Posted on 09/30/2004 4:49:07 AM PDT by HarleyD
You're using that inaccurate, discredited piece of dreck?
Charles Finney, in his Revivals of Religion, wrote that huge outpourings of emotion were the evidence that revival has happened. He also wrote that such displays would be automatic if one followed his blueprint for revival.
In other words, Finney believed that peoples emotions could be manipulated into the desired response, through the application of his methods. And this is how revivals are done.
In my mind, anyway, the word "revival" means "mass conviction/mass conversions". Emotional displays are optional. I often wonder if a revival could occur w/o the emotionalism one usually associates with tent-style revivals?
(And if the best you can do in reply is to blast away at a book that I merely used the title's rhetorical question of to frame my closing argument, then Calvinism is in real trouble.)
DH used to be a big hero of mine.
Mine, too. I was uneasy with the vitriolic rhetoric and sloppy research found in The God-Makers. IMO the success of that book/film went to his head. What I found doubly odd was that, given the commercial success of The God-Makers, his follow-up projects didn't go after the Jehovah's Witnesses or another high-profile non-Christian organization. Instead, he directed his sights increasingly on fellow Christians with the books The Seduction of Christianity, Beyond Seduction, Whatever Happened To Heaven?, and now What Love Is This?. Each book alienated more and more of his prior readership, and saw smaller and smaller sales numbers as a result. I strongly suspect that What Love Is This? was written as a belated response to Calvinist writers Gary DeMar and Peter Leithart. In 1988, DeMar and Leithart wrote a rebuttal to "Dave Hunt's Theology of Cultural Surrender" in their book The Reduction of Christianity. They demonstrated that Hunt is far more accusing of non-dispensational, non-PreMil/PreTrib Christianity than the historic, orthodox creeds of the Christian Church are. In doing so, Hunt falsely sets himself up as the yardstick by which men's faiths must be measured.
Good thing Hunt hasn't quit his day job. It's always worthwhile to point out that Hunt has no formal theological/historical/seminary education whatsoever. In his day job, IIRC, he's a certified public accountant. If he were as careless with the facts and figures in his client's books as he is with his own, he'd lose his day job, too.
I fully expect Dave Hunt, at some point in the twilight of his career, to announce that he and his church are, alone, the last remaining faithful believers in Jesus Christ, here in the twenty-first century.
And on his deathbed, he'll probably express doubts about the other members of his church, too.
As a Southern Baptist, I find myself to be a little more Calvinistic than the average SB. But I take a laid-back approach. I am pretty happy with the SBC these days, since they have got rid of most of the people in high administration who don't believe the Bible to be completely true. I find I agree with the top people a lot more than I disagree.
I think the SBC and the Cooperative Program do wonderful things in the Lord's name and through His power. And that is because a few Bible-believing Southern Baptists cared enough to organize the ocnvention against the liberals.
It is really worht studying. Nothing like it has happened in 500 years of Protestant history.
When we moved to this area the SBC church we found was the only church nearby that focused on the Bible. We're a little disappointed with the movement in our church to "modernize" the presentation and the preaching isn't up to our expectations (not trying to criticize the pastor). But we're unwilling to leave at the moment. Like you, I do agree with them more than I disagree and I can "generally" bite my Calvinistic tongue. But we suppliment ourselves with John MacArthur tape sermons so that helps.
On a national level, the split away from the other Baptists was a move in the right direction. But SBs don't have a systematic theology and within the SB community this is creating problems. (I posted something on this a long while ago.) They have some creeds and so forth but when pressed about defining their theology a little more, the administration generally throws up their hands and say, "Can't we focus on missions?". In trying to appease the Arminian SBers, it is allienating the Calvinist SBers.
It is commendable the SBs broke away from the liberal Baptists. However, eventually they're not going to be able to ignore the Arminian/Calvinist split within the church for long. It's not surprising this article says the same thing.
The liberal would throw up his hands and say "soul competency", which is really just a cover for not believing the Bible.
Doctrinal error has generational consequences. It's no accident that mainstream Protestanism is a shell of its former self.
In my experience, there just aren't that many Calvinists in the SBC period, or in modern evangelicalism at all. America is an Arminian country, for better or worse.
Ugh. That's just painful. I see a particular preacher on the air these days. He pastors an enormous church, and his sermons are always the same. Self-help, self-esteem, getting through tough times, etc. There's nothing wrong with these things, but this isn't the central message of the Gospel, and I fear that his listeners might be getting the wrong idea.
This theory has been expressed before. Not sure that I agree with it, but it is very, very interesting. Dr. Gary North wrote an entire book on the fall of the Northern Presbyterian Church that took that very position.
I don't necessarily agree with a lot of North's theology (covenant), but the book is free and online.
http://www.freebooks.com
Normally I would agree but recently I have been doing some research on the doctrine of original sin. In tracing this doctrine backwards I find a great many people who do not believe in original sin do not believe in the virgin birth and do not believe in the inerrancy of the scriptures. It is interesting to me how subtle these theological heresies can be for many good Christians on this site have argued against original sin. I wonder if they would be so willing to argue against the virgin birth and the inerrancy of the word of God.
I've always been told there are many ways to interpret the scriptures and that each verse has multiple meanings. I believe, while there may be a tiny amount of truth to this, this premise is basically wrong. There is only one basic interpretation of scripture. I don't see the issue so much as Calvin vs Arminian as much as I see it as what is the correct.
If the non-Calvinistic Baptist theology prevails then I think the author is absolutely correct. Baptist theology will become indistinguishable from liberal theology because theology will be based upon feelings and emotions, not solid theology. Where the Calvinist churches have failed in adhering to Calvinistic doctrine, heresy has slipped in and corrupted the church. And look at the mess non-Calvinist churches are in today (yes, that includes the RCC). Do you honestly think Baptist churches will be any different once they abandon their Reformed views?
That is tough to contemplate, for I love the Southern Baptist Church. I'm raising my kids in it, and never want to leave.
The book I shared with you is quite blatant. Dr. North claims that evangelicalism (that is, an insistence of experientialism over doctrine and covenant) is nothing more than a waystation between Calvinism and outright liberal heresy.
I think Dr. North takes it to an extreme that I probably wouldn't. He finds fault with those who would ask to hear of someone's Christian conversion to determine churhc membership, and I think in most cases that this is a good idea.
o "Services at [name omitted] have an informal feeling. You won’t hear people threatened with hell or referred to as sinners. The goal is to make them feel welcome, not drive them away."
Sort of like Jesus preaching parables?
CROSSED FINGERS
How the Liberals Captured the Presbyterian Church
by Gary North
This book is the first to detail the step-by-step program of infiltration used by modernists to take over the Northern Presbyterian Church. Other books have chronicled the results of this program, but none has shown how it was done. The infiltration process began as early as 1870, and it culminated in the expulsion of the conservatives in 1936. This book shows that the modernists held a systematic theology that was a perverse mirror image of the Presbyterianism of the Westminster Confession. It presents the compromised midway theology of the majority wing of the Church: New School Presbyterians and fundamentalists (after 1910). I t also shows why the conservatives were unwilling to defend the Westminster Confession through court actions against heretics except in the 1890's, and even then, they refused to deal with many of the fundamental theological issues. The conservatives, from Charles Hodge to J. Gresham Machen, were themselves unwilling to accept all of the Confession, especially in the key area of creationism. Because they crossed their fingers when they swore allegiance to the Confession, the modernists also crossed theirs, and all but six of them got away with it. The conservatives were outfoxed time after time.Then, after 1907, the conservatives consented to a series of tactical moves that passed institutional power to the modernists and their pietistic allies. They did not understand what they had done until two decades after they had done it. By then, it was too late. This book also lists a series of red-alert signals that point to a replay of the liberals' strategy.
1096 pp., indexed, hardback, $34.95
Institute for Christian Economics, P.O. Box 8000, Tyler, Texas 75711
And for the free book online, go to...
http://www.freebooks.com/docs/243a_47e.htm
Yet the Puritans also reference experience. Divines in the Dutch Nadere Reformatie like Comrie and Voetius held experience as well, sometimes bordering on mysticism and seen today in the most insular sects like the Netherlands Reformed Congregations.
By contrast, in the CRC and its derivatives (also Dutch), bearing the indelible stamp of Kuyperian covanentalism, experience counts for little to nothing.
While we would probably dismiss Finney out of hand, I have high regard for both Kuyper and the Puritans/Dutch Second Refomration divines. All claim to start from Scripture, as did Mullins in the article above. You can see the difficulty.
Here is your statement about love.
And love, by it's very nature, cannot exist unless there be free will to choose not to love! Don't believe me? Go get one of those dolls that says, "I love you," when you pull on the string and tell me how satisfying that is compared to the genuine love of your family and friends.
Can you offer scriptural evidence to support your supposition that 'love cannot exist unless there be free will to choose not to love!'?
Doesn't the doll do what it was created to do? Do we do what we are created to want do?
The real question is not why a God who gave us free will and respects it would allow those who exercise that free will to rebel to exist in the first place. He does so because He loves them enough to let them decide whether to submit to His wooing. The real question is why the God of John Calvin and Augustine (both of whom, it should be pointed out, advocated using the State to force people to convert) is such a puppet-master that He would create beings and force them to rebel against Him, and such a sadist that he takes those helpless, morally-unresponsble beings and damns them to hell! As Dave Hunt asks in his book of the same title: What Love Is This?
I know you are familiar with the 5 points of Calvinism, including Irresistable Grace, (I am not a Calvinist), but how could Almighty God actually be in a wrestling match with a created being's, a person's, will? How could God not be able to call someone to Christ that he wanted to come to Christ? Does God decide he wants to bring someone to Christ and then fail because that person is unwilling? Is God up in heaven fretting and saying, "Oh man! Foiled again! What can I do to get that person to come to Christ? I've done everything I can think of and he still refuses."
suh-weet
Look at your heart and ask yourself why you feel uncomfortable with this.
suh-weet-er.
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