The role of freewill faith in the demise of prayer.
Jesus predicted the ‘falling away’, or the apostasy of our day at the ‘beginning of sorrows’ in the last days. The time has truly arrived and prayerlessness is part of it.
The cause is that evangelism today has a rationale the very opposite of the saints during the 14th C to the early 19th C. The changes came with New England Theology’s 19th C evangelism of ‘easy religion’.
The influence of the lapsed Jonathon Edwards (“Freedom of the Will’ 1746) and the new concept of faith by psychologist William James, were the roots of change. Both combined to accelerate the old error of Origen’s freewill faith that was later echoed by Pelagius.
James, the father of American psychology, was a closeted agnostic, but his new ideology spread throughout colleges, seminaries and theological halls of learning. He with Edwards previous New England Theology, successfully destroyed the necessity and credibility of radical conversion from previous centuries.
Dramatic 19th C. Changes.
(1) Among them was a new breed of rough and ready evangelists who emerged with the gift of the gab. They were often uneducated but sensational stage performers, who grabbed the quick admiration of the masses. The attraction was their emotional bombast offering automatic unconditional entry pass to heaven that was irrevocable.
(2) D. Moody, B. Sunday, R. Torrey, and a host of zealous evangels offered a magical new method of faith with a fast track to glory. Billy Sunday’s handshake; walking the sawdust trail; lifting a hand; bending a knee; moving the lips, were all ways of rapidly receiving eternal life. These new methods were ratified by the invitee lisping affirmation by rote repetition of the tutors’ words in a ‘sinners’ prayer’, a travesty of prayer itself.
(3) Ironically these persuasive gospel salesmen called the respondent’s actions repentance and faith.
(4) Thus, the parroted response of the invitees was said to be adequate proof of their unconditional, irrevocable eternal salvation because any lisping lip movement was said to be faith, according to Romans 10:9.
(5) Ultra bibliolatry, using one verse twisted from its context, became the new idolatrous fetish that moved masses into the church.
(6) Heightened altar-mania occurred globally after 1948, commencing with concentrated city campaigns of the Billy Graham Crusades and the further developments of mass media that ensued.
(7) The mass conversions over the last seventy years have been most questionable.
(8) Even separatist critics of Billy Graham’s ecumenism, still use the same ideology based on the erroneous ability of universal innate ‘faith’ using Romans 10:9 &13 as catalysts automatic regeneration of the Spirit.
An admixture of modernized faith, freewill theology, and American salesmanship brought 19th C. easy conversion to the masses. Right wing conservatives, evangelicals, and fundamentalists were gulled and soon captivated by the borrowed cliché, ‘revival’. Unlike the spirit of prayer which had generated previous awakening and conversion it was now unashamedly generated by humanist methodology.
