LET’S DIG A LITTLE DEEPER ( Cont. )

The Christian church is called to be the spiritual sentinel of our cities.  We are the “salt of the earth.”  We are the watchmen on the walls.  Generally nothing is to go in or out, whether good, bad or ugly, without our knowledge.  Only we have been given the power and giftings through the cross of Jesus to pray in the good and stand victorious against the bad and the ugly.  Jesus said, “Behold, I have given you authority to tread on serpents and scorpions, and over all the power of the enemy, and nothing will injure you”(Lk.10:19).  The spiritual condition of our cities is a direct reflection of the spiritual condition of its church.  Now that’s a novel thought isn’t it? If a city is thriving spiritually and most of the time economically also, its church is typically thriving also. If a city is suffering spiritually usually its church is suffering too.  There is no separation of church and state on an issue like this. It’s an equation as sure as 2+2.  We can legislate it out of site and convince ourselves it doesn’t exist but the angels of heaven and hell our well aware of the of the link and exploit it all the time.  The condition of a city is like a spiritual thermometer of the condition of its church.  You see it, you see its church.  So what blessings have we released or what troubles have we condoned? What have we slept through? What has passed our watch without our notice and has been able to take up residence in our towns?  What have been the spinoffs of our mindless devotion to this wolf in sheep’s clothing called sectarianism?  Or in more graphic terms “Division.”  One can only wonder.

     So Protestantism is inherently branded with the hot iron of sectarianism.  Its stamp is practically on everything we do.  It was George Whitefield, the great Methodist revivalist of the eighteenth century who insightfully said, “Father Abraham, who have you got in heaven?  Any Episcopalians?  No!  Any Presbyterians?  No!  Any Baptists?  No!  Have you any Methodists there?  No!  Have you any Independents or Seceders?  No, no!  Why who have you then?–We don’t know those names here; all that are here are Christians–believers in Christ–men who overcame by the blood of the Lamb and the word of His testimony!  Oh, this is the case, then God help me, God help us all to forget party names and to become Christians in deed and truth.”10  Charles Finney, the amazing revivalist of the nineteenth century, brought down the gavel on this issue saying, “There is High-church and Low-church, Old-school and New-school, Reformers and Conservatives in all the denominations; and these seem to be pressing their peculiarities in a spirit and by measures that are highly sectarian.  Sectarian conventions, Ecclesiastical meetings, Councils, Synods, and all the parade and paraphernalia of sectarianism seem to an alarming extent to to be engrossing the mind of church.  Now this is certainly a great evil, and unless a counteracting influence can be brought to bear on the churches; unless ministers cease from this sectarian spirit, cease from the janglings and strife of words, cease from creating prejudices, cease from heresy hunting and all the management of ecclesiastical ambition, and give themselves up directly to promoting brotherly love, harmony in the church, the conversion of sinners and the sanctification of the saints- it is certain that revivals of religion can not exist, neither go forward in purity and power.  What is peculiarly afflicting in view of this state of things is that ministers and many Christians have become so thoroughly sectarian, and are so thoroughly and deeply imbued with the spirit of sectarianism as to be wholly unconscious that they are sectarian.  They seem to suppose that they are only contending earnestly for the faith once delivered to the saints, that they are really and only jealous for the honor of God and the purity of the church.  They have exalted their peculiar views in their own estimation into fundamental doctrines, and contend for them with as much pertinacity and vehemence as if all must be reprobates who do not embrace them.”11  And everyone said, Amen!  Then there are the comments of Frank Bartleman, one of the foremost pioneers of the great Azusa Street Revival at the beginning of the twentieth century.  He said, “Every fresh division or party in the church gives to the world a contradiction as to the oneness of the body of Christ and the truthfulness of the gospel.  Multitudes are bowing down and burning incense to a doctrine rather than Christ.  The many sects in Christendom are, to say the least, evidence to the world that Christians can not get along together.  Written creeds only serve to publish the fact that we can not understand the Word of God alike and get together on it.  Is the Word of God then so hard to understand?  They who establish a fixed creed bar the way to further progress..”  and he goes on to say, “The Spirit is laboring for the unity of believers today for one body that the prayer of Jesus may be answered, ‘that they all may be one, that the world may believe.’  But the saints are ever to ready rather to serve a system or party; to contend for religious selfish party interests.  God’s people are shut up in denominational coops.  Error always leads to militant exclusion.  Truth ever more stoops to wash the saints feet. ‘In one Spirit are we all called into one body’ (1Cor.12:13).  We should be as one family, which we are, at home in God’s house anywhere.” 

     These cutting edge thinkers were light years removed from the high-church mentality of their times and it is unfortunately still the same today and more so.  Thus all the religious posturing and spiritual platitudes so common within much of the church today do little to dull the obvious implications of all our divisions.  Unfortunately over much of what we offer today our Lord Jesus would say, “You have a name that you are alive, but you are dead” (Rev.3:1).

     Again in the Latter Rain Revival of the 1940’s and early 1950’s, the Spirit moved precious few souls to raise their voices against the corruptions of sectarianism, and their words resound with insight and significance for our era.  A.W. Rasmussen, a pastor of the Independent Assemblies of God during that time said, “In the beginning of ‘Pentecost’ we were deathly afraid of denominationalism and we never failed to lift up our voice and proclaim that we were not a denomination, but a movement.  How is it today?  Pentecost is divided up into many camps of denominationalism.  It has gone the way of every preceding spiritual revival.  It seems that every revival ends up in an apostasy of its own.”12-59  George Hawtin, another church leader of that era wrote, “The great Pentecostal revival of the twentieth century was no sooner under way than we like all our predecessors began to divide ourselves up into denominational groups.  We like all others before us set up our fences and made our statement as to what we believed, making it impossible to go on to the next glory and the next revelation of truth.”12-68  And again he wrote, “I shall never be able to forget the glory, the awe, the reverence, the holiness, and the power that came to our classroom as we waited on God that glorious 13th of February, 1948, when God began to do a new thing that was destined for a time to shake the church system all over America…as I look sadly in retrospect now, I can see with clearness that the great and blessed move of God was not two years old before the sectarian spirit began to show its ugly head.”12-96

     Then there was the Charasmatic Renewal of the 1960’s.  Once again there were flickers of light that reached beyond the conventional thinking of sectarianism and offered some hope of a return to biblical unity however short-lived it was.  And even though this hope wasn’t matched with an equal amount of biblical insight and vision necessary for substantive change, there was nevertheless a move of the Spirit toward unity.  One writer notes, “On March 13th, the new Catholic Pentecostals met in prayer with members of the South Bend chapter of the Full Gospel Business Men’s Fellowship International, where Catholic ‘intellectuals’ and evangelical Protestant lay people discovered quickly that their unity in an experience transcended deep theological and cultural differences.”9-65-66  And again, “To Neo-Pentecostals, this experience is so dynamic that it produces an all-embracing religious enthusiasm and renders denominational and theological barriers insignificant as deterrents to Christian fellowship.”9-8  And one more quote, “The existential ‘encounter’ with Christ rather than correct doctrine intellectually accepted, becomes in Charismatic Renewal, the only basis for Spirit baptism and the unity it effects.”9-124  While these statements are more like a low grounder to the shortstop than a home-run on true biblical unity, the Spirit’s movement toward unity was still there, however awkwardly it was interpreted.  The emphasis on “an experience” as the primary basis of unity was one of the most discouraging aspects of the Charismatic Renewal and acted like a spiritual land-mine waiting to explode under the feet of the movement, which it eventually did, leaving all our walls fairly intact the way they are today.  The above author makes this point well, “The baptism of Holy Spirit was not enough of a unifying experience to prevent fragmentation from occurring almost immediately.  Pentecostalism had not once received organizational form.  Its spirit was in itself anti-organizational.  Thus there was no one beginning, no basis for agreement, but rather diverse, simultaneous, local, varied, uncoordinated, and perhaps finally unreconcilable positions taken by different churches and congregations.”9-38  The cause of Christian unity is far more fundamental and basic to the faith than any amount of “experiences” can address.  They’re just to subjective to lend themselves to the kinds of deep personal and corporate repentance and reformation necessary for true unity.

     Please remember sectarianism is a multi-medaled winner.  Up against any contender it has consistently proven superior.  No matter how well intentioned a church or religious organization, if this menace isn’t recognized and firmly given the boot it will quickly take over, and so it has time after time.  You simply can not play footsie’s with this monster and succeed in the biblical sense.  All who have tried to maintain its company have fallen prey to its power.  The politically liberal obsession with socialism is an interesting case in point.  Though historically it has been a proven failure wherever it has been tried, robbing independence and the entrepreneurial spirit that makes a solid economy tick, it nevertheless continues to be pushed as a model of utopia.  So also with Protestantism’s fixation on sectarianism, after literally hundreds of years of failure, we Protestants continue to promote and finance its existence.  We just keep bailing water out of our sinking ship thinking there’s a hole somewhere. We keep righting the sail, fixing the rudder, not realizing that the whole ship is falling apart around us and was never built right to begin with. We have become so polarized around a sectarian mindset we can’t imagine thinking in terms of any other dynamic as a church.  Even some of the best attempts at unity today are invariably flawed with divisive concepts that can’t help but produce more of the same.  And so on we have gone, year after year, decade after decade, century after century hopelessly tied to the same post that keeps us going around in circles on this issue, steadily getting weaker with seemingly no one who recognizes the folly.  Like a delocked Sampson blindly walking in circles for the Philistine devils we too have given up our glory for this madness called sectarianism.

     So what is the solution?  Again Dr. Merle D’ Aubigne aptly notes in reference to the success of the Protestant Reformation, “The Reformation was quite the opposite of a revolt: it was the re-establishment of the principles of primitive Christianity.”  It’s in the reestablishment of these principles that apostolic church unity has a guaranteed home-run over the centerfield fence.  Until the church is willing to bring those principles back into its ball park, were going to just keep striking out.  Schism in the church has always primarily been ideologically driven and its solution will certainly be no different.  To think otherwise has always been the path of least resistance, but it leads nowhere.  With signs everywhere flashing dead end, it’s amazing how many people and movements continue to go that way.  You won’t find many people on the road we are taking, but it is the surest way to get to the goal.  Only time and God’s grace will determine how long it will be till this road is put back on the churches map. More next article.

Luther Canon

Sola Scriptura