THE MIRAGE OF THE AMERICAN CHURCH.
The writer acknowledges the vast difference between the visible earthly church (churches) of man and the invisible body of Christ, the true church comprised of the saints. The latter are those whom God has regenerated by His Spirit at His behest rather than by mere human design and persuasion.
Many are still looking for the true church, as they discover the flaws of each church evaluated. They will never find it, because it does not exist. The word itself is not in the original New Testament (Koine Greek) and at six New Testament English translations omit it altogether.
The American Church poses as the world’s leader in the art of preaching but in essence its extemporary ‘gift of the gab’ and unctuous verbosity does not fool the man of the street. It is not the real thing and the common man knows it.
Its superior psychology of evangelism is merely the closeted use of the agnostic Father of American Psychology, William James. Its abandonment of biblical radical regeneration has been replaced by automatic clerical midwives who usher in thousands upon thousands of still-births each week.
Its Bible has been substituted by William James’ Varieties of Religious Experience (1850). Indeed, experience has become the be-all and the end-all. On the one hand the experience of doctrinal or biblical knowledge is said to automatically gain redemption, while on the other hand popular church indulgence in feverish so-called spiritual phenomena (paranormal) is said to be the best experience.
The American church has learned well the pagan devices of humanistic crowd control and professes to have invented them.
From 1814 America’s Age of Evangelism spread its superior message of easy-religion all over the world for the next hundred years. By the 20th century it had become a pandemic.
American super-spiritual methods of quick mass conversions are not only boringly repetitive, but merely sound and fury without the genuine fire that only the abandoned spirit of prayer can bring. But is it based on its superior gift of the gab and its unctuous disease of verbosity?
Is its barrage of ideology drawing upon mere biblical knowledge from the Tree of Knowledge or do its homilies draw upon the Tree of Calvary? Humanism now possesses its pulpits said to be superior to the blight of sacramentalism. Affirmation, lip profession has come to stay with the aid of fanatical bibliolatry that exploits chosen Scriptural extracts twisted from context and made interpretive arbiters of God’s Word. No wonder there were 2,800 Church denominations by 1970 (Barrett’s World Christian Encyclopaedia). Is it any wonder that reactionary pragmatism has become the common place tool of church pulpits?
THE MIRAGE OF THE AMERICAN CHURCH