intro
All of us who know the Bible know that it warns us against what it calls apostasy. Apostasy essentially means “getting away from a position,” “getting away from an established milestone. “This verb composed in the Bible speaks of moving away from God’s truth as he revealed. The apostate in the Word is a person who once knew the truth but changed his mind about what he considered true.
- Let me give you two examples.
- First.
- Barth Erman: he was a confessed Christian.
- He obtained several degrees in the theological field but today declares himself agnostic; considered a minority of Christianity.
- Speaks today against the New Testament and denies the possibility of really knowing who Jesus was.
Another lesser-known example is William Barclay, who has written several biblical comments that are impressive for his knowledge of Greek and culture, however, in his autobiography he revealed that he changed his mind about what he had created and what he had written in The Comments. I no longer believed that Jesus was God, who would have died for us, did not believe in hell, and believed that everyone would be saved in the end. In his last book, he declares himself agnostic.
In the Bible, there are many reasons why someone departs from faith; in the parable of the sower, there are those who listen, but then forget; Paul speaks of those who hear the doctrines of demons and turn away from faith and those who embrace, falsely called, science. There are several cases of apostasy in the church, of people who loved the world and who strayed from the knowledge of the living God. In short, the external reasons are multiple: money, sexuality, insubordination. , unresolved problems, etc. In this conference, I want to talk about an external cause of apostasy: belief in different doctrines of God’s truth.
Not that liberalism is the biggest cause of apostasy, but it is the most important for our time.
This movement has a very old origin. In general, liberalism is the result of the Enlightenment, characterized by the revolt against religion and Christianity in particular. Was it his theoretical referencing rationalism and his empiricism?opposing philosophies, but that together they conclude that God should be excluded from the human universe. The result of this at the academy was very profound, as biblical miracles were considered done almost unanimously, and from these new criteria for the observation of truth much has changed.
People have begun to believe that God does not interfere with history, that biblical stories are mere myths and interpretations of an ignorant and prophetic people, and that the miraculous does not exist. With this two types of “history” were created, the world And salvation ?, this, referring to the “things of God”, un proven and not credible. With this, the Bible ceases to be a historically reliable book. It becomes a simple book of theology, historically ignorant. The Bible ended up being considered a book full of contractions and inconsistencies.
In this context, has the critical historical method of Bible analysis emerged, a clearly liberal and anti-Christian method. The difference between? Write and “word of God. “According to this separation, Scripture is the written book, with human error, subjectivity, and misinterpretations; it is the Word of God that is valid and infallible, and must be found in the scriptures.
The Church has responded to this radicalism. Now, what did liberalism leave to God’s people?Nothing! They disconstructed the faith, but they did not put anything, according to them Jesus was a peasant, reformer of Judaism and alone, who impressed so many of his disciples that he was raised by them as Messiah, Lord and God. against this was called neo-orthodoxy. The greatest representative was Karl Barth, who stood up to protest against those who said they took God out of the church, put the Bible and background, and killed God’s people. If on the one hand we should be grateful to Barth for fighting liberalism, on the other hand we must be careful with him. Why did Barth agree that the Bible was full of mistakes, but that God still spoke through this imperfect Bible through an existential encounter?He didn’t completely solve the problem because he assumed many hypotheses that were still liberal. Liberalism has had a major impact on the Church, despite neoortodoxy. As a result, ecumenism, feminism, gay theology and the emptying of churches arise.
Ecumenism began with Protestant liberals. The idea was that all religions felt they were looking for God and transcendence, since everyone was looking for the same thing, everyone has to be real, this is obviously apostasy. Equipping Jesus with other leaders is blasphemy. To say that Christ is not the savior, but ONE savior is anti-god and antichrist.
The feminist movement also begins with liberalism, when it began, this movement only had ideals, they wanted women to be able to vote, receive a living wage and go to college, yet a woman named Kathleen Bliss wrote a book entitled?Do women’s work and status in the Church? (1952), where she tried to convince people to apply feminist ideals within Christian churches, as a result, women began to be ordained pastors and to hold positions of authority in churches, contradicting many biblical statements about complementarity between the roles of men and women.
This context opened the door to the homosexual movement. The critical historical method relativized biblical theological and moral concepts, allowing homosexual interpretations of the sacred text. According to the fundamentals of this movement, Paulo is against homosexuality because he did not know the scientific truth about homosexual genetics and things like that.
The result of this was the emptying of the Church, many people did not agree with these movements and left in the midst of this movement, looking for churches truly centered on the Word of God.
Theological liberalism began to take firmer measures in Brazil in the fifties and sixties, today it is increasingly present in our nation, invaded our social networks, was published in books and was present in sermons, let’s look at history for a moment to arrive in our current context.
In the United States, at that time, the debate against “modernism” began, in three respects: a debate against theology (with neo-orthodoxy), against ecclesiology (with ecumenism) and against society (with Marxism). Because theological schools were weak and almost non-existent in Brazil, young people and pastors studied in the United States and thus brought liberal and neo-Orthodox ideals. As in the first half of the century the market for evangelical publications was very scarce, things stopped, but from the 1950s and 1960s some denominations began to absorb liberal ideas. Some conservative seminars began to adopt the critical method of biblical interpretation, which led some people to begin to believe in liberalism and neo-orthodoxy. When these pastors preached these ideas in their churches, they were often overlooked; however, they still had a lot of reach in several local churches.
Twenty years after the American controversy, liberalism has reached local churches through educational institutions. The pursuit of academic respectability has destroyed the ministerial awareness of theological seminars.
Historical denominations (Lutherans, Baptists, Presbyterians, Congregationalists, Methodists, etc. ) began to adopt more liberating theologies, such as neo-orthodoxy, because of the pastors and seminarians who brought these ideas to their flocks.
Even fundamentalism? He began to gain space thanks to youth. At that very first, the Presbyterian churches and some others resisted this fact very much. There were many struggles, the seminars were closed and the members were expelled. Several influential pastors have produced several very famous liberals, such as Rubem Alves, here in Brazil. According to him, “the church must not convert the world to the church, but to the church to the world. “
Finally, Christian literature has been affected by this context, the great Catholic publishers adopted liberalism as a method of biblical interpretation and began to disseminate neo-Orthodox material, material consumed even by such evangelicals.
Liberalism is another religion because it denies everything Christianity asserts, so to overcome this heresy we must emphasize:
1. The inerrance of the act
2. The literality of miracles
3. The exclusivity of Christianity
4. The centrality of Jesus
5. The historical-grammatical method of biblical interpretation
Beloved, seeking to be able to write to them with all due diligence about common salvation, I had the need to write to them and exhort them to fight for the faith that was once given to the Saints (Jude 1:3).
Conference of Augustus Nicodemus and Mauro Meister on “Apostasy in the Church in the global context and in the Brazilian context?”XIV Christian Consciousness (VINACC)?2012