Reviews by Hubie Goode: Dating Outside Your Religion

Dating Outside Your Religion

by Rick Pelle

Dating someone of another faith can be a difficult situation even when the couple is deeply united. We can learn from biblical times and bible stories just how difficult differences in religion can be for even the most united of couples.

King Solomon was known as the wisest of the wise and ruled with incredible foresight and intelligence. The Bible says he had 700 wives and 300 concubines, some of whom were the daughters of pagan kings, who forged an alliance with Solomon. These alliances were often sealed with the presentation of a daughter's hand in marriage. One of these pagan wives who Solomon favored dearly convinced Solomon to make offerings to her pagan gods. The result of those offerings left Solomon struck down by the God of the Israelites with insanity and he died in disgrace.

Abraham and his Wife Sarah wish only to have a son to continue their lineage but Sarah is barren and thought to be too old to conceive. She gives her husband her Egyptian servant Hagar who has a child by Abraham. Later when God gives Sarah a child of her own Hagar and her Son Ishmael are sent into the desert to die. Instead they become the ancestors of the Arab Nations and we all know how that family feud has played out over the centuries.

Moses was placed in a basket by his mother and floated down the river to save his life. He was raised by the daughter of the Pharaoh and treated like a member of the royal family. Moses finds out that he is actually a Hebrew and in a rage kills an Egyptian who is beating a Hebrew slave. He is forced to flee into the land of the Midianites. He rescues the daughters of a Midianite priest who takes him in and gives him his daughter Zipporah as a wife. God tries to kill Moses but he is saved by Zipporah in a bizarre ritual which involves the circumcision of their son and the tossing of the foreskin at the feet of Moses. Moses and the Hebrews eventually reject and abandon Zipporah because she is an Ethiopian and she and her sons are sent away to live their lives with her father in the desert.

The concept of marrying within your religion is emphasized in the story of Rebekah. Abraham was living in Canaan and was so concerned about his son Isaac not having a proper Hebrew wife. He sent his servant to the City of Nahor to find Isaac a wife. The servant returned with Rebekah who was a godly woman and who became Isaac's wife. The couple was barren for more than 20 years but eventually had twin boys Jacob and Esau.

Sampson was encouraged by his family to marry Miriam a Hebrew maiden who loved him very much but he was smitten by the beauty of a Philistine women named Semadar. Semadar had a sister named Delilah who was so taken by Sampson's strength that she wanted him for herself. The ensuing family squabbles left both the Philistines and the Hebrews with burned villages and destroyed crops as the girls fought over him eventually causing the death of Semadar and the downfall of the once invincible Sampson by the hand of Delilah.

The Bible gives us many examples of the pitfalls of dating outside of ones faith and though many of the stories may be parables designed to teach to the leanings of the church they are no less prophetic. Sir Edmund Burke (1729-1797) said: "Those who do not know history are destined to repeat it." If religion is important to you and you choose to ignore the teachings of the Bible, to date within your faith, you could be tempting fate.

Rick Pelle is a political and religious blogger. He often takes positions that are conservative in nature but just as often he expresses views considered liberal or libertarian. Check out his blogs below:

Dating Outside Your Religion
Discussion Of All Things Spiritual

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Reviews by Hubie Goode: Europe's spiritual death, great falling away, religious liberalism, Julius WellHausen

The Wellhausen Agenda

part 3

It wasn’t long before the inception of Religious Liberalism that it jumped the pond and soon began being preached in old-line denominational churches, colleges and seminaries of the east coast United States. European intellectuals made the case that a new understanding of the Bible was indeed progress and would bring about a marvelous new humanism that would deliver America from the shackles of “dark ages” thinking that had held them back.

Scholar J. Grescham Machen reviewed those days and the coming liberalism to the Methodists, Anglicans, and the Presbyterians. He reminded us of what religious liberalism really is. Valiantly holding to the Word of God, he announced to those churches the degree of chicanery that was inherent in religious liberalism. It went about promoting itself as Christianity but was in fact a wolf in sheep’s clothing. In much the same way George Orwell outlined the re-definition of terms in his classic novel, 1984, this liberalism used the same terms, i.e. “Christ”, “God”, “Bible” and “inspiration” to mean something other than what had been the traditional meaning for the use of those expressions.

One must hold fast to the hope and prayer that the ordinary man of our time will not be forced to adhere to a religion which is in fact “Neo-Christianity”. We must all stand tall and fight against the bastardization of the true Christian faith, for woe be to us to believe one thing and live quite another.

Machen wrote his book, Christianity and Liberalism in 1924, but for many of the day the warning was too late. The arguments of religious liberalism had already insinuated themselves within the educational structure of society. Not surprisingly, in the wake of the so called intellectual revolution of the times, many of the famous thinkers and philosophers of the day had their own ideas included in religious liberalism. This so called progress went as follows:

1) Darwin’s teachings on evolution are indeed fact, despite a weak presence of evidence, and because of this, we know that we are here due to evolution.

2) Because we know that we have evolved, then the brain must also have evolved, along with the mind of man, and therefore we have moved from the simple of the past to the complex of the present and then on to the future.

3) Therefore, since the mind of man has evolved, then it follows that his ideas, concepts and understanding has also evolved and matured. (This of course is evidenced by the fact that we have done away with war, hatred, conflict, prejudice, insanity, injustice, yadda yadda....)

4) If the ideas of man have evolved, then also our understanding of God must evolve. God used to be a tough taskmaster, but now he is a God of love.

5) Now that God is all about love, the idea of sin is anachronistic. Sin is not a violation of God’s law, God cannot be offended. Therefore, sin itself is sort of like Santa Clause, something made up when we had an immature understanding.

6) Therefore it is education that is the real salvation, not forgiveness and redemption, but re-education of a higher form. The spark of divinity is already in man and just needs to be fanned into new flame.

7) As we pursue new enlightenment, the old ways of war, hatred, famine and the like will become as anachronistic as our old ways of thinking about God.

“Every day and in every way, I am getting better and better,” was the Freudian chant of the day, and I am talking about inside of churches. The Power of Positive Thinking had yet to be written but the audience for its readership was already in the making. Encouragement, optimism and perspective tricks were the new clarion call of the day.

What had existed for so long as the mainstay of Christianity was now redefined as “butcher shop” religion, and the masses bought this lock, stock and barrel. It was now all about expanding a persons thinking about himself and his human possibilities. Check your local book store, the self-help section is quite large and has been large for over 70 years now. This stuff sells books. (If nothing else)

Not only Darwin and Freud were involved here, but Karl Marx as well. Marx’s “social Darwinism” promised the improvement of humanity if people would sacrifice themselves unselfishly for the good of the commune. Religious liberalism was a strange bedfellow of the political left and the conservatives of the day saw this as nothing but a Communist front organization influence upon the American public.

Fortunately, liberalism had not won the battle in the United States at this time. Frontier Christianity upheld its strong doctrine and allegiance to the infallibility of scripture. Toward the end of the 1800’s, the preaching of persons like Dwight L. Moody had a profound effect upon the masses of America. Colonial America was not so easily shaken by the ideas of Europe and held fast to the essential true nature of scripture and the inspiration of the Bible. This is not surprising, as there are no atheists in fox holes, and pioneers of the day had to make their way in a wilderness, they weren’t comfortable on the couch like the Europeans were and keeping their faith true and correct was something akin to daily bread, sometimes the only daily bread.

The result, as we all know, was the brith of the fundamentalist movement. Young preachers from all around the country began pressing forward against the poison of the encroaching liberalism. They saw the dangers of accepting the ideas of evolution, Marxism and Bible denying liberalism. New churches spread like wildfire and new denominations sprang up all around the country as an ebb tide of resistance formed.

These believing preachers postulated on five points in the battle against liberalism:

1) They preached “verbal plenary inspiration” as the way that God made the Bible. A person could trust every word, for scripture could not be broken due to God’s protection and the life or death seriousness with which those who delivered the message and those who copied it took the “Words of God.”

2) They preached the deity of Christ. Due to the romanization of Christ in many art works, and a few other references, the liberals were stating that Jesus was born of a Jewish girl and a roman soldier. This made fundamentalist preachers livid as they took this as flat out blasphemy. We all know what someone who is Jewish looks like, for the most part, and scripture itself says that he looked like any ordinary man. The blue eyes are possible, but I say, improbable. Regardless, the main point is of course, Jesus birth by divine means.

3) They preached the finished work of the cross. The shed blood of Christ at the cross was central to everything. To minimize the role of Christ’s sacrifice was similar to slapping someone’s mother. When this argument is put forward, it covers all roads leading back to the main point of the very existence of God. But in the interim to getting there, you also deny his great love for you and me and his insistence on seeing us brought back to a proper place with him in the whole of our reality. This is not a gift to be taken lightly.

4) They preached salvation by grace alone. Salvation by works was contained within the liberalist message and once again, was a slap at the personhood of God and also his sacrifice. If you could bring about that restored relationship yourself, then not only was Christ’s sacrifice simply a nice gesture, but you and I share a plane with the creator himself. That’s an inescapable point of logic when considering this. If you can restore the broken relationship with God that happened in the Garden of Eden, then Adam could have just killed himself, since the price of sin (stepping out of the will of God) is blood, death. Does this remind you of some folks who believe they can kill themselves and other innocent victims and arrive in the presence of God? hmm.

5) The premillennia return of Christ. The doctrine of the special mission of the church as the Body of Christ and its deliverance from the world before the days of the Great Tribulation that was to come upon the earth was a fundamentalist linchpin. They looked forward to the sweet chariot that would swing so low, and the liberalism churches would never even come near this preaching.

Interestingly enough, the results of all this fire and brimstone was that liberalism became firmly rooted in America. Liberalism’s impact was largely felt in the east and waned as one traveled farther west, naturally, to the lesser developed and smaller townships, away from the big cities. Comfort and satisfaction often result in liberal ideas taking a hold they would not have otherwise.

Fundamentalism eventually has given way to something called evangelicalism. Evangelicals unite around the firm conservative platform, it is less likely though to go to war over its convictions. It’s a “softer” version of the fundamentalism which is willing to come to some sort of midway compromise with liberals for the betterment of everyone’s living conditions within society. They are more than likely to see their movements as a “social action” but are also still a major counter force to liberalism.

Liberalism’s conquest of Europe and its continuing battle in America is certainly one of the major stories of mankind. Part of that story still remains to be seen. One thing is inescapable though, Europe, since 1900, has given the world the bloodiest century in the history of mankind. No tribal or hill country rivalry, no civil war anywhere on the planet has so covered the Earth with blood like World Wars I & II which have directly and indirectly caused 50 million deaths there about. Nor has the world itself been so in jeopardy from powerful men who mean to do harm on a major scale in order to initiate their own agendas. Don’t wonder where God has been during all of this, for when you ask him to leave your churches, schools and legal departments, he leaves a nation or nations at the whim of his enemy, and the results are a painful reminder to us all.

Despite Europe’s vaunted so called intellectualism, it has been unable to defend itself against the rise of movements like Nazism, Communism, fascism, the occult and other ideas that have literally corrupted its soul. America today is seen as “prudish”, but Europe would never call itself “depraved” despite the evidence. The external results of a spiritual death are hard to ignore and Europe has written a book on this in big bold letters.

Wellhausen and his liberal cronies killed the spiritual life in Europe. Will America learn this lesson? Will it stop to see the deathly results of giving Satan a voice in society? Do you think he is our friend? Do you think he has ANYTHING to say to you and me? Just ask Europe.

When we stop to consider the centuries old family fued between the Jewish nation of Israel and its disgruntled brothers the United Arab Emigrates, can you see how Europe and America can become just as distanced due to the spiritual death of Europe and the continued (although quickly eroding) divine protections of America? Does an attack have to come from tanks and missiles? Or can a nation long held close as an ally have already have been wearing away its partner in freedom simply by the illicit influences it proposes? Does Europe realize that if it hadn’t been for America, they would all be strongly influenced by Nazism today? Fascism would have taken over major parts of the whole world, as is another major movement planning to do in the near future which both Europe and America have become more and more chummy with.

The people of Ancient Israel, time and again preferred to listen to the rantings of the used car salesman from hell at the expense of their love relationship with God, based mostly on the appeal to human ego. It’s an old story, from Genesis to Judas, who are you going to listen to? Whom will you believe? The idea of “Blessed is the Nation whose God is the Lord”, is not some fairy tale, or nice platitude. It’s a political fact. When Israel couldn’t get it together, they were thrust from the land God had promised them, scattered all over the world for centuries. You and I could have Jewish blood in our families and not even know it. This is no “Atlantis” hypothesis. The Israelites are an historical fact that remains with us today and their story is a black and white representation of what happens to nations who ask God to leave. Whether it be Europe with its intellectualism or America with its Supreme Court rulings.

Liberalism is a parasite that sucks the life from true Christianity. It calls itself Christianity, but it denies the inspiration of the Bible, the deity of Christ, the virgin birth, the true nature of faith, and yet they want real Christians to still consider them part of the overall pie. No such luck! What is so insidious is that they do not have their own churches. They are a church of the mind, of the perspective and only reveal themselves when they put forth their ideas in the social realm. Learn to spot them. Root them out. They could be in the pew next to you. Not the “bodysnatchers” but the “spirit snatchers”.

Clarity is divine, and the game here is confusion. If you are confused as to the black and white truth of these things, then you have been effected. Don’t like my saying that? It wouldn’t bother you if you were right with God.

1Timothy 4:1 says: “.... in latter times some shall depart from the faith, giving heed to seducing spirits, and doctrines of devils.” Defection from the faith is an historic part of mankind, from Eden to Jerusalem, to Europe in the 1800’s. Paul mourned over those who had been led astray from the faith, and in a rather speedy manner. He told them to accept no other Gospel but that which he had given them when they first believed (Galatians: 1:6-8) and to let those who had preached that false Gospel to be accursed. Let world history be your guide. Review the history of Europe in the 1900’s versus the 1700’s. Or for that matter, review the history of the world. The cause and effect of forgetting God is the same for us today as it was for ancient Israel, and they are a chosen people.

Certainly rationalism cannot be superior to revelation, for plainly the wages of rationalism and relying on our own reason can be seen in the escalation of our own dissolution time and time again.

Reviews by Hubie Goode: The Wellhausen Agenda Part 2

The Wellhausen Agenda

part 2


Wellhausen was born in 1844 in Hamlen, Westphalia, Germany. He studied at the University of Gottingen and was so brilliant in his understanding of all things theological that he was awarded a professorship at Greifswald University. Theological studies continued there for the next ten years and in the meantime he departed step by step and inch by inch from the view of Bible scripture as being of divine inspiration. He was fired as a result of this. Other colleges entertained him in the interim and he eventually ended up teaching at the college he had first graduated from.

His career developed as he wrote many books on biblical criticism. Wellhausen eventually became famous as the leader of a strain of thought called “Higher Criticism”. A noted author gave us an insight into just what this thing called Higher Criticism was: “Scholars who will not admit divine revelation seek to explain Old Testament belief in God in terms of evolution. They would have Old Testament monotheism be the resultant from lower stages, or from polytheism, or regard it as a particular instinct of the Semites, or as borrowed from neighboring nations.”

It is easy to see how the ideas of Darwin and evolution were a big influence on the thinking toward biblical assumptions. These ideas spread like a wildfire throughout society as they had with them the guilding pet for the ego of man that pleases everyone at one time or another. Once a social movement begins, no matter its truth or shaky grounds, it is hard for a social animal like mankind to hold firm to an idea that leaves him on the outside.

Author Paul Heinisch had this to say: “The Wellhausen school maintains that pre-Mosaic religion in Israel had been polydemonism in the form of totenism, animism, ancestor worship, fetishism. Recent investigations in the countries of the ancient Orient, however, have demonstrated that the religions of the Near East as far as can now be ascertained, did not sink to such levels; they were polytheistic in character (star worship, personification of natural forces), and tapered off in a monarchical system. Rather than evolution, there was retrogression, because the number of gods gradually increased. Furthermore, prehistory testifies that primitive man was in no way intellectually inferior to his descendants, and that at least the realm of art was quite superior. Ethnology also refutes the theory of religious evolution, for the concepts of the so called primitive peoples are purer than those of their neighbors already engaged in agriculture and cattle raising. Therefore, we need but give scant attention to those passages which have been cited as having traces of the above-mentioned “isms”*

*Paul Heinisch, Theology of the Old Testament (St. Paul, Minn.: Liturgical, 1955). p. 34

As you can see, keeping in line with most of those who have agendas, Wellhausen had to invent an account of prehistory that was later refuted by scholarship that actually checked up on what he had to say. Once again, as in the case of Sigmund Freud, evidence meant little, the priory of stipulating that the Bible was just a collection of superior works akin to Shakespeare could not be bothered with the facts.

Another passage to support this refutation can be taken from Hienrisch’s book on page 86, where it is discussed under the title: “The Notion of God’s Justice before the period of the Literary Prophets.” Wellhausen claims that God’s justice was largely unknown until the writings of those who put the Old Testament together. It was vitally important to place the label of “fairy tale” on the Genesis account before such a claim could indeed be made. Adam and Eve ran into God’s position on rewarding those who stayed in his universal plan and punishing those who decided they knew better long before anyone wrote about it, but that didn’t fit into Wellahusen’s agenda.

A view known as the Documentary Hypothesis of the Pentateuch is crucial to understanding Wellhausen’s impact upon textual criticism. The phrase literally means that there were four other writers of the Old Testament and Moses may have been one or more or perhaps had a finger in some place of the writing.

In 1678, an Oratorian Catholic Priest named Richard Simon stated that there were at least two writers of the Old Testament, an Elohist and a Yahwist. This was based on the fact that there are two mentions of the name of God in the Old Testament at different points, Jehovah and Elohim.

Wellhausen dressed this up even more in the rhetoric of “college boys” of his day. He attempted to clarify who wrote what when by establishing criterion and chronicling the books in question. He dated them by the postulate of the science of comparative religion. The base concept is that cults indigenous to one another evolve in the same manner: from a pluarity of gods to a singularity. This “evolution” occurs roughly at the same rate, due to the cults geographic proximity providing a social, economic, political, and religious catalyst toward mutual change. Therefore, said Wellhausen, those passages that deal with a single deity were added at later dates than the simple narratives. Therefore, books like Deuteronomy were written as a result of social evolution and not divine inspiration.

For Wellhausen, only Exodus was completely historical. Not surprising, since the Jewish nation still exists today and is historically tied to all those events directly in both religious and also in physical history. He felt however, that everything before the monarchy was a complete myth.

Wellhausen’s college boy ways were a major contributor to religious liberalism as it took out those things considered spiritual that were included in the Bible. Due to this “demythization” of scripture, the door was opened for others to give their own hand a shot at interpreting Biblical truth and as a result they created in their minds a round robin of allegories that were all sound and fury and no necessary truth.

The logical consequence of all this was a defection from sound doctrine by the church. Christianity slowly lost its soul amidst the strength of so called higher learning and became something of a humanist religion that looked like many others all around the world. Those who adopted Wellhausen’s reason soon found that they had a book of human theory instead of the living, breathing Word of God.

Now Christianity became a complex set of human rationalizations. This defection from the orthodox view of Christianity, leaving it merely the flavor religion of the day, left the Bible as a book without hope, without life, without authority. Intellectual pride spread throughout the schooling system of Europe in that day and as the old guard died off, the new education of “the Bible as just another book” took hold.

Little did those young people who were being educated in this way understand that they were indeed being brainwashed to lose faith in the Bible. Every generation believes it is superior to grandpa and grandma as they benefit from the progress that past societies have made, so naturally as this generational process moves on, the counter education can easily take hold as more than just an alternative, but more or less as the discovered truth that our poor ancestors just were too stupid to realize.

How much like the generations of the Israelites in the book of Kings! It boggles the mind.

Despite all of this, churches still existed. Choirs sang. Candles burned. But spiritual life had died. The Bible was now only empty pages once written by men long dead. European Christianity was destroyed from the inside while still possessing the form it had always held for ages. It was apostate. Apostate being that it had all the appearances of the real thing but not the power of God. It had become demented, a jabbering, gibbering fool sitting on the corner in rags arguing with himself. Preachers of the day began to quote and teach everything but the scriptures and they lost an important foothold on reality.

Many believe that the AntiChrist will be the leader of the European Economic Community, and they may be right. Europe lost its soul during the days of Wellhausen and if they do not once again become involved in a spiritual life, they may indeed give birth to the one who is to come. There are those who say in fact that he is already living in the Monarchy of Britain and ready to take up the crown of England. We shall see.

Matthew 16:5-10 says:

Now when His disciples had come to the other side, they had forgotten to take bread. Then Jesus said to them, “Take heed and beware of the leaven of the Pharisees and the Sadducees.” And they reasoned among themselves, saying, “It is because we have taken no bread.” But Jesus, being aware of it, said to them, “O you of little faith, why do you reason among yourselves because you have brought no bread? Do you not yet understand, or remember the five loaves of the five thousand and how many baskets you took up? Nor the seven loaves of the four thousand and how many large baskets you took up?”

Basically, Jesus is here warning against being too proud of your own reasoning as it has little to do with the Lordship and abilities of God, the creator of the universe. You simply can’t leave God out of any argument about spiritual reality. It all starts with: Does God exist? If he DOES exist then anything is possible, if he doesn’t then you can make up anything you like.

He also speaks here about the leaven of the Pharisees and the Sadducees, leaders who thought they knew it all, and had a right to direct others in the truth, and yet they fought with Jesus over everything. There is also a school of thought that says these two groups came from a certain lineage, a lineage which Christ himself called, in a sense, the Sons of the Devil. And that could very well be a literal idea. Physically literal. The SONS of Satan. If so, and we know that Satan is the great enemy of all we have been discussing, then they too had an agenda. If the line still lives today, it’s not too much of a stretch to state that Jesus would have called Wellhausen one of these men also, for he too had an agenda.

So Europe looks to be a part of that “great falling away” predicted in scripture before the end times. We get so programmed by the fantastic presentations of the media in venues like the movies and television, that we often are waiting for the sun to explode before we see something happening. Wouldn’t it be sad if we came to the end of it all and God pointed out to us that this historical event, happening long before we were even born, was indeed the beginning of the end, the great falling away before the second coming. But it’s not fantastic, so we missed it. Don’t be proud in your own understanding of these things and easily dismiss what I am suggesting. You could be dead wrong.

Next time: America the Liberal

Reviews by Hubie Goode: The Wellhausen Agenda

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

Reviews by Hubie Goode: What does God Require of Us?

What does God Require of Us?

Football great John Elway once told a reporter that during the stretch of his rather successful National Football League career, every Monday morning he would wake up and be almost unable to move due to the severity of the physical requirements of paying football. He would ask himself every week why he was continuing on, but no matter what he answered to himself, he always went back to work on Tuesday.

John was indeed a great player, perhaps one of the best of all time, but he didn’t get that way by just existing. He wasn’t a player of the ages because of some magic talent switch he turned on and off when he needed it. In order to be good, really good at anything, one needs to become that thing. In John’s case, as with all football greats, he became “football playing”. He was literally a slave to the game.

Every freedom has it’s corresponding bondage, and every bondage has a corresponding freedom. You can be a slave to regular exercise with healthy eating and free from the corresponding physical problems of not doing so, or you can be overweight while eating all you want without care and be a slave to the corresponding physical problems that will result.

You cannot be free to eat all the junk you want and also stay in perfect physical shape, that kind of freedom does not exist. But we’d love to have that kind of freedom wouldn’t we? After all, those fashion models in the magazines look the way they do because they were just born that way. Feh. We’d love to think we can eat all the fatty delicious burgers we want and still look slim and trim. There is no such thing as total freedom. We always have to choose our bondage and our freedom.

So choose well for life. What will be your bondage and your freedom? This is a vital move for the Christian who wants to know God. Every Christian wants a meaningful and real relationship with God, but how do we get it? Are we going to be free from sin and a slave to God or are we going to be a slave to God and free from sin? It makes sense to choose God, because the outcome is always that God wants to give us something. This is the main reason God asks something of us.

It’s not hard to see once you study the relationship of ancient Israel with God the Father, that all the Father wanted was to enter into a give and take relationship with a people special to himself. When they did as he asked, they were blessed, when they did not do as he asked, they were abandoned. It’s a hard thing to figure as to why ancient Israel would repeatedly choose other ways of doing things, like Baal worship and Asheroth, instead of clinging whole heartily to YWHW who had always looked out for them. Indeed, the rules he laid down for them can be considered some of the best guidelines for living on the Earth that mankind has ever seen. And yet, much of the slavery they DID choose often lead them to do things like sacrifice their own children in a fire. Amazing.

Basically there are five things God asks of us: He wants us to LOVE him, LOVE others, esteem ourselves, be a steward, and be a servant. In order to attain these things God asks us to :

1) Love and Worship him.

In Matthew 22:37, we read that the greatest commandment is to love God with our whole heart, our whole mind and our whole soul. That may sound daunting, and maybe you have no frame of reference for such a thing, even feeling that such a thing is beyond the call of duty. But consider that in the heavenly realm there are odd looking creatures who hang around the throne of God all day and night singing: “Holy, Holy, Holy is the Lord God, the Almighty, he was, he is and he is to come.”

I shouldn’t call them odd looking I suppose, because there is nothing that is NOT Holy in the presence of God, but my point is that not only are they Holy also, but they have a free will to do this action forever and ever. A tough concept isn’t it? Or is it? Could it be that we have a hard time conceiving of such a thing because of our own fallen state before God? But these beings indeed know something we are not aware of and find it quite normal and natural for their actions to be performed for every second of eternity. That’s how far natural man is from the presence of God.

2) Love our neighbor.

Matthew 22:39 states that the second greatest commandment is to love your neighbor as yourself. Anyone who has visited a prison, or a homeless shelter, has usually seen mankind at its lowest. Personally, I could never have been a policeman, they see mankind at its worst everyday. But you don’t need to go to prison or a rehab center to see people at their worst. You only need to work in an office in any building in America.

How hard it is to love fellow workers who are nice to you today, but tomorrow, when something goes wrong, they all start pointing fingers among themselves and may even attempt to divert blame for some misfortune from themselves and on to you; then tomorrow they act as if everything between the two of you is the same as it always was. That’s where the "rubber really meets the road," in everyday life. It’s easy to throw money at a problem down the street, but what happens in the cubicle next to you? Still loving the “backstabber”?

3) Love ourselves.

In the same scripture from above, we see the same idea about love directed toward ourselves. To fail to do this is to miss the place of value that God sees us inhabiting. In God’s relationship with Israel, He constantly strove for them to live higher lives, to be better than just animals in the dirt. Our basest desires are usually nothing but trouble, just read the tabloids and watch sensationalized television shows to understand how pervasive and, unfortunately common place, such destruction is.

It’s important to understand that when we are given direction by God to avoid things that will ultimately be our undoing, no matter how attractive those things are to our flesh, that we are not only acknowledging his place in our universe by following his directives, but we are also respecting ourselves and the importance that God himself places on us as his created beings.

4) Be a steward of our resources.

We’re the caretakers, not the owners. We’re the ambassadors, not the Kings. We are to manage our resources according to the values that God places on things and people. Everything you have is given, and allowed to be possessed. There is no other reality. We need to think very hard about the priorities we as humans place on where the money goes. Do we spend in the wrong places, and for the wrong reasons? Do we support things that seem harmless but are an affront to God?

Our Government needs to consider how wise it is, with all the economic problems we have here and now, to continue with a space program that is more of a drain on our taxes than a help. And that is just one thing that the Government needs to re-consider, there are many. When I walk around Santa Monica, California and I see a relatively small area of real estate filled with over 20,000 homeless people, not to mention the 90,000 who fill the rest of Los Angeles, I find it hard to imagine the thinking behind any Hollywood movie that costs 40 million or more to make.

How do you handle your own finances? Your own time? Your own efforts? Are you as productive as you could be? Just keep in mind that all those distractions around us in our society are merely a vacuum cleaner turned on in your wallet.

5) Give our lives away.

Rather than working every day for the accumulation of people, places and things, God wants us to be servants to mankind. Jesus himself said that he did not come to be served, but to serve. That sounds beautiful, I know, but how many of us are slaves to being a servant? (and I include myself in that diagnosis) Do you get up everyday and decide that today you are going to make someone else’s day? Or is it all about you?

Just like the ancient Israelites in their refusal to follow God’s decrees, you and I can easily slip into a daily life that is not only “Anti-God” but easily “God-less”. Who is your main concern everyday? Yourself? Those you love? You know that even Adolf Hitler had a girlfriend. How easy is it for us to just take care of our own? Yet God calls us away from that. I know it sounds harsh, but if you are not reaching out to others on a daily basis, you might as well be practicing Ba’al worship like the ancient Israelites who were banished from God’s presence.

So, okay... those are the things that God asks of us. Unlike some horrible Demigod of a B movie, or wooden idols from the tropical islands, God seeks relationship with us, for our betterment. He promises his side of the bargain is a blessing. What are those blessings?

1) In return for loving him, he wants to give us the reality we inwardly groan for. In God’s reality, the one we have trouble seeing, He is the vine and we are the branches. He wants us to experience his fullness flowing though us in a way we can only guess at in our current state. However, if we are compliant, we can know those things which have not even entered the mind of man. Everyone would long for spiritual intimacy with God if they knew it were possible. We can only be deeply satisfied with life when we are satisfied with Him. To deny this, is to admit to your fallen state before him, for that is indeed the reality of the universe and it is YOU and I who are out of sync.

2) In return for loving others, we receive rewarding relationships with them. Your quality of life has MUCH to do with your relationship with people around you. Business itself would not function if not for people, society would grind to a halt if not for people. Society is all about people, whether you realize it or not. No man is an island, and when you try to be, you suffer deeply in your own soul. Ask any advertiser if family and friends aren’t a major tenant to their public sales message. They will tell you.

3) When we see ourselves as God sees us, we have better rapport with ourselves internally. We stand on the truth that there must be value in us before God due to his actions all through human history concerning us. We are to love ourselves as God loves us, and when we do that, we hate those things about ourselves that don’t match up.

It’s annoying to constantly be tripping over our own feet spiritually. If only we could go through life without the constant breakdowns! But we CAN’T make that perfection, and God knows this, therefore he has paid the price for our imperfection before Himself and covered mankind in his grace; rather than just ending the whole thing and doing something else. He doesn’t want robots though, he only wants those whose free will are happily resigned to his leadership, and that explains a lot of why the world is the way it has been for a long time now.

4) In return for being a steward, we are freed from the tyranny of chasing after things in hopes that we are satisfied. Ask anyone who has sunk huge sums of money into public storage compartments just how they managed to get into that position, or how they can justify holding onto things that aren’t being used, but just getting older. Even Buddhist monks will tell you that to own things means you are owned by things. God wants us freed from the bondage and futility of collecting stuff for our lives. Living for this world is like flushing your hard earned money down the toilet.

5) In return for being a servant, God gives us a satisfying purpose in life. You know I am not going to talk to you about things like evolution. For evolution makes many claims that are directly opposed to Biblical truth. Much of that information is often disseminated not in the search for truth, but in the search for discrediting God, and his word. It is “disinformation”. Don’t believe that? Just consider how we all feel that we are independent from the rest of the world. Have you ever considered that the entire nation of China is your brothers and sisters? And India, and Africa. (Yes! We ARE the world.) Don’t believe that, even though DNA science has proven race to be a myth? You have been programmed by disinformation to not believe it.

We were not created to live selfishly, but for others. In a perfect world, we would each lend a hand to the next man or woman and they would lend a hand to us; by doing that we lift the whole world to a higher place. Just as an Eagle cannot be happy confined to a cage, or a fish confined to a bucket, we cannot live happily in a life consumed with ourselves. We all live in harmony and love when I pass you my sandwich for lunch while the guy next to me gives me his. We give and are given to.

When you find yourself becoming more in harmony with these precepts, you are maturing in Jesus. He knows that in these areas is found our highest good, for ourselves and for those around us. His goal is not to make us comfortable in this world with riches that only pass away, but to give us the eternal qualities of the next world, the one we all hope to see each other in some day - for eternity. If having us dragged through the mud in this life will make us more like Christ, (and keep in mind, that the whole of reality is in tune with Christ, and it is US that is out of tune,) then he will do all things necessary to make sure you are given every opportunity. It is severe, but it is mercy. It is severe mercy.

Jesus loves you. Trust him.