The Wellhausen Agenda
The Suicide of the West: a book by James Burnham, is a tome we would all do well to read. One of the main tenants of this book is that the west recalls enough about Christianity to be sorry for its sins, but not enough to remember where forgiveness comes from. Burnham believes that there is a serious deterioration in the body of Christianity, a body that the world simply cannot do without.
Could this be true? Could the Christian religion be but a thin shadow of its former self, but due to over 100 years of living in this deconstructed state, no one really understands this? And does that ascertation include the members themselves?
Little does the general public, if not Christianity itself know, that the true church of Christ was once dealt an almost “death blow” at one time which still lingers with us today. You might ask, how can this be? How can such a thing have happened and yet the event is still virtually unknown? To discover the truth about this event, we must look east toward Europe. We must look into the group called “The European Intellectuals”.
Europe, as you will recall, was both the home of the Reformation and also the Enlightenment. The secular and the sacred streams of belief battled each other through time during previous centuries. They battled on any and all public and private playing fields of opinion over the basic quesitons of life.
Rousseau, with his almost drug induced recitations on almost everything, was often called the Father of the Enlightenment. His treaties on the nature of man, the reasons of government and the forces that influenced the future of mankind, became a bizarre set of contradictions that played a large part in the French Revolution coming to pass.
The intellectual ferment of the 18th century set up a whole new set of rules for how everything was to be considered. Everything was to be questioned and all former information was to be jettisoned. Suddenly, questions about the meaning of meaning were now public discussion fodder, a situation that for centuries before was considered a moronic blind man’s bluff.
Suddenly, as once was considered in Ancient Greece and the like, questions about: Who is man? Who is God? What is government and such, became the “new” cool for those who believed they were in the know, or at least those that had the privilege of living above the masses.
It was a time of revolutions, as any history book will inform you; French, Russian, American and more. Those revolutions also took the form of the spiritual, moral and mental change. The new contending forces of thought became reticent in their acquisition of the minds of mankind. Religion itself was not spared from this “skulduggery” (heh) and the reshaping of basic concepts took on a “new look”, although not necessarily a “better look”.
Calling oneself “religious” actually meant something at one time. Usually those persons were made up of Orthodox Christians, Orthodox Catholics or Orthodox Jews. There was also a well respected place for those titles and most knew what they meant. The Bible was a revered book, the government was respected and social order was kept in a proper place. Goils were goils and men were men.
But in the 19th century, suddenly the idea that things could change drastically without notice was quickly adopted. This change also adopted as one of its lap dogs, the Christian religion.
This change within the Christian religion is so far reaching, so dramatic and fundamental that because of it, Christianity became an animal of a different kind on the inside despite its adherence to those things which made it a landmark before the world for centuries.
Churches still had babies baptized, choirs still sang praise, and candles still continued to burn, but the core which kept Christianity alive had suffered a great falling away. The idea that God himself was in the midst of it all, ever watchful, ever present and intimately involved, slipped away from the Church at this time.
How could his have happened? What now existed that had not been seen before? Two words: Religious liberalism.
How it all Began
The man’s name was Julius Wellhausen, he was a German rationalist scholar, theologian and Old Testament scholar. He stepped forward, and in a rather simple and un-effacing way, introduced religious liberalism. He became a subject of great interest as he introduced to Christianity a new way of understanding the Bible. As always, the battle begins in the mind.
Before Wellhausen, the Bible was considered the true, revealed and inerrant word of God. Christians everywhere believed they had within their grasp the actual inspiration of God himself as given to men he had chosen who were dedicated to the death to deliver the message which was for all mankind, past, present and future, the whole world over. It was believed to be the “manual” from the creator to the creation for life here on Earth, which of course, could not be intrinsically separated from God himself. In the Bible we had a book we could trust without fail despite all appearances. Man could be wrong in reason at certain points, unable to disavow himself of personal interest or public agenda, but the Bible was infallible.
Wellhausen, and his group of intellectual cronies, turned all that around. He insisted the direct opposite, that it was human reason that could be trusted and that it was the Bible that had to be questioned. He presented, that far from being the Divine inspired Word of God himself, that the Bible was in fact a sublime collection of human documents.
First of all he maintained that Moses did indeed NOT write the Pentateuch. Instead, he surmised, the Old Testament is really a collection of writings from many different writers whose form and verse are combined into a tome which we now call the Pentateuch. As a result, the Genesis story is really just a lovely fairy tale that illustrates certain truths but cannot actually be a real story about people called Adam and Eve.
He also maintained that the various events in the Old Testament are not so much truth from God but instead are just the results of evolutionary thinking, or as some others today put it, the result of the bicameral mind. (See my post on the Neuvo Tech Deception) Until Wellhausen and the German rationalists, the idea of the Bible being trustworthy unto death was unquestionable. But once they provided their ideas, the reverse became true, spreading throughout society like a deadly unseen virus or cancer. Human reason was now God and The Bible was as valid as The Illiad.
Wellhausen’s book: Prolegomena to the History of Israel, called for a new understanding of the nature of inspiration from God. At this point in 1878, a cold wind of doubt and distrust blew through the churches of eastern Europe and has continued to this day, although it seems as though things have always been the way they are, due to the fact that no one alive is quite old enough to remember how it used to be. How much like Israel in the Book of Kings are the Christians of Earth today? Is anything actually new? Not much. The names and dates change, but the cycle continues over and over.
Since the days of anti-revelation liberalism, Christianity has ceased to be based on the revelatory Words of God. Instead, it is now a composite of religious views anchored by human reason. Revelation has since been doubted and then denied; today it has been replaced by rationalism which has been given the stamp of “progress”.
more on this next time
Could this be true? Could the Christian religion be but a thin shadow of its former self, but due to over 100 years of living in this deconstructed state, no one really understands this? And does that ascertation include the members themselves?
Little does the general public, if not Christianity itself know, that the true church of Christ was once dealt an almost “death blow” at one time which still lingers with us today. You might ask, how can this be? How can such a thing have happened and yet the event is still virtually unknown? To discover the truth about this event, we must look east toward Europe. We must look into the group called “The European Intellectuals”.
Europe, as you will recall, was both the home of the Reformation and also the Enlightenment. The secular and the sacred streams of belief battled each other through time during previous centuries. They battled on any and all public and private playing fields of opinion over the basic quesitons of life.
Rousseau, with his almost drug induced recitations on almost everything, was often called the Father of the Enlightenment. His treaties on the nature of man, the reasons of government and the forces that influenced the future of mankind, became a bizarre set of contradictions that played a large part in the French Revolution coming to pass.
The intellectual ferment of the 18th century set up a whole new set of rules for how everything was to be considered. Everything was to be questioned and all former information was to be jettisoned. Suddenly, questions about the meaning of meaning were now public discussion fodder, a situation that for centuries before was considered a moronic blind man’s bluff.
Suddenly, as once was considered in Ancient Greece and the like, questions about: Who is man? Who is God? What is government and such, became the “new” cool for those who believed they were in the know, or at least those that had the privilege of living above the masses.
It was a time of revolutions, as any history book will inform you; French, Russian, American and more. Those revolutions also took the form of the spiritual, moral and mental change. The new contending forces of thought became reticent in their acquisition of the minds of mankind. Religion itself was not spared from this “skulduggery” (heh) and the reshaping of basic concepts took on a “new look”, although not necessarily a “better look”.
Calling oneself “religious” actually meant something at one time. Usually those persons were made up of Orthodox Christians, Orthodox Catholics or Orthodox Jews. There was also a well respected place for those titles and most knew what they meant. The Bible was a revered book, the government was respected and social order was kept in a proper place. Goils were goils and men were men.
But in the 19th century, suddenly the idea that things could change drastically without notice was quickly adopted. This change also adopted as one of its lap dogs, the Christian religion.
This change within the Christian religion is so far reaching, so dramatic and fundamental that because of it, Christianity became an animal of a different kind on the inside despite its adherence to those things which made it a landmark before the world for centuries.
Churches still had babies baptized, choirs still sang praise, and candles still continued to burn, but the core which kept Christianity alive had suffered a great falling away. The idea that God himself was in the midst of it all, ever watchful, ever present and intimately involved, slipped away from the Church at this time.
How could his have happened? What now existed that had not been seen before? Two words: Religious liberalism.
How it all Began
The man’s name was Julius Wellhausen, he was a German rationalist scholar, theologian and Old Testament scholar. He stepped forward, and in a rather simple and un-effacing way, introduced religious liberalism. He became a subject of great interest as he introduced to Christianity a new way of understanding the Bible. As always, the battle begins in the mind.
Before Wellhausen, the Bible was considered the true, revealed and inerrant word of God. Christians everywhere believed they had within their grasp the actual inspiration of God himself as given to men he had chosen who were dedicated to the death to deliver the message which was for all mankind, past, present and future, the whole world over. It was believed to be the “manual” from the creator to the creation for life here on Earth, which of course, could not be intrinsically separated from God himself. In the Bible we had a book we could trust without fail despite all appearances. Man could be wrong in reason at certain points, unable to disavow himself of personal interest or public agenda, but the Bible was infallible.
Wellhausen, and his group of intellectual cronies, turned all that around. He insisted the direct opposite, that it was human reason that could be trusted and that it was the Bible that had to be questioned. He presented, that far from being the Divine inspired Word of God himself, that the Bible was in fact a sublime collection of human documents.
First of all he maintained that Moses did indeed NOT write the Pentateuch. Instead, he surmised, the Old Testament is really a collection of writings from many different writers whose form and verse are combined into a tome which we now call the Pentateuch. As a result, the Genesis story is really just a lovely fairy tale that illustrates certain truths but cannot actually be a real story about people called Adam and Eve.
He also maintained that the various events in the Old Testament are not so much truth from God but instead are just the results of evolutionary thinking, or as some others today put it, the result of the bicameral mind. (See my post on the Neuvo Tech Deception) Until Wellhausen and the German rationalists, the idea of the Bible being trustworthy unto death was unquestionable. But once they provided their ideas, the reverse became true, spreading throughout society like a deadly unseen virus or cancer. Human reason was now God and The Bible was as valid as The Illiad.
Wellhausen’s book: Prolegomena to the History of Israel, called for a new understanding of the nature of inspiration from God. At this point in 1878, a cold wind of doubt and distrust blew through the churches of eastern Europe and has continued to this day, although it seems as though things have always been the way they are, due to the fact that no one alive is quite old enough to remember how it used to be. How much like Israel in the Book of Kings are the Christians of Earth today? Is anything actually new? Not much. The names and dates change, but the cycle continues over and over.
Since the days of anti-revelation liberalism, Christianity has ceased to be based on the revelatory Words of God. Instead, it is now a composite of religious views anchored by human reason. Revelation has since been doubted and then denied; today it has been replaced by rationalism which has been given the stamp of “progress”.
more on this next time
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