POPULAR HERESY OF EVANGELICALS SINCE 1948.
The hidden humanism of the evangelical churches promotes the easy religion of do-it-yourself salvation.
1. God said it.
2. You say it.
3. You have therefore believed it.
4. You automatically have it (irrevocable eternal life).
This is the humanistic psychology of New England Theology that pervades America and much of the global outreach in the third world after one hundred years of the Golden Age of Evangelism. This libertine right wing humanism was refined in a redefinition of faith by William James, the Father of American Psychology, in his Varieties of Religious Experiences in the 1850’s. This plague of easy religion that went global, in the 1948 B.G. Crusades, is a complete distortion of the Reformation’s message of grace.
In 1746 America turned away from the message of its Puritan Fathers with the lapsed evangelist of the First Great Awakening, Jonathan Edwards. After reading the English philosopher John Locke, he wrote, ‘The Freedom of the Will. He had not only rejected the Puritan Fathers, but re-echoed the humanism of Origen, Pelagius, and Jacob Arminius.
What was their root problem that led them into Christian humanism? They rejected both the Genesis account and the Romans 5 description of hereditary original sin and were deluded by Rome’s notion of Adam’s original righteousness. The logical extension of this main error is to misunderstand the image of God in human creation, and then innately arm all humans with the faculty of preserved freewill and an active light of conscience. Implied in this heresy is the notion of a universal residual vestige of inner faith enabling receptivity to God’s overtures.
RE-EXAMINING THE CREATION RECORD.
1. Adam was crated in a state of innocence from which he and Eve fell when they rejected God’s offer of grace through the tree of life by grasping for paranormal knowldge from the Tree of Knowledge.
2. Adam was made in the tripartite image of God with a body-soul-spirit. As such he was unique to the animal kingdom with his reflective capacity to confer with himself, internalize, rationalize and cogitize accordingly beyond mere instinct. Of the trinity God the Father; God the WORD; and God’s Spirit self reflection is manifest in the Scriptures in Genesis and In the Gospel of John etc.
3. God created Adam with a definitive difference. He gave him a LIVING SOUL
4. When Adam and Eve fell from their state of innocence
Instead of the biblical faith through grace, it is now grace by human faith (that Jesus, the apostles and the prophets said we lack). Instead of seeking the Lord wholeheartedly with earnest pleading for the gift of faith hearers are told to use their own faith to claim what rightfully belongs to them so they can miss hellfire in the after-life. This DIY religion claims that:
A. God said it (Romans 10:9)
B. You believe it by saying it.
C. Once you say it too, you’ve got it
D. Now you have received the irrevocable gift of ETERNAL LIFE. (they are assured by the indoctrinator).
However, the psychology of positivist religious humanism can never be a substitute for radical, real, conversion.
Even when the church is apostate and in a state of Ichabod the method of easy religionists will gain converts. More so when the preacher is a powerful speaker full of charisma. But, one may ask: What sort of converts? And: To whom have they been converted? The preacher, the church, or a denomination? It is most doubtful indeed that they have been ushered into the kingdom and translated from the ‘kingdom of darkness’ to which they belong.
Evangelists compass land and sea to make one more convert, but in the above context make them twofold more the child of hell, Jesus claimed.
KNOWLEDGE and the TREE OF KNOWLEDGE has unwittingly been made a replacement for the TREE OF LIFE.
whether EVANGELICAL, LIBERAL, ORTHODOX, OR ROMAN the emphasis is SALVATION BY KNOWLEDGE of creed, doctrine, confession, or sacred writ of Scripture.
There is no doubt that God will use any avenue to attract and arrest souls for He is not willing that any should perish. But the best that can be expected from the evangelicals today is that one might be ARRESTED by the Spirit and awakened, though this rarely occurs where Ichabod prevails where personality cult pulpiteers lead an assembly. However, when such does occur it is unfortunately called conversion and the victim is rushed into indoctrination to such an extent that he/she is brainwashed.
Perhaps pastors, evangelists, and soul-winners should be reminded that there is a Holy Spirit ready to do the work of grace once they stop interfering.
1. The Father will arrest and draw the lost awakened soul towards Calvary and self discovery in the process
2. The Father will ensure that the arrested seeker will HEAR AND LEARN OF THE FATHER so he can later come to Christ.
3. Like the Twelve the lost soul who has heard the CALL TO FOLLOW will be drawn to self distrust, self revelation, and broken readiness for the eye opening ILLUMINATION of the WORD at the hands of the risen Christ Himself. John 20, Luke 24.
The arrested, and slightly awakened soul shows such earnest gravity in his seeking that this disturbs the comfort zone of the hirelings wearing fleeces, who are unaccustomed to such a manifestation. If they cannot soothe the dying pillow of the lost with false hopes they then call for the psychologist or psychiatrist to ease his disturbed mind, because apostate church pulpiteers today have never seen God work before in genuine conversion. They do not know the signs of the godly sorrow or the anguish that a smitten seeking sinner experiences. It is foreign to the religious Protestants of our day and cannot be counterfeited even by paranormal physical aberrations common to mystics and phenomena seeking assemblies who claim to possess the Spirit’s fulness.
