baptism is an essential element of salvation.

In an 1823 debate with William Maccalla he declared boldly that it is baptism that washes away sins and that baptism saves us.  But when pressed on the subject later, he equivocated.  By 1828 he would settle on baptism as an act necessary for forgiveness and salvation.

I have personally observed in modern congregations of the Church of Christ or various ‘Christian Churches’ the emphasis placed on getting people down the aisle and into the baptistry.  I have talked to church members who, when asked about their salvation experience, they described their baptism.  Baptism is their hope and their assurance.  I have talked to C of C pastors who have told me that salvation depends on repentance, faith, baptism, and ‘living right’ from that point forward.  So one heresy tends to lead to others.  These are no small matters.  These are damnable heresies.  I challenged one such pastor who admitted that he, like everyone else, failed to live a sinless life since his ‘conversion.’  He saw the Christian life as a ‘sawtooth,’ up, down, up, down, saved one day and lost the next.  I asked him if he got re-baptized every time he got down.  He hadn’t thought about that.

A Baptist historian of the period, Robert Semple, in describing the 1823 debate, complimented Campbell on the forcefulness of his arguments, but cautioned that his harsh criticisms of his opponents would blind their minds with resentment, preventing truth from taking hold.  I suggest we’ve seen much of this in President Trump’s experience, generating a new term, ‘Trump Derangement Syndrome.”  For a Christian to be guilty of this is inexcusable.  See Colossians 4:6 and 2 Timothy 2:23-26.  But Campbell insisted, in response to Semple, that his tone was exactly what the apostles would use in his situation.

Inconsistently, considering his hardening views on baptism, while pursuing his goal of Christian unity, he wrote in 1824 that a Christian is anyone who believes that Jesus is the Messiah, is immersed, and joins a church.  He explicitly included Calvinists and Arminians, Presbyterians, Episcopalians, Methodists, Baptists, and Quakers under the umbrella.  Interestingly, I have met members of the Church of Christ who insist that theirs is the only ‘true church’ and that baptism is only valid, and presumably only saves, if done in a Church of Christ.

Of course, in his quest for unity he declared that anyone who desired Christian unity would necessarily accept the doctrinal positions of Alexander Campbell.  My way or the highway, so to speak.

Campbell launched a venture to revise the New Testament, to advance ‘the ancient gospel and order of things.’  For the Greek text he used the new and corrupt text of Johann Griesbach, and a variety of English translations to guide the translation.  He received considerable criticism over this effort, but more importantly, Campbell will be in trouble with God over this.  You can read my position on inerrancy and textual criticism in Section #8 of my “10 Heresies” essay, which you can find in the Discipleship section of this site.

In 1827 Campbell debated Robert Owen, a functional atheist whose life’s goal was to rid the world of religion.  Owen agreed to defend five propositions he had published:  (1) All religions are founded on human ignorance, (2) they are opposed to the universal laws of human nature, (3) religions are the source of vice, disunion, and misery, (4) they are a barrier to the formation of a society of virtue, intelligence, sincerity, and benevolence, and (5) they are maintained only by the ignorance of the masses and tyranny over them.

I would love to debate an atheist who would attempt to defend these propositions.  They are inconsistent even within an atheistic worldview!  (See my several essays on apologetics in the Evangelism section of this site to go deeper.)

Unfortunately, in Owen’s part of the debate he changed his mind and launched into another topic, an explanation of his twelve laws of human nature, the philosophical ground on which he had failed to establish a utopian village in Indiana.

His first law, for example, was the assertion that individuals have no control over their personality or the circumstances of their birth and upbringing.  People are thereby wired by their inborn disposition and external forces.  No free will.  Owen’s vision was to prepare ideal circumstances to initiate a utopian society.  Apparently, Owen had enough free will to solve the problem despite being constrained by his worldview, a materialism dictated by matter and forces alone.

The debate went on for eight days, with sessions lasting several hours each day.  This format was typical of other debates that Campbell enjoined during his career.  It is not reported whether much resulted from these marathons.

In an 1837 debate a Roman Catholic bishop challenged Campbell to explain where the true church was from which the RC church had supposedly departed.  Interestingly, Campbell used the classic “trail of blood” argument, popularly held by Landmark Baptists.  (You can find The Trail of Blood booklet online.  It’s an easy read and well worth your time.)  Part of Campbell’s argument was to note that many groups historically persecuted by the RCC did actually qualify as the true church, including the Novatians, Donatists, Cathari, Waldensians, and Protestant Reformers.

Foster observes that many Protestants at the time might have been uncomfortable with that last item in the list, since their lineage derives directly from the RCC.  For my part, I see Campbell’s embrace of “the trail of blood” a credit to him.  Additionally, Campbell contended from historical records, properly, that the first real pope did not arise until the 7^th century.  He also correctly refuted the bishop’s insistence that the RCC produced and safeguarded the Bible and its teachings.  In fact, the RCC persecuted Bible believers and Bible owners throughout their history . . . even until recent times.  We interviewed an older lady in Rockford, Illinois, a few years ago who related how her parish priests had confiscated New Testaments from members who had received them from an evangelist.

Campbell engaged politically, serving as part of the Virginia Constitutional Convention of 1829-1830, meeting prominent figures that included James Madison, James Monroe, and John Marshall.  Campbell advocated public schools for all white citizens (he had no antipathy, but he had no care for the black population), the education of women, and making Scripture a part of the educational curriculum.  As we have seen in this century, public schooling and the Bible are, ultimately, mortal enemies.  It took a long time for the anti-Christian socialists to bring this to pass, but today the Bible and Christian principles have been completely excluded from public schools.  God will judge Christian parents who have surrendered their children to that snake pit.  But Campbell believed that public schools could and would educate the citizenry into a Biblical worldview.  The Bible knows nothing of “public” education.  The education of children belongs to family and church.

Campbell built Bethany College in 1840 with a noble intent.  “All science, all literature, all nature, all art, all attainments shall be made tributary to the Bible and man’s ultimate temporal and eternal destiny.”  His presuppositional approach is echoed in the 20^th century by Francis A. Schaeffer, who hoped that evangelicalism would build the best possible culture, grounded on a Biblical foundation.  Campbell hoped that his institution would be thoroughly non-sectarian.  Yet by imposing his doctrinal standards he had created yet another sectarian school.  Foster agrees that this was self-delusion:  “It was naïve of Campbell to believe that people who were ‘properly educated’ would agree with his conclusions—what he was absolutely convinced were clear and evident truths.”

Campbell was the 1^st president of the American Christian Missionary Society, established in 1849 to support evangelists and distribute the Scriptures.  I’ll point out here that nowhere in Foster’s biography do I see any evidence of Campbell doing personal evangelism.  He loved to preach, debate, and argue at length (in print, especially), but I see no care for the individual lost soul.  Perhaps Foster missed this.  Perhaps not.  According to Foster, Campbell loved an audience, as many do.  But when he entered a room filled with people, he did all the talking, at length.  That is not discipleship.  Teaching is not just talking.  See my Discipleship essays for a Biblical view on the subject.

Campbell’s detractors came from his roots and his associations, Presbyterians and Baptists.  His followers were called “Campbellites,” a pejorative that persists until the present day.  Baptist preacher Lawrence Greatrake warned that Campbell denied the Holy Spirit’s work in conversion.  Campbell seemed to emphasize a simple, reasoned profession as indicative of salvation, acknowledging the facts of the Gospel . . . but no conversion experience.

Greatrake:  “The Devil, brethren, is never so dangerous, as when he assumes the form of an angel of light, and comes into the churches with great profession of zeal for ordinances, and some part of the truth:  but not the whole truth.”  For example, Campbell taught that Peter did not preach that the Jews on Pentecost were forgiven of their sins by faith, “but by an act of faith, by a believing immersion into the Lord Jesus.”  I have observed the resulting delusion among Campbellite church members who have little awareness of repentance, or saving faith, or the new birth, or a radically changed heart and life.  Rather, they contentedly recall their baptism and affirm their church attendance.

As mentioned, I’ve visited many modern churches within the Campbellite lineage.  They don’t look any different from the rest of evangelicalism, which has been conquered by the seeker-sensitive megachurch growth techniques of Rick Warren and Bill Hybels.  There may be nuanced differences among the pastoral staff’s theology, but members often aren’t aware of this.  We had neighbors who were faithful members of XYZ Christian Church in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula.  When I explained to them that their church believed that baptism was essential to salvation, and that you could sin your way out of God’s family, they didn’t believe it.  But I had spent time with that pastor in his office.  I encouraged our neighbors to do the same.

There is much more to Campbell’s life, but I must end this shortly.  As mentioned, the Civil War crushed Campbell’s spirits.  His son, Alex Jr., narrowly escaped a conviction of treason by receiving a pardon from President Andrew Johnson.  Alex Jr. had joined as an officer in the Louisiana militia, after West Virginia had seceded from Virginia in 1861 and sided with the North.

Far worse for his legacy, after Alexander’s death his children by his first (deceased) wife enjoined a two-year legal battle over the estate with the second wife and her children.  The fight was long and ugly and showed no indication of Christian love on anyone’s part, as far as Foster reports.

Foster:  “Somehow Campbell’s deepest convictions about ‘the image of Christ’ being the true measure of a Christian did not capture the minds of his own family.”

Perhaps the item most informing my lack of confidence for Alexander Campbell’s salvation is the way he treated his neighbors.  His estate was grown initially from a 300-acre farm deeded to him by his first wife’s father.   Over the next 40 years his estate became valued at about $7 million dollars (in current terms).  He owned hundreds of acres of choice farmland around Bethany and owned a wool producing business.  He also acquired property in Ohio and Illinois.

How?  Some by purchase, but often by loaning money to friends in need who could not pay him back.  He repossessed their collateral land.

I hope to see Alexander Campbell in Heaven.  We’re all wicked sinners in need of mercy, forgiveness, and much grace to live the Christian life.  His life is cautionary . . . Watch out for big shot preachers.  Determine doctrine from your own honest and careful study of Scripture.  Don’t let one man dominate even a small local church.  Ask questions.  Be a Berean.  Care for other believers.  Care for lost souls.  Don’t be led by someone who doesn’t.

• drdave@truthreallymatters.com

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160. The Rise and Fall of American Fundamentalism
June 1, 2021

In the 1920s a group of pastors led by W.B. Riley founded the Fundamentalist Fellowship to attempt to rescue the Northern Baptist Convention from theological liberalism.  They wanted to retain the social and material benefits of remaining within the denomination, including their retirement packages.  They hoped to use denominational politics to gain operational power and purge the schools from ‘liberal’ seminarians.

The New Testament knows nothing, of course, of denominations and their political games.  But this collection of ‘conservatives,’ some weaker, some stronger, many amillennial, went to the annual NBC meeting in 1922 to offer a statement of faith that all teachers would be required to sign . . . which was rejected.  In 1925 they offered a resolution to require missionaries to affirm Biblical inspiration, Christ’s virgin birth, the blood atonement, the resurrection, and the new birth.  That was voted down by a factor of two to one.

David Cloud, in his 2020 book The History and Heritage of Fundamentalism and Fundamental Baptists, suggests the reason for such failures to save an apostate denomination was the cowardice of the ‘conservative’ pastors.  They weren’t fighters.  They say they love the truth and oppose error, but they won’t stand, especially if they might have to pay a price.  They won’t risk their church attendance, property, offerings, retirement plan, or even their prestige.  The liberals call for love and unity, and offer compromises at the beginning, and the conservatives cave again and again.

The anecdote is representative of all of the efforts to establish and maintain fundamental churches and doctrine over the last century.  I recall that in the 1980s the largest churches in almost every state were independent fundamental Baptist (IFB) churches.  But now most of these churches, if they still exist, are small and ‘aging out’ – the pews filled mostly with seniors.

Cloud does his usual thorough job in this book, tracing the histories of notable preachers, churches, and associations, decrying the present decrepit state of the IFB movement.  But he misses some vital structural failures, which I’ll mention as we go.  As usual (in my essays), I’ll just sample some of the history he details.  I recommend this book for your shelf to fill in the rest of the story.

Cloud cites historian George Marsden, who described early 20^th century fundamentalism as a broad coalition of conservative Baptists, Presbyterians, Methodists, and Pentecostals, but by the 1960s retained predominantly Baptist separatists, namely the IFB churches – independent, but informally associated by various schools, missionary societies, and fellowship meetings.

Southern Baptists (and other denominational Baptists) have gone wholly evangelical, attracting the world with worldly methods and music, and emphasizing the positive and avoiding the negative in their preaching.  Heresies abound within evangelicalism, which Cloud details.  The Bible speaks much of an apostate Christianity in the last days before the Lord’s return.  See 2^nd Peter chapters 2 and 3 for examples.  In 2^nd Timothy 3, Paul notes that evil men and seducers shall wax worse and worse, deceiving and being deceived.  That’s where we live today.

Cloud suggests (in sync with the writings of Francis A. Schaeffer) that the roots of theological liberalism are found in 19^th century philosophy.  Frederick Schleiermacher (1768 – 1834) extolled feeling and experience over Bible doctrine.  You’ll see evidence of this attitude in almost any evangelical church you visit.  Particularly, Schleiermacher’s “faith” was not in the Word of God, but rather his “faith” was in “faith” itself.  Today there are many references to “people of faith” or “a person of faith.”  You may as well suggest that someone is a person of strong emotions.  What or whom the faith is in is all that matters.

The German philosopher worked, successfully, to separate the intellectual content of Christianity from feelings.  This is the basis today for “worship services” throughout Christendom, whereas the New Testament pattern for the church is Biblical-driven discipleship within and personal evangelism without.  (See my ‘church’ essays near the beginning of the Discipleship section of this site.)

As early as 1884 J.C. Ryle wrote that churchgoers had become utterly incapable of discerning among competing opinions, doctrines, and creeds, no matter how destructive a false choice might be.  “Everything is true, and nothing is false, everything is right and nothing is wrong.”  Biblical counsel is not just to judge righteously to determine truth, but to “hate every false way.”  (Ps 119:128)

I’ll offer an example of the many mini-bios in Cloud’s book.  John Straton, pastor of Calvary Baptist Church in New York City from 1918 until he died in 1929, was “a crusader, a two-fisted hard-hitting man of God, always the defendant at the bulwarks of Christianity.”  At age 18 he was in law school and embraced humanism and evolution despite being the son of a Baptist preacher.  But he got saved under preaching in Atlanta, and rejected not just evolution, but postmillennialism and its social gospel consequences.

As pastor in NYC his sermons were reported on by the New York Times.  On occasion the text of his entire Sunday sermon was included.  Some media (as opposed to all media today) were opposed to his Biblical preaching.  Hostile journalists satirized him as ‘the Fundamentalist’s Pope,’ the ‘Witch Doctor of Gotham,’ and the ‘Meshuggah (Yiddish for crazy) of Manhattan.’

Straton preached on the streets and preached against sin.  Modern fundamentalists take pride about preaching hard from their pulpits, but I don’t see them on the street.  In all the years I did street evangelism in downtown Chicago I rarely ran into another Christian who was doing the same, but I never ran into a pastor who condescended to seek sinners where they could so easily be found.

Straton called America to repentance.  (Since the 1970s ‘conservative’ preachers have focused on political activism via the Republican Party.  If they had rather been obedient to the Great Commission, perhaps God would have preserved American freedom.  How goes the Republican Party today?)  He also preached against communism, the social gospel, denominationalism, and skepticism.

Straton named names.  He called the popular liberal Harry Emerson Fosdick “a religious outlaw – the Jesse James of the theological world.”  He called out S. Parkes Cadman, president of the Federal Council of Churches, for saying there is no Hell.  He said Cadman was “sprinkling cologne upon the putrid iniquities of a rebellious race.”  (Apparently, he wasn’t worried about Cadman’s self-esteem.)  He preached against the tendency of American courts to pander to humanistic psychology and to coddle criminals.  He wrote books against worldliness – Satan in the Dance Hall, for example.

He went to Harvard, Dartmouth, Columbia, and other universities to debate skeptics.  In my own experience over the last 50 years, the IFB churches neglect the campuses.  The pastors and members seem to be intimidated by concentrations of atheists.  But those are the easiest people to share truth with!

Cloud applauds Straton’s prophet-warrior spirit.  He looks around and sees none like John Straton or A.J. Gordon or J. Frank Norris.  Cloud:  “The essence of Fundamentalism was its warrior spirit, and that was Biblical and right and good and godly, though the fighting wasn’t done with any perfection . . . But conservative evangelicals don’t believe in fighting after this manner.  They don’t even like fighters.  If they find a fighter battling against sin and error, it is far more likely they will attack him than join him.”

Cloud covers the history of huge Bible conferences that launched the fundamentalist movement in the late 19^th century.  These included the Niagara Bible Conference, the Northfield Conference (founded by Moody), and many others.  An attendee at Niagara described his experience:  “Oh, what discussions we held in those days!  How the Lord Jesus Christ was exalted, how the Holy Spirit was honored, and how the Bible was expounded!”

By 1941 there were over 200 conferences each year in 50 locations.  The Winona Lake Conference had 2,000 in attendance, including 400 preachers.  Sessions ran from 7 am to 10 pm.  America was different then, not a ‘Christian nation’ by any means, but a nation enjoying much salt and light.

Cloud regards that culture favorably in that much of the preaching was solid Scripturally, and expository (teaching through passages of the Bible, in context), as opposed to topical.  Most IFB preachers in my experience, most of the time, preach topically, skipping around the Bible or, worse, launching a 45-minute sermon from one verse, telling stories and pounding the pulpit with exhortations and reproofs.  Cloud sees shallow preaching as the prime factor in the weakness of modern IFB churches, “because the people have not been taught to understand the Bible for themselves.”

What he misses is that Biblical discipleship cannot be centered on the passive experience of listening to one preacher, no matter how sound the sermons.  Discipleship is a strongly participatory process, a training program, as I discuss extensively in the Discipleship section of this site.

Cloud properly correlates teaching on prophecy – from a premillennial / pretribulational perspective – with the zeal and fruitfulness of the early 20^th century fundamentalist movement.  Expectation of the imminent return of the Lord Jesus motivates personal holiness and zeal for the Great Commission.  God intends His people to study and to reach out to the lost with a sense of urgency.  He also notes that the old-fashioned Bible conference days were serious, holy, with little levity in the pulpit, no cheap promotionalism, and no carnal entertainment, no boasting on the talent, no ogling the singers.

The Bible conference movement generated many missionary enterprises, including the China Inland Mission, the Africa Inland Mission, the Central American Mission, the Conservative Baptist Foreign Mission Society, and others.  Cloud includes a mini-bio of C.T. Studd, who famously penned the song “Only One Life,” with the chorus, “Only one life, ‘twill soon be past, Only what’s done for Christ will last.”

Fundamentalists were there at the beginning of broadcast media in the 1920s when the government began issuing radio licenses.  In 1922 Paul Rader began broadcasting in Chicago; in 1923 John Straton did so in New York and the Bible Institute of Los Angeles founded its own station.  In 1925 J. Frank Norris launched KFBG in Fort Worth.  The young John R. Rice preached on those air waves.  Moody Bible Institute was on the air 32 hours per week by 1927, including chapel hours, Bible studies, and a children’s Bible club.  That club enrolled over 17,000 members by 1940.  By 1942 the show “Miracles and Melodies” was broadcast from 187 stations in 45 states.

Persecution of fundamentalist radio developed as the ‘liberal’ Federal Council of Churches lobbied the Federal Radio Commission to deny licenses “for special interest group propaganda.”  Fundamentalists countered by creating syndicates that purchased time slots from local stations.  That, in effect, is how conservative talk radio persists into the present day.

Cloud reports in detail on the establishment of Bible Institutes and colleges.  My view:  Why copy the world’s system?  In God’s New Testament plan you’ll find the churches as the “pillar and ground of the truth.”  Most of the ‘good’ material that is covered in Bible colleges should already be in the discipleship program of the churches.  An 18-year old raised in a Christian family and a sound church should know his Bible, know how to contend for the truth, and have extensive experience in 1-2-1 evangelism and in teaching (younger children).  Biblical education should continue on throughout adulthood, facilitated through the local church.  (See my church articles!)

Fundamentalism was a hymn-singing movement.  Lyrics from the most cherished songs of the last two centuries “have become an intimate part of Christian language.”  The major themes are rich in doctrines, including the blood atonement, the resurrection, the 2^nd Coming; God’s grace, love, mercy, and protection; and our privileges regarding trust, comfort, cheer, joy, patience, and hope.  “There was a holiness that characterized the music of that era.”  Cloud notes that “the world’s music was jazzy and sensual even in Fanny Crosby’s day, but the hymns did not partake of that spirit.”  Evangelicalism’s music is infested with worldliness and the remaining fundamentalists are following quickly.

Cloud decries ecumenism / interdenominationalism, attempts at unity among churches and denominations, falsely applying Jesus’ prayer in John 17, which was a call for unity grounded in TRUTH.  If Christians were actually centered on Biblical TRUTH, unity would be a no-brainer.  Instead, the unity movements have disdained Biblical doctrine in order to build bigger and broader institutions.

Cloud:  “A major reason why men have compromised the Bible’s teaching on unity and have broadened the basis of unity is that they aren’t content with the New Testament church.  They want to build schools, associations, denominations, missions, institutions, movements, and campaigns that operate beyond the New Testament church.”  Indeed.  But the IFB churches, right through until the present day, are just as guilty of this as the evangelicals.

The Fundamentals:  A Testimony to the Truth, a set of 12 paperback books, was published from 1910-1915 to defend basic Biblical doctrines against attacks from theological modernists.  Funding was provided by two wealthy Presbyterian brothers, one who was the President of Union Oil Company.  Copies were sent to 300,000 preachers and teachers around the world.  The Fundamentals comprised 90 articles authored by 64 notables on subjects such as the Deity of Christ, the virgin birth, the infallible inspiration of the Bible, science and the Christian faith, and many others.  The writings opposed evolution, the Jehovah’s Witness movement, Mormonism, Christian Science, and Spiritualism.

The goal was to promote and establish a mainstream, middle-of-the-road Fundamentalism.  It was not separatist.  Staunch separatist fundamentalists were not included among the authors, such as J. Frank Norris, John Straton, and T.T. Shields.  Such ‘fighting fundamentalists’ would have insisted on including articles on prophecy, baptism, the Lord’s Supper, church discipline, holiness, eternal security, and spiritual gifts.  You might have noticed that the most popular (and conservative) parachurch ministries of today, including various creation and evangelistic ministries, carefully avoid positions on key doctrines.  The Fundamentals included no warnings about the Roman Catholic Church or Pentecostalism.

Cloud spends some time on the ministry of D.L. Moody, suggesting that Moody’s ‘results’ may not have been as spectacular as usually reported.  Moody’s preaching often neglected repentance, so perhaps may have not had as many genuine converts as some biographers suggest.  Cloud cites McLoughlin’s book, Modern Revivalism:  “The over-all effect of Moody’s revivals in the United States was just about the same as that in Scotland and England.  He boosted the morale of the regular churchgoers, but he did not reach the masses and he did not add appreciably to the numerical growth of the churches.”  McLoughlin cites statistics for churches in New England that indicate no long-term church growth from extensive revival efforts.  Rather, Cloud suggests, churches “often experienced a flash of excitement followed by spiritual decline,” which is the opposite of true revival.

The book describes the rise and fall of many fundamentalist colleges and churches.  Cloud notes that by 2019, Bob Jones University had dropped from 5,000 enrolled to 2,400 over the previous 25 years.  He cites fundamentalist blogger Lou Martuneac who sees BJU as “having drifted far from the doctrinal foundations it once staunchly held for many decades.”  An older IFB pastor observes that BJU has gone anti-KJV, and in practice despises those in the inerrancy camp they once stood with.  Also, that their music trends toward CCM and they are content with Calvinists in their midst.  Additionally, in common with all those trending toward worldliness, in the BJU alumni camp, “most do little to no true evangelism, though that was not the case a generation ago.”

Evangelist Monroe Parker (1909-1994), who taught at BJU from 1937 to 1949, preached a sermon on New Evangelicalism in 1978 at the Fundamental Baptist Congress meeting in Detroit.  He defined the New Evangelical spirit as “an irresponsible effort of some evangelicals to lure men to an acceptance of Christ as Savior through unscriptural alliances, and in some cases through open appeal to the lust of the flesh, the lusts of the eye, and the pride of life.”  New evangelicals started out, he said, with sound doctrine but a corrupt method, a philosophy of pragmatism, and an exaltation of feeling and experience.  Also, they added in a social gospel, “hence, a synthetic religion.”  This spirit has corrupted almost all of western Christendom.

How to fall for this?  First, get friendly with those who hold false doctrine, for the sake of unity or political activism, or . . . pick your excuse.  Next, loosen your hold on doctrine so you can get along with your new associations.  Then, despise those who hold fast to what you once believed and separate from them, all the while accusing them of being divisive and separatist.  All the while, let the world go to Hell without a warning.

Among the many churches, schools, and associations that have fallen in the last century, Cloud cites Moody’s Northfield School for girls and the Mount Hermon School for boys.  NMH’s administration advertises, “We’re a secular school that affirms religious diversity.”

Looking across what is now evangelicalism and a quickly morphing fundamentalism, Cloud concludes, “Everything is morphing, blending, homogenizing.  The black and white of an uncompromising stand for truth is merging into the gray of ‘lets all be friends’ and ‘do theology’ together.”

He sees a few old-line non-denominational Fundamentalist churches, but mostly “they are getting smaller, weaker, softer.  For the most part, the fight is gone.”

The book recounts some of the history of the Scopes Trial of 1925.  Atheistic humanism swept over the public schools in the 1920s.  Cloud believes that the battle was lost because Christians didn’t stand.  The churches were apathetic.  “The battle . . . was fought with carnal weapons instead of spiritual . . . by political action campaigns . . . which requires compromise of Biblical convictions and the forming of unholy alliances.”  Nothing has changed in American Christendom.  Consider the enormous resources and energy that Christians have invested in the Republican Party over the last several decades and how little in the Great Commission.  If we truly wanted God to preserve freedom in America, we should have made our priorities His priorities.

I’ve been fascinated, in a horrific sense, how during the COVID pandemic that conservatives, including Christians, have been so eager to get their kids back into the public schools, the very source of the Marxist and anti-morality worldviews that have come to dominate American politics and culture.

Cloud criticizes the “my way or the highway” attitude of some of the most notable IFB preachers of the past.  W.B. Riley tried to stay in his Convention and clean it up from the inside.  He was vicious to those pastors who disagreed and separated their churches from his movement.  J. Frank Norris  wanted to control everything in his sphere.  It doesn’t have to be someone famous.  I’ve seen the control-freak mentality evident among IFB pastors of small, medium, and large churches.  The Bible knows nothing of this.  The New Testament epistles were written to the Christians in the churches who were expected to exercise their gifts and do the Lord’s work as brothers and sisters, as peers.  They were not written to super-pastors to lord it over their flocks.

Cloud professes to understand and warn about what he calls the “Big Man” problem, but he apparently doesn’t see how rampant it is.  When the very structure of a church is focused on one man in a pulpit, whose main ministry is his so-called ‘pulpit ministry,’ God’s pattern is  violated grievously.  Cloud admits that the parachurch seminary has no Biblical authority for its existence, but the entire IFB culture is invested in Bible colleges.  The exceptions are small Bible Institutes under the umbrella of a local church, but these simply train men to replicate the pulpit/pew system.

Cloud does not call for isolation of the churches.  “A New Testament church is at liberty to fellowship with and cooperate with likeminded churches.  We see this throughout Acts and the Epistles.”  He says that you don’t need formal networks.  God knew what He was doing in establishing the local church.  When man thinks he can do better by building formal associations, denominations, and parachurch ministries, he’s not only wrong, but hinders the work of the Holy Spirit.  As an example, an independent Bible college that draws students from afar will descend to the lowest common denominator.  It won’t challenge its ‘market’ – the churches from which their students come – to rise to a higher level.

In 1994 Ernest Pickering warned evangelicals against their fascination with psychology.  “People are more interested in having their feelings explored and diagnosed than they are in hearing objective truth from the Scriptures. … The emphasis today is upon ‘my needs’ rather than upon God’s person.”

Frank Norris was an early pioneer in big-numberism. He persistently bragged on and published his church attendance. At one point Norris was the pastor of “the two largest Sunday Schools in the world by the average attendance,” as he put it.  In 1946 the combined membership of his two churches, one in Fort Worth and the other in Detroit, was reported at 25,000.  Throughout my lifetime I have seen the same emphasis, even in small churches.  Cloud documents how this obsession leads to manipulative evangelism, false converts, and weak church members.

The Sword of the Lord, a periodical founded by John R. Rice, and Rice’s protégé, Jack Hyles at First Baptist Church of Hammond, were at the forefront of the rise and fall of many IFB churches in the late 20^th century.  Rice’s publication (still going) promotes “the greatest soul-winners,” “the greatest pastors,” “the greatest evangelists,” and “the greatest churches.”  Hyles hosted his annual “Pastors’ School,” bringing in thousands of IFB pastors and workers to copy the methods required to build super-sized churches.

The IFB culture promotes “the man of God” evangelist or pastor shamelessly.  With such a super saint in total command of every aspect of your church, how can anyone grow spiritually?  Why should anyone try?  Cloud notes that “no man is great, except Jesus Christ.  No man is called great in Scripture,” not Abraham, Moses, David, or Isaiah.  “Faithful” and “beloved brother” are appropriate . . . where earned.  “Beloved brother” – that’s how Peter referred to Paul in 2 Peter 3:15.

Cloud has an extensive section on Jack Hyles and the ministry of 1^st Baptist Church of Hammond, Indiana, but I won’t cover the details here.  I do recommend it as a cautionary tale.  Also, I recommend his study of Lee Roberson and Tennessee Temple University . . . which does not exist anymore.  Cloud did his seminary work at TTU.  The associated church was Highland Park Baptist Church.  Cloud observes that God designed the New Testament church to operate as a body with every member essential and contributing.  He saw that at HPBC there was no such practice.  “Only a small percentage of the members contributed effectually to the building up of the body.”  Yet this “building up” was primarily about numbers.  The evangelism was based on high pressure manipulation, particularly through the bus ministry, a problem even more pronounced at FBC Hammond.  In such churches no criticism of the leadership is tolerated.  I’ll note that the large IFB Bible colleges attached to a home church use their students, recruited from churches around the country, to build the numbers of the home church, enabling bragging rights and consequential marketing power to recruit even more students.

In Cloud’s concluding chapter he asserts that “Fundamentalism as a movement is gone.”  It was largely captured by New Evangelicalism.  Highland Park BC, for example, went ‘modern’ in the 1990s after Lee Roberson retired, eventually dwindled, and later was simply bought out by an evangelical church.  Most of what remains of the IFB churches tends to be small and aging out.

Cloud has fellowship with a few churches which, for example, “still hold to their founding principles, still hold to Biblical separation as a doctrine, and still hold to sacred music.”  There aren’t many, he says, and they are scattered.  “And for the most part they are getting smaller, weaker, softer.  For the most part, the fight and fire is gone.”  He describes a few churches that exemplify the exceptions, but as I see it, they are still structured on a Super-Pastor, pulpit/pew pattern.  One give-away is that in each description Cloud spends most of his text extolling the virtues of one man in each church.

I won’t add more analysis as I close.  My analysis on God’s design for the New Testament church is detailed in my ‘church’ articles in the Discipleship section of this site.  I challenge you to read them.  If you think I’m in error I would welcome a communication from you.  If you live locally I’ll buy you lunch just to hear you out.  I’m always ready to learn.

These issues are of vital importance as we approach the Lord’s return.  We must be about the work of the Great Commission and avoid distractions that will cost souls their eternity.  So get evangelism right.  Get discipleship right.  Don’t waste time and energy on matters that don’t touch eternity.  And don’t get drawn into churches or associations that defy Biblical principles.

• drdave@truthreallymatters.com

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161. The War that Decides It All
July 1, 2021

The history of the churches over the last two millennia “has not been that of a community of one heart and mind, carrying out the will of its Head under the guidance of the Holy Ghost, and steadily growing in love, holiness, wisdom, and power, but of a community divided against itself, forgetful of God’s purpose, filled with ambition to rule in this world, and covetous of its pleasures and honours. The Holy Ghost has not been able to do His full work in the Church, and therefore her witness to the world has been partial and feeble.  The Head, though nominally honoured, has passed more and more from the thought of the Church as her living and ruling Lord, and from the knowledge of men as the King of kings.”

This is the assessment of Samuel J. Andrews, as relevant in 2021 as when he wrote it in 1899, in his book, Christianity and Anti-Christianity in Their Final Conflict.  Andrews (1817-1906) was a lawyer in early life, then a pastor and a professor of philosophy, and wrote several books.  In this book he anticipates the culmination of this Age, especially the rise of the Antichrist and the dangers facing the churches as the world slips into spiritual darkness.

Modern pantheistic philosophy, for example, infiltrates the public mind as it denies a personal God, scoffs at immortality, and dilutes moral responsibility.  Evolutionary philosophy degrades man as if he “appears for a moment as a shining bubble, then disappears forever.”  The Bible is mythologized and sin becomes a despised doctrine.

Since humanity sees itself as Divine, with no God or gods above, the “Man of Sin,” namely the Antichrist, will demand and expect the worship of the world since “he is the highest expression of that Divinity.”  Biblical / Christian faith “presents God in the Person of the Son descending into humanity, first to redeem it from sin and death, and then to lift it up into heavenly light and glory.”  Anti-Christianity, though, sees man beginning as an animal, “but continually ascending, and revealing more and more through the ages its Divinity.”  Andrews thereby sees the Final Conflict as, not between Biblical faith and atheism, but between Christ and pantheism, which we see unfolding powerfully over the last century in the form of various New Age movements.  The occult holds far more power over the imagination of man than does mere materialism.

Andrews therefore calls out to Christians to choose and to stand on their convictions, whether to act as if the Lord Jesus will actually return, imminently, or to supinely submit to the present worldly order, and become part of the Antichrist’s dominion . . . short-lived though it may be.

Modern Christendom divides into two major factions, Andrews suggests.  The minority are those who hold to a literal eschatology, expecting the world to grow more and more wicked and apostate, enabling the rise of the Antichrist, but terminated with the 2^nd Coming of the Lord Jesus and the final judgments.  The larger faction, what we might call ‘liberal’ Christendom, “hold that Christ will establish His kingdom by the peaceable and gradual diffusion of His principles.”

Accordingly, we should all get along, be nice, love one another, avoid doctrinal issues, and seek the approval of the world.  Don’t offend anyone!

The Lord Jesus, in contradiction, predicted that following Him would divide families and insure persecution, even unto death.  His own death on the Cross was a forerunner of what multitudes of His followers would suffer over the next two millennia.  But His resurrection, His defeat of Death, is the earnest of His promise for everlasting life, for us.

In Andrews’ time, the modernists accused him and other literal Bible believers of embracing “a pessimistic theory.”  But Andrews simply called their attention to whether the Scriptures foretell the Antichrist and whether the tendencies of the age we live in, religious, political, social, etc., indicate conditions ready for the appearance of him “who opposeth and exalteth himself above all that is called God, or that is worshipped.”

The work of Christ is summarized into two parts by Andrews:  1^st, that of atonement (the Cross and the Resurrection) and our salvation; 2^nd, establishing and ruling the Messianic kingdom.  The Antichrist wholly denies the first – “no atonement, no Cross, no priesthood.”  For the second, he will substitute his own kingdom, with elements including “liberty, fraternity, equality, and in which will be the highest development of man.”  Andrews goes on to describe foreshadowing of the Antichrist’s work in the history of the Roman Catholic Church and the tumults associated with the French Revolution.

Andrews:  “In France the existence of God was denied, the name of Christ dishonoured, the Christian Era abolished, new feasts appointed to supplant the old religious festivals, and no worship sanctioned but that of ‘Liberty, Equality, and Eternal Truth.’”  The elite declared that France had in one instant annihilated eighteen centuries of error!  (Leftists in America today have the same spirit.)  Napoleon overturned some of that, making an alliance with the Roman Catholic pope.

The Lord Jesus taught that His followers would suffer relentless hostility from the world – John 15:19-20, 16:2, and 17:14, for example.  When Adam fell, he effectively ceded dominion over the fallen world to Satan, ‘the god of this world.’  Faithful Christians – those who preach the Gospel to the lost around them – antagonize people who reject the Gospel by calling out sin for what it is, and calling out to sinners to humble themselves and repent.  See John 7:7.  Humility is certainly not the hallmark of this age!  Scripture is clear that hostility to the Gospel will only increase in the last days before the Lord’s return.

Andrews  observes “a seeming concord established between the Church and the world on the basis of a common worldliness, but it is superficial and unreal.”  The so-called ‘social gospel’ is representative of many churches’ desire to curry favor with the world, along with a multiplicity of charitable programs – I like to call them ‘cheeseburgers for the homeless’ – but with a determined disdain for preaching the Gospel clearly, lest offense be perceived.

As these programs proliferate, Andrews notes what the Lord said about the spiritual condition of the Church just before His return:  “And because iniquity shall abound, the love of many shall wax cold.” (Matt 24:12)

A good friend of mine recently challenged his fellow members of a small adult group in his evangelical church to get started in 1-2-1 evangelism.  That church’s culture is all about so-called relational evangelism, or worse, invite people to church and hope that somehow the Christian faith rubs off on them . . . although the Gospel is never preached clearly.  To his dismay he received a cold and antagonistic response.  The realities of a coming judgment  and a Lake of Fire for those who reject the Gospel are increasingly despised in a church culture that just wants to get along and be comfortable.

Now, the Lord knew that iniquity and coldness would abound before His return.  Yet He calls His followers to wax even bolder as the world grows darker.  In 2 Tim 3:12-13, the Holy Spirit (via Paul) promises persecution for those who serve God.  We had better keep our armor on (Ephesians 6) as we share the Gospel.

If you’re a Christian and are not about the Lord’s business, the business of sharing the Truth about why He died and rose again, then don’t worry about the armor . . . the Devil and his forces won’t bother you much.

Andrews suggests that in the last days, “when the development of truth and falsehood is completed, we have the absolute truth and the absolute lie standing face to face.”  The contrast between light and darkness will enjoy startling clarity.  In America over the last few years we see the enemies of truth, free speech, and morality more brazen, more obnoxious, and more cruel than ever before.  But clarity is good – it provokes one to choose.

The spirit of Antichrist, Scripture teaches, is hindered, partially repressed before the Rapture.  We see the restraints disappearing rapidly today.  Wickedness is proud and ‘in your face.’  See Isaiah 5:20-23.  Morality is reversed.  Andrews:  “The spirit of lawlessness is consummated in the lawless one . . . (who) will be its last and truest representative.”  Society’s degradation will both mould him and prepare his way.  Our self-esteem soaked culture produces a spirit of pride, of self-exaltation that will enable the man of sin to present himself as God.  2 Thess 2:3-4.

The response of American Christians has been timid at best, cowardly at worst.  Instead of church members drawing together in encouragement and mutual comfort, their response to COVID was to livestream ‘the show.’  Instead of reaching out to the lost with more fervor and compassion, Christians have embraced the excuse of COVID to isolate and to avoid their responsibility in the Great Commission.

Rather, Christians continue to be in thrall to America’s political drama.  As Andrews points out, in the first century obedience to Christ and His cause was dependent on no political institutions.  I believe that Satan has fooled American Christians into thinking that the war to end all wars is that between the Democrats and the Republicans.  What stupidity!

“The Christian Church,” Andrews writes, “is wholly unlike any other religious community in that it is founded on life, not on abstract religious truth or doctrine.”  Teachers may teach some truth, but only Jesus “makes His disciples partakers of His own life . . . The relation of His disciples to Christ imply a vital union – the temple made of living stones, Himself being the chief corner-stone; the vine and the branches.”  One must be born again to be brought into this union – it is a supernatural life.  We must live life with this perspective.

Otherwise, Andrews notes, the church ceases to be an organism; rather, it is merely an organization.  Here’s a test for your church:  When it was stressed under COVID, did it act as an organism by working even harder, striving to maintain its life, desperately watchful to preserve even the least of its members?

Christ’s work, Andrews insists, is first in the Church, to fill it with His life; and second, through the Church, “to manifest Himself to the world.”  The ‘falling away’ of the Church is revealed by its disconnection with its Head, so that life within a church has no vital testimony, and that a church loses (or never had) zeal, and the world goes to Hell with nary a warning.  Churches have lost their first love (Rev 2:4), if they ever had it in the first place.  Brotherly love, a principal feature of the churches in the Book of Acts, is rare today, and Christians seem to resent any exhortation to care enough for their community to offer the Good News of salvation.  Each man looks upon his own things, neglecting the spiritual health and wealth of others.  (Phil 2:4)

Andrews compares the perspectives of the ancients regarding the ultimate future of humanity.   He reports that there is no reason to believe that the ancient Orientals, nor the Greeks nor the Romans, had any hope for a universal kingdom of righteousness.  They had no belief in human brotherhood or the social perfectibility of man, and no Divinely appointed goal for humanity.  The Roman poet, Lucretius, said, “All things by degees must fail, worn out by age, and doomed to certain death!”

In contrast, the Hebrews, through revelation, anticipated a future kingdom of God toward which all history must progress.  The Old Testament, and the Bible as a whole, reveals one supreme God, directing humanity toward a definite end, wherein His authority is established over all nations.  Peace and prosperity will prevail everywhere.  The world will enter a golden age.  Thus, the followers of the Book “look forward rather than backward.”  Yet the present and future are rooted in history, beginning in Eden in innocence, and so on.  Followers of God’s Messiah will be kings and priests made like unto Him, and will share in the administration of His rule.

Not until Jesus enters “His kingly office can the Church reign with Him.”

Augustine and others worked to create the kingdom of God by their own power through the hegemony of the Roman Catholic Church, establishing popes  as avatars for the King of kings, they thought.  Accordingly, Rome has always affirmed the absolute supremacy of its lords over all secular rulers, requiring even emperors in times past to kiss the feet of the pope.  Surely, they would say, the Lord’s work requires unity and so unity must be enforced.  Needless to say, this system has no Biblical support whatsoever.

Biblically, unity is based on doctrinal truth (John 17:17).  Also, knowing man’s tendency to aggregate power, God designed his New Testament church system to consist of independent local bodies; furthermore, even within a local body there is no one person who acquires tyrannical authority.  (See my ‘church’ essays in the Discipleship section of this site.)

A consequence of Rome’s system, with one man ruling supposedly in the place of Christ, has been a loss of expectation for the Lord’s return.  The corruption has spilled over onto evangelicalism and fundamentalism in that exaltation of particular men, superstar megachurch pastors, for example, tempts the believer’s focus away from the Lord Jesus and His imminent return, along with the urgency of the Great Commission in the last days.

Secular philosophy has prepared the world in many ways for the Antichrist.  Andrews cites Immanuel Kant’s denying that we can obtain any true knowledge of God, laying the foundation for skepticism, and promoting concepts of God that are merely anthropomorphic, making God more like man . . . simple idolatry, really.

Pantheistic philosophies now permeate the West.  Andrews cites Saisset:  the essential element of pantheism “is the unity of God and nature, of the Infinite and the finite, in one single substance.”  Dualism is gone in the unification of nature, man, and God.  Spinoza asserted one universal Substance as a unity of God and all existence, but this Substance has no consciousness, intelligence, or will.  So there is no Person.  So why use the word God?

Schelling:  “Mind in man is nothing else but nature gradually raised to a state of consciousness.”  Hegel saw man as the highest of beings, the last in the chain of development; in short, man is God.

Andrews judges secular philosophy appropriately:  “This incarnation of God in Nature is the principle of philosophy, everything is to be explained by it.  But it is in man that this absolute essence, or God, comes to the full possession of itself, or to self-consciousness; and man, therefore, is the highest of beings.  In him the process of the Divine development comes to its culmination.”  And so is prepared the way for the Antichrist.

Andrews notes that in what we would now call the New Age perspective, the idea is that Jesus differed from other men in that he was more conscious of ‘God’ in himself and so he could manifest more power; yet all men are in the same sense Divine and so can tap into the same power.

But pantheism denies the free will of man, since the self is swallowed up in a universal Self.  Biblically, of course, the Creator cannot also be the created.  When God creates, it is by an act of personal will.  He creates us as separate persons made in His image, which includes the ability to choose and act freely.

Consequences of the pantheistic / New Age ideas include a rejection of the idea that man is fallen, sinful, and corrupt – how can we be if we share the universal essence of ‘God’?  Any ‘redemption’ must be some kind of awakening to an awareness of our godhood.  There is certainly no need for a Savior apart from ourselves.  The life of Jesus is relegated to metaphors and inspirational examples of nice behavior.  The Resurrection must have been some kind of illusion; the Church does not exist in any sense as His body.  The institution of the Church has no living Head.  And there is no ‘2^nd Coming.’  If the Church is to be relevant, its job is to save the world . . . materially . . . by teaming up with socialist governments and organizations.  Much of Christendom today, of course, embraces redistribution of wealth, in part by charity, but overwhelmingly by governmental edicts.

The end game of the world’s philosophies, which have infected the churches, is the coming kingdom of Man and, since Man is God, it is also the kingdom of ‘God.’

The elite among men will be the equivalent of little christs, little gods.  Andrews cites an old song:

I am the master of my fate,

I am the captain of my soul.

When I have encountered individuals who have this testimony, I have asked them whether they are even the captain of their own bowels, or whether they can forego sleep for a mere week.

Andrews makes an interesting commentary on cultural impact of the news media, especially their propensity to publicize vicious crimes:  “Children, through the daily or weekly newspaper, are made familiar with forms of vice which should be known to those only who have some right to the knowledge.  This publicity is beyond doubt a powerful factor in the increase of crime; and likely to become still more powerful in the future, as the depraved appetite grows by what it feeds upon.”  How much more today with children glued to their smart phones?

The entire culture and all of the institutions (government, education, news, entertainment media, etc.) are antagonistic to the Christian faith.  In Andrews’ day:  “The columns of not a few of our magazines and newspapers are open to those who deny any God, any revelation of a Divine will, any life after death.  Principles are continually defended which subvert Christianity.”

We have a good friend who lives in a small town in upper Michigan, who regularly gets letters published on the local editorial page.  She openly professes Biblical positions on the controversies of the day.  That the paper publishes her letters is remarkable.  Perhaps there are other newspapers out there who would be open to a letter from you.  Maybe, maybe not.  Why not try?

Andrews saw these trends as preparations for the cultural spirit that will enable the Antichrist.  Even Christians get infected with the secular spirit promulgated by the media they consume.  Consider the typical Christian’s addiction to sports, political controversies, endless entertainment and social media, and consumerism.  What energy, what motivation is left for evangelism and discipleship?

When the Antichrist takes power, “he will surely not leave the press uncontrolled.  It will be permitted to say only what he wishes to have said, and any utterances against him will be followed by swift and severe punishment.”  Is it not fascinating how quickly and harshly the world’s present powers have taken control of media over the last few months, suppressing dissent?

Andrews has much to say about the evils of ‘Christian socialism.’  Eradication of poverty is the excuse, although socialism has, many times over the last century, delivered poverty and suffering to those under such governments.  Socialism, of course, means an ever-growing power of the State, power ultimately over every aspect of life, as I’ve discussed in other essays, especially those on Stalin and Mao.

Individualism and personal responsibility give way to collectivism, wherein the State owns the land and the capital.  In promising equity for all, only an elite few prosper, and prosper richly indeed.  The phony promises allegedly aim at a perfected society, a utopia.  False Christendom plays into this, hoping to play their part in bringing the kingdom of God to the Earth.  This is post-millennialism – Jesus does not return until after we have  established a kingdom of peace worthy for Him.  The ‘prosperity gospel’ preachers are part of this, promising temporal blessings while despising the command to save souls by preaching against sin and calling for humility and repentance.  Further, since we’re supposedly building the kingdom now, an imminent Rapture is denied, along with any Great Tribulation.

There are no sinners, only victims.  It’s not their fault.  The problems are due to systemic racism or sexism or whatever.  Salvation is impossible once these ideas take root.  Society must be restructured!  Christian socialists “must substitute the saving of society for the saving of individuals.”  Socialists don’t actually like individual human beings.

Andrews observes that for churches to survive, and maintain budgets and paid pastoral staffs, they must compromise and yield to the hostile spirit of the age.  “Obnoxious doctrines are given up or put in the background,” and the church minimizes its distinction from the world.  (Worldly ‘worship’ music is just one of the manifestations.)

The secular socialists, Andrews notes, view the Christian socialists as useful idiots.  When the time is right the secular powers will dismember any church that holds to any Biblical doctrine.  True socialists want Heaven and Hell to disappear entirely.  The hearts and minds of men should be focused entirely on improving the world, obedient and subservient to the ruling elite.  Of course.  Socialism is just atheism, writ into political philosophy.

Andrews suggests that pantheistic philosophy is revolutionary by nature, seeking to overthrow any useful historical institutions or principles.  “It repudiates the authority of the past, because the voice of ‘God’ speaking today must overrule all His earlier utterances.”  I’ll note that Pentecostalism has imbibed this spirit, incessantly looking for new revelations, not much interested in what that dusty old Bible teaches.

Furthermore, “the kingdom of the Lawless One must be in its nature a kingdom of violence, in which the strongest will and strongest arm will be master.”  We see violence multiplying in our own country over the last year as a precursor to the Antichrist’s overwhelming oppression.  However, God will bring His own righteous violence upon this mess during the Tribulation.

Andrews anticipates 21^st century politics as he describes how the Antichrist shall rule.  The guiding principle is that of the public good, the welfare of society.  We see judges despising the Constitution and established laws by invoking what they deem best for society.  We see media censoring news and constructing narratives to make it seem like the public is in favor of a given policy.  The result is lawlessness – the Biblical term is iniquity – a despising of traditional, historic, and even Biblical norms.  What seems right in our own eyes now is what matters.

The Antichrist then is not so much the ruler who commands, but the promoter and executor of the will of the people.  After all, he is the culmination of manhood.  No mere despot has ever enjoyed such power, obedience, and adulation.  He will establish a global harmony unlike any exhibited by any monarchy or democracy heretofore.  Every edict will be justified by the public good.

I see the Rapture as the climactic event that precipitates the arrival of the Antichrist.  My guess is that several calamities will precede the Rapture.  (Is COVID-19 one of them?)  When the Rapture occurs there will be a global demand for protection and peace and the Antichrist will offer the solution – his rule, empowered by Satan himself.  The most hated of the Christians will have disappeared . . . only the modernistic, liberal, socialist ‘Christians’ remain.  And so the Antichrist and his False Prophet (as described in the Book of Revelation) will found a universal Church in sync with their global government.

Andrews:  “All religions must be in harmony with the purpose of the State and a help to it.”  We see these trends today.  The Bible likens the Church of the last days to a harlot.  The Antichrist’s Church will be virulently anti-Christian.

In the coming kingdom of iniquity there will be no morality, only laws enforced by the guns of the State.  No one else will have guns.  Life will be fragile as abortion and euthanasia increase, and as the Gulag multiplies globally to house political and religious dissenters.  The Bible reports that multitudes of people who come to Christ during the Tribulation will be martyred.

Samuel Andrews concludes with a plea to the Church, to “be filled with the Spirit of truth and of unity that she can bear witness of Him unto the world in the fulness of faith.  No one will say that she can now bear such a witness.”

Any one of us can do our part in the Great Commission as we approach the climax of the ages.  We can at least try.  Run an errand today and hand out some Gospel tracts.  Look for or create an opportunity to speak up and share the Gospel verbally.  If you can’t do it well, do it poorly.  Pray for other believers and actively encourage them.  Don’t do nothing.  Wouldn’t you like to be about the Lord’s work at the moment of His appearing?

• drdave@truthreallymatters.com

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162. Game of Gods: Part 1
August 1, 2021

. . . all modern trends point to the specter of a terrifying, bigger and more pitiless conformity.  – Erich von Kuehnelt-Leddith, Leftism

What kind of conformity?  Shall the world be ruled by an atheistic / materialistic, science-dominated elite?  Not at all.  The conformity will be pitiless, though – individual rights and desires will be crushed.  The conformity will be bigger than ever seen before – a globalism with Marxist-Leninists in power from the international level down to local communities.  And the conformity will be terrifying.  Those who don’t conform will be judged terrorists and will be hunted by the all-powerful State.

Biblically, we see the culmination with the rule of the Antichrist; yet we see current trends preparing his way.  To answer the question, though, it is clear that the overarching worldview of the conformity will be pantheistic, pagan, New Age-spiritual.  This is the case that Carl Teichrib makes in his 2018 book, Game of Gods:  The Temple of Man in the Age of Re-Enchantment.

Many New Age believers see a ‘grand synthesis’ taking place.  A new planetary reality will emerge when enough of humanity, a critical mass, awakens to expand our so-called consciousness and connect with the cosmos.  (I won’t try to explain what people actually mean by such language . . . after all, they don’t.)  Some call it a “global mind change” or a “communion” – humanity reaching for “an ever expanding realization of Divinity.”

Some of this may be viewed as variations on Hinduism or, more generally, “Oneness” or “One-ism,” as Peter Jones critiques in a book I’ve previously reviewed:  “In One-ism everything shares the same essence.  In a word, everything is a piece of the divine.”  But then nothing is.  If I am God and you are God and my cat is God and the gravel in the driveway is God, then truly God as a Person does not exist.

Economist Thomas Sowell uses the phrase “vision of the anointed” to describe the attitude of leaders in politics, media, the tech media, education, and emergent megachurches who currently prescribe what we are to think and how we are to act.  This includes, of course, accepted modes of speech and thought.  Deviate and you will be cancelled, or worse.  It is evident, though, that the saviors of society live totally selfish, hypocritical, and corrupt lives.  The rules are not for them!

Teichrib reports on a global youth conference in 1997 in which student teams were guided to proclaim goals for the world, for which they would invest their lives.  What came out included zeroing out debt, abolishing money, and mandating a biometric card for everyone “with a points-system based on your occupation and its value to the planet.”  Access to health care, education, and even food and shelter would be dependent on your score.

At one table a group of junior-high girls put on a play, laying hands on “Mother Earth” and chanting, “I’m guilty . . . of wasting water . . . wasting electricity . . . killing animals by wearing leather sandals . . . polluting the environment when I’m fully aware of the oil leak in my dad’s car.”  They confessed their eco-sins and Mother Earth forgave them.  One 14-year old wept, calling for an end to reproduction, an end to children.

This is not old-fashioned atheism, is it?  The coming global religion will be dogmatic, intolerant, and judgmental, and will involve worship of all kinds of gods . . . anything but God as revealed in the Bible.

Much of the groundwork for the ascendance of pantheism was laid by Lenin, Stalin, Mao, and other atheistic despots.  Karl Marx, also an atheist, did not advocate revolutionary action; rather, he anticipated an inevitable (what we would call) Marxist revolution as the lower classes rose up.  A Marxist-Leninist, though, is impatient;  he wants to act now.

Lenin:  “Yes, we are going to destroy everything, and on the ruins we will build our temple!”

Accordingly, history must be destroyed so that no one knows how societies functioned (or dysfunctioned) for millennia past.  Critical thinking must be destroyed to enable acceptable group-think.  Morality must be destroyed so that the masses are totally distracted by physical temptations and sins of the flesh.  Above all, Biblical Christianity must be destroyed so that no one hear or understand the Gospel of individual salvation.  Only then can the Antichrist, via his elite minions, rule a complacent population.

The COVID pandemic has certainly trained the masses, all over the world, to comply with ridiculous and anti-scientific rules and guidelines.  We are more sheep-like than ever before.

In a planned and tightly controlled society, Teichrib notes, all economic and social life are directed to achieving social targets, such as (supposed) equality and racial harmony – a classless state.  The masses are assured of peace and prosperity, all the while entrepreneurship and liberty disappears.  Those who desire liberty must be crushed in the name of social justice.  Any study of history, of course, reveals the lies and suffering visited upon people who have lived in socialist states.  The most vivid modern examples on display for Americans are found in urban America.  How have American cities, and especially the black populations in those cities, fared under their socialist leaders since the 1960s?

It doesn’t matter whether the form of socialist tyranny is Nazism or Stalinism or Maoism or New Ageism or Wokeism; in fact, it’s a scam to define politics as Left vs. Right.  The proper poles are Tyranny and Freedom.  French historian Jacques Ellul wrote that “Hitler’s methods stem directly from Lenin’s precepts; and conversely, Stalinism learned certain lessons about technique from the Nazis.”

In his 1933 Nuremberg speech just after rising to Reich Chancellor of Germany, Adolf Hitler preached:

“Man as an individual, whatever power he may have in himself, will be incapable of higher achievements unless he can place the powers of many in the service of a single idea, a single conception, a single will, and can unite them for a single action.”  The ultimate groupthink.  Conform.  Obey.  There is room no more for rugged individualism, which used to be a virtue.

The traditional view of individual freedom, in sync with Biblical values, is for one to embrace an ethic above mere laws or culture, to do the right thing even if unpopular, to resist being herded.  Christian martyrs throughout the ages represent the best of ‘rugged invidualists,’ going against the flow . . . by simply following the example of their Lord and Savior.

Former atheist Peter Hitchens noted that “Soviet power was – as it was intended to be – the opposite of faith in God.  It was faith in the greatness of humanity and in the perfectibility of human society.”  Christians are necessarily ostracized or persecuted or executed for daring to believe in a God above the State.

In the modern West the path to today’s growing tyranny was productivity and consumerism – making stuff and spending money.  Now, work and reward and private property are Biblical principles, until money (mammon) becomes god.  I’ll note that secular conservatives proclaimed MAGA during the Trump years, but what they meant, primarily, was economic greatness.  There was never a hint of moral reform, not to mention a spiritual revival.  A century ago, admiring the achievement of the Panama Canal, Richard Haliburton wrote, “One has the feeling that this is the work of gods, not men.”  The gods of the West in the last generation include Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, and Steve Jobs, noted for wealth and innovations that produce . . . wealth.

What is valued, even what is true in the postmodern sense is determined by the community or, rather, by those who hold the levers of power in the community.  Feelings dominate.  Rational discourse is very hard to find.  If you have a big media platform you can even cancel Dr. Seuss, despite the vast numbers of famous ‘liberals’ who are recorded on video reading Dr. Seuss books to children.

One of the fathers of postmodernism was Martin Heidegger, a Nazi Party member from 1933 until the end of WW2.  In 1934 Heidegger delivered a speech on the “spirit of the community” found in National Socialism, “a new configuration of the people,” and an “inner reeducation of the entire people toward the goal of wanting its own unity and oneness.”  Heidegger, one of the most famous secular philosophers of the 20^th century, viewed the scholar as not one who knows absolute truth, or even searches for it, but rather he who questions and challenges anything that pretends to be true.

Teichrib writes that Theosophy, founded by Helena Petrovna Blatavsky, is a blend of Hinduism and Buddhism with elements of Western occultism.  It sees itself as “Divine knowledge or science,” and the “Wisdom of the gods.”  Man can be perfected and human evolution is guided by Perfected Men, or Adepts, or Supermen, or Planetary Spirits, or Masters.”

The 1893 World’s Parliament of Religions in Chicago brought together thousands of people from religious and occult faiths from all over the world.  Teichrib sees the event as the birth of the modern interfaith movement.  One typical speech included the dream that “The religion of the future will be universal in every sense . . . a universal brotherhood of love and service; it will establish upon earth a heavenly order.”  The Theosophical Society enjoyed gatherings of thousands in its own right, attendees savoring the oneness message of the “Divine Human.”  Swami Vivekananda insisted that “Man is to become divine by realizing the divine.”  To call someone a sinner is an act of defamation:  “It is a sin to call a man so; it is a standing libel on human nature.”  The Swami is still relevant.  His legacy was repeatedly lauded at the 2015 Parliament of the World’s Religions.

The idea that man is divine or can become God is as old as Lucifer’s self-deceit that led to his rebellion and being cast down from Heaven to run amok upon Earth.  It’s as seductive as Lucifer / Satan’s promise to Eve that she could become as God.  In the 1990s the US government conducted DMT (Dimethyltryptamine) experiments on volunteers.  Test patients described encounters with ‘angelic beings’ and ‘alien creatures.’  The researchers were shocked at the subjects’ certainty that these were real communications, indeed, that the beings were manipulating the subjects.  One patient reported, “It’s more like being possessed.  During the experience there is a sense of someone, or something else, there taking control.  It’s like you have to defend yourself against them . . . It’s like they have an agenda.”

The lead researcher, Rick Strassman, hypothesized that DMT unlocked a different level of reality, enabling contact with intelligent entities.  Similarly, an Amazon basin plant, ayahuasca, ingested as tea, has long been used in Brazilian spiritism to provide “soul access to other worlds.”  Yet, from ancient times, Hindu mystics have had the same experiences while practicing yoga / meditation.  And then there are the experiences of the users of LSD and other hallucinogenics.

The apostle Paul wrote about these entities and their messages as “seducing spirits and doctrines of devils.”  Also, that Satan transforms himself into an “angel of light.”

The California-based Esalen Institute, founded in 1962, has been central to exploration of consciousness through chemical substances, and has investigated and promoted yoga, various psychological techniques, sexual adventurism, and Eastern religions and philosophies.  Workshop titles include “Modern Shamanic Initiation,” “Spiritual Psychology,” “Yoga Works,” “Deep Mythology,” and “Spiritual Democracy.”  Their expressed goal has been to teach the culture to integrate ideas in sexual orientation, spirituality, and social justice.”

Almost one million people have participated in Esalen workshops since 1962.

Teichrib sees New Age culture as an internalizing of spiritual authority, wherein “personal experience is the final arbiter of truth.”  The Biblical reality is that man is designed in God’s image and the individual finds spiritual truth by looking externally to the personal, infinite God who is there.  Rather than building up our self-esteem to the ridiculous level that we see ourselves as God, to find spiritual reality is to humble ourselves, our sinful selves, repent, and trust the Lord Jesus for salvation . . . who purchased that for us with His shed blood.  His resurrection is the promise to us that we can live forever in a New Heaven and a New Earth.

Generations of public school education and media indoctrination have shifted America from its roots.  A study in the year 2000 showed that only 43% of Americans agreed that God “is something separate from me.”  At the same time, 85% of Americans agreed that “underneath it all, we’re all connected as one.”

In a 2009 Pew Forum survey, 24% of Americans affirmed belief in reincarnation, and 26% agreed with the idea that spiritual energy is “located in things like mountains, trees, and crystals.”  About 10% of evangelical Protestants accepted New Age beliefs.

By May 2017 the slide had gone much further.  Summit Ministries and the Barna Group, in a worldwide survey, reported that 61% of practicing Christians “agree with ideas rooted in New Spirituality,” including ideas such as “all people pray to the same god or spirit,” or “meaning and purpose come from becoming one with all that is.”

These trends are not just in opposition to Biblical truth; they also deny the materialistic (matter is everything) worldview quite explicitly.  It’s easy to see – in any bookstore – how many shelves are filled with New Age offerings, while the Christian selection diminishes, along with purely atheistic / materialistic works.

Ray Yungen visited major bookstores in Europe in 2014.  Counting shelves of New Age books, he found 80 shelves in the Dublin store, 88 in Dusseldorf, and 100 in Birmingham.  Yungen:  “The New Age is the religion of Europe.”

A modern Western New Age guru, Neale Donald Walsch declares, “We need a new God.  The old God isn’t working anymore.”  And the new God is . . . us!  Angelo Pizelo:  “We are activities of God and when we come to full awareness and realization of this, we transform our lives and thereby transform our world.  Then we will all collectively experience the awesome reality that everything is good and everything is God.”

Of course, if everything is good, and everything is God, then there is no right or wrong, everything is about perception or maya (illusion) as the Hindus express it.  So, who has the power?  Who makes the decisions and enforces the policies?  It will take a super-elite and enlightened ruling class.

Christian historian Gene Edward Veith recalls that Hitler’s Fascist intellectuals “sought to forge a new spirituality of immanence, which focuses upon nature, human emotions, and the community.”  They despised and worked to expunge the Jewish and Christian view of a transcendent God who proclaims a transcendent moral law, to which every mere man and woman is accountable.

Teichrib reviews the modern environmental movement which seeks to bring every human activity under its umbrella.  Earth’s “cancerous growth of population” must be halted lest poverty, war, racial strife, pollution, etc., rage out of control and destroy us all.  Unlimited abortion serves the cause, along with sex education unencumbered by moral judgments. The traditional God-ordained family must be destroyed as an institution.

The results are moral chaos and societal destruction, with conditions ripe for global control under the Antichrist . . . whose reign will be driven by spiritualism (demonism) and worship of Satan in the form of the Ultimate Leader.

Accordingly, the Earth itself is seen as having a spirit, a living consciousness, a unified ecosystem that includes an interwoven human consciousness, which we all must tap into, and subsume ourselves.  The demons can help people do just that!

Actor James Coburn:  “The Earth is a living organism.  We’re killing the one we love the most, and she loves us.  We’ve got to praise our Mother Goddess!”

Francis A. Schaeffer’s 1967 book, Pollution and the Death of Man, was written, in part, to respond to Lynn White’s 1967 essay unjustly blaming Christianity for ecological problems.  The Biblical position is stewardship, respecting, managing, and caring for the creation which displays the glory of the Creator, even after the Fall.  The Christian has responsibility to properly care for the environment God gave to us to live in.  But we are not to worship it.  Paganism, which  includes the Hindu practice of worshiping cows and the New Age idea of identifying a goddess with the Earth, leads to all kinds of trouble.

Teichrib attended the seventh annual Paganicon in 2017 in Minnesota.  He was fascinated by a talk on the history of modern Witchcraft, tracing its roots from Theosophy, Freemasonry, and Rosicrucianism, and drawing connections to the early environmental movement of the 1960s.  A well-known witch in attendance explained that if your system of witchcraft has a degree structure, its roots are in Freemasonry.  When the room was surveyed to determine how many attendees had been born in a Pagan household, only a small number raised their hands.  The majority professed to family backgrounds that were Catholic, Lutheran, and even Baptist.  Despite diversity among branches of paganism, there is a strong bond centered in Earth worship and eco-activism.  In a group discussion on hexing, there was much enthusiasm about metaphysically targeting President Trump.

It is estimated that in the Twin Cities metro area there are 20,000 pagans, along with hundreds of established covens.

Some witches at the conference were frustrated at all of the emphasis on social justice.  Rather, they pleaded, the emphasis should be on spirit conjuring, for this is where the power comes from.

“What comes after Postmodernism?” asked Christian writer Paul Gould.  “Answer:  Paganism.”

New Age promoter Neale Donald Walsch writes of his communications with non-human intelligences.  The central theme is oneness.  “This is the greatest secret of all time.  It is the answer for which man has searched for millennia.”  Clearly, Satan is convinced that this is the message to unify unbelieving men, women, and children under his rule.

Teichrib empathizes with the motivation for oneness, in that it may be, to some, a plausible worldview to effect peace, harmony, and a brighter future for all.  But reality is that matter and creatures and man and events have separateness.  Pain is different from pleasure.  Rape and murder are not equal to charity and compassion.  The desire for life over death is not illusion, not meaningless.  How can we have a “better tomorrow” if “better” and “tomorrow” are illusions?  You are not a rock.  You and I have individual personhood and therefore responsibilities to other persons; above all, a responsibility to know and love God,  our Creator and Savior . . . if we respond to His call.

If all is One, then why get stirred up about hatred, which is non-existent in the Oneness worldview?  To determine what is hate and what is love requires judgment, Teichrib points out, “which is predicated on the act of separating beliefs, values, and actions.”  Judgment requires a transcendent moral law, which makes no sense unless there is a transcendent / infinite / personal God.  Only the Biblical worldview makes sense of reality, including all of our human experience.  Wickedness arises from the spectacularly free will choices of individual persons, who are to be held personally accountable by other persons in this life, and will be held ultimately accountable by the good God at the Final Judgment.

Teichrib:  “No one who espouses Oneness actually lives it out . . . Oneness is the illusion.”

God’s otherness, Teichrib notes, is elucidated in Isaiah chapter 40.  In verses 12-17 God constrasts Himself with the creation, human wisdom, and the supposed might of nations.  “Behold, the nations are as a drop of a bucket , and are counted as the small dust of the balance . . .” etc.

Walter C. Kaiser, Professor of Old Testament, said simply, “God is in a class by Himself with no competitors.”  I’ll note that the Gospel is in a class by itself with no competitors.  No other worldview comes close to rationality, no other truth holds out such hope for every member of the human race, no other ultimate claim is so supported by evidence and by resonance in the human heart.

Teichrib lays down the gauntlet:  Will you align with the pagan gods of nature?  Or with God?  One-ism or Two-ism?

He asks, “How will you choose?  Whom will you follow?”

• drdave@truthreallymatters.com

 

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163. Game of Gods: Part 2
September 1, 2021

The Roman Empire was already populated by a diverse set of religions when the followers of Jesus began to multiply. These Christians didn’t fit in. Francis Schaeffer in his book How Should We Then Live? The Rise and Decline of Western Thought and Culture (1976), observed that “The Caesars would not tolerate this worshiping of the one God only. It was counted as treason . . . (which) became a special threat to the unity of the state. If they had worshiped Jesus and Caesar, they would have gone unharmed . . . No totalitarian authority nor authoritarian state can tolerate those who have an absolute by which to judge that state and its actions.” Christians had God’s word, the Bible, as the absolute authority and so they were thrown to the beasts.

Carl Teichrib cites this operating principle used by Satan’s minions throughout history in his book Game of Gods: The Temple of Man in the Age of Re-Enchantment. This essay is Part 2 of my assessment of Carl’s highly recommended book.

It wasn’t just totalitarian Rome then, but all through the ages we see Christians persecuted by tyrants who demand obedience and abhor individual freedoms, across the spectrum, especially freedoms of speech, thought, worship, and association. Lenin’s Russia still persecutes Christians, as does Mao’s China. In America today, the most hated group is Bible-believing Christians, who go beyond simple Constitutional principles – which are hated quite virulently – in daring to proclaim that God’s laws are wired into reality, that we are accountable to Him, and that the solutions to man’s moral problems are not civil laws but rather the preaching of the Gospel.

Today’s political satanists want to divide people, fomenting hatred by race, by skin shade, by gender, by anything that riles people up. But when Christianity spread in the 1st century, we find Jews becoming followers of Jesus Christ, along with Greeks, Romans, Asians, and Africans.

Teichrib: “Salvation was open to princes and paupers, men and women, soldiers and scholars and slaves. God’s redemption would be inclusive and exclusive; inclusive in that He desires ‘all men to be saved, and to come unto the knowledge of the truth,’ exclusive in that salvation can only be found in Jesus Christ.”

But that puts man’s hope and destiny above politicians and politics and media power, and it asserts that all are subject to one Judge, Lord, and Savior. The billionaire and the President and the CEO all must bow the knee to the One who will be either their Savior or their Judge. This is the truth that the powers in this world simply cannot stand. It’s disgusting – they work for power by dividing, lying, and fostering hate. In opposition, the Gospel works to unite in truth and love.

If you believe that God is there, and that He created every human being in His image and with equal value in His sight, you will – with repentance and transforming faith – embrace the Gospel. All that has done good in Western civilization, including freedom and liberty and rights against oppressive governments, stems from this Biblical foundation. All historical evil, however, in both East and West, stems from sin. What is tyranny but sin run wild, corrupting the hearts and minds of the most ruthlessly talented?

It was the Gospel and Biblical principles that overthrew slavery in the Roman Empire, that overthrew slavery in the British Empire, and that provoked that most bloody Civil War in America to end slavery here. But the Enemy wants to divide by race once again.

America today emulates ancient Rome in its multiplicity of pagan worldviews, and especially in the rise of the occult. Teichrib cites historian Richard Cavendish who notes that the driving force behind black magic is a hunger for power. Satan convinced Eve that God was lying about human limits; ever since, the serpent is a symbol for occult wisdom, especially the search for that wisdom that can make you a god.

If you’re a Mormon, what is your goal? To become God! Joseph Smith: “God himself was once as we are now, and is an exalted man, and sits enthroned in yonder heavens! . . . Here, then, is eternal life – to know the only wise and true God; and you have got to learn to be gods yourselves.”

No lack of self-esteem in Mormonism, is there? Freemasonry, similarly, is about the ‘evolution’ of man into superman. Masonry is about ‘ancient Mysteries,’ not about social and charitable programs. Foster Bailey: “It portrays the recovery of man’s hidden divinity and its bringing forth into the light.” The freemason aspires toward vast spiritual forces, hoping to obtain awesome spiritual powers.

In a 1999 conference, Teichrib encountered people who claimed contact with space-beings. These “extraterrestrials” peddle the same wares that Satan offered to Eve in Genesis chapter 3: special knowledge, divinity, everlasting life with man in charge.

One alien channeled: “The Second Coming is imminent, and you may as well get ready. This is a particularly good idea because you’re it. You are the Second Coming . . . Become your own Messiah.” Accordingly, it’s all about you. Love yourself. Proclaim your greatness. Get offended at anyone who disagrees with you.

Teichrib is blunt about these ‘aliens,’ that they do not, in fact, come from a galaxy, far, far away. They are sentient and intelligent, but the content of their messages exposes their true identities. They work with the “angel of light,” the one who first corrupted humanity in the Garden. Their agenda? Keep you from finding God.

Game of Gods has a fascinating section on the connection between the Tower of Babel and the cosmopolis or megalopolis of today – man’s tendency to build bigger and bigger cities, concentrating power and wealth and enforcing a tyrannical group-think within urban boundaries. It is increasingly difficult for people to escape the cities, which hold the lion’s share of a nation’s political, economic, cultural, and educational power. Teichrib calls the city-tower of Babel the first recorded Temple of Man.

Over a century ago, globalist Hendrik Andersen wrote, “Surely the blending of humanity into one complete unity of purpose and desire can but have been foreseen from the beginning, and it is our duty and privilege in life to help bring all human efforts into one grand harmony.” This is the program of the Antichrist.

It is interesting (to me, at least) that in E.E. “Doc” Smith’s Lensman Series, the best SF of all time (!), the evil tyrannical Eddorians rule via a completely autocratic, top-down hierarchy, their HQ a massive domed structure on their home planet. In contrast, the benevolent Arisians, mentors to humanity, enjoy a distributed, shared power structure, its citizens dispersed in a rural / small town culture throughout their home planet.

Also, as I’ve written extensively about, God’s New Testament plan for His churches is that they are to be distributed house-based networks throughout a given region, with shared and limited leadership. Yet the largest, richest, and most corrupt churches in history strive for size, centralization, and power concentrated in the hands of an elite few.

America’s founding fathers understood these principles in establishing federalism, whereby the states were to retain most of the governing power, and power at all levels was to be divided in the tripartite form, legislative, judicial, and executive. Within the states, counties and local communities were to reserve authority not granted either to state or federal governments . . . etc. We are far from that vision, aren’t we, with the highest levels of government overreaching and striving to control every aspect of American life.

When the Lord Jesus returns with overwhelming power (Rev 19:15), He will overthrow our modern Babel. As Teichrib writes, “He has every right to do so.”

The New Jerusalem will be our Capital, “a city of His work and not ours. It is His delight, His place of dwelling among Men – a truly global city.”

The only utopia possible is also certain, already written into our future, but only for those who are God’s born again, forgiven, redeemed children.

Nevertheless, Satan works relentlessly for global unity in preparation for the rise of the Antichrist. In a United Nations Millennium Forum (2000), the Spanish contingent called for “Religious and spiritual dialogues to promote shared ethics and values in service to the United Nations.” A Turkish delegate wrote that “the world does need a civilized coordinator in international relations and in settling global problems . . . the last ditch authority on the Earth.”

The Bahai International Community, working with the UN on global governance, declared that “the groundwork for global civilization calls for the creation of laws and institutions that are universal in both character and authority. The effect can begin only when the concept of the oneness of humanity has been wholeheartedly embraced . . .” This would be accomplished top-down, from an elite ruling class through educational and mass media systems.

Teichrib summarizes some of the history of globalist dreams, going back several centuries. He mentions, for example, Andrew Carnegie who was inspired by the 1899 Hague Peace Conference, which established an international Permanent Court of Arbitration. Carnegie built his magnificent Peace Palace – a “Temple of Peace” – a symbol of the great and glorious brotherhood of nations. Thus began the 20th century, the bloodiest in world history.

The League of Nations, established after WW1, was a great disappointment to the most fervent globalists, H. G. Wells, for example. Wells saw the League as the progenitor of a federal government ruling the entire Earth, controlling arms, currency, labor regulations, health, and education.

I’ll just mention that I believe a major factor in the Trump Derangement Syndrome was the hatred of globalists for Trump’s efforts to re-establish American sovereignty.

Scott Nearing, a radical socialist, wrote in the 1920s that calamity and crisis can be used to leverage emotions, to unleash ideological change. Modern leftists are devoted followers of such schemes. Question: How have governments reacted to the COVID pandemic? Answer: As an exciting opportunity! In 1945 Nearing wrote: “Worldism, as a cultural stage, will be reached when the dominant activities of mankind take place on a world scale . . . The organization of a world society is the next step in a deliberative culture change.” Today with instantaneous global communication, and wokism pervading every institution — governments, media, education, entertainment, corporate policies – the Antichrist’s culture of obedience, fear, and ignorance is upon us.

Even the Southern Baptist Convention, in 1946 (!), in its annual meeting issued a statement from its Special Committee on World Peace: “We recommend that Southern Baptists endorse the principle of world federation, and work toward amending and improving the United Nations organization to achieve that end.”

So much for the Great Commission.

Game of Gods reviews the contributions of the green movement toward globalism. I recall attending Earth Day activities in my high school in the Spring of 1970. We were warned of the dangers of human-induced climate change, which would make the planet uninhabitable by 1990. The scariest threat was that of a looming global ice age! (Nobody talks about global cooling anymore, though.)

A multitude of popular and technical publications, UN conferences, political careers, and government-backed industries have turned green into a global religion since then. Sustainable Development (sounds nice, huh?) and other buzz-words serve as superficial excuses for whatever it takes to achieve global governance. In a 1990 report coming from a Manitoba conference, under the heading “Social Justice,” there was recommended an “assured basic income from birth to death for every woman, man, and child on Earth.” Plus free university education, free medical and dental care, and “access to socially useful work.” Only then can we begin an era of “global economic equality.”

Under the guise of sustainable development, a “global policy of one child per family” is necessary. And since not everyone will comply eagerly, we will clearly need a strong police state for enforcement.

In 1999 newscaster Walter Cronkite received the Global Governance Award from the World Federalist Association (WFA). In Cronkite’s speech he observed that the U.S. will have to yield up some of its sovereignty for world government, although this will be a “bitter pill” for many. Addressing Christians who object on prophetic grounds, Cronkite mocked: “I’m glad to sit here at the right hand of Satan.”

Attending the 2012 WFA conference, Teichrib’s friend Olivia Chance was struck by a pervasive contradiction. The repeated theme, ‘we must unite before we destroy each other,’ was contradicted by a hope for a disastrous war. The League of Nations and the UN were each birthed after global war. The hope now is for such a crushing calamity that will usher in a truly global government.

One conference member spoke of “waiting for that one historic tipping point.” Consider how governments across the world, from national to local, have used the pandemic to force obedience upon people, destroying small businesses at the expense of the corporate elites, closing schools and churches, engendering a host of other health problems (undiagnosed cancers, for example), and exponentiating suicides and crimes . . . despite the science, which was clear from March 2020, that the primary threat was to elderly folks with other complicating health issues.

My belief is that there are calamities in the near future to follow, and the rapture will be the final tipping point that provokes global tyranny under the Antichrist. But time will tell.

In 1960 Edgar C. Bundy analyzed the National Council of Churches and its promotion of socialism and world government. He concluded they were conducting “a massive campaign to supplant the individualistic Gospel of the Galilean with a great collectivistic machine designed for political and economic ends . . . The preaching of the Christian doctrine of individual salvation is of necessity silenced.” Teichrib: “When we seek to create Heaven on Earth, the Great Commission gives way to the Great Collective.”

In light of all these powerful and pervasive forces, what can the individual Christian do?!? You can do what has always been free for you to do. Share the Gospel with anyone who will stop to hear. Give a tract to everyone else. Don’t you feel any urgency to do something as we approach the Lord’s return?

The religion of power in this present world is pagan. The Green movement and climate change dogma scream the message that the planet is on the brink. The evil West and evil capitalism and evil free market economies are the cause and Christianity is the core problem. A speaker at the 2010 World Religions Summit proclaimed that it is time to discard the past dogmas of traditional faiths – particularly Christianity.

Within Christendom (including both genuine and apostate elements) modern global paganism works on and through the leadership. Seminary faculties and denominational leadership and megachurch pastors are pressured and co-opted to become part of the coming global church. The sheeple, never having been discipled and few of which have actually been born again, follow passively along.

Teichrib observes that inter-faithism implies spiritual equality across religions. Thus the unbeliever can argue “that Christianity is a meaningless sect in an ocean of pointless religion.” The Christian that buys into ecumenism / interfaithism will quickly reject any thought of preaching a Gospel that saves individuals from Hell. He’ll be careful to speak only ‘happy talk’ lest there be offense. He won’t contend for the faith because there is nothing worth contending for in his unregenerate heart.

In modern evangelical churches, Teichrib notes, the quest is for God feelings. “I felt God moving.” “I could feel the Spirit.” ‘Worshipers’ seek a sense of oneness. It’s all flowing toward paganism.

Game of Gods has an extensive analysis of transhumanism. Technically, the term means ‘beyond or more than human.’ Contemporarily, though: “Transhumanism is humanity’s intentional evolution through science and technology.” Technologies along this road include virtual and augmented reality, brain-computer interfacing, cybernetics and chip implants, AI, robotics, nanotech, genetic manipulation, and cryonics.

The dream is perfectibility – a new species of man with infinite capacity and eternal life. The prophecy is the coming Singularity, when we exceed the limits of flesh and bone. “Man, machine, and information will merge into a new creation.” We will become Ubermensch.

In the envisioned utopia a perfect collectivism will result, populated by post-humans. Class and gender and sex fade away in the global hive. It sounds like the Borg collective in the Star Trek universe. In the 1990s when the Borg episodes were written, the collective was presented as horrific, disgusting, and evil. The Star Trek heroes fought for the ideal of individualism. I wonder if the slant might be different if written today.

An overwhelming fallacy exists for any concept whereby human brains are ‘uploaded’ into robots or onto the net. Information is not the same as life. Human consciousness is connected to the soul, the spiritual element of human life. We are not machines, not merely collections of molecules in motion. If everything we are and think and do are merely consequences of brain chemistry, then no persons exist. The essential features of human life and thought include rationality, logic, morality, love, hope, meaning, integrity, and beauty. In a materialistic worldview these do not exist. But they do exist. Made in the image of a personal God, we are persons, not automata. We are fearfully and wonderfully made with free will, values, and beliefs that should correspond with reality. Technological transhumanism does not.

This is also the reason that general AI, the hope to create a tech equivalent to human consciousness, will never work. Indeed, many AI experts believe that they are as far from that goal as ever, despite making tremendous progress in narrow AI applications in machine learning, facial recognition, medical diagnoses, playing GO, etc.

It is interesting that some transhumanists see the ultimate goal as everyone uploading their ‘consciousness’ to a global net, and then merging into a single global ‘consciousness.’ That sounds a lot like Buddhism and nirvana.

Teichrib reports on Transformational Festivals, held regularly all over the world, which invite people to gather for seminars, workshops, yoga and ‘energy healing,’ art, spirituality, and ‘intentional community.’ New Age cultural elements infuse these events.

One festival producer explains: “These festivals are really doorways to open a whole, life altering change, and that leaves a real door open for the person who comes for the music act, and then they find a whole another world of spirituality.”

Burning Man is the most famous of these festivals. It got started on the summer solstice of 1986 on a strip of oceanfront in San Francisco with about two dozen in attendance. Now it’s an annual event that, since 2015, caps its attendance at 70,000, meeting in the Nevada desert.

Celebrities and CEOs and empathetic New Agers from all over the world attend. The Man is a towering human effigy, sometimes over 100 feet tall. At the end of the week it is burnt to the ground as tens of thousands party.

Teichrib: “Describing Burning Man is notoriously difficult. Is it a festival? Is the Burn an experiment in social cohesion, or a model of libertarianism? Is it about art and play? Is it hedonism, nudity, and debauchery, or introspection and spirituality? Yes and no, all at the same time.”

All forms of spirituality are celebrated except . . . Christianity, which is mocked.

Regional Burns now take place across the U.S., Canada, Israel, South Africa, and around the world. Smaller festivals spring up, derived from Burning Man.

I applaud Teichrib for traveling with a friend to set up an evangelistic outreach tent. A friend of theirs suggested the sign, “CAMP OF THE UNKNOWN GOD.” Teichrib admits their footprint was miniscule: “one tent, one sign, and two dusty men.” But people stopped to talk. An oddball artist asked, “Who is the unknown God?”

They offered shade from the desert heat and refreshments, and asked visitors to tell their story. Learning something about their guest, they could communicate the Gospel more easily when it was their turn to tell the story.

So to Teichrib and his buddy, Burning Man is not just a social-spiritual movement. It is a mission field. As is everywhere on planet Earth. Don’t be shocked when lost people act lost. Be thankful for the clarity that you know they need the Gospel.

In his last chapter, the author speculates on the various ways that human culture may transform as we draw nearer to the Lord’s return. Some may scoff at the idea that the most vicious of paganist histories might repeat, like the blood-soaked altars of the Mayan temples. But Teichrib suggests that we are not too sophisticated to hinder the 50 million abortion deaths each year around the world. (There have been about 2.5 billion abortion deaths since 1970.) Abortion, after all, is justified in part as a means to maintain Earth’s sustainability!

Carl Teichrib’s final challenge to Christians is to get out there and effectively communicate the King’s message, whether the land is hostile or friendly. In doing so we must be alert and discerning.

The only available transformation for every lost sinner is enabled by being born again into God’s family, promising a certain resurrection and an eternal life in a properly restored eco-Earth. We will get to work on that restoration during the Millennium.

The Oneness promised by the pagans in our culture would be, at best, a nothingness, a loss of individuality, a loss of personhood. God promises us a fully conscious, rational, and loving “sync” with Him and with others of like mind and heart. The Gospel is truly counter-cultural. Even in this life, once we obtain eternal life through repentance and faith in the Lord Jesus, we can have freedom from both the penalty and the power of sin.

But each of us must choose.

• drdave@truthreallymatters.com

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164. A Shining Star: The Life of Peter Cartwright
October 1, 2021

How soft are we American Christians?  Rather than measure ourselves amongst ourselves, perhaps we might look at the lives of some serious Christians from yore – Peter Cartwright, for example.  That circuit-riding Methodist preacher (1785 – 1872), looking back on the work of his peers in the early 19^th century, wrote the following:

A Methodist preacher in those days, when he felt that God had called him to preach, instead of hunting up a college or Biblical institute, hunted up a hardy pony of a horse, and some traveling apparatus, and with his library always at hand, namely, Bible, Hymn-Book, and Discipline, he started, and with a text that never wore out nor grew stale, he cried, “Behold the Lamb of God, that taketh away the sins of the world.”  In this way he went through storms of wind, hail, snow, and rain; climbed hills and mountains, traversed valleys, plunged through swamps, swam swollen streams, lay out all night, wet, weary, and hungry, held his horse by the bridle all night, or tied him to a limb, slept with his saddle blanket for a bed, his saddle or saddle-bags for his pillow, and his old big coat or blanket, if he had any, for a covering.  Often he slept in dirty cabins, on earthen floors, before the fire; ate roasting ears for bread, drank butter-milk for coffee, or sage tea for imperial; took, with a hearty zest, deer or bear meat, or wild turkey, for breakfast, dinner, and supper, if he could get it . . . This was old-fashioned Methodist preacher fare and fortune.  Under such circumstances, who among us would now say, “Here am I, Lord, send me?”

Who, indeed?  The Autobiography of Peter Cartwright:  The Backwoods Preacher is a compelling and humbling read.  He recounts his adventures riding the circuits of Kentucky, Tennessee, Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois for over 50 years.  Cartwright baptized over 15,000 converts personally.  Of lesser note, he was also a member of the Illinois legislature, but lost to Abraham Lincoln in a Congressional race.  He founded Illinois Wesleyan University.

Leigh Crockett, a Baptist pastor in Anderson, Indiana, summarized Cartwright’s style:  “He took on infidels, cultists, slave-owners, modernists, ruffians, Indians, heretics, tavern owners, and Jesuits with equal fervor and boldness.  If he couldn’t convert someone through his preaching, he’d try to bring them around with his cunning or his fists.”  Well, that last bit is exaggerated, but at times he did have to respond to violent troublemakers with sufficient physical force to turn the tables.

The terrain from Virginia to Kentucky, in 1785, when Peter was born, was an almost unbroken wilderness.  Thousands of emigrants from the coastal areas who made their way to Kentucky lost their lives to hostile Indians.  Cartwright reports that several families in their own company, when he (as a young child) and his parents moved to Kentucky, were slaughtered in ambushes.  This wilderness abounded in buffalo, elk, bear, deer, turkeys, and much other game.  The Indians were determined to keep intruders out of the land.

Peter admits that as a growing youth he was a “wild, wicked boy, and delighted in horse-racing, card-playing, and dancing.”  His father failed to restrain him, while his mother pleaded with him, wept over him, and prayed for him.  Peter often wept under his mother’s admonitions and even under firm preaching, resolving to “do better and seek religion,” but he never followed through.  Unfortunately, he was very successful at gambling and this “became a special besetting sin to me.”

Around 1800, the family attended a huge camp meeting at Cane Ridge.  Preachers from several denominations preached to thousands (perhaps 25,000 altogether over the course of several weeks) who traveled there on foot, on horseback, in carriages and on wagons.

The message was more Biblical and more common across denominations back then, as preachers “proclaimed repentance toward God and faith toward our Lord Jesus Christ.”  An estimated one to two thousand souls were genuinely converted during this extended meeting.

Cartwright came to see Cane Ridge as a great revival that bore significant fruit for years to come, but lamented that there were too few to teach, to disciple, and to form sound churches.

In 1801, almost 16, Peter attended a wedding with his father and brother, where there was much drinking and dancing.  That night, back at home, he reflected on his behavior, feeling guilty and condemned.  Blood rushed to his head, vision narrowing, heart palpitating . . . he was sure he faced the end.  Fearful of dying in this state, he fell to his knees and cried out to God for mercy.  His mother awoke immediately, came to his side, praying and exhorting her son to look to Christ for mercy.  Peter promised that if God would spare him that he would seek and serve Him.

Peter sold his race-horse, burned his playing cards, fasted, prayed, and read his New Testament.  Word spread and his “associates in wickedness” came to straighten him out.  Instead, he exhorted them to repent.  It took three months for Peter to find real peace and assurance, which he finally did at another camp meeting.  As others responded to the preaching, he bowed and prayed for mercy, too, finally receiving the strongest impression – “Thy sins are all forgiven thee.”  He experienced joy as if he had already entered Heaven.  He and his mother and many other Christian friends shouted and praised God.  Peter professes that never, for one moment, did he ever again doubt that the Lord had forgiven him and converted him.

The revivals of that age occasionally deteriorated in excesses, Cartwright observes, precursors of the Pentecostal excesses of the last century.  Running, jumping, barking, uncontrolled jerking, trances and visions, claiming to have seen Heaven and Hell and talking to the Devil himself along with damned souls – Cartwright saw these as great evils, stirred up by Satan’s minions to distract and bring shame on genuine works of God.

During Cartwright’s ministry he preached and fought against these perversions.  It’s interesting, noting that he wrote his autobiography in 1856, how he calls out specific cults.  He cites the “self-deceived Millerites” (forebears of Seventh Day Adventists and Jehovah’s Witnesses), who proclaimed that if anyone opposed them, God would send fire down from Heaven and consume him.

He writes that the “blasphemous Shakers” made the same threats, and claimed that “they could heal all manner of diseases, and raise the dead, just like the diabolical Mormons.”

Cartwright recalls an event in Indiana, at a settlement that included Methodists, Baptists, and Presbyterians.  Shaker priests showed up in an attempt to sweep church members into their cult.  Cartwright’s help was requested and debates were set up, culminating in a 3-hour sermon by Peter.  He ended with an invitation for all who would renounce Shakerism to publicly come forward and take his hand.  Forty-seven did so.  The next day Cartwright went door-to-door to plead with those who had fled the meeting.  The number rose to eight-seven, upon which Cartwright organized “a regular society, and the next Fall had a preacher sent to them.”

As I’ve written elsewhere, the local “societies” had much in common with a house church.  Methodist traveling preachers would visit regularly to teach and insure progress in learning sound doctrine.  I’ll note that John Wesley and Peter Cartwright and other notable Methodists of the 18^th and 19^th centuries did, indeed, persist in some doctrinal defects, including a weak view on the security of salvation, and an extreme view on sanctification, approaching a sinless ideal.  But I won’t cover that here.  You might check out my essay, “10 Heresies . . .” in the Discipleship section of this site.

At the tender age of 17 Peter Cartwright was formally given a license to preach by the area’s Methodist ‘preacher-in-charge.’  Peter didn’t think he needed or even wanted a formal letter, but he was urged to keep it and make use of it in case he was challenged.  Desiring more education, he found a school not far from home, but discovered that the teacher despised Methodists and that his classmates were disposed to wickedness and played every kind of dirty trick to discourage him.  It didn’t take Peter long to realize that there would be no benefit for him in that school, and so he started to form a circuit, making converts and organizing local societies for the new Christians to meet, encourage, and pray for one another.

At that time the Methodist hierarchy allowed a preacher to support himself from society offerings, but for a single man the maximum allowed was a mere $80 per year.  Most of the time, they couldn’t raise half that amount.  Cartwright:  “These were times that tried men’s souls and bodies too.”  It was too hard and lean for many, especially those married with children, who gave up riding the circuits for an established pastorate in a town prosperous enough to support his family.

Cartwright remembers great trepidation in giving his first sermon after he had committed to going on the road full-time.  He prayed fervently for God to convert just one soul as evidence that he was called to this work.  An infidel was present (that’s what they called atheists back then), was soundly converted, and became a useful member of the church.

He was teamed with an older preacher on their very large circuit, encompassing a large swath of Kentucky, reaching into Tennessee:  “Our rides were long, our appointments few and far between.”

Cartwright preached against vanity and worldliness.  Looking back from 1856 when he wrote the book, he declared that in his early days “there was little necessity for preachers to say anything against fashionable and superfluous dressing in those primitive times of early Methodism; the very wicked themselves knew it was wrong, and spoke out against it in the members of the Church.”

Parents did not allow their children to attend balls or plays or send them to dancing schools.  They didn’t drink alcohol at all and had memorized all the hymns and spiritual songs available to them.  By 1856, apparently, church culture was looking much more worldly.

While traveling an Ohio circuit in 1806 he preached a meeting where two sisters were very fashionably dressed, with rings, earrings, bracelets, gold chains, etc., perhaps $200 worth of jewelry visible.  (Equivalent to several thousand dollars now.)  He approached them and encouraged them to pray for God to touch their hearts.  Others joined in.  About midnight “they were both powerfully converted.”  Rising to their feet, shouting, they removed their jewelry, declaring, “We have no more use for these idols.  If religion is the glorious, good thing you have represented it to be, it throws these idols into eternal shade.”

Cartwright, under the direction of his presiding elder, undertook a serious course of reading and the study of literary and theological books.  Every quarter William McKendree would examine Peter on his progress, correcting errors and instructing him on improving his speaking and writing skills.  “I am more indebted to William McKendree for my little attainments in literature and divinity than to any other man on Earth.”  Cartwright considered such an education the pinnacle of discipleship, “more advantageous than all the colleges and Biblical institutes in the land.”  Every day presented another opportunity to learn and to practice.  He writes that he wonders whether he has done more good by preaching or by distributing Christian literature.  He estimated that he regularly distributed a thousand dollars’ (19^th century dollars!) of literature per year.

Would that churches today had the same vision for the discipleship of their members!

Cartwright asks whether Methodism would even exist if John Wesley had waited for a literary and theologically-trained band of preachers before he started his work, rather than send lay preachers out as soon as they were determined to do so.  “Methodism in Europe this day would have been a thousand to one, if the Wesleyans had stood by the old landmarks of John Wesley; but no – they must introduce pews, literary institutions, and theological institutes, till a plain, old-fashioned preacher, such as one of Mr. Wesley’s ‘lay preachers,’ would be scouted, and not allowed to occupy one of their pulpits.”

Looking back from 1856:  “We have no such preachers now as some of the first ones who were sent out to Kentucky and Tennessee.”

Methodists of old opposed the practice of Presbyterians and other Calvinistic Protestants who contended for an educated ministry, for pews, instrumental music, and salaried ministers.  “The illiterate Methodist preachers actually set the world on fire – the American world, at least – while they were lighting their matches!”

Please do read my  “church” articles in the Discipleship section of this site.  I believe that Peter Cartwright would have been in sync on many points.

Cartwright wrote that he feared for his beloved Methodism.  “Multiply colleges, universities, seminaries, and academics; multiply our agencies, and editorships, and fill them all with our best and most efficient preachers, and you localize the ministry and secularize them, too; then farewell to itinerancy; and when this fails we plunge right into congregationalism, and stop precisely where all other denominations started . . . I greatly desire that . . . all our presidents, professors, editors, and agents shall be laymen, and our ministers follow their appropriate calling, namely, preach the Gospel to a dying world.”

By the late 19^th century, Methodist churches had gone “uptown,” no need for a traveling preacher / teacher, no need for local societies – local house fellowhips – to share responsibilities among the members for mutual encouragement, prayer, teaching, and spiritual growth.  Once prosperity arrives, we can pay for a hireling preacher, sit back, and watch the show.  If there are souls to be won, let the paid clergy go and do it.

I see the typical ‘congregational’ church, with its facilities, paid clergy, and passive membership as a spiritual suicide pact.  The members are taught that if they show up, shut up, and pay up, then they are doing their duty.  After all, that’s all that the clergy require of them.  And the hireling pastors see how little they have to do to get their wages, so they are content, too.  The clergy band together in denominational and other informal pastoral associations, and they fit in with their peers, who also purport to be ‘men of God,’ and so who is there to say there is a problem?

Cartwright:  “Thus, as sure as a leaden ball tends to the earth in obedience to the laws of gravity, just so sure our present modus operandi  tends to a congregational ministry.”

The system is universal across evangelicalism and fundamentalism, and generates the coldness and apostasy of the last days before the Lord returns.  The tragedy is that many could be saved in this age if Christians took on the responsibilites of evangelism and discipleship themselves, instead of ‘outsourcing’ so poorly to the system.  The Methodist denominations are today, of course, completely apostate.

Cartwright’s autobiography is filled with adventurous anecdotes.  Enemies of the Gospel in those days did not shy away from violence to break up camp meetings.  In a new area they held a camp meeting opposed by a large collection of rowdies.  “They came drunk, and armed with dirks, clubs, knives, and horsewhips, and swore they would break up the meeting.”  During Cartwright’s sermon on Sunday morning, two young men with whips stood up and began to laugh, talk, and flirt with the ladies.  Peter asked them to desist, but they cursed him.

Two magistrates on hand were too fearful to engage and so Cartwright moved toward the pair of troubemakers, dodging a pass at his head with a whip.  Tackling one and restraining him emboldened the other men in the crowd to tackle the other.  The other rowdies accosted the crowd, with the ringleader attacking Peter, who decked him with one blow, dropping him to the ground.  The rowdy mob was routed and 30 prisoners detained, and ultimately judged and fined severely.

Restoring order, Cartwright – undeterred – rose again to preach, now picking his text, “The gates of Hell shall not prevail.”  The results were extraordinary, with over 200 professing Christ and prayer meetings continuing on for two more days.  The Lord used the Devil’s plans against him.

Cartwright took many opportunities to labor among slave populations, seeing several revivals and many converted.  He worked hard to condemn slavery, which became an extremely divisive issue among the Methodists, because of southern Methodist preachers who not only compromised on the issue, but some who married into slaveholding families and became owners themselves.

Cartwright:  “Then they began to apologize for the evil; then to justify it, on legal principles; then on Bible principles; till lo and behold!  It is not an evil, but a good; it is not a curse, but a blessing.”  Cartwright was convinced that if the Methodists had stood in unity against the evil of slavery from the beginning, that at least several of the slave states would have been free and the nation could have ended the curse without a Civil War.

Cartwright also decried the many divisions and secessions of the Methodists in England and America.  Regarding bad doctrine and schisms, “was there not a preacher or preachers at the head of it? . . . There never has been a schism or a division in our Church but it was headed by a preacher or preachers, that have become wise above what is written.”

The cause, though is in the system itself.  To whom are preachers accountable when they lord it over the flock?  A Biblically wise membership will choose their own elders and hold them accountable.  All of the evangelical denominations in the West for the last few centuries, including Methodist, Baptist, and everything else evangelical or fundamentalist, are guilty of Nicolaitinism, concentrating power within a clergy class, contrary to God’s design for His New Testament churches.  (See my church essays.)

Cartwright worked with others to publish and multiply copies of the Bible and distribute them all over the region.  “Nothing but the principles of the Bible can save our happy nation or the world, and every friend of religion ought to spread the Bible to the utmost of his power and means.”  Now in our prosperous 21^st century it is even more vital for Christians to spread Gospel tracts and Bibles and Biblical literature into the spiritual darkness around us.

In 1817 Cartwright was assigned to a four-weeks’ circuit in Kentucky that had been neglected for some time.  Records showed that over 150 members had dropped out; some not attending a class meeting for a year or two.  Peter worked relentlessly to visit everyone on the rolls and was able to restore about 60 of them.  They put a stop to slave trading and drinking; many cast off their jewelry and other vanities, and congregations increased in number and in spirituality.  Now, that’s discipleship!  Peter held a camp meeting with powerful results, over 250 saved, including about 40 slaves.

It was difficult to put Peter Cartwright on the defensive.  On the road on one occasion, he stopped over at a large house, discovering that the owner was putting on a dance that night.  Sitting quietly in a corner, praying for an opportunity to preach to these strangers, a pretty young lady decided to challenge him, asking him to dance with her.  He grasped her hand and led her onto the floor.

Before the fiddler could start, Peter announced to all that he never undertook a matter of importance without first asking the blessing of God on it.  Proclaiming, “Let us all kneel down and pray,” he dropped to his knees, not letting the girl loose, and prayed with all his heart.  His sermon / prayer converted several, including the owner, who became the leader of the society Cartwright organized right there.   The little revival spread throughout that county and several young men converted at that dance became preachers.

In Peter’s mind there were no hardened crowds.  He never could tell which crowd or which class of people might respond to the Gospel.  He did his part and left the results to the Lord.  He wondered whether, at that dance, that he succeeded in taking the Devil by surprise, returning the favor for the many troubles he had suffered at the Adversary’s hand.  All he was sure about was that his job was to be “instant in season and out of season.”

Cartwright provides an interesting commentary on three types of troublesome preachers in his day, quite relevant for our times.  1^st, there were those who exalted their feelings and impressions as standards, rather than the Bible.  If you oppose their impressions, they say you are fighting against God.

2^nd, those wrapped in self-importance, desiring to be recognized and praised by the ignorant multitude.  3^rd, there is a “dark, motley crowd of wizards, witches . . . who must have a fee for divining and soothsaying, and make a gain of their pretended art.”

Cartwright had many encounters with Calvinists.  He visited an older fellow who despised Methodists and was devoted to persecuting them; accordingly, Peter was sure he was a lost man, and so explained that he had not come to debate but to invite him to trust the Savior.  Cartwright explained that “if God had decreed all things, he had decreed that there should be Methodists, and that they should believe precisely as they did, and that they were raised up by the decree of God to torment him before his time, and that he must be a great simpleton to suppose that the Methodists could do or believe anything but what they did . . .” etc.

Over the next few days the fellow began to consider how his Calvinist view of sovereignty affected everything he said, thought, and did.  Realizing the absurdity of it, he came under conviction, called his neighbors to pray for him, recognized he was a lost and ruined sinner, and chose to repent and trust Christ.  His extended family soon followed.

In Illinois Cartwright came “to become acquainted with Joe Smith personally, and with many of their leading men and professed followers.”  This was after the Mormons had been “driven from Missouri for their infamous and unlawful deeds,” as Cartwright put it.  On conversing with Joseph Smith, Cartwright reports, “I found him to be a very illiterate and impudent desperado in morals, but, at the same time, he had a vast fund of low cunning.”

Smith tried to win Peter over to Mormonism, first with flattery.  When that didn’t work and Cartwright continued to preach publicly against Mormonism, Smith cursed him, saying, “I will show you, sir, that I will raise up a government in these United States which will overturn the present government, and I will raise up a new religion that will overturn every other form of religion in this country!”

Cartwright replied, “My Bible tells me ‘the bloody and deceitful man shall not live out half his days;’ and I expect the Lord will send the devil after you some of these days, and take you out of the way.”  A very few years later, Joseph Smith was killed by the outraged citizens of Illinois, who drove the Mormons out of the state.  Cartwright’s account of the troubles the Mormons caused in Illinois is worth reading.

On Universalism, a doctrine which permeates the emergent wing of evangelicalism, Peter thought, “If I were to set out to form a plan to contravene the laws of God, to encourage wickedness of all kinds, to corrupt the morals and encourage vice, and crowd Hell with the lost and the wailings of the damned, the Universalist plan should be the very plan that I would adopt.”

I’ll close with an item that touched my heart.  Chicago in 1830 was as “infant city,” when Cartwright’s friend Jesse Walker was appointed to the mission there, although Walker was “well stricken in years, and well-nigh worn out, having spent a comparatively long life on the frontiers.”  He made converts and formed local societies, walking the same streets that now form downtown Chicago, where I did sidewalk evangelism for several years, tracting and sharing the Gospel with thousands.

The harvest field now seems colder and rockier than it was in Walker or Cartwright’s time.  But our mission hasn’t changed.  We don’t have to ride on horseback for countless miles to find lost sinners who need the good news.  We don’t need to ford icy streams, or sleep on buffalo skins before an open fire.  We have better than saddles for pillows.  We have more resources, more opportunities, and more liberty than at any time in world history to preach the Gospel.

When we meet Peter Cartwright in Heaven or during the Millennium, I’m sure we’ll be fascinated with his accounts of the grace of God in his life and ministry.  He certainly qualifies as one of the ‘stars’ cited in Daniel 12:3.    Perhaps he’ll relate some of his soul-stirring adventures around a campfire for us.  Afterward, he might just turn to you and me and ask us how we used God’s grace for ministry in our time.  I pray that we have something to say.

• drdave@truthreallymatters.com

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165. One Way to Have a Good Day
November 1, 2021

My wife and I had a ‘good day’ last Tuesday.  Bonnie went for a morning walk and crossed paths with three landscapers.  She gave tracts to each; we give tracts out in packets of three to everyone.  Three different topics, hoping that at least one will grab their attention and help them to find salvation.  That’s why we have 24 different titles on ThinkTracts.com – lots of choices.  We run into some people more than once and, if they’re interested, we can offer them different topics every time.  Also, every individual who gets a packet is close to several people in their lives, who may respond to a different ‘hook’ than the one who received the tract.  Over the years we have seen people saved who found or got a tract 2^nd or 3^rd hand.

We stopped by the Post Office to send a few tracts with a letter to a professor in New York who had written a thoughtful essay I recently read.  The Post Office clerk was new to the job, and was delighted with the three colorful tracts I offered him.  We then went to lunch and gave tracts to several of the college-age employees.  I told the three 20-something guys at one table that I designed educational tracts especially for young intellectuals and so, nine different tracts to that table, in case they want to trade later.

During lunch we also tracted an older couple, a young family, and several singles. We lingered long enough for a turnover of customers in the dining room, allowing us to give out more packets before we left to do our weekly shopping at a ‘big box’ grocery store.

While shopping for food we crossed paths with a goodly number of people in the aisles . . . “Hi, how’s it going today?  Hey, a gift for you.  We design these cards, they’re educational, something to stimulate your mind.  Check it out . . . God bless you.”  We were blessed with a 100% ‘accept rate’ that day.  (It averages about 98%.)

Bonnie stopped at the fabric counter to get some material cut.  She offered some clothing construction advice to two young ladies waiting behind her, and gave them tracts.  She also engaged the two ladies working the counter in conversation and they happily accepted tracts, too.

As we checked out, a fellow about my age was behind us in line, grumbling about the lack of cashiers.  I engaged him in conversation, discovering that he had been deployed to Afghanistan for six years.  We found common ground (I enjoyed a 20-year Air Force career) and had a wonderful conversation.  He was happy to receive our tracts and snapped off a salute as we left – I was honored to return that salute.

Throughout the day I also ‘hid’ or ‘placed’ a number of small, business-card-sized tracts.  If you want some tips about how best to do that, I’ll be happy to share personally.  Altogether, we handed out or placed over 250 tracts that day.

A few days before I took my grandson out to ‘knock doors’ for about an hour.  We were able to share the Gospel with several people who answered the door, and rubber-banded tracts to the doorknob of anyone not home.  I then took my grandson to lunch so we could talk about any- and everything under the sun.

When my wife and I stop for gas we do not pay at the pump.  I pump the gas while Bonnie goes inside to pay cash.  She invariably finds three people to give packets to.  This week we also bought a lot of Holloween candy.  We may get a hundred trick-or-treaters who come to our door, asking for a treat.  Each one gets a plastic sandwich bag filled with three tracts and two half-sized candy bars.  We stuffed 150 bags in preparation.  I hate the idea of running out.

By the way, I’ve actually heard of Christians who turn their lights out so they can avoid trick-or-treaters, apparently not caring for their souls, or the souls of their parents – for whom the tracts are designed . . . and for whom Christ died.

In the last week we have distributed about 500 tracts, a fairly typical week.  That represents at least 500 people touched, including those close to the ones who received the tracts.  Each 1 counts.  Each 1 matters.

Are we special or specially gifted?  No.  Occasionally, someone who answers a door I knock will ask if I’m a pastor or in ‘full-time’ ministry.  Nope, just a Christian trying to pass along what someone shared with me when I was a young man.

Over the years I’ve learned, I hope, a bit of wisdom in doing this work and acquired, by the grace of God, a bit of boldness, although I still feel the old trepidation, an unavoidable part of the spiritual warfare connected to the Great Commission.  You just push through the trepidation.

Could you get out at least 100 tracts this week?  Yes, of course you could, if you desire.  If you just do it.  If our tracts do not resonate with you, then acquire some from Chick.com, or LivingWaters.com or OneMillionTracts.com or from MarkCahill.org.  Just get started.  That’s what freedom is for.  While we still have it, let’s use it.

Below, we have two brand new tracts available at ThinkTracts.com.  The first, Is Your Face “Over-Designed”? , is an intelligent design argument that clobbers atheistic / evolutionistic fairy tales by looking at the very evidence we can see in the mirror.

The second, Carbon 14 Dating & the Age of the Earth, is a slam-dunk show-stopper for evolution, which depends on the idea of ‘billions of years’ to attempt to make evolutionary story-telling plausible.  Of course, even billions of years wouldn’t be enough . . . nor would trillions or quadrillions (See our tract on DNA).  But the presence of the Carbon 14 isotope everywhere you find carbon, necessitates an age of the Earth in the range of thousands of years, perfectly consistent with the Bible’s true history.

Is Your Face “Over-Designed”?

Carbon 14 Dating & the Age of the Earth

• drdave@truthreallymatters.com

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166. Aspiring little gods
December 1, 2021

What is the greatest temptation of them all?  What was the very first temptation offered to man?  Which temptation encompasses all other temptations?  Surely, it was the offer made to Eve, “Ye shall be as gods.”

A necessary corollary to the spectacularly-free will that God gave to each of us image-bearers, is our vulnerability to the temptation of autonomy . . . that we can be the masters of our own destinies, that we can do whatsoever we will and avoid unseemly consequences, that nobody – not even God – should tell us what to do.

Break any commandment and you’re also attempting to fracture reality, the reality that this is God’s creation and you and I are creatures within it, constrained not only by physical laws, but also by moral laws – wired into our conscience because they are wired into the very character of our Creator.  In short, we don’t get to make the rules.  The rules are the fabric of reality.  Our mission is to learn, understand, and live accordingly.  Only on that path is salvation, happiness, meaning, and success.  Furthermore, success from God’s perspective may be entirely different from that promoted by the multitudes of little gods who rule our political, economic, academic, media, and cultural establishments.

The world includes some fanciful religious constructs that propose a path to godhood – Mormonism, for example, under which the aspirant hopes to rule his own planet in the afterlife.  Mormonism, along with much of New Age ideology, though, is derivative of Hinduism, which still boasts over a billion followers.

I recently read the autobiography of Rabi R. Maharaj, Death of a Guru:  A Remarkable True Story of One Man’s Search for Truth, co-authored by Dave Hunt, published in 1984.  Rabi was raised in a devout Hindu family on the Caribbean island of Trinidad.  In this essay I’ll summarize some of Rabi’s experiences, which culminate in his finding the true God, the Lord Jesus Christ.

Rabi, the young child, desperately yearned for attention from his father, Chandrabhan Maharaj, but received none.  “For eight long years he uttered not a word, not even a whispered confidence to my mother.”  Dad devoted himself to yoga, achieving a trancelike state daily.  Rabi observes that millions in the West experience “altered states of consciousness” through Yoga, TM, hypnotherapy, guided imagery, and other techniques.  For thousands of years, though, Hindus in India have known that there is real power in Yoga.  Real power?  Yes, demonic power.

Rabi’s mother would explain, “He is someone very special – the greatest man you could have for a father.  He is seeking the true Self that lies within us all, the One Being, of which there is no other.  And that’s what you are, too, Rabi.”

The lad was enticed along the same path, believing that his father was in direct communication with Brahman, the ultimate reality, all that is good and evil, everything and yet nothing, and that one’s ultimate salvation is to somehow “realize” that he is himself Brahman and merge with that reality.

Dad’s admirers came from miles around to worship him, leaving offerings of fruit, flowers, cloth, and cash.  Rabi admits that years later he, too, would achieve a meditative state deep enough to visit strange planets and commune with Ascended Masters . . . but never found his father there.

Rabi’s mother was given in an arranged marriage to Chandrabhan at age 15, ending her dreams of a university education in England.  The greater shock came when her husband, shortly after she became pregnant at 15, withdrew into his silent world of meditation.  Now she had to care for him “as she would for a child born deaf, dumb, and blind.”  But she was loyal and steadfast to what she saw as her responsibilities.

Fortunately, Rabi had an extended family on the island, with many aunts, uncles, and cousins.  Rabi was taught that because of past karma, he had been born into the highest caste.  “I was a Brahmin, a representative on earth of Brahman, the One True Reality.  Indeed I was Brahman – it only remained for me to realize this, my true Self.”  From the age of 5, Rabi practiced meditation daily.

After Rabi’s wealthy grandfather died, the boy and his mother shared Nana’s bedroom for a time, above the family’s rum and dry goods store.  They would hear footsteps stomping in the attic at night, sure that the old man’s angry spirit lingered on.  “Visitors, too, experienced these things.  There was hardly a guest who spent the night with us who was not attacked physically by unseen hands or did not see sudden apparitions.”  Overnight guests rarely repeated a visit.

Demons love to play games with followers of occult religions.

Hindus regard snakes as gods.  Rabi kept a live macajuel snake in his room and worshiped it, just as he worshiped the monkey god and the elephant god and, above all, the cow god.  Ultimately, to Rabi “God was everything and everything was God – except, of course, those unfortunate beings who had no caste.”  Rabi and one of his uncles separately encountered a huge, brightly colored reptile lurking about the house, “guarding” Nana’s money and possessions, clearly a demonic manifestation.

Grandpa Nana had been an angry, vindictive fellow, often flying into rages, beating family members – except for Rabi.  They accepted this as part of Nana’s karma he had to work out.  In his rages he would exhibit supernatural strength and cunning . . . yet “he was a religious man, too,” gathering his family for Hindu prayers and worship.

Nana went ballistic when his wife, Rabi’s grandmother, Ma, brought home a Bible from a hospital visit.  “I’ll teach you never to bring Christian lies into my house!” he roared, then beat her severely with a leather belt.

Rabi would get angry when he heard a local pundit quote the Bible on occasion.

(“pundit:  A Brahmin who is especially learned in Hinduism and who is able to apply this knowledge for the benefit of others.”)

That pundit believed that all religions held some elements of truth and would lead their followers, eventually, to Brahman.  Rabi was aghast at such compromise.  Yet Rabi struggled with an internal sense that while everything was God, it seemed that there must be a Creator, a Person separate from His creation.  But Rabi was determined to be pure in his Hindu doctrine; his reputation as a young pundit-in-the-making was already spreading far beyond his own town.

During Rabi’s daily meditation he had visions of psychedelic colors, unearthly music, and exotic planets where various gods talked with him.  He met horrible demonic creatures in forms often depicted by the images in Hindu, Buddhist, and Shinto temples.  He found those experiences frightening, but was assured it was all to be expected along the path to Self-realization.  Rabi was obviously a chosen vessel, guided by the same Forces that had once guided his deceased father.  And so he welcomed his growing spiritual power.  He wondered why none of the spirits he encountered were kind or gentle or loving.  But they seemed very real, “and not mere myths like the Christian god Santa Claus.”

Rabi was disillusioned when he found out about immorality involving his temple’s leaders and the young girls and women who liked to hang around the temple.  Rabi was assured by a respected elder that such goings-on were simply the results of karma from the past lives of those involved.  And so karma excuses anything under the sun.

Still just a teenager, Rabi enjoyed the worshipful attention he received.  Why not?  He would seat himself before a mirror and worship himself!  “Walking the streets I felt that I really was the Lord of the universe and that my creatures were bowing before me.”  Sounds just like something many of our political and corporate leaders might say.

Rabi had plenty of spending money from gifts and offerings laid at his feet.  “Some pundits were among the wealthiest of Hindus; already I was learning how quickly and effortlessly the money piled up.  Poorer people of lower castes were often the largest source of a pundit’s income.”  This sounds a lot like modern Christendom, with its salaried clergy, plush facilities, and scripted “worship shows” that despise the Biblical mandate for true discipleship.

Sent to a boarding school in Port of Spain, Rabi was challenged by the variety of races and cultures represented by the student body.  “The world was filled with other human beings who were completely outside the caste system.  How had they come into existence?”  What hope had they?  Suddenly,  Rabi was not at the pinnacle of local society.  He was challenged about his faith.

“Is it true that Hindus believe everything is God?”  “You mean a fly is God, or an ant, or a stinkbug?”  “Are you God?” asked a Portuguese boy incredulously.  “Yes,” I replied firmly, “and so are all Hindus.  They just need to realize it.”

He was challenged on his vegetarianism, but insisted that “It’s wrong to take a life.”  “Any life?” one responded.  Then what about the microbes in the water he boiled for tea?  Millions of bacteria!  Rabi would respond with dogmatic fervor, but was troubled, knowing he had no foundation for his arguments.  But after all, his classmates had not seen what Rabi had seen in his trances.

Later, walking on a jungle trail, Rabi was cornered by a large snake.  Frozen in terror, he suddenly remembered his mother’s voice, “Rabi, if ever you’re in real danger and nothing else seems to work, there’s another god you can pray to.  His name is Jesus.”  Rabi choked out a yell, “Jesus!  Help me!”  To his astonishment, the snake dropped its head and scrambled away.  Who was this amazing god, Jesus?

Rabi’s doubts multiplied.  How could he apply Hinduism to real life?  He saw two opposing views of God.  “Was God all there was, or could He make a rock or a man without its being part of himself?”  If Brahman included all evil and all good, as well as death and life, and love and hate . . . that makes everything meaningless, and life is an absurdity!  Also, if reason is maya (illusion), then how can you trust any concept at all?  Starting to think of a personal Creator, separate from His creation, Rabi was sure that the true God must be loving and kind.  He couldn’t trust any of the Hindu gods; none of them loved him.

An aside . . . Atheism is self-refuting in much the same way as pantheistic cults like Hinduism and Buddhism.  If all of existence consists merely of matter in motion, then there is no rationality, no logic – what ‘you’ think is just brain chemistry.  ‘You’ are not a person, but rather just a clump of molecules in motion.  All that is important to human experience, the transcendent qualities of love, justice, meaning, hope, and beauty, have no reality.  You won’t find purpose in the Periodic Table.  You won’t find compassion in Maxwell’s equations.  Similarly with maya – everything is meaningless, nothing.

At age 14 Rabi had a close call with appendicitis.  The third day into recovery as he staggered painfully toward the bathroom, he nearly lost consciousness, crying out, “Jesus, help me!”  He felt a hand on his arm holding him up, although he was alone.  The darkness lifted.  The pain was gone and he felt a remarkable surge of strength.  Later, upon awakening from a deep sleep, he discovered a Gospel tract on his bedside table, written by Oswald J. Smith, an account of a young man who became a follower of Christ.  The story moved Rabi deeply, but was soon forgotten.  He already had plenty of gods to worship.

Rabi was struck with guilt when a poor neighbor lady put money at his feet and awaited her blessing from him.  Reaching out to touch her forehead, he was startled by an internal voice of unmistakable authority:  “You . . . are . . . not . . . God!”  His arm froze in midair and he began to tremble.  Despite people watching him, he abruptly turned and left, found his room and fell across his bed, sobbing.

The lad began to question everything.  “If I were of the same essence as a sugarcane, then essentially there was no difference between me and sugarcane – which was absurd.”  He realized that pride had blinded him.  What a hypocrite, believing doctrines that made himself the Lord of the universe!  He considered all his past sins – thefts, lies, selfishness, pride, an uncontrollable temper, and even hatred toward some of his relatives.

A few days later he was visited by Molli, an 18-year-old classmate of his sister, Shanti.  She seemed amazingly joyful and confident.  Rabi was shocked to hear Molli describe how she had left her Hindu beliefs and had become a Christian.  He was startled to hear her description of a God of love.  They talked at length, but Rabi was outwardly hostile to her message, and deeply troubled within.  The young lady treated him with compassion, begging him to seek God for the truth and promising to pray for him.

After Molli left, Rabi fell to his knees and asked God to show him the truth.  He knew this was his last hope.  He also felt assurance that God would answer his prayer.

Not long after, Rabi’s friend Krishna, a newly converted Christian, opened up John chapter 3 to explain how to be born again. The idea of a life and eternity changing spiritual rebirth was in sharp contrast to the idea of thousands of reincarnations that never seemed to accomplish anything.  Rabi’s sin problems, he realized, could never be solved by merely changing bodies.

Rabi yearned to be a new person.  Could Christ change him completely?  But what would his family think?  What about the pundits who had trained him and the many Hindus who had worshiped him?  How could he betray them all?  He would lose everything.

After Rabi’s 15^th birthday his friend Krishna invited him to a Christian meeting.  The singing, the joy, the unfeigned exuberance were startling to him.  The lesson from Psalm 23 touched his heart.  Rabi was saved before leaving that place, humbling himself, repenting from his anger and selfishness and pride, and calling out to Jesus for forgiveness.  Light flooded his soul.  “Tears of repentance turned to tears of joy.  For the first time in my life I knew what real peace was . . . I had been born again.”

Several of Rabi’s friends and cousins soon followed in becoming Christians.  They worked systematically through the house to gather up and destroy all of the Hindu idols and religious paraphernalia they had previously treasured.  The fear of the Hindu gods was completely gone.

Rabi sees these ‘works of repentance’ as the end of the person he had once been . . . the death of a guru . . . “the death of my old self and the resurrection of a new person.”

This new believer could now forgive others because he had been forgiven through Christ.  In karma there is no concept of forgiveness.  Another change . . . no more stomping footsteps in the attic at night, no objects suddenly moving as if by an invisible force, and no more serpents or other demonic manifestations.  The demons were banished, no longer able to masquerade as Hindu deities or spirits of the dead.

The house church they attended included low-caste East Indians and several blacks.  How strange and wonderful to fellowship with and love those he had despised before!  Now he saw caste as a “great evil that erected cruel barriers between human beings, giving to some people a mythical superiority while condemning others to be despised and isolated.”  The same evil, of course, is being perpetrated on American school children, corporate workers, and the military in the guise of critical race theory today.

Rabi’s devout Hindu uncle Ramchand tried to convince the boy that he didn’t need to become a Christian; he could just add Jesus to the pantheon of their gods.  Rabi explained, “Jesus said that he is the way, not a way; so that eliminates Krishna and everyone else.  He did not come to destroy sinners – like Krishna said of himself – but to save them.  And no one else could . . . Furthermore, I don’t believe in reincarnation, because the Bible says that ‘it is appointed unto men once to die, but after this the judgment.’”

Uncle Ramchand appealed to tradition – Rabi could even be an atheist so long as he still called himself a Hindu.  But to Rabi it was a matter of truth, not tradition.

Rabi experienced what Christians in Hindu cultures experience all over the world – persecution.  “The very people who had bragged about how broadminded Hindus were and who had claimed that Hinduism accepts all religions were the most bitter in denouncing us for becoming the followers of Christ.”

In 1967 Rabi entered college in London, beginning his pre-med studies.  The immorality among the students appalled him.  In his chemistry class, right in the middle of a lecture, his professor noticed Rabi’s tieclasp which proclaimed:  Jesus never fails.  In a loud, mocking sarcasm, the prof asked him, “Do you really believe that?”

Rabi replied, “Yes, I believe it with my whole heart.  Jesus has never failed me yet.”  The prof went on to marvel that “someone in this class believes the Bible?  And he’s an East Indian!”  The news swept through the college.  Challenges would come from fellow students every time he sat down to eat lunch.  “Do you really believe in God?  Why?  What about evolution?  Hasn’t science explained everything?”  Some were hecklers but some really yearned for truth.

Frankly, I’m envious!  How I wish that I’d drawn attention like that in a university setting.  When I taught engineering at a major state university, everyone knew I was  a Christian and – worse – that I was a young Earth creationist!  Few had the guts to ask me anything about it, although I was diligent myself to share truth with others.  Universities are the best places to share the Gospel, of course, because college students are still somewhat open-minded and the college years are the last years that most people will discuss worldview issues with someone they disagree with.  (See my apologetics essays in the Evangelism section of this site for a perspective on how to deal with challenges and – better – how to challenge those who have a screwed-up worldview, namely, any worldview that is not Bible-based.)

Rabi saw some conversions among his classmates, but also invested time in Hyde Park, Piccadilly Circus, Trafalgar Square, and other places to share Christ.  Encountering many drug addicts he was startled to discover that many had the same experiences on drugs that Rabi had once had in Yoga and meditation.  In Biblical history we find that the sin of sorcery is often connected with mind-altering substances.  The Greek word for sorcerer, as in Revelation 21:8, is pharmakeus and refers to those who use drugs deliberately to induce occult experiences.  Drugs are still gateways for demonic influence and possession.

Rabi came to understand the satanic strategy underlying drugs, meditation, unconstrained sex, and the rebelliousness of youth.  Those were the days of the hippie movement, glorified in the music of the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, and many other groups.  He recalls a Stones concert in Hyde Park with 250,000 in attendance after the overdose death of Bryan Jones.  Yet “they were as stoned on the music as they were on hash and LSD.”  The rock & roll and drug culture was also turning on multitudes to Transcendental Meditation and Yoga.  The East was invading the West, and few Christians had any discernment.

Rabi spent some time in Zurich, a city filled with young people turned on to drugs and Eastern mysticism.  He teamed up with a Christian ministry aimed at organizing young people to distribute Bibles and literature, and to evangelize door-to-door, training churches that were interested.  The local leader, Heinz Strupler, exclaimed, “It’s a job for everyone!”  Heinz had a passion to stir up the Swiss and awaken the churches to the Great Commission.  He was convinced that most church members in Europe were not born again.

Rabi and six others fasted and prayed over the work.  “We soon learned that it wasn’t easy to recruit Christians, young or old.  Few wanted to leave their comfortable homes and well-paying jobs.  It was much easier to convince an ex-addict or converted prostitute to be a real disciple of Christ than it was to awaken someone raised in the church.”  Nothing has changed in the West since then, has it?

But they saw a number saved from their own work among those addicted to alcohol, drugs, and immorality.  “What joy it was to see ruined lives transformed by the power of God’s Holy Spirit!”  Sadly, many of the young people they met continued on a trail of drugs and mysticism, hoping to travel to India to study under a guru.  “The paradise they hoped to find in India would turn out to be the very gateway to Hell! . . . The evidence of demonic power operating through drugs and Eastern mysticism confronted me daily!”

They shared one-to-one and they preached to crowds up to hundreds that waited in front of the train station.  “It was quite a sight at these meetings to see immovable Swiss coming forward at the invitation to receive Christ . . . it was the Holy Spirit at work.”  One hard-core hippie who trusted Christ was so grateful that he gave the team his old VW.

Rabi discarded his pre-med studies in exchange for theological training at the London Bible College.  On weekends he helped preach on the school’s evangelistic team.  On vacations he would return to help with the work in Zurich.  They created a Christian coffeehouse that served marvelously to bring seekers in for conversation.  They were careful to warn about false conversion, an initial enthusiasm without repentance, that left someone open to the old temptations.  “Christ expected his disciples to obey him, not just to believe on him.”  “If any man will come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross and follow me.”  (Matthew 16:24)  Many that were saved stepped off the drug trail to India and returned to their parents to apologize, parents they had recently hated, but now loved with Christ’s love.

Rabi eventually traveled the world, speaking to the churches on these issues.  His heart ached when he visited India and saw millions suffering in poverty and depravity, marveling that so many in the West looked toward India for spiritual guidance.  “To live and die in such a wretched, abject misery . . . with running sores on your body, a gnawing hunger in your stomach, and the deeper emptiness in your soul are only maya, an illusion . . . and yet to be told that you are God and only need to ‘realize’ it – who could devise a more macabre joke than that?”

For Westerners to fall for this diabolical deception – what blindness!

I heartily recommend the book.  I found it heartwarming, encouraging, and educational.  This isn’t just apologetics theory on Hinduism and mysticism; rather, Rabi gives us down-in-the-dirt, real-life examples of the consequences of falling for the Devil’s schemes.  Also, his life encourages us to make our days count, seeing the souls around us as one heartbeat from Hell.  Let’s at least try to do something about that!

• drdave@truthreallymatters.com

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