By Reese Currie, Compass Distributors

It seems like only yesterday when I wrote our "Three Year Review" for December 1999. The years seem to be flashing by. I would like to thank my readership for sharing with me in this journey of faith.

In my personal life, I received a non-accredited Pastoral Ministries diploma this year, which was something of a test of faith in itself. It led to a great deal of self-examination as I went through my coursework. It is an awesome responsibility to be a leader of a New Testament assembly and, unless a person is overly self-assured, he wonders if he is up to the task. Now that I have the piece of paper, it being non-accredited, there is probably little I can actually do with it. However, the knowledge gained during the course was the main purpose anyway, and it certainly made me a better deacon than I would have been otherwise.

On the web site, this year didn’t turn out quite as I had expected. I began with the Three Year Review (I had postponed running that due to something big that happened in November 1999) and then moved into positive ground with "What’s Your View of Truth?" presenting truth as an absolute and not as relativism as is common in the church today.

Unfortunately this led to a few run-ins with Roman Catholics, people for whom truth is infinitely flexible, to be redefined at the will of the pope. These interactions led me to want to understand the enigma of Roman Catholicism. It became a bit of a fascination to me. How could people be so vociferously in favor of a system that has virtually no agreement with the Bible? This fascination led me down a few different roads, leading to my writing four articles this year on Romanism. Last month’s "Romans to the Romans" is meant to be the last word on the topic. I do not want to belabor the issue when there are others that are equally important, if not more so.

I have recently gone in great depth into church history. It is true that I had always had an interest in church history but more from a strictly Baptist perspective. It is important to look at church history, for those who are ignorant of history are bound to repeat it.

There is a cycle in the church that repeats itself over and over again through history. It takes about 430 years to take place each time.

To understand the cycle, I have to give you a little background. There are three different "faith systems" in Christianity, and believe it or not, they are not "Catholicism, Protestantism, and Evangelicalism." They are really institutionalism, confessionalism, and pietism.

Institutionalism is the prevalent belief in Roman Catholicism, Eastern Orthdoxy, and Anglicanism. It is in essence the belief that a faith’s validity is based on its apostolicity, which is to say, association with a church that is supposedly a product of apostolic succession.

Confessionalism is basically a belief that salvation is granted to those who follow a particular scholar’s doctrinal findings and associate with the state church that also believes those doctrinal findings. Most forms of Calvinism have been at this stage since the late 1600’s. You can ask some Calvinists a Bible question and they respond with a quotation from the Westminster Confession of Faith. This is an example of confessionalism.

I personally was raised in a Presbyterian Church and the gospel was never preached there for the simple reason that personal faith in Christ was a non-issue. To be saved, I simply had to agree with the confessed doctrine and attend church. The concept of a personal experience of God was alien to that church’s teachings. There are "evangelical Presbyterians" that are not like this; however, I would think the larger part of the Presbyterian church is steeped in confessionalism.

Pietism is the belief that salvation is based on a personal experience of God’s grace established by repentance and faith in Jesus Christ, a personal experience that all need to have in order to be saved. Pietism later became "evangelicalism."

It is quite hard for a person of a pietistic position to really understand an institutionalist position, and vice-versa. As a Baptist, I personally hold a form of "pietistic" belief. Try as I might, it is pretty hard to get the idea of personal salvation across to a person who believes that affiliation with an institution will save him. However, I see nothing but a personal salvation in the New Testament.

That having been said, the whole concept of personal salvation disappeared from church history shortly after the first century and was not really found again until pietism made its appearance in 1669.

The cycle that a church goes through is to be initially pietistic, then confessional, then institutional, and as I have said, this cycle takes approximately 430 years.

The New Testament faith is highly expressive of a person’s need for personal salvation through repentance and faith in Jesus Christ. However, the understanding that "faith in Christ" is all you need for salvation led to a need to correct doctrinal error, even in the first century. The apostles attacked the principles of Judaizers, Gnostics, and antinomians, all perversions of the faith. Judaizers wanted to continue in the Law; Gnostics sought to divorce the spirit from the body and believed all matter was bad; and antinomians felt no responsibility to live holy lives.

As the church moved out of the first century, there came attacks from all sorts of heresies. The early church fathers wrote extensively to combat doctrinal heresy. The early catholic church became guilty of vacillation on important points of doctrine. Today considered one of the "church fathers," Athanasius was banished and pardoned not less than five times for his teaching on the Trinity, as the early church vacillated between the Trinitarian position, which is the truth, and the more easily understood Arian position which is the spiritual child of Gnosticism.

As these things were sorted out, a person’s faith began to be measured by their belief in doctrine rather than their belief in Christ. The agreement with the church fathers, even where they were themselves in error, became a requirement to be part of the Christian community.

Finally, the errors, those places in which the church fathers departed from the Bible, had to be justified. The answer was to make the church an institution. By claiming a line of succession from the apostles, merely human authority was given the appearance of divine authority, and the authority of the institution was regarded as higher than the authority of the Bible.

From there, the institution departed terribly far from the Christian faith and it was all justified by apostolic succession. This process was not really complete until the crowning of pope Leo, the first to truly lay claim to the formerly pagan title Pontifex Maximus, in 455AD; approximately 430 years from Christ’s resurrection. (Historians will note that Leo I was actually the Bishop of Rome in 440AD, however, councils as late as 451AD denied that he had more power than the Bishop of Constantinople. He wasn’t really recognized as supreme until after he had faced down the Vandals in their invasion of Rome in 455AD.)

Let’s move ahead to the mid-1500’s. Martin Luther had a personal experience of faith in Christ while in a monastery. He began to question the right of an institution to depart from the teachings of the Bible. This culminated in the Reformation. Calvin and Zwingli had similar experiences of personal faith.

Due to the need to defend their faith immediately against the criticism of Roman Catholicism, extensive Bible-based writings were produced by both Luther and Calvin. Unable to defeat the Biblical foundations of the faith, the popes turned to violence and wars were fought all over Europe as the institutional churches, Roman Catholic and the Church of England, fought to suppress the Protestant faiths.

In the 1600’s, during the wars and after, when the wars had cooled, a desire to preserve the teachings of Calvin and Luther resulted in—you guessed it—confessions. And a sort of Protestant scholasticism became the norm and the teaching of a need for a personal experience and relationship with Jesus Christ was lost. Within about 200 years of the spark of the Reformation, personal faith in Jesus Christ was supplanted with the need to agree with the doctrines of either Luther or Calvin and associate with their respective state churches. Some people in these churches have remained committed to confessions, while others became involved in modernism as a result of the rationalism of the 19^th century.

Moving ahead exactly 431 years from the pinning of the 95 Theses to the door of Castle Church in Wittenburg in 1517, we find Reformed Protestantism as a whole turned to institutionalism by uniting in the World Council of Churches in 1948. The World Council of Churches associated Reformed Christianity with the supposedly "apostolic" authority of the Church of England.

The logical progression from there would be for the World Council of Churches to reunite with Romanism. While the Church of England represents apostolic authority to some, one pursuing the "ultimate" in supposed apostolic authority can stop at no less than the pope of Rome.

In 1833, John Keble, John Henry Newman and Edward Pusey began the Oxford Movement out of a sense that the de-emphasis of the "apostolic authority" of the Church of England in English society was harmful, and they desired to restore it. In 1845, however, many in the movement deserted the church of England and reverted to Romanism, having come to the belief that only the pope had the proper authority. How deluded men become when they seek their authority from human institutions rather than Christ. The ultimate end of the quest for supposedly apostolic authority is ecumenical and organic union with the Roman Catholic Church.

Pietism came about in 1669 with a man named Philip Spener. His religious influences included the writings of the German mystic Johann Arndt and the English Puritans. He understood Luther’s justification by faith not as a mere doctrine, but as a personal experience of spiritual rebirth. He was a man who preached repentance and discipleship. He felt that a conscious Christian experience of conversion was necessary, and he held hopes that his teaching would permeate the whole church. He believed that the church consisted only of people who had experienced personal faith in Jesus, a belief held by Baptists about a century before. This led to the formation of "pious societies" of people who had had this experience of salvation, and led to the name "pietism."

Pietism is the spiritual predecessor of evangelicalism, which saw its birth mainly in John Wesley. Evangelicalism tends to put a little more emphasis on doctrine than straight pietism, and evangelicalism also withdraws from the pietistic emphasis on mysticism.

Wesley’s own movement was immediately somewhat confessional, as Wesley produced his own articles of faith derived from those of the Church of England. There was a falling out between John and his more institutional brother Charles who questioned his right to start a denomination in the Americas apart from the apostolic authority of the Church of England. Methodism fell very quickly to rationalism in the 19^th century, and many of Methodism’s leaders today believe little of the Bible record. As a result of its early confessional and institutional leanings, Methodism has in the 20^th century sought institutionalism far sooner than might otherwise be expected, through ecumenical dialogue with the supposedly apostolic Church of England.

Nevertheless, most of evangelicalism today, after approximately 250 years, still remains free of confessionalism. This is possibly because of the general disregard for good doctrine among some of the later evangelical churches, but possibly only because evangelicalism is still early in the cycle that usually takes about 400 years to reach its completion.

It is interesting to note that in the late 1990’s, the Southern Baptist Convention, one of the more mature evangelical denominations, began using adherence to the "Baptist Faith & Message" statement of faith as a requirement to teach in their schools in response to heretical liberal teachings. Therefore, the seeds of confessionalism are planted in the SBC as a defense against heresy, and right on schedule; the denomination is just about 155 years old.

Yet, perhaps the purest example of pietism in today’s world is a Southern Baptist, a man named Henry Blackaby, who wrote a number of books and courses. Blackaby has all the elements of Philip Spener. He preaches strongly on repentance, discipleship, and the need for a personal relationship with God, and his teachings on these matters, like Spener’s, produce good results. Also like Spener, has a strong desire that his teachings on a personal "experience of God" will permeate all denominations. Unfortunately, he also shares Spener’s emphasis on mysticism and de-emphasis on doctrine, which leads to a certain procrustean treatment of Scripture and history, molding both to support his views when an objective look at both often contradict his somewhat enthusiastic teachings.

Blackaby’s desire to have his teachings permeate all denominations has made him into something of a puppet of the ecumenical movement, which can be trusted to promptly disregard all of his teachings once their common goal of organic union under the pope is achieved. At that point, papal doctrine will supplant all divergent views.

The emphasis on mysticism and de-emphasis of doctrine is also a factor in modern Pentecostalism and the charismatic movement. However, they are a less pure example of modern pietism than Henry Blackaby because many in the charismatic movement as a whole does not adequately preach the need for repentance. Technically, Blackaby is a part of the charismatic movement through his association with the charismatic and highly ecumenical organization, Promise Keepers.

A trend I see among many believers who convert later in life is that their introduction to Christianity is through Pentecostalism or the charismatic movement because of its strong emphasis on the need for a personal experience of God. Then, the realization of Pentecostalism’s absolute vulnerability to heresy and fraudulent teachers leads many of the more studious adherents to go to a Baptist church, where there is both the recognition of the need for a personal relationship with God, and a recognition of the need to enforce sound doctrine.

We find that even evangelicalism, in the 1990’s, began a quest back toward institutionalism. The signing of the Evangelicals and Catholics Together agreement represented an absolute betrayal of Biblical faith on the part of evangelicals seeking to please men rather than God. While this agreement does not represent a desire for organic union, it does proclaim something of a "cease-fire" by which the Biblical doctrine of the necessity for a personal experience of Christ will not be preached to Roman Catholics.

This is a terrible betrayal of the beliefs of John Wesley. Wesley had a personal, life changing experience of God after years of interest in the pietistic teachings of the Moravians (later known as the United Brethren). He realized he himself had been a priest in the Church of England for years and yet had been unsaved. After his conversion, the very first people he targeted with his new message of repentance and faith were the religious people in the Church of England. He lost his right to preach from Church of England pulpits on the basis of daring to suggest that affiliation with the Church did not automatically save people but they needed to receive a personal faith in Christ.

This explusion led Wesley to preach in the open fields around England. Although initially uncomfortable with the idea that was introduced to him by George Whitefield, Wesley gave it a try, and soon found himself preaching to thousands out of doors in fields all around England. He made the gospel available to people who were persona non grata in the institutional church, the poor, the worker.

This is the heritage that evangelicals deny when they sign agreements stating that they will not fight the apostasy of institutionalism with the pure gospel of salvation through personal repentance and faith in Jesus Christ. It is an abomination that anyone would even consider denying the gospel to those deceived by the organizations of "institutional worship."

Recognizing our point in history, then, what are we to do? I believe our place is to practice "moderation in all things" as Jesus advised us. While we must uphold good doctrine, we must at the same time avoid confessionalism. We must never teach that salvation depends on anything other than a personal relationship with Jesus Christ gained by repentance, which is turning away from sin and self and turning to God, and faith, which is our absolute trust in Christ and His finished work to save us. But at the same time we must be very clear on doctrine so that people may lead the most fulfilled lives of discipleship possible, and in fact place their faith in the true Jesus, as there are many counterfeit versions of Jesus preached today.

We must avoid confessionalism simply because confessionalism leads to institutionalism. If we base our faith on confessions, we must eventually ask, "why is this confession valid?" That necessarily leads to some need for apostolic successionism and institutionalism to explain the confession’s validity apart from Scripture. Whereas, if we stick to the Bible as the solution to doctrinal arguments, the authority of the Bible is built-in; it is the word of God, and it is self-authenticating in this regard.

Balance is what we need to strike in our time on earth, and this is very difficult. Our human systems are made up of correcting errors. For instance, in democratic countries, we tend to elect conservatives, then to correct conservative extremes, we elect liberals, and then to correct liberal extremes, we elect conservatives again.

This is also a trend we have seen in the church. Both conservatism and liberalism by definition are deviations from a norm or an ideal. They are both to be avoided. We must look at the teachings of Scripture not as conservative or liberal, as is the tendency in today’s society, but as the norm, the ideal. Things in the Bible that we consider "conservative" today are only conservative in relation to the aberrant state of our society. They are in fact the norm of God’s standards for us, His people. And the norm for the Christian church is personal salvation through faith in Christ and the need to apply Biblical doctrine to our walk thereafter.

Four Year Review is Copyright © 2000 by Compass Distributors