One of the most fascinating stories I’ve ever read has a direct bearing on why our modern Church world is the way it is. That is, sinking into the quicksand of apostasy. I’ve written about Noah Hutchings of Southwest Radio Church, Paul Smith (brother of Chuck) of Calvary Chapel, and several other ministry leaders who always lashed themselves to Scripture. Their fidelity to Scripture kept them from hobnobbing with elites who compromised somewhere down the line. That bought the latter fame, fortune, and adulation.
God bless men like Hutch and Paul, and the rest. The faithful remnant.
I have always believed it is vital to know history so that we can understand where we are now and where we might be going. Of course, prophecy gives us a general idea, but knowing where we came from—both in the mists of antiquity and in the last couple hundred years—helps us navigate the choppy waters we’re sailing through presently.
My basic premise in this piece is looking at the theological damage wrought by false teachers that infected our seminaries, and later, national ministries.
I think the foundations of our origins explain a lot. A few have stood fast on the Bible’s accounts of origins as outlined in Genesis. The erosion of biblical truth in our country started long ago. In the middle of the 19th century, a perfect storm of attacks on the Bible came from two different directions: modern science and German seminaries employing unbelieving professors. By unbelieving, I mean that they professed to be Christians, but within the walls of the seminaries, they kept a dirty secret: faculty turned out pastors to believe that much of the Old Testament was myth – The Exodus never happened; David and Goliath, Jonah and the great fish, and Noah’s flood (especially Noah’s flood!) never happened but were Hebrew legend.
And Adam and Eve? Forget about it!
By 1902, German professor Friedrich Delitzsch gave a lecture in Berlin titled “Babylon and the Bible,” in which he claimed that much of the Bible was influenced by Babylonian myth (as opposed to the truth, which was exactly the opposite). Even the Kaiser attended the lecture. Princeton’s brilliant defender of the Bible, Robert Dick Wilson, challenged Delitzsch’s brutish attack on the Bible. Yet most people wanted to follow the German pagan masquerading as a man of the cloth.
It was in this era that science (falsely so-called) blended with the clergy to promote and market evolutionary theory—Darwinian philosophy—exporting it to America. By the time of the infamous Scopes “Monkey” Trial, evolution had gained a real foothold in America, and its domination was complete by the 1960s. School prayer was out, and more and more members of the clergy capitulated and did not stand strong on the biblical accounts.
(I want to also make the point that Darwinian Philosophy is just that—philosophical musings. It is not settled science but rather comes from the anti-God bias of Europe during the Enlightenment. It is philosophy.)
The effect was felt on many levels. In the last century, Hitler, Stalin, and Mao had all read Darwin, including Herbert Spencer’s works, which developed the concept of “social Darwinism.” These dictator-beasts used these philosophies to murder 100 million people. Frankly, the overall American church leadership community did not rise to the level of real leaders and defenders of the faith. Evolutionary thought came to hold American society in the same death-grip.
But to that story I promised at the beginning. Most of us have no real idea just how deeply propaganda has decimated society. In the remarkable Barry Werth book, Banquet at Delmonico’s: Great Minds, the Gilded Age, and the Triumph of Evolution in America, there is a very weird (but enlightening!) story involving the man known as “Darwin’s Bulldog,” Thomas Huxley. It proves that Darwinian Philosophy is fatally biased against God. Werth’s book is a really interesting story about evolutionists like Huxley and Herbert Spencer influencing Americans to believe an alternate story to Genesis.
Huxley, keen on developing the now-famous “horse series” of evolution, visited a fossil collection at Yale, in New Haven, Connecticut, in the late 19th century. Huxley was so excited to see the extensive fossil collection that he almost lost control of himself. Hear this brief excerpt:
“While his wife went with friends to Saratoga, Huxley plunged into the most anticipated week of his stay: several long days examining paleontologist O. C. Marsh’s skeletons at Yale’s new Peabody Museum, with a side trip to see fossilized dinosaur footprints along the sandstone banks of the Connecticut River north of Springfield, Massachusetts. At about the same time that Darwin had published Descent and Agassiz was renewing his attack on evolution as bereft of facts, Huxley had undertaken with a Russian collaborator to assemble the fossil lineage of a single modern mammal, concentrating on the horse.”
Darwin and his friends knew they had real holes in their theory, particularly as it related to transitional fossils. In other words, they needed to find real transitional fossils. For example, a sea creature becoming, over eons of time, a land animal.
“Darwinians had learned, in large part from engaging with Agassiz, not to rely too heavily on fossil records, which were well recognized as hosting too many dead ends, anomalies, and missing links. And Huxley resisted departing from his own popular theory. He pored over box after box of Marsh’s bones assiduously, challenging him again and again, calling for a hoof from this ancient species or a molar from that one. With each challenge, Marsh beckoned an assistant to fetch another crate. ‘I believe you are a magician,’ Huxley finally blurted. ‘Whatever I want, you just conjure up.’ Huxley declared the collection ‘the most wonderful thing I ever saw,’ telling Marsh: ‘The more I think of it, the more clear it is that your great work is the settlement of the pedigree of the horse.’”
Notice that key phrase: “Whatever I want, you just conjure up.”
Here is clear proof that Darwinian Philosophy is hopelessly biased. What it tells us is that Huxley manufactured a “horse evolution series” out of whole cloth. The series that appeared in many of the science textbooks we read in our youth was phony. But it sounded authoritative, and millions believed it. That day at the Peabody, Huxley simply put together his concept of a horse by fitting bones from different animals together to create his “evolutionary horse.”
The fact is, just as Genesis describes, God created animals after their own kind. Dogs were dogs. Whales were whales.
Horses were horses. They were never tiny animals that eventually evolved physical elements that make up the “modern” horse.
Horses have always been horses.
This kind of scientific propaganda has shipwrecked the religious faith of millions and millions of people.
Why am I telling you this? What does this modern scientific history have to do with the Church and theology?
I have talked to scores of young people over the years, and they well understand the disconnect if we accept the claims of Darwinian Philosophy. If we say that Genesis is in some way myth, how can we then claim that Christ was resurrected? Or that He even lived?
Do you see? Attacks on the Bible affect everything in it. Including eschatology. This is one of the main reasons that Bible prophecy has also fallen out of favor in our churches. The devil knows that the more he can attack the Bible, the more our society suffers.
Dr. Calvin B. Johnson was a long-time Methodist clergyman. He saw that after several Methodist denominations came together as the United Methodist Church in 1968, theological malpractice reigned. Today, the UMC is one of the most left-wing denominations in the country.
Johnson knew all this was coming; his book came out in 1997 and remains one of my best sources for understanding why the American Church is the way it is today. In particular, he has a wealth of information about how churches slowly developed the view that much of the Bible is myth. Published in the April 1951 edition of Adult Student, we read:
“The second section [of Genesis], Chapters 12 through 50, is made up of hero stories out of the semi-legendary past of the Hebrew people.”
Wow.
And to prove my point, the UMC has also for decades been a friend (dupe?) of the PLO. In the 1990s, after Bill Clinton invited Yasser Arafat to the White House 13 times, the serial killer also met with UMC officials. Pretty soon, Christians began hearing the “Jesus was a Palestinian” lie. Even author Philip Yancey identified our Lord that way, the Redeemer who is a Jew. The link between attacking Genesis and the rest of the Old Testament, and the attempted destruction of the New Testament, is clearly seen.
I’ve gone on too long, but happily for us, we don’t accept these lies about the Book. It remains for us the one and only true Word of God. We must, though, educate ourselves about the nature of the lies, and where they came from, so that we can maintain our vigilance for the duration.
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