To all new movements (like IFB, etc...)

I am not overlooking that. That there are various levels of pentecostalism ranging from orthodox to heretical is beside the point.

The point is that ALL pentecostalism is new. That is almost invariably a bad thing.

By new I do not mean that it is based on the positive evolution of doctrine as we see in the evolution of the doctrine of the Trinity during the age of the patristics.

By new I mean it is not based on anything in church history. It ignores church history.

Why is that bad? Is it not from the Bible alone that we should get our doctrine and not from church history or any other source?

Certainly.

But church history represents millions of Christians understanding of what the Bible teaches.

No one man is smart enough or spiritual enough to, without the aid of church history and the progression of Christian doctrine, to hammer out all of these things himself in a vacuum.

So intelligent and humble Christians put great stock in what the church has believed for thousands of years before they were born.

Arrogant and ignorant Christians disregard it.

If that sounds blunt and controversial- it was meant to be. I think such arrogance and ignorance ought to be confronted and condemned. I think it is this that is KILLING the church in our backwards religious culture.

We need a revival of love for the TRUTH as opposed to this wicked love for our own private interpretations of Scripture.
That revival will not come until Christians vociferously condemn the evils of our religious culture. The greatest of which is the ignorance and arrogance of many people sitting in church pews and standing in pulpits in this nation of ours.

 

1. Condemnation is the goal in this case. Conversion to my viewpoint is not as important. It is naive and unbiblical to coddle arrogance and ignorance and expect to make any worthwhile difference while doing so.

2. God does send revival as it pleases him alone- but even the most cursory of glances at the history of revivals clearly establishes that what I described above and what you are undermining accompanies such revivals.

 

This is snotty drivel. I am not surprise to see quantum thumbs-upping it.

Wrong. I know that probably sounds very spiritual in your head but it is bunk for this reason.

If you don't know how to interpret Scripture with humility and wisdom then you cannot properly question anything. And if you do not cherish the findings of greater men of the Scriptures than yourself accompanied by countless other men of such caliber who have over the course of nearly two thousand years worked together with each other standing on one another's shoulders and kindly inviting us to stand there as well- then you lack the wisdm and humility to interpret Scripture. You might as well be without the Scripture altogether.

 

I did not insult him personally. I attacked his ideas.

I am not attempting to avoid being offensive at all costs. I am simply attempting to assault erroneous ideas understanding beforehand that many will find this offensive.

You find this strategy in common use among almost all godly bible characters
including the Lord Jesus and almost all leaders of great revival and reformation movements in history- men like Luther, Edwards, Spurgeon, etc...

I do not equate myself with them by any means but I do tire of being called upon to defend means that men better than all of us on here used with great success.

I am not trying to win friends and THEN stand firmly for truth and oppose error. I am trying to stand firmly for truth and aggressively oppose error first and let God send what friends he may. And God has done that faithfully and in abundance.

I do not think your strategy of being more winsome is effective. I do not know of any men used mightily of God to bring about real change in a culture who did not aggressively oppose error and unflinchingly stand for truth.

Because that remark was not made in a vacuum. It had a context that rendered it as I said- bunk. I explained the context of it in my reply.

Well I appreciate your right to your perspective and give as much credence as I deem useful to consensus. But I do hope to never wear my humility as a bright badge for all to see so that I might get credit for being humble. Confidence and passion are often mistaken for arrogance just as seeking popularity and approval above the victory of truth are often mistaken for humility.

 

Yes, the popular strategy desperately needs to be reevaluated. The strategy of coddling arrogance and ignorance is doomed from the start. This strategy is the fad now and has been for a few decades, While we embrace it we LOSE ground in our culture.

So yes the strategy should be reevaluated but humility is necessary for that to take place. The humble ones are almost NEVER the ones with the sweetest words. Boldness, bluntness and humility are are true companions. Those who think they are being humble by being more winsome almost never are. But they convince themselves that they are by gaining consensus of other people who also want to think that these things make one humble.

Humility is a ready willingness to be the odd man out- to be the one called arrogant for standing firmly for what he thinks is right. Humility is almost never in the ranks of consensus. Humility is the lack of ambition for consensus concerning the popular fad of communication or ministry or whatever.

Arrogance thinks that it is humility. That's the arrogance of it. Arrogance loves to be bragged on about how humble it is.
Humility doesn't think of these things at all. Humility thinks only, "How can I communicate the truth the way it best deserves to be communicated in the current circumstance? How can I do that regardless of the criticism it brings, the strife against me it stirs, the vitriolic words it will heave upon my head- but I know that the sting of truth that makes me unpopular is that which makes the difference in the long run."

So yes, with all my heart I pray the current strategy will be reevaluated. I hope that some soul hungering more for truth than consensus will compare the methods he currently employs to the methods of men like Luther or Peter or Paul or Christ or Elijah or Edwards or Spurgeon and many others who are not restricted to just a fad of communication strategy like the one brainwashing our religious culture today. I hope then TRUE humility will arise in that soul and embrace the sting of truth that has ALWAYS made the difference for the Kingdom of God in every age when it has prospered.

 

But you assume that you understand all the great doctrines of Scripture in a vacuum. God did not give it to us that way.

Even the authors of the Bible knew they needed the hundreds of years of godly people before them!

Paul did not learn all he knew in his prayer closet speaking in tongues.

Paul stood on the shoulders of thousands of years of men of God before him. Those men bore him up to the understanding that he had of theology. It ws from there that he built his great Holy Spirit inspired theology.

Th doctrine of the Trinity did not come to full fruition in the first century. Athanasius looked to Paul and Tertullian and the other patristics before him, and whether you know it or not you have looked to Athanasius all your Christian life for aid in your understanding of the glorious yet complex doctrine of the Trinity. You didn't just pick up your Bible one day and jot down the word Trinity in a margin having never learned it before. You lean on church history for that.

This idea that you can understand everything in the bible in a vacuum is folly. God did not give us the Bible that way. The reason anyone would think we can fully understand it that way is that we live in the most ignorant and arrogant religious culture the Church has ever known.

God is about the Body. Though he is personal his primary work is ecclesiological. We work TOGETHER to understand the Bible. We are not so full of ourselves that we ignore our intense need of each other to even understand the Scripture and we are certainy not so blind that we are oblivious to the necessity of leaning on the pillars of thousands of saints before us who are also, though now in heaven, part of this same Church. This American lone ranger, me and the Holy Ghost and nobody else business is a new deadly fad.

Sola Scriptura CAME from men who cherished the help of the patristics and the scholastics, etc... who came before them.

If you have an ounce of real humility you will cherish it too. And you will hold in disdain any attitude like that which Pentecostals and KJVonlyists embrace which ignores church history and orthodoxy- tools God Almighty has employed to build his church stronger and stronger throughout the ages.

 

We discussed the fact that there are probably many good IFB churches in spite of the experience that many of us have with many very bad IFB churches on a previous page.

This thread is about the arrogance and ignorance of new movements, like, and I'll clarify here a bit further, many camps of IFB churches which ignore the unspeakable importance of historicity of doctrine. These types go about preaching in their pulpits things that no previous generations of orthodox Christians ever preached- and they don't care. These types are a dark blight on our culture and are, in my opinion, greatly responsible for the apostasy of our age. Youtube Tony Hutson for a good example.

If your church cherishes the help it gets in interpreting Scripture by leaning on thousands of Christians spanning generations before them- and if your church's doctrine reflects that kind of spiritual and godly attitude- then I commend you.

What I condemn with every fiber of my being is the haphazard newness found in so many new movements which spawns such damnable heresies as mormonism, Jehovah's Witness, and somewhat less atrocious but still dangerous doctrines such as Pentecostalism and KJVonlyism and teetotalism and dispensationalism and extra biblical standards and pastoral dictatorship, etc, etc, etc...

I plead for reasonable people to examine the doctrines they hold dear against something deeper and more meaningful than their own individual private interpretations of Scripture- against that which the Church of the Lord Jesus Christ has painstakingly hammered out before us, taught and stood for and died for for nearly two thousand years.

For example, you indicate that you do not know what reformed theologians by and large have historically believed about predestination in your comments. So you probably have no idea why you are not reformed yourself. You don't like it because you don't know it. And it might be that you don't know it because you don't care enough to study what the church believed before IFB. This is dangerous. Your views ought to be submitted to much fiercer scrutiny than just the few in your church or camp of IFB's can provide. It ought to see if it stands up historically. If it does not then you have no better reasons for believing your doctrines the the Mormons have for believing theirs. EVERYBODY SAYS THEY BELIEVE THE BIBLE. That is a meaningless claim. Deeper than that must be- but how did I come to interpret the Bible to say what I think it says? That is the all important question.