Emergent antiquity

“Today, there’s a big resurgence of Calvinism,” informed Jordan in his Sunday morning sermon last week. “It’s fascinating what we’ve lived through in the last 70 years. There was a great fundamentalist movement in the first part of the latter part of the 1800s, early 1900s. It came out of the Reformation and the recovery of Bible truth.

“The fundamentalist movement in the ‘40s and ‘50s made a tactical mistake: When you’re gaining and learning and growing in life, if you ever reject it, you just stop where you are.

“Chicago was the citadel of fundamentalism in all of America. Someone in the 1940s wrote a biography on Harry Ironside, who pastored Moody Church, and called him the ‘archbishop of fundamentalism.’ He was one of the premier leaders of the fundamentalist movement, where they were standing for the Word of God; they were standing for salvation by grace through faith and Pauline truth.

“In fact, if you read the books Ironside wrote in the ’20s and ’30s, you’d think I wrote them, or J.C. O’ Hair wrote them, or C.R. Stam wrote them. They were clear about Paul’s ministry; the difference between prophecy and mystery; the law and grace; the Body of Christ and Israel.

“They understood those things. That’s what we come out of. And O’Hair warned them. Back in the 1940s J.C. O’Hair warned the fundamentalist camps--he said, ‘You turn your back on the distinctive ministry of Paul and God’s going to scourge fundamentalism with the rod of Pentecostal fanaticism.’ That’s exactly what happened!

“Because fundamentalism weakened itself into what was called ‘New Evangelicalism,’ which now that fundamentalism is gone, they just call themselves evangelicals, which is sort of a watered-down version. That took place in the ’70s and ’80s and the charismatics took over. And you get the charismatic confusion in the ’80s and ’90s.

*****

“You know, we mentioned earlier about contemporary Christian music. You know where contemporary Christian music came from? It came from Chuck Smith at Calvary chapel out in southern California. That one ministry out there changed the whole tenor of evangelicalism.

“It introduced a style of music, a style of worship, a style of church services, a style of activity, and now fundamentalists, because they’re into ‘gain is godliness’ and so eager to have the crowd of people. It’s, ‘You got to entertain people to get them in, and getting them in is godliness.’

“Smith went out into the Pacific Ocean and baptized a thousand ‘Jesus people’ in one weekend and everybody said, ‘Oh, God’s moving!’ Why? Because they thought ‘gain was godliness.’ How do you get that way? Go read I Timothy 6. The first thing you did was you turned away from wholesome words, even the words of our Lord Jesus Christ for the ministry of the Apostle Paul.

“Paul writes in I Timothy 6: 3-5, ‘If any man teach otherwise, and consent not to wholesome words, even the words of our Lord Jesus Christ, and to the doctrine which is according to godliness;
[4] He is proud, knowing nothing, but doting about questions and strifes of words, whereof cometh envy, strife, railings, evil surmisings,
[5] Perverse disputings of men of corrupt minds, and destitute of the truth, supposing that gain is godliness: from such withdraw thyself.’

“The charismatic movement focuses on experience; what satisfies your flesh. Listen, religion is designed for the satisfaction and the lust of your flesh. You go into great temples and the architecture, and the beauty of the surroundings, and the music, and it satisfies the aesthetic values that your heart has and you want to ascribe to that. You look at it and say, ‘Wow, this is wonderful,’ and you feel humbled from it.

“Then there’s the other side of the flesh. Not just the formalism, but there’s jumping the aisles and running the benches and everybody having a hootenanny. They moved into that and that’s taken over evangelicalism today.

*****

“If you aren’t grounded in Romans, what’s the next book and the next book? Corinthians and Galatians. Romans is, ‘Here’s the gospel of grace.’ Corinthians is, ‘There’s reproof about not getting right in Romans.’ Galatians is corrections about not being right in Romans doctrine.

“You know who the Corinthians were? They were man-centered; they were the ancient charismatics of Paul’s day. The Galatians were Moses-centered. They’re the Calvinists and the Reformed teachers of Paul’s day. They didn’t have those titles but they were the same activities back there. We just have modern manifestations of them today.

“When you move from the charismatic stuff, the next thing you go into, and this is what we have today, is a resurgence of Calvinism.

“Did you know the largest Protestant denomination in the world, the Southern Baptists, are now fighting for its life over this issue?!

“You watch the great resurgent movement; the call it the emerging church and the emergent church. It’s the Bill Hybels (Willow Creek) and the Rick Warrens of the new generation. They’re all basically Reformed people. You have Mark Driscoll (Acts 28) and John Piper. These guys are nuts when it comes to teaching the Bible; they’re all a bunch of Reformed Calvinists. You need to know that.

“Everybody talking about Jesus isn’t talking about the Jesus of the Bible. And even when they are talking about the Jesus of the Bible, they aren’t talking about the ‘Jesus Christ, according to the revelation of the mystery.’ (Romans 16:25)

“What that means to you practically is, in Calvinism and in all this Reformed theology, the law is the standard by which you’re to live your life.”