Last Saturday morning, I participated in the annual Chicago
Hunger Walk, walking along the lakefront at Melrose Harbor to raise money for
city social agencies who receive regular food donations.
After the event, the group I’ve recently been volunteering with
(Housing Opportunities for the Elderly) decided to avoid the super-crowded
lakeside bike path and return to their Edgewater headquarters via neighborhood
streets.
Wouldn’t you know, as the traffic lights dictated our exact
walking route, we ended up smack-dab in front of J.C. O’Hair’s old behemoth
North Shore Church at Wilson and Sheridan, now inhabited by a largely black
church, Uptown Baptist, and an Asian group that meets under the name “Good News
Evangelical.”
The huge old sign, “Christ Died for Our Sins,” still stands
to draw far-away eyes from its precious billboard-level real estate on the
roof.
*****
What always chokes me up no matter how many times I go by
that building—and I just spent last year living in a studio apartment only a
mile-and-a-half westward on Wilson—is knowing how instrumental the local
ministry from that address was to the entire country and even the world.
Then I think about the astounding fact that my church in
Rolling Meadows, Shorewood Bible Church, is the sole inheritor of the old North
Shore. My preacher, Richard Jordan, was the last one to preach from its pulpit
in the late ’70s before the property’s sale.
As Jordan testifies of O’Hair, “No other single individual
had more to do with spreading across America the truth of the distinctive
message and ministry of Paul—what we now call ‘Mid-Acts Dispensationalism.’
Understand we have that as a heritage! We didn’t just come sucked out the end
of somebody’s thumb. There have been people from Paul’s day until now preaching
this. Mr. O’Hair was addicted to the ministry and he had saints working with
him who were addicted to the ministry.”
*****
It was in 1932 that O’Hair’s eight-year-old daily
neighborhood radio program became nationally broadcast, and when he died in
1958, O’Hair shared the record for one of the two longest continuous radio
programs on the air. The other one was Amos and Andy!
To give a brief history of John Calvin O’Hair, he was born
Dec. 31, 1876 in Little Rock, Ark. Trained as an accountant, he got the itch as
a young man to see the world and wound up becoming U.S. ambassador to Mexico
before returning to the states to establish himself as a prominent businessman
in the lumber and construction business.
In 1917, O’Hair, now married to Kansas native Ethel (with
whom he had six children), entered into full-time evangelism, preaching and
teaching across the country before being invited to pastor North Shore in 1923.
Nine months later, the church built a radio transmitter in
the bell tower and started the station WDBY, which stood for “We Delight in
Bothering You.”
“Back then you didn’t have a dial to dial up; you had little
crystal sets and whatever station was broadcasting—the nearest one is what you
listened to,” explains Jordan. “It just overflowed everything else.”
*****
A classic anecdote is about a woman who ran a brothel
upstairs from a bar her husband owned directly across Wilson Avenue from the
church building.
As Jordan tells the story, “Every day, at four o’clock in
the afternoon, O’Hair came on with his radio broadcast and, well, it kind of
messed up the music in the bar and in the brothel. It makes it rough when ‘Nothing but the Blood’ is being sung
and the gospel’s being preached.
“One day she got mad enough and determined, ‘I’m going to
put that preacher in his place.’ She stormed across the street, went inside and
there was Pastor O’Hair, standing behind the glass screen with the microphone
and he’s preaching.
“He sees her walk in and sit down, so he turns to her and
preaches the gospel directly to her and she sat on that desk and got saved that
day. Well, obviously it changed the business across the street. Her husband
never got saved, but she did and wound up in the mission fields in South
America for almost 50 years!”
*****
It was O’Hair’s commitment to the local church, more than
anything else, that made his ministry a national success.
“For some reason that fact seems missed, but back then’s
when the movement . . . O’Hair was in
Chicago with a church that impacted the whole region,” says Jordan. “Harry
Bultema was up in Michigan with a church
that impacted that whole area. Later on, Henry Culp was out there in
Pennsylvania.
“If you were in central Pennsylvania, you knew something
about who Culp was. If you went into the Deep South and knew something about
‘right division,’ you knew Henry Grube and Roy Lange. If you went out onto the
West Coast, you knew who William Root was. In the Northwest, you knew Lloyd
Peterson.
“There were hundreds and hundreds of men just like O’Hair.
He sort of stood out as the one everyone saw. What they understood was the
whole movement was moving and working through local churches and regions, impacting
the whole areas.”
*****
North Shore organized a men’s grace fellowship that was
attended by up to 400 men each month.
“Three or four times a year they would buy a full-page in
the Chicago Tribune for $28,000—a lot of money back then—and O’Hair would write
a gospel message,” says Jordan. “We’ve got copies of them in our Heritage Room
at the church.
“In the late ’60s, all that kind of went away and I used to
ask questions about why and guys would lament how it just fell apart. You know
what happened to the Grace Movement? It fell out of the hands of the leaders of
local churches and into the hands of para-church institutions, and when came
time for them to do some of the things the passage in I Corinthians 16 says to
do, they didn’t have the context of the local church to do it out of.
“I’ve said many times you can’t practice separation God’s
way if you haven’t learned to do it in the context of the local church. And
when it’s done brutally, and not with the charity, it’s generally done outside
of the context of a grace church.
“When I moved to Chicago in 1979, I learned something about
O’Hair by talking to the handful of older folks who were still left. I’d had a
lot of people tell me about why O’Hair was a great man and why his ministry was
a success, but I discovered something talking to his people.
“And there were two things that most people don’t seem to
notice. He was a great dispensationalist. On his grave in the Wheaton Cemetery
the family marker has II Timothy 2:15 right under his name. He was Mr. Right
Division.
“He was a strong doctrinal proponent. When the
congregational church went into modernism, the little record book we still have
has a record of O’Hair standing up against it and leading the church out.
That’s when it became not the North Shore Congregation but North Shore Church,
standing for truth against error.”
Still
looking for the next place to plant myself in Chicago, I’ve been staying
temporarily in Park Ridge with a church friend and his two children—ages 8 and
11.
Walking
through their basement the other day, my eyes lit up at the sight of a
bookshelf full of old Bible studies on VCR tapes, including some from
Shorewood’s summer family conferences when they were held at Trinity
Evangelical Divinity School in Deerfield, Ill.
Popping in
one of the tapes last night (dated July, 2001) Jordan made mention of Trinity,
calling it “one of the premier institutions in the world for evangelical
theology.”
He then
said, “You can take systematic theology courses here, and read all the
systematic theology textbooks, and yet there’s one thing always missing. They
talk about theology. They talk about anthropology, the study of man. They talk
about angelology, the study of angels and the spirit world. They talk about
soteriology, the study of salvation, and ecclesiology, the study of church.
They talk about escatology, the study of last times.
“But there’s one thing that’s never there. You know what it
is? It’s Israelology. I’ve never been able to figure out why somewhere,
somebody didn’t say, ‘You know, you can’t understand the Bible if you don’t
understand the nation Israel, so why don’t we add to our theology some
Israelology.’
“You can
come with me into my study and I’ve got a dozen different authors, different
schools of theology with the systematic theology books. Look through all of
them—
from Lewis
Sperry Chafer, who’s the most voluminous, to Charles Baker, who would be in our
camp, all the way over to Dabney and Strong, or to the modern guys—and they
won’t have ANY—or very little—about Israel.
“Paul
says, ‘I don’t want you to be ignorant about Israel and the mystery (program
for the Body of Christ).’ You see, Satan’s policy . . . it’s to the Adversary’s
advantage to get you to confuse the two so that you’re trying to be somebody you’re
not.
“And Paul
said, ‘Boy, you better not do that; there’s something right up early on in your
Christian life you need to get ready for.’
“What about Israel? What happened? Pastor J.C. O’Hair from
here in Chicago used to say this all the time—‘You can’t understand the Bible
unless you understand Israel.’ ”
*****
It was
with the 5th Century controversy started by Pope Cyril of
Alexandria, targeted at Nestorius of Antioch, that literalists forever lost the
battle of, ‘Are we going to take the Bible literally or allegorically?’ and the
people who hold the institutions of the Church are allegoricalists.
As Jordan
outlines this monumental turning point in church history, “Cyril got into a
conflict with Nestorius, who was archbishop of Constantinople, about whether
Mary was the ‘mother of God.’
“It’s a
long detailed issue and they got arguing about what some words mean and Cyril
wanted to take it allegorically. Nestorius says, ‘We take it literally,’ and
they wound up with a great controversy. Cyril said Mary’s the mother of God.
Nestorius spoke of Mary as the mother of Christ but thought it improper to
speak of her as the mother of God.
“The fact that Nestorius was trained in Antioch, and
inherited the Antioch zeal for exact biblical exegesis, and insisted upon the
recognition of the full manhood of Christ, is of first importance in understanding
his position.
“In
Antioch, they emphasized the humanity of Christ. Cyril says, ‘Because you’re
emphasizing the humanity of Christ, you’re denying His deity.’ Strange, isn’t
it? Nestorius wasn’t; he was just emphasizing His humanity. And Cyril says,
‘See, you’re denying the deity of Christ because you don’t think Mary is the
mother of God. You only think she’s the mother of the humanity, so you believe
Jesus is only a man.’ ”
Now,
Nestorianism itself, as a theology, developed the idea that Jesus was two
people in one person, but Nestorius didn’t believe the heresy.
“Nestorius
was exactly right and Cyril was wrong, but you know who won? Cyril. And that
controversy . . . by the way, the
Nestorians gave out the gospel as missionaries in China in 7th
Century. They took it all over Africa, Persia, and India and all the way to the
Pacific Ocean in China. They were heretics, named that way, but they had a
zeal. You know what they were? They were outside the camp.”
*****
Jordan
says the hardest thing you’ll ever do is to be a heresy hunter.
“Being a
heresy hunter is a dangerous thing because it breeds into you an innate sense
of your own rightness and an innate ability to always tell everybody else
what’s wrong and consequently what’s right,” he explains. “It’s, ‘There’s this
heresy that must be stomped out—let’s all get together!’ and it’s going to be
what you say is right and what you say is wrong. And you will take a humble
demeanor to it, but that will be what the underlying seed is and it’s very, very
dangerous.
“It’s much
easier to do that than to take the time to build truth. It’s easier to tear down than it is to build, and so it’s very
dangerous to be in the mode of just being that error-hunter in defense of
truth.
“And so,
as the church was persecuted with its vigor, it begins to slide into
institutionalism. But they did it rationalizing, and rather than it being the
life of Christ, now it’s the institutional things.
“You
develop an organization and without that organization—‘We’re going to put you
out.’ All of a sudden you get the hierarchy. That’s where the false church came
from.
“But then
you’ve got the true church out there, underground from the visible church,
putzing along.”
History books will tell you it wasn’t until the 4th
Century—with the Council of Ephesus—that the 27 books in the New Testament were
determined to be Scripture.
The reality is that before the Apostle Paul died the whole
New Testament had been written, collated together and authenticated.
Jordan confirms, “The saints before 70 AD had every book in
their Bible you’ve got in your Bible. They had it in their language, of course,
but they had the same book; the same text you’ve got. Just what do you think
those New Testament prophets in those new churches were doing?!”
*****
God’s mechanism for putting the books together was through
certain men He supernaturally empowered via the Spirit of God, giving them the
capacity to identify one book as Scripture and another as not, then collating
them together.
“One of the things
the prophet did in the Bible from the very beginning (the first Bible prophet
was Abraham) was speak for God,” explains Jordan. “They could say, ‘Thus sayeth
the Lord.’
As Paul puts it in I Corinthians 14:37, “If any man think
himself to be a prophet, or spiritual, let him acknowledge that the things that
I write unto you are the commandments of the Lord.”
Jordan says, “The prophets were able to gather the books together supernaturally and when the Bible was completed there was no longer a need for that ministry--the spiritual gifts passed off the scene.
“Everybody could now have their own personal copy of the
Word of God and there was no need for just one or two people in an assembly to
do (the communicating). Now every Believer had all the enablement on his own
because he had the written Word of God.”
In Paul’s epistles, he sets up the model for what the true
church was to be about; a classroom for the authoritative communication of
sound doctrine.
“It’s not the preaching skills; it’s the doctrine done God’s
way—Paul’s way,” says Jordan. “The model
won’t work if the doctrine ain’t what motivates it, and without ‘right
division’ we can’t get the doctrine.
“There’s a great word you ought to learn. It’s the Latin
word habitus. It means ‘the
orientation of the soul for the purpose of acquiring wisdom.’ You see the word habit in there? There are things that
you learn and there are ways to learn wisdom; the Pauline edification.
“Habitus is to provide a structure for people to acquire to orient
their soul so they have wisdom that they can go out and walk when the rule book
runs out. That’s what the local church was; it was a classroom.
Not just didactically, but in the life—trying to produce the habits of
godliness in life. And that’s what Paul established and that’s what was there
when Paul set up his model.”
*****
When Paul informs in his last written epistle (II Timothy)
that “all they which are in Asia be turned away from me,” he’s saying, “They’ve
turned away from me; they’re not following what I taught.”
Jordan explains, “Before the Apostle Paul is even off the
scene, what happens to his model? Well, it gets corrupted. It doesn’t cease to
exist because there are people who still follow it. But it gets to be
corrupted.”
*****
It was during the Enlightenment period that the model took
hold, “We’re going to find the truth and it’s going to be one unit. We’re going
to develop one perfect body of knowledge that everybody can agree to and
science is what’s going to help us do that because we believe all knowledge is
a unit.
“That’s why theology
is the queen of the sciences in the Enlightenment,” says Jordan. “They believed
science would allow them to produce this general encyclopedia with all this
knowledge united together, which would then allow them to produce a perfect
man, a perfect society, and this is where the universities began.
“A university is a collection of colleges. Now when you got
that idea, what’s going to happen? It’s gonna fail. Can you come to one perfect
man, one perfect knowledge? No. The only place you can find that is where?
“This fails so what follows is Post-Modernism which says
there is no perfect knowledge. It says, ‘We tried to find it and couldn’t, and
the failure to obtain to a unity of knowledge means there isn’t any perfect
knowledge. There can’t be one perfect knowledge. There can’t be what’s called
one meta-narrative. There can’t be one narrative that explains everything.’
“Now, doesn’t Genesis 3 explain things? ‘Well, it can’t be
that simple . . .’ So you have what’s called multi-culturalism, which is what
naturally comes out of all that. It says, ‘Everybody’s story is as equally good
as the other guy’s story because there is not one true over-arching truth.’
“Everything is
fragmented so you have this endless array of micro-theologies and micro-truth
and everything is just total division and there is no truth.”
*****
What can never be mentioned enough is the fact that every
philosophy that’s ever been known to man has been found in book of
Ecclesiastes.
Jordan says, “Socrates, Aristotle, Plato, all the big brains
that everybody falls all over . . . When I was in college (Southern Baptist
Mobile College) the head of the literature department thought the Greeks were
the greatest things ever born.
“All of western civilization is built on the wisdom of the
Greek philosophers and they stole everything they know out of Ecclesiastes and
never gave God credit for any of it. They’re a bunch of shameless plagiarists.
When I say that, people just yawn like it doesn’t make any difference to
anybody and then they’re the ones who go around carping about the Bible.”
*****
Ecclesiastes, along with Proverbs, Psalms and Song of
Solomon, came out of the early time period in Israel associated with David and
Solomon and, like the others, is designed to keep the Believer’s heart through
Israel’s history.
“There’s something going on especially important during this
period of time—a little over 100 years,” says Jordan. “I remember the first
time I ever thought of that years ago, it really impressed me. It’s sort of
like God just stops everything He’s doing and says, ‘Okay Israel, I just want
to take a minute here.’
“The day of the Lord is as a thousand years so 100 years
would be more than a minute—it’d be, ‘Give me a few hours here of your time so
I can try to teach you something very special about where your heart needs to
be. Not just where your head is; where your heart needs to be.’ And then He
records this stuff in Psalms, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, Song of Solomon.
“We studied before how that Psalms is really an exposition
of the covenant God makes with David. That’s why there are five books in the
book of Psalms. Proverbs is David explaining to his son what wisdom will do for
him and then he gives him a series of proverbs.
“The first nine chapters of the book of Proverbs is just an
explanation of how wisdom will work; what it will do for you. And then (David)
begins to give (Solomon) some proverbs and by the end of the book Solomon
develops some of his own.
“Wisdom had taken root in Solomon and here are instructions
for the ‘believing remnant’ in Israel about how to be wise and face the satanic
policy of evil and not be deceived by it. Ecclesiastes is the wisdom of the
world.
“In Proverbs, Ecclesiastes and Song of Solomon you see the
downward trend of Solomon’s life and ministry. You see that when apostasy sets
in, it winds up participating in the satanic policy of rebellion just like Song
of Solomon has Solomon doing.”
During the Middle Ages, a mixture of biblical teaching and
Aristoliean philosophy developed known as scholasticism.
There was an attempt to reconcile divine revelation with Aristotle’s human
speculations.
“They developed a methodology in the academy and that’s
where systematic theology came from,” says Jordan. “Aquinas, these guys, based
on Aristotle’s Golden Mean—the greatest virtue—and they develop a systematic
way of explaining God.”
Aristotle was a student of Plato, who was taught by
Socrates. In my Dummies book on world
history, it says, “Socrates was a critic. He lived to question, to pick apart
assumptions . . . Plato depicted Socrates as intent on convincing his fellow
Athenians to reexamine their ideas about right and wrong. Plato’s writings
describe Socrates using a technique that’s been called the Socratic method ever since: Socrates
asks the person he is talking to for a definition of a broad concept (such as
piety or justice) and then tries to get the person to contradict himself with
his answer.”
*****
Time is the way you measure the distance between phenomenon
and events. If there’s no movement, there’s no time, which is why Plato’s idea
that eternity is timeless doesn’t work.
“Eternity isn’t that there is no time; eternity is that time
never ends—it just keeps going on and on and on because there’s event, event,
event, event,” says Jordan. “Some time we get the idea that, ‘Well, in eternity
there’s no time.’ Time is the way you experience what’s going on and when God
created time, time is the phenomenal event in which all the other creation is
experienced.”
*****
Fundamental to the intended literal interpretation of
Scripture is making the distinction between the earthly program God gave Israel
and the heavenly program given Christians, the Church the Body of Christ.
Jordan explains, “If I’m looking for the life of Israel, I’m
going to look for physical institutions—a literal, visible, physical nation
with a literal, visible, physical priesthood with literal, visible, physical
ordinances, and identifying marks and signs, and land and a government.
“When I’m looking for the Body of Christ, am I looking for
land, or buildings, or organizations? I’m looking for some spiritual life.
“That right there, in
my own personal opinion about all of this, is probably the single most
important issue that nobody in the history books pays any attention to. Almost
nobody.”
*****
Covenant Reform theologian and Calvinist preacher R.C.
Sproul, who is a huge, huge name on national Christian radio, hanging out with
other Christian radio celebs such as John McArthur and James D. Kennedy, gives
this doctrinal statement on one of his websites:
“We believe the
(Christian) church is essentially Israel. We believe the answer to the
question, ‘What is a Jew?’ is, ‘Here we are.’ We deny that the church is God’s
Plan B. We deny that we are living in God’s redemptive parenthesis. We are the
Israel of God, princes with God and the ecclesia; the set apart ones.”
Now, as a Gentile, Sproul is obviously aware he’s not a
descendant of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. The term Jew in the Bible is ALWAYS a descendant of Abraham, Isaac and
Jacob—ethnic Israel. Gentiles are never referred to as Jews in the Bible.
Jordan explains, “When Sproul reads Jew, he says, ‘Oh, we
won’t take that literally. We’re gonna spiritualize it. We’re gonna study it
allegorically. That’s really an allegory.’
“And that difference in approach to the Bible . . . R.C.
Sproul is a saved Gentile, a member of the Church the Body of Christ, but he
doesn’t know the fullness of what that means to him because he’s caught in a
system that won’t let him study the Bible literally.
“A lot of folks in the conservative fundamentalist camp do
the same thing. They get on the TV and say, ‘Jesus said you’re going to receive
power after the Holy Ghost has come upon you and be witnesses unto me in Judea,
Samaria, Jerusalem. That’s your hometown.’ They all say that.
“The problem is if you read two verses beyond that verse in
the Book of Acts, the angel looks at those guys and says to them, ‘Ye men of
Galilee, why stand ye here gazing?’
“You see, it’s easy
to fall into the trap if your system needs you to do it, and the greatest
motivator to not take the Bible literally and to allegorize it is that it helps
your system out, and that’s something you got to be real careful about.
“The first and probably the most fundamental element of
dispensationalism is studying the Bible literally. Because when you take the
Bible literally, you won’t do what Sproul did. You understand what he said? He
said, ‘We’re not dispensationalists; we believe we’re Israel!” You can’t take
the Bible literally and believe that.
“The true church today is the life of Christ in us. When you
look for your kin folk across the ages of church history, that’s what you’re
gonna wind up looking for more than anything.”
Look at the Dummies
book on world history and you get clued in quick as to how it happened that the
vast majority of Christianity takes an allegorical approach to the Bible.
Under the heading Replacing
Homer with the Bible is the summary, “Another reason why furious
interpretations and counter-interpretations marked Christianity from the
beginning: Look at the places where Christianity sprang up. Christianity
filtered through a world marked by Hellenistic (Greek-like) traditions, by the
Greek teachings that followed Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, and Alexander the
Great’s empire.
“Early centers of the Church included Alexandria, Egypt,
which was a capital of Greek scholarship, and Rome, where so many Hellenistic
philosophies rubbed up against one another for a long time. . . As Greek
thought shifted to Christian thought, the Bible took the place of Homer’s poems
and the Greek-Roman pantheon as a general context for philosophical
questioning.”
*****
As my preacher, Richard Jordan, reminded in a Sunday sermon
just the other week, “Before the ink was dry on Paul’s epistles, efforts were
under way to syncretize the truth he taught with Greek philosophy. The most
influential school emphasizing this approach was Alexandria, Egypt. It’s the
place where almost all of the corruptions of the Word of God available today
originate from.”
World History for
Dummies reports that around 255 BC,
“Eratosthenes becomes librarian at Alexandria, Egypt, in charge of the largest
storehouse of knowledge in the world.”
Under the subhead Putting
philosophy to practical use, the book states, “If you get the impression
that Greeks after Alexander the Great didn’t do anything but philosophize;
remember that much of what came under the broad heading of philosophy (Greek
for love of wisdom) had practical
applications. Geometry, for example, came in handy for surveying and building.
“Incredible buildings
went up during the Hellenistic Age. Among them was a fantastic marble
lighthouse in the harbor of Alexandria, Egypt. Alexandria became a center for
Greek-style learning. The library there held 700,000 volumes.
“The librarian in charge of that great storehouse of
information was a Greek named Eratosthenes, who was also a geographer. He
worked out a formula for measuring the circumference of the Earth, measuring
shadows in Syene, Egypt, and in Alexandria at the same time—at noon on the
summer solstice.
“Then he used the difference between the shadows, multiplied
by the distance between the two cities, to calculate the planet’s size. Another
Greek at Alexandria reportedly built some kind of steam engine, although nobody
knew what to use it for. That thread of knowledge would be picked up in England
quite a few centuries later.”
*****
When it comes to the Bible, Alexandria is where the
allegorical method of interpreting Scripture has its roots.
As Jordan explains in a newly published classroom companion
textbook for his international Grace School of the Bible, entitled The Fundamentals of Dispensationalism: The
Key to a Strategic Grasp of the Bible, “The spiritualizing of Scriptures by
the allegorical method is the mother of all abominations in the earth.
“The allegorical method of interpretation comes from a
Jewish fellow by the name of Filo. Filo tried to take Greek philosophy and
unite it with the Old Testament Jewish Scriptures. It was picked up in church
history by a man named Origen . . .
“What is Egypt a type of in the Bible? The world. The
allegorical method of interpretation of Scripture is associated with
Alexandria, Egypt. When we study
manuscript evidence, you will see this show up with Origen as the first Bible
corrector, the first polluter of the Word of God.
“He not only develops a false method of interpretation and
introduces it into Christendom, he also develops the corruptions to the Word of
God that are available today in the New International Version, etc. that leave
verses out and add verses and change words around to change meanings. Origen is
the source of that . . .
“According to the
historians, the town of Antioch (in Syria) had the opposing school of
interpretation from Alexandria (that used the Grammatical/Historical method).
Antioch has the opposing Bible text also.
“What do we know about Antioch? Do you remember that the
disciples were first called ‘Christians’ at Antioch? In Acts 13, it was the
church at Antioch that sends Paul out with the gospel. He reports back to
Antioch all through his ministry. If you
wanted to find out how to understand and interpret the Bible, would you go to
Egypt or Antioch? I’d go to Antioch!
“I just explained to you how to read church history in the
first three centuries and there is not one church historian that ever lived who
would say that was a sound method. They would have said it was a biased method
of interpretation. And to that, I would say, you are right.
“The problem is, it is a good bias. Philip Schaff writes his
church history from a bias. He’s the great authority in the Encyclopedia
Britannica on church history, yet he writes from the bias of the allegorical
method. We write from the Grammatical/Historical bias.
“The split between the two methods was created by those
people trying to amalgamate their understanding of Scripture with Greek
philosophy. They tried to make the Bible
equal with human viewpoint and vice versa and join them together. The culprit
that caused this was education.
“Are we against education? Of course not. It is about human
wisdom versus divine revelation. In the Bible, the way God expects you to
understand His Word is literally. Always make the words on the page the issue.”
*****
In the 3rd and 4th centuries, a fight
between these two power centers among the Church councils led to Antioch losing
the political battle.
“They turned to the Greeks as the model by which they
trained and that’s where the allegorical method of studying came from; it’s the
Greek method of interpretation,” explains Jordan. “Among the things picked up
here is what they call virtue and
that becomes the great discussion. You know, with the Greek philosophers—Plato,
Aristotle—virtue was the big issue with them. What is the supreme good?
“Virtue is what? It’s your lifestyle; what are the rules
that order the things of your life? All of a sudden, things change from the
assimilation of sound Bible doctrine that produces life to the external
lifestyle and the academics that would produce . . . to where you can say,
‘This is it—we meet the rules.’
“This is where the academic life began and, leaving the
Pauline method (of Bible study), you enter into the academic world. This is
where the structures of the university system—
the academics and so forth—start and you have the rise of
that.
*****
“Now, when you get into Romanism, you get what’s called
monasticism; men going into the monasteries. The idea now is you’re not just
going to seek virtue, but you’re going to be celibate from the world off in a
monastery and find the supreme good through isolation. You’re going to get rid of
worldliness by not being in the world.
“Now, can just
anybody do that? If everybody can’t do it, you then have to have a special
class of superior people. That’s where the clergy comes from. See how it all
develops?!
“You now need to go out of culture to a place to learn it
and therefore you’re not learning among the people! Paul says in Thessalonians,
‘Know them that labor among you and over you in the Lord.’ People in leadership
of an assembly are people who are among you—not off on a hilltop somewhere.
“When that developed it was these guys (from the
institutional Church) that took it over. And so you have this whole system
where you had this special class of people and this runs really from the 5th
to the 15th Century. That’s called the Dark Ages.
“There were only two places to get any learning—one was in
these segregated places and the other was in the king’s court. And if you want
to see what happens when things go that route, the Dark Ages is what you’re
looking for.”
*****
With the Reformation, or the age of the Renaissance, running
from about the 15th to the 18th century, there’s a return
to training people outside of monasteries, but what’s going to be used to train
people is the writings of the (Greek-Alexandrian influenced) Reformers.
Jordan explains, “You ever talk to anybody called a
Calvinist? Why would you call them a Calvinist? Because they follow the
writings of Calvin (who followed Augustinian doctrine). You ever talk to
anybody who tells you they’re part of the Reformed Church? Why do you call them
the Reformed Church? Because they’re following the writings of the Reformers.
Catechisms, creeds . . .
“There’s a big movement today to go back to the
‘confessional church.’ They’re talking about the Reformation churches that have
these great creeds. The Westminster Confession of faith and the Helvitic
Confession of faith. The doctrinal statement becomes the standard. For Paul,
what was the standard? The Book.”
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