WESTERN CHURCH REJECTS FAITH BY GRACE?
Of the world’s 2,800 denominations (Barratt 1970) there are five main segments in the Christendom’s churches:
1. The sacramental church Christians, captives of tradition;
2. The liberal church Christians serving critical intellectualism;
3. The moral-majority church Christians addicted to a moralizing agenda
4. The conservative church Christians often evangelical and Conservative
5. The separatist fringe-dwelling church Christians claiming sectarian uniqueness
The universal faith of the religious Christian is often misplaced. Freewill faith belongs to humanist voluntarism, espoused by Origen at first, then more radically by Pelagius, his successor.
After 3rd C Origen self-will faith was echoed by Constantine’s 4th C Church of Rome; the Renaissance; the 18th C Enlightenment and finally by 19th C New England Theology evangelicals. The 18th C positivist philosophy which viewed man as basically good, betrayed the New Testament truth of his evil heart, darkened conscience, deceitful motives and wayward will, which is captive to original sin.
Since 1846 the USA evangelicals have rejected the Reformation’s righteousness of faith: a faith given by grace to the wholehearted seeker. Instead they claimed man is able by innate self-faith to access God’s grace under the sound of the Gospel preacher. The preceding saints’ intercessory prayer gatherings that would empower such preaching were overlooked and the evangelist became the chief catalyst. This new concept was built on the false premise that a measure of grace and faith is universally resident in man from the image of God he bears. Thus his assumed ability to understand, and seek the Lord becomes active in the presence of preaching. Yet, hinged alone on the vehicle of preaching the new genre of fundamental evangels unwittingly compromised the New Testament. The prophets and the apostles said that no one naturally understands the preaching of the Word, nor wants to seek Christ . (1 Corinthians 1:21; Romans 3:11; 1 Corinthians 2:13-14.)
Automated, mechanical evangelism soon abandoned the old-time weekly intercessors’ meeting and in its humanistic flurry of extemporary bombast it persuaded men to be converts of the church, but not of Christ.
Ditching original sin and replacing it with an unsullied image of God within man can never do more than sow tares in the harvest field of the world that once received the good seed of the Sower.
The Bible doctrine of faith through grace was inverted so that human self-willed faith became the key to conversion and the phenomenal growth of church empires in the USA. This easy-religion of stage produced sensationalism wowed the American populace as it tried to simulate a third Great Awakening. But it has constantly lacked the spirit of prayer, so essential to any awakening of the lost and the arresting power of the Spirit so paramount before conversion.
Oratorical persuasion of itself is a poor substitute. This new genre featured Billy Sunday, who won converts by a handshake at the end of his tent meetings. Also the likes of 19th C Dwight L Moody and Reuben A Torrey, mechanized automated conversion of the masses and devised modern methods of prayer to GET WHAT WAS DESIRED FROM GOD. The most famous fetish (still in vogue today) was to repeat the rote ‘Sinner’s Prayer’ for immediate salvation based on Romans 10:9 and 10:13 twisted from their context.
