Changeable Truths
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Changeable Truths |
Bible Truth Changeable Truths. Communion: |
Fundamentalist Protestants claim to have an unchanging core of faith that dates back not only to the Reformation, but to the earliest Christians. This "unchanged gospel" is often contrasted with the "additions" to the faith which they then claim to have been made by the Catholic and the other Ancient Churches. Protestant worshippers generally believe that they are continuing in an unchanged, pure and uncontaminated faith. But have they been misled? If Protestant claims to be guardians of a "pure" Christian Gospel are to have any weight at all, the core truths of Protestantism must have been maintained without change through the relatively few years since the Reformation. BUT JUST HOW UNCHANGING HAVE PROTESTANT TRUTHS BEEN? Let us look at some of the fundamental areas of doctrine and practice of the Protestant Churches: WORSHIP, SALVATION, EVANGELISM, MIRACLES, MARY, END-TIMES . Most of these issues are basic to Protestant theology, and were major causes of the schism with the Catholic Church. Yet even in such core areas of belief, Protestant teaching has been stood on its head in a very short period. 1. WORSHIP. The original Reformers had ideas regarding worship that would amaze most modern-day Protestants in the same denominations today. Most Protestants fondly believe that their worship is similar to that which was instituted during the Reformation, and based upon that of the Early Christians. How many of the Protestant worshippers who revel in their worship songs, hymns and choruses, realise that Reformers like Calvin, Knox, Zwingli and Cranmer would be scandalised by their worship, and accuse them of following the Babylonish practices of Romanism! All these reformers railed against accompanying music of any kind in church, or the singing of human-composed songs. Neither of these practices appeared in the New Testament, so they were banned as Popish corruptions! Organs and musical instruments were broken-up and ripped out of churches across Europe. Books of sacred music were burnt wholesale. Only the unaccompanied chanting of the Psalms was allowed. Only gradually did music creep back into Protestant services, influenced by Catholic practice, and led by the Lutherans - who were the Protestant group most opposed to abandoning images or music-making in church. By the 17th Century metrical versions of the Psalms were allowed, and in the 18th Century Hymns not based on the Psalms began to creep back in some denominations, but the tunes had to be sombre, and include no half or quarter notes. Choirs and organs made a slow come-back. But lively music, hand-clapping or dancing would have earned the perpetrator rapid expulsion from virtually any Protestant denomination before the present period. However, in modern times, more and livelier music was needed to attract worshippers, and keep people coming to Protestant churches - and so the early Protestant principle of worshipping only as laid down in Scripture was cast aside. 2. SALVATION Perhaps worship-style can be overlooked as a relatively minor issue. Salvation, however, can not. So has Protestant doctrine on Salvation stayed constant since the Reformation? As can be seen in Free Will or Predestination? the belief of many Protestant groups and denominations has changed radically over the past few centuries. Three hundred years ago, most of the world's Protestant churches believed with Calvin that an individual had no say whatsoever in his own Salvation. God, in his absolute sovereignty had chosen at the beginning of time all who would be saved, and all who were doomed to damnation. There was nothing any individual could do to alter this. Today, following intense criticism of Calvinism, most mainstream Protestant denominations have reversed this theology and follow a doctrine that once they would have condemned - namely Arminianism, which permits that an individual can gain salvation by his or her own free choice. This has been a basic change in the doctrine of major protestant denominations. Yet this complete reversal of belief about salvation over the past two hundred years has been quietly brought about, and very often covered up and hidden away. 3. EVANGELISM Most fundamentalist protestant churches today place a strong emphasis on evangelism - in fact witnessing the faith to non-believers, or to believers of other denominations, is seen as a very high priority. But has this always been so? Strangely not. Most people have heard of Dr Livingstone, and the many Protestant missionaries of the 19th century. But how many protestant missionaries do we know of from the 16th 17th and 18th centuries? Not many. While the Catholic Church of this period sent Ignatius Loyola, the Jesuits, the Franciscans and many other missionaries out to proclaim the Christian faith throughout Latin America, and to Asia and Africa, the Protestant churches were doing very little. Why was this? It has a lot to do with Lutheran and Calvinist theology, and the way in which the Reformation happened. The Reformation in Europe largely succeeded through the exercise of State Power, and appeals to nationalism. The kings of England, Denmark and Sweden, and the rulers of the German states took over church property to create state-run churches. State churches were also created in Holland and the Swiss cantons. The new Protestant churches were therefore nationally-based from the outset and lacked an internationalist outlook. As we have seen, protestant theology, particularly that of Calvin, emphasised the grace and sovereignty of God in choosing his elect for Salvation. God had already chosen who was to be saved. Man's work counted for nothing. Therefore there was considered to be little point in sending missionaries out to heathen peoples. They could make no difference to God's plan. If God wanted to save the heathens, he would make them Christian himself. If he didn't want to save them, missionary effort was doomed anyway. So why bother? The combination of these two factors led to the idea that just as God had selected certain individuals to be saved, so he had selected certain nations to be saved and blessed, whilst others - the heathens - were destined only for destruction. (See By their Fruits) By extension, since the heathens were doomed anyway, it was little sin to drive them from their lands and eliminate them. In North America, therefore, only a few half-hearted attempts were made by the Protestant settlers to convert the Indians. The Spanish and the French spent much more energy on this, with hugely greater success. It was only when Calvinistic doctrines were being attacked and replaced at the beginning of the 1800s that we see the formation of the big Protestant missionary societies. With the additional impetus of the need to compete with Catholic gains among indegenous peoples, another big reversal of doctrine suddenly took place. Mission was not only good, but necessary. Men's work could win souls for God. Modern-day Protestants could be forgiven for thinking that these were Reformation principles - but these are new doctrines to Protestantism. 4. MIRACLES A Protestant elder of the 17th century looking at many protestant churches today would be astounded and appalled. He would see "Signs", "wonders", and "miracles" supposedly manifesting at nearly every service. He would see big-name evangelists rating themselves by the number of miraculous healings that took place at their meetings. He would see people "baptised in the Holy Spirit" and "talking in tongues". All these things would be entirely foreign to him. Not only would they be foreign to his view of Protestant religion, he would probably see them as deceits and abominations! If the Reformers preached one thing consistently, it was that the time of miracles was long past. The Reformers considered that the age of miracles had ended with the Age of the Apostles, and that in the current dispensation miracles simply did not happen. All miracles and healings that took place at Catholic services and Holy Sites were obviously feigned and deceitful - a sign of ignorant catholic "superstition." In England, orders were issued to, "utterly extinct and destroy all shrines... and all other monuments of feigned miracles, pilgrimages, idolatry and superstition, so that there remain no memory of the same". People were punished for claiming that miracles had taken place. The greatest miracle of all - the real presence of Christ's body and blood in the mass, was denied. For centuries miracles were pooh-poohed by Protestant leaders as fodder for the uneducated and superstitious. The huge U-turn towards the acceptance and even the expectation of miracles has happened in little over a century. The Charismatic revival movement, which launched this change, began at a small Chapel at Azusa Street, Los Angeles, USA, in the years just after 1900. "Speaking in Tongues" and "Baptism in the Spirit", along with associated miraculous healings, "signs and wonders", began there, and slowly spread to other denominations across the world. Today, although many Protestant denominations still deny modern-day miracles, many others, just as large, have reversed this position. Many Protestant evangelical groups base their popular appeal on a theology that would have been decried by all their predecessors as dangerous and heretical. The strange thing is that these same groups continue to claim that they are the possessors of a pure unaltered faith. yet it is they, not the Catholics or Orthodox, who are continually changing and rejigging their beliefs. 5. MARY Another change in belief among most Protestants is in relation to the Virgin Mary. Up until the Reformation, the Virgin had been honoured and venerated by all Christian Churches. (See The Virgin Mary and Queen of Heaven.) Today, with the exception of some Anglicans and some Lutherans, the Protestant attitude is often one of outright antagonism to paying any but the most grudging honour to the Mother of the Saviour. Generally the Virgin Mary and her role are studiously ignored. Luke 1:48 states "..from henceforth all generations shall call me blessed." But this is a verse honoured in the breach by most protestants. Many modern Protestants would claim that the Reformation condemned giving honour to Mary. But was this actually so? In fact the first Protestants held views on Mary that would probably amaze their later descendants.
Zwingli's successor, Heinrich Bullinger, said
French Calvinist pastor Charles Drelincourt said in the 17th century -
Calvin himself believed in the perpetual virginity of Mary, and Martin Luther held the doctrines of the Queenship of Mary and the Immaculate Conception. So how did this change come about? As with the Protestant removal of several books from the Bible (see Abridging the Bible), it was a gradual process, dependant on usage and human tradition. The Reformers opposed, prayer to Mary or the Saints. They also disliked Images and shrines - particularly those connected with the miraculous. Many opposed the celebration of Saints Days, or anything that the Church Traditionally taught that was not duplicated in the Bible. This meant that the means of honouring Mary were cut-off drastically. Although claiming still to honour the Virgin Mother in theory, in practice Protestants developed no means of doing so. Without prayers, images or liturgies, Mary gradually became a distant figure to most Protestants. When they ventured out of their own communities and saw Catholics and Orthodox Christians honouring Mary, they began to see this as a strange practice. The attitude had already developed that "if Catholics do it, it must be wrong", and so new doctrine grew out of habit and usage. Protestant theologians began to condemn not only prayer to Mary, but also other things that had not previously been controversial. Titles such as Queen of Heaven and doctrines such as the Assumption were attacked first, but then even universally accepted doctrines such as her perpetual virginity and the title Mother of God began to be attacked by over-zealous Protestants - presumably forgetting the fact that the creeds and councils of the Early Church had always been accepted by all Christians. The result is that today, leading Protestants can be found who will argue that the woman known to all history as the Virgin Mary, and honoured as perpetual virgin even by the Muslims, far from being a virgin, went on to have up to ten children after Jesus! That, despite the creeds, she wasn't the Mother of God, that her body lies forgotten in some corner of the Middle East, and that she might not even be in heaven! All these "protestant doctrines" of Mary are expounded with extreme vigour, despite being recent fancies, never adopted by any Council of the Church or even by any Trinitarian Protestant Church of any standing. The leaders of the Reformation themselves would be embarrassed by this development in doctrine. 6. END TIMES. What exactly will happen at the End of Time, and what will precede the Last Judgement? These questions may appear highly academic or theoretical, yet, as we shall see, the practical results of holding differing beliefs on these matters can be considerable. And this is yet another major area where Protestant doctrine has been completely stood on its head in the past two hundred years. At the time of the Reformation, and for hundreds of years afterwards, Protestant doctrine was clear. So clear that it was relied upon as a major weapon to assault the Catholic Church. Then everything changed. The Biblical Millennium - Changing the Ending. The Biblical Millennium is the name given to the1,000 year-long rule of Christ and the Saints spoken of in the Book of Revelation, and which lies between the first and second defeats of Satan. It directly follows the time of terrible plagues and tribulations by which the Book of Revelation is most known. Before the Reformation it was taught that the first defeat of Satan had taken place when Jesus died on the Cross. The plagues and tribulations were past, and the thousand year reign of the Saints with Christ represented the current period - the age of the Church. The world would be made Christian. Christ would return at some future point, and the Last Judgement would take place. The Reformers significantly altered this theology. In their view Satan had not yet been defeated for the first time, and we were currently in the era of plagues and tribulations. The tribulations set out in Revelation were largely symbolic, and represented the wars and disasters of our own time. This allowed them to identify the Pope as the Antichrist, and the Catholic Church as the Scarlet Woman of Revelation. This mainstay of their propaganda would simply not have been possible under the earlier theology in which the Antichrist was associated with the direct persecution of Jesus and the Early Christians. In Victorian times, however, there was a major revolution in Protestant theology. In America, a new belief developed, known as dispensationalism, which swept through reformed churches, publicised by Schofield, in his Reference Bible. Among other things, this stated that the era of tribulations spoken of in Revelation had not yet begun. The tribulations were in no way symbolic or representational, but would soon occur exactly as laid down in Revelation. The Beast, the Antichrist and the Scarlet Woman had not yet arisen, so the Reformers' identification of them with Rome and the Catholic Church could no longer be supported. Even so, many fundamentalist Protestants clung to their beliefs that these identifications could be retained for later use. A NEW OUTLOOK The effect of this new theology was dramatic. No longer was the world expected to grow more Holy and Christian as Jesus's return approached. Instead, sin would triumph, and Christians were due to become a persecuted minority as the world suffered a series of devastating plagues and disasters. This dreadful future was not a pleasing prospect for the average believer. So another new doctrine promptly arose to solve this problem. Taking another text in Revelation as a cue, it was stated that all true Christians would miss this fearsome age by being bodily swept up into heaven just before the disasters and tribulations began to hit the earth. This mass Assumption was called the Rapture. Few outside the Evangelical and Protestant Pentecostal churches have even heard about this doctrine, but within them, it reigns supreme. This new doctrine, completely unknown before the 1840s, has become a controlling doctrine in many Reformed, Baptist, Pentecostal and other Churches. It has also had a huge effect in the creation of Sects like the Jehovahs Witnesses and many others, all seeking for signs of the "End-Times". Besides the "Rapture", (the logic of which seems to defy much of what is taught in the bible), the dispensationalist doctrine raises many other problems, such as the need for two separate resurrections of the dead, and two "final" battles with Satan. It has also cast a pall over the outlook of many Protestant Churches. For if the world is soon to be destroyed, why work to improve it, to conserve the environment, or to better the conditions of the poor? Why work to build a just, Christian Society? The best thing to do is simply to concentrate on gaining personal salvation. In this way a basically hopeful "End-Times" doctrine of a steadily improving world, has been turned into a negative doctrine of a world sinking hopelessly into sin and destruction. This is a profound and massive change in the belief and outlook of a major proportion of the world's Protestants. And this huge reversal with its totally new doctrines, unknown to the first 300 years of Protestantism, has happened in the last 150 years. CONCLUSION. Catholics are often accused by Protestants of consenting to the Development of Doctrine - that is, allowing new doctrines to be added to those established by the Apostles and Early Fathers of the Church. This is presented by Evangelical Protestants as one of the chief corruptions of Catholicism. In fact, when Catholics have defined supposedly "new" doctrines like the Assumption, the doctrines have not normally been new at all, but have been held by the Church since the early centuries, yet not officially defined. However, as we have seen, far from being the strongholds of an unchanging biblical faith, as they like to present themselves, it is the Protestant Churches which have been the ones with a malleable and changeable belief system. Doctrines held as central and biblically-based by one generation, have been completely overturned and replaced by the next - often with completely new and unhistoric beliefs. This is change of a completely different order of magnitude to any so-called "Development of Doctrine" in the Catholic Church. Fundamentalist Protestant Churches claim to follow clear Biblical doctrines discerned through the guidance of the Holy Spirit. An inescapable conclusion must therefore be drawn - either the Bible and the Holy Spirit have changed their view on these matters, which is impossible, or these Protestant Churches have been seriously and fundamentally misled on basic matters of doctrine. In other words, if protestant "truths" are subject to such basic change, they cannot be truths. |