Christian Anarchy

Every Believer a Priest…

In the year 1229 A.D. at the Council of Toulouse the Catholic Church banned the laity from Biblical access. Their reasoning was “The depth of the divine Scriptures is such that not only the illiterate and uninitiated have difficulty understanding them, but also the educated and the gifted”. One could find some truth in that statement by studying the evolution of the Protestant Church from the time of the Sixteenth Century Protestant Reformation to the present.

Martin Luther translated the Bible from Latin to German and Wycliffe and Tyndale produced an English version. Gutenberg’s invention of the printing press allowed the reproduction of affordable copies in large volume and the laity gained access to the Holy Writ. Wide distribution of Scripture aided the Reformation but as the doctrine of the priesthood of all believers set in and every literate Christian became a theologian, individual interpretations overcame the central Calvinistic orthodoxy and the Protestant Church morphed into hundreds of denominations with thousands of individual opinions, considerable heresy, no immutable doctrine, and no cohesion.

I received an email this week from a Christian who believes the Old Testament Jewifies Christianity (click on What’s New) and should have been removed from the Canon long ago. He writes, “The Protestant Bible, unfortunately, still contains an Old Testament with its Old Covenant and a New Testament established by the New Covenant. This is unfortunate because the two Bibles being together as one, gave an element of validity to Old Testament doctrines which are counter to and at cross purposes with the New Covenant scripture.”

Another lay theologian added the following remarks to someone else’s article and since the author responded with agreement to one of his assertions and did not defended orthodoxy, he sent the entire piece out by email giving the impression the author confirmed all of his views:

“God has placed each one of our Presidents in office according to His divine will and purpose. He forms the light and creates darkness, He makes peace and creates evil He the Lord does all these things. We are mere puppets!”

“Christ fulfilled the law and then died to the law and when He died we died with him, entombed with Him and in spirit were raised with Him. We are dead to the Law God gave to Moses, for those that came up out of the land of Egypt…”

My redeemed exposure to Christianity is about half way through its fifth decade. During that time Protestantism has become more outrageous and chaotic year by year. Many who answer to the Christian label are guided by “lucky dips”. A lucky dip involves opening the Scripture to a random page and reading one or more random verses in an effort to find Divine guidance. God could provide guidance by this means but often does not and taking verses from the Bible without connecting them to major themes produces devilish error.

In United States hundreds of thousands of Christians migrate from church to church on a regular basis because they have scriptural disagreement with their Pastor. And this is not the worst of it; thousands of pastors have become individual theologians and mount their pulpits every Sunday preaching their own interpretation of scripture which may, and often does, conflict with other pastors, even those within their own denomination.

Much of this anarchy is sincere and well intentioned. Instructors in schools of theology are often pagans whose credentials are pedagogic. Humanism flourishes when election and calling are put aside in favor of intellectual ability.

Arminianism removed Christian emphasis from the Will of God and centered it on human decision. This heresy is a driving force behind the increase in humanistic theology. Arminianism focuses on the creature and his ability to make independent decisions. The focus is misplaced; it should be on God’s Word and on His consistent practice of individually choosing His servants.

Very early in United States history the laity began to succumb to the wiles of liberalism. At the beginning of the Nineteenth Century, Harvard University was under Unitarian leadership and employed Unitarian professors. New England, the cradle of new world Reformed Christianity, with light headed abandon, gave up the foundational doctrines of the Westminster Confessions and took up the evil opinions of men.

In many ways the Reformation might be compared to a revolution with Luther, Calvin, Knox, Beza, Farel, and others as revolutionaries. They revolted against the evils of the Catholic Church and created a new Protestant Church based on sound Biblical principles but lacking a core structure. Revolutions lack predictable culminations. An assessment of the Protestant revolution reveals a large measure of failure.

Sola Scriptura is a core tenet of the Reformed Faith but paradoxically the theological anarchy of contemporary Christianity appears to be a result.

A small amount of consideration will reveal the massive debt contemporary humans owe to their ancestors. The compilation of knowledge passed on from generation to generation has resulted in our ability to live a long, comfortable and peaceful life. This debt to predecessors has not carried over into the Christian realm where the study and contemplation of scores of able Christian thinkers is regularly ignored and replaced with the shallow thoughts of individual Christian rebels.

It is difficult to underestimate the arrogance of today’s Christian thinkers who regularly fail to give credence to the documents produced by scores of ancestral Christian ministers and scholars who met over a six year period in the Seventeenth Century producing documents designed to provide Christendom with a cohesive theology. Often this prodigious work is dismissed as archaic and irrelevant and replaced with the vapid emotions that are common in contemporary churches. Read about the Westminster Assembly here.

We Protestants are correct in condemning the Catholic Church for encroaching on the sovereign dominion of Christ and for creating an overweening emphasis on Mary, the Mother of Jesus. But when we ignore the thinking bequeathed us by former generations we return Christian theology to the Stone Age leaving those who seek to follow Christ in danger of dying from ingesting scores of poisonous heresies.

The mantra Sola Scriptura, championed by Reformed Christians, results in some Bibles readers believing the Iraq War is a righteous endeavor and others believing it is an horrendous evil. Some believe the Second Coming of Christ is imminent and others believe it is far in the future. Some believe all guidance now comes from individual relationships with The Savior and others believe obedience to the Law is the sole criterion for righteousness. Some believe God cannot overcome the will on human beings and each Christian must “make a decision for Christ” while others maintain no one can come to Christ unless the Father draws them. Some believe the great commission is the evangelization of the world and others believe our primary duty is obedience to God’s Laws. Some believe God’s Laws are now and will always be the standard for Christian behavior while others believe the Laws are no longer valid. Some believe the Jews are still God’s chosen people while others believe the Jewish Covenant was broken at the Diaspora and Christians are now God’s sole choice. As heresies multiply and become more flagrant sincere Christians seek to convert others to their inadequate and outrageous beliefs.

The heresy of Unitarianism began a couple of Centuries ago and the would-be theologian who seeks to divide the Holy Writ seems in accord with their disdain for the Trinity and emphasis on the New Testament. The Bible is The Law. It is the entire existing narrative of the dealings of the One True God with His people. It is the duty of every Christian to understand God and His Law. Attempts to redefine God and alter or rewrite His Word are blasphemous; hubris of the worst sort.

The other independent expert has apparently not noticed that obedience is the major theme of the entire Bible. He has overlooked God’s pervasive injunctions for obedience, ignored the 119th Psalm, failed to comprehend Jesus’ support for the Law in Matthew Five and ignored His statement that anyone who breaches even the least of the Commandments is “least in the kingdom of heaven”.

We worship a sovereign God Whose Will cannot be thwarted. We are made in His image and are capable of making decisions. We were not created to be robots and it pleases our Creator when we decide to reverence Him and follow His Laws. Conversely when we rebel, create our own laws and determine our own ways He is angered and we can expect His wrath.

Heresy breaches scripture and ignores the sound theology bequeathed us by our forefathers.

Al Cronkrite is a regular columnist for Novakeo.com
Al Cronkrite is a writer living in Florida, reach him at: