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The Historical Story of External Factors Perverting the Meaning of Church (part three)
Evidence in the New Testament
As you read through the New Testament, you see early attacks inside and outside of the church that correspond to what happened at that juncture of history in the world. Revelation 2 and 3 provide a good example of how churches in the first century degrade through changes in doctrine and practice in areas appropriate to the occurrences of the time, diverting from Jesus Christ and His commands. The Lord Jesus Christ gave many various means to keep His churches: faithful pastors edifying, preaching, admonishing, warning, and protecting, church discipline, the Lord’s Table, and personal and ecclesiastical separation.
All of the tools for preserving churches intact revolve around the sufficient, canonical words of scripture. The Word of God is like a purifying fire, like a hammer that breaks a rock in pieces, and like water that washes away filth. The fire burns away dross, the hammer shapes something ugly into the beautiful, and the water cleanses away sin and false doctrine. All of this keeps a church or churches on track to extend to another generation.
False Tradition and Human Philosophy
Scripture itself never loses its power, but it becomes something different when someone mixes it with false traditions and human philosophy. In the Old Testament, pagan religion from surrounding foreign nations perverted Israel’s doctrine, practice, and worship. In the New Testament, Gnosticism, a collection of religious ideas and systems that emerged in the late first century AD, had a significant impact on the church by infiltrating it.
One can see in the New Testament reactions to proto-Gnostic false teaching that arose during the history of the first century. It reshaped doctrine, especially regarding the nature of God, creation, and salvation. Gnostic beliefs posited a dualistic worldview where a supreme, hidden God existed apart from a malevolent creator deity (the Demiurge), which some Gnostics identified with the God of the Hebrew Bible. They believed that material existence was flawed or evil, leading them to focus on personal spiritual knowledge (gnosis) as the path to salvation rather than faith in Christ’s sacrificial death and resurrection.
First century Gnosticism emerged from various sources, such as Jewish mysticism and Hellenistic philosophy. Scripture teaches its own sufficiency in part to combat adding and taking away from its teaching. The additions and subtractions emerge from the woof and the warp of that historical period.
Platonism
Debates over doctrine early in church history hinged on philosophical issues. These debates did not and would not occur from solely influences of scripture. Teachers familiar with the dialogues of Plato relied on the writings of the Greek philosopher in their interpretations of the biblical text. To recognize how they arrived at their teachings, one must understand how neo-Platonic Greek philosophy mixed into their doctrinal views. Plato represented a distinct view of the world seen in the type of teaching espoused by those hearkening to his ideas.
Church leaders believed Christians could appropriate the world’s philosophy and culture, where this seemed right to them. Augustine of Hippo provides an example, when he writes:
If those who are called philosophers, particularly the Platonists, have said anything which is true and consistent with our faith, we must not reject it, but claim it for our own use.
Plato’s writing contributed to the shaping of early doctrine of professing Christianity, including in systems of interpretation of scripture. The Alexandrian Jewish scholar Philo was a key figure in developing allegorical interpretations of the Hebrew Bible, aiming to reconcile biblical texts with Platonic philosophy.
Schools of Theology
Schools of theology arose, many times organizations separate from church authority. Origen was a student at the catechetical school in Alexandria, which had a strong tradition of allegorical interpretation, and likely studied under Clement of Alexandria who was known for relating Christian teachings to Greek philosophy. Origen didn’t invent allegory but he significantly advanced and popularized it, drawing on the influence of Greek philosophy. He often distinguished between a literal and a spiritual or allegorical meaning of scripture.
Doctrines did begin to change and false ones spread to various churches even in the first century, as seen what occurred in the seven churches of Asia (Rev 2 & 3). John expresses concerns over the doctrine of Christ that reflect the introduction of proto-Gnostic heresies (1 & 2 John). The Apostle Paul confronts Greek philosophy in 1 Corinthians 6, that presented a lax view of sexual immorality. In 1 Corinthians 15 he addresses something undoing the doctrine of the bodily resurrection of Jesus Christ.
The Roman Empire
Most professing Christians and churches could not resist the power of the Roman Empire’s embrace of Christian religion and modification to the religious power of the state. The emperor Constantine possessed his own experience of Christianity and then used his position to affect faith and practice. He promoted his imagination of Christianity with construction of cathedrals, Bible translation, and the calling of official councils for discussion of theological issues.
Like a Rome emperor wanted unity in his empire for its resultant strength, Constantine and then others after him pushed for cohesive doctrine and practice across the empire. He organized and structured Christianity around his own aspirations for Christianity. This conformed Christianity beyond the New Testament to a state religion. Doctrine and practice became malleable to the state. The emperor and the state hierarchy used its authority to use its power to mold Christianity according to the same means by which it ordered the political and secular.
Influence of the State
State endorsement brought safety and great influence. It was difficult for small churches to resist the current of state power, getting swept into the flow of its governance and acceptance. Churches could sell their freedom and autonomy for security and prominence. Anyone could conceive of the opportunities that could come with the immensity of the state and the size of its resources.
The state would endorse those with its position and finally punish those resisting it. It published and propagated what it approved. At many different points it would destroy anything in opposition. What remained available was what the state affirmed. During many various periods, the state kept what it ratified and eliminated what it didn’t. This was a means to maintain cohesion.
More to Come
God and the Bible Are Dispensational (Part Three)
The Bible did not come in one neat tidy package. God delivered it progressively through men over a period of 1500 years during history in real time, even using forty different men as human authors. As God revealed scripture, it did not come with a separate interpretive handbook and glossary for defining terms. He expected and presumes people will get it through plain reading.
As God imparted scripture through inspiration, people understood who were hearing in that day. The Old Testament audience did not need the New Testament to ascertain the writings. When He delivered more, past writings become better understood in a fuller way, bringing even greater knowledge of God’s message.
God’s Word has one meaning, yet many applications. People knew the meaning as God revealed scripture. He required the original audience to believe and practice what He wrote.
Satanic Attack on Dispensationalism
From the very beginning, Satan directly and then through the world system attacks scripture in several ways. He does this in one key manner by corrupting the meaning of God’s Word. Satan twists and also confuses the meaning. He does not want people to know with certainty what God says. Change of meaning abolishes or invalidates the authority of scripture.
Satan wants people to think and act in a different way than what God said. He does this in an incremental fashion, where people drift or move further away from scripture. The doctrine and practice of the Bible changed over the centuries through a modification of its meaning. By changing its meaning, it becomes at first a slightly different book and finally a very different one. This fulfills what Satan wants, but also satisfies the innate rebellion of man.
Changes in the meaning of the Bible relate to contemporary events and movements in history. Rather than adapting to what God said, people conform what God said to their desires or will. In a plain reading of the New Testament, churches were autonomous assemblies under the authority of the Lord Jesus Christ through His Words. Satan and his system attacked them in vigorous and violent fashion.
Individual churches were vulnerable to fear of the fierce opposition of the Roman Empire. This disposed them toward reorganization favoring extra ecclesiastical hierarchy. Many moved toward greater cooperation and confederation. Prominent churches took on more dominance and authority for their leaders.
Philosophies of Men
In Colossians 2:8 Paul warns against philosophies. The New Testament addresses various heresies arising from human philosophy. Preserved early Christian writings trace the invasion of extra-scriptural thinking into the church. Doctrine and practice changed through intertwining neoplatonic philosophy with scripture. The church became something bigger than local.
The church at Rome at the center of the Roman Empire took on enormous prominence. Emperor Constantine I gave Christianity legal status in the Empire with the Edict of Milan in 313AD. When Constantine became the sole emperor of the Roman Empire in 324, Christianity became its official religion. Christianity became a state church for the Roman Empire when Emperor Theodosius I issued the Edict of Thessalonica in 380AD. This is the Roman Catholic Church. The Roman Empire was Catholic or Universal, so its state church became Catholic too.
Allegorization and Spiritualization
For a true church, local only, to become universal, allegorization or spiritualization of scripture must occur. This developed over three centuries with a unique influence, it seems, from a theologian, Origen of Alexandria. This allowed for modification of meaning to allow change in doctrine and practice. About a hundred years after Origen, Augustine further systematized allegorization of scripture, now known as covenantal theology. The Bible could become a vessel in which to pour ones own doctrine and practice by allegorizing it.
Allegorization or spiritualization gives a lot of leeway with interpretation, making it highly subjective. Someone can read what he wants into the text of scripture. This affects the authority of the Bible.
The Protestant Reformation of the sixteenth century was led by men raised as staunch Roman Catholics. They reformed Roman Catholic doctrine, however, still preserving much allegorization and spiritualization. More than Augustine, they composed a hybrid of allegorical and literal interpretation, now still referred as covenant theology. The immediate spiritual offspring of the Protestant Reformers further systematized an approach to the interpretation of scripture. Their system of interpretation justified a state church, something not seen in the Bible. They could find it by spiritualizing the church.
Amillennialism
In the main, the church could become an actual kingdom through spiritualization, a view of the future called amillennialism. The theologians of Roman Catholicism removed the distinctions by unifying Israel and the church. The church replaced Israel. They adapted the Old Testament prophecies of Israel and the kingdom for fulfillment in the church. Instead of a future fulfillment of the New Testament prophecy of Revelation, they spiritualized it as fulfilled in the destruction of Jerusalem in 70AD.
Liberal theology easily proceeded from amillennialism. Liberals take the same approach even further, making almost everything in the Bible to mean what they want. They see now and in the future a spiritualized kingdom, a progressive social order. Jesus, the cross, the resurrection, and the gospel all take on their own meaning, most often related to advocacy of social issues. Modernism dovetailed easily and nicely from covenant theology.
Growing In and Out of Favor
Even though God and the Bible are dispensational, dispensationalism grew out of favor in mainstream teaching. In recent times, institutionalized theology portrays dispensationalism as of recent origin, arising with Darby in the 19th Century. Premillennialism, a literal interpretation of Christ’s kingdom, traces to the first century with the apostles. However, believers responded to covenant theology with a systematization of a literal interpretation of scripture in the 19th century. The Protestant system of covenant theology itself is of historically recent composition.
I contend that the rising popularity of covenant theology above dispensationalism traces to its allure to human pride. Men ascertain from God’s writings their secret meaning. This allows for a wide variety of contradictory belief and practice. Men like it when they’re free to do what they want, justified by what “God said.”
More to Come
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