This Saturday, the Faithful Leadership: Church History course will address the theme of “Contemporary Church”. Augustus Nicodemus will speak of the “Modern Apostolic Movement”, Franklin Ferreira, of the “Ways and Routes of Contemporary Theology”. And Leandro Lima, on “The Rationalism of Liberalism and Fundamentalism”. You can watch it live here.
Taking the bait of this historical period, there is no way to address it without mentioning theological liberalism, a movement whose production took place between the late eighteenth and early twentieth centuries and marked by the influence of the Enlightenment and the relativization of the authority of the Bible and miracles. Augustus Nicodemus gives the following definition in an interview:
- Liberalism is.
- In many ways.
- A product of the Enlightenment.
- A movement that emerged in the early 18th century and had at its heart a revolt against the power of institutionalized religion and against religion in general.
- The philosophical assumptions of the movement were.
- First.
- The rationalism of Descartes.
- Spinoza.
- And Leibniz.
- And the empiricism of Locke.
- Berkeley.
- And Hume.
- The combined effects of these two philosophies? Who.
- Despite being theoretically opposed to each other.
- Agreed that God must remain outside of human knowledge? it had a profound impact on Christian theology.
- After the invasion of rationalism into theology.
- It was concluded that “the supernatural does not invade history.
- ” History has come to be seen as a simple natural relationship of cause and effect.
- The concept that God reveals himself to man and that he intervenes and acts in human history was soon excluded.
- The historic Christian faith has always believed that biblical miracles happened just as they said.
- Miracles such as the virgin birth of Christ.
- The miracles that Christ himself performed.
- His physical resurrection from the dead.
- The miracles of the Old and New Testaments are generally taken as facts.
- The liberal theologian.
- In turn.
- And the neo-orthodox distinguish between history (history.
- Raw facts) and heilsgeschichte (holy history or salvific history).
- Creating two different and unrelated worlds: the world of raw and real history.
- Feasible and the world of faith.
- The history of salvation.
- Topics such as creation.
- Adam.
- Fall.
- Miracles.
- Resurrection.
- Among others.
- Belong to the salvific history and not to the real and gross history.
- For liberals and neo-Orthodox.
- It does not matter what actually happened at the tomb of Jesus on the first day of the week.
- But the declaration of Jesus’ disciples that Jesus was resurrected.
- So what they mean by that is very different from what the historic Christian faith believes.
- In fact.
- They regard the biblical accounts of miracles as pious inventions of the Jewish people and early Christians.
- Myths and legends from a pre-scientific age.
- When there was still no logical and rational explanation for the supernatural.
In these videos, Nicodemus and Hernandes Dias Lopes show the dangers of liberal theology: