160 - The Rise of Christianity’s Historical Impact [A]

The Rise of Christianity’s Historical Impact
Ephesians 4:17–21
Ephesians Lesson #160
August 7, 2022
Dr. Robert L. Dean, Jr.
www.deanbibleministries.org

Opening Prayer

“Our Father, we’re thankful for Your Word. When we stop to think about it, we realize that Your Word has been preserved for the last at least 3000 years. Maybe some parts of it were composed even before that, coming together in the writing of Moses around 1500 or 1400 BC. That it has been preserved and has been given to us for the purpose of teaching us about reality.

“That there is an objective reality, that it is that reality which You created, and that You have the right as the Creator God to define reality and to determine what the standards of Your creatures are because You have created a universe that initially reflected Your righteousness and Your justice, but it’s been corrupted by sin.

“Father, there’s much about this that we need to understand, how this has played itself out in history, because that will challenge us in the way we reflect on our own thinking and our own lives and values.

“We pray that as we go through the material this morning that it will enlighten us as to what has transpired around us. We pray this in Christ’s name, amen.”

Slide 2

I want to develop an application from what we’ve been studying in Ephesians 4:17–21. I want us to remember the basic structure of the passage. It begins with an exhortation, a command that we are not to walk—not to live our lives, think, act or conduct our relationships— like the rest of the Gentiles. There’s supposed to be a demarcation.

That is described in terms of a fundamental problem which has to do with the reality of the impact of sin, that is, original sin—a concept, a doctrine that is not at all popular today. Because of the entrance of sin into the human race, we are separated from and alienated from the life of God.

This has had consequences in our abilities to understand and comprehend truth, which in turn has consequences, described in Ephesians 4:19 as having given themselves over to lewdness to work all uncleanness with greediness.

Basically, it’s a description of our world today; not much different from the world of the Apostle Paul about AD 60: a world that was immoral and had no sense of eternal absolutes. But it was a world that was beginning to be transformed by the impact of Christianity.

Coming out of this I want to look at a sort of transitional message from these five verses to what comes after it, Ephesians 4:22–5:33 which is a focus on the spiritual life.

1.      Because it is the spiritual life, the transformation of Christians in terms, first of all, of thinking.

We live in a world today where most churches would never say that. It’s a transformation based on emotion, and even if they don’t say that, they exhibit it by their methodology, which is a focus on producing a certain kind of emotion that is thought to be worshipful.

We have to understand where that came from, which means we have to take a look at history. So today you’re getting a history lesson. I will try to cover in a very broad sense the history of Christianity over the last 2,000 years. So buckle your seatbelts, you’re in for a bumpy ride!

The rise and fall of Christianity’s impact on Western Civilization developed a phenomenal impact over approximately 1,600 years. See, it’s not something that happens quickly, either in history or in our lives. It is slow, it’s incremental; it takes time to overcome the horrors of carnality and the depravity of the human mind. Then we need to understand what has happened since 1600.

Many of us have looked around, we read the paper, we hear the news, and we think, what in the world has happened? Did I somehow step through the looking glass and go down the rabbit hole and am living in some alternative reality?

I look around and people are basically calling good things evil and evil things good. This isn’t just a few people, this isn’t just some intellectual elite—that was maybe 75 years ago. Now it’s the people on the street, it’s everybody. What has happened? How did we get to this point?

We need to understand how we got to this point for two basic reasons:

1.      If we’re going to have any kind of an impact on reversing this, then we have to understand how it happened, because the reasons it happened are all spiritual. They had consequences in intellectual activity in theories and philosophies that are being played out in nearly every home in America today. So, we have to understand what the problem was, how it developed, and its impact.

2.      Coming to grips with that helps us to understand how we have internalized a lot of that human viewpoint thinking: evil thinking, the devil’s thinking or worldly thinking. Whatever we want to call it we’ve internalized it because that’s what happens when you grow up within a culture, and none of us escapes that.

Some of us have had better opportunities to get rid of a lot of it than others, simply because we were born in a solid Christian home, and we were taught the Word from the time we got out of diapers. That’s my case and a lot was done to circumvent the influence of the culture around as I grew up.

But even so, my parents were fallen sinners, and they were influenced by the worldview of their generation, just as much as anyone else. So they had their problems and their issues, and this is always the case. We need to see how Christianity’s fallen and its impact.

Slide 3

The structure:

To give us a framework, Paul gives the command in Ephesians 4:17. It’s within a series of commands on how the believer is to walk. Walking is a metaphor for how a person conducts their way of life, their way of thinking primarily, “as a man thinks in his soul, so is he.” It all starts in our mind, between our ears.

Spiritual warfare is not something the charismatics think it is: going out and doing battle with Satan, taking dominion in the name of Jesus, and all the other nonsense they have which is just another form of worldliness encapsulated within the clothing of the vocabulary of Christianity.

Spiritual warfare is what goes on between your ears, whether you focus on the truth or focus on the lie. That’s basically it; it’s pretty simple.

There’s a contrast here. We’re not to walk like the rest of the Gentiles do. In other words, we’re not supposed to think, we’re not supposed to make decisions; we’re not supposed to act like the unbelieving world acts around us.

That tells us, as I’ve said many times, if you don’t know the characteristics of the world around you, then you won’t be able to spot it when it’s in your head. We need to understand that and that the basic problem of man is the consequence of sin in its effect on our thinking.

Because man is in rebellion against God, Ephesians 4:18, our understanding’s been darkened, we’re alienated from the life of God, all of which is summarized in the phrase, “futility of the mind,” Ephesians 4:17.

And the result of that is, they’ve basically given themselves over to lawlessness, antinomianism, and lasciviousness: all of this to work all uncleanness with greediness, Ephesians 4:19. This just summarizes the way of the fallen world in trying to make life work apart from God.

The critical part here, Ephesians 4:20, “But—that means there’s a difference—you have not learned Christ this way.” None of us learned the Bible, learned Christ, or learned the doctrine from the Scriptures that way.

There should not be that compromise between what Christ says and what the world pressures us into. Let’s review these commands because we’re in the “walking” section of Ephesians 4:1–5:9 describing how Christians are to conduct their lives.

That’s not legalism; that is God saying, “I’m the Father, you’re the kid; we have certain rules in the Father’s household, and you have to follow the rules. If you don’t follow the rules, there will be consequences.

When you grow up in a home or you allow your kids to grow up in a home where there aren’t consequences for misbehavior, then you’re teaching them that it’s okay to misbehave against God as well because there are no consequences. This has had the devastating consequences that we witness in our world around us with the rise of criminality, immorality, and the complete rejection of standards—this whole postmodern relativism thing.

SLIDE 4 SKIPPED

Slide 5

Ephesians 4:17–18a says that this walk, which is related to the high position of our calling in Christ, is to be in contrast to the way the Gentiles around us think, decide and live. I say “decide” because decisions are based on values and priorities. Your decisions, your values, your priorities are going to be different. You are going to look at things differently.

Slide 6

We see in Ephesians 5:2 that we are to walk in love: the love of Christ, the love demonstrated on the cross. As Jesus gave the great commandment for the church in John 13:33–34, “A new commandment I give you, that you love one another, even as I have loved you.”

We are to love one another. This is not an emotional love; this is a mental-attitude love. We have a culture that, as a result of worldview shifts in the last 200 years, cannot think about love in terms of an objective, mental attitude separated from emotions. But that’s what love is; that’s the love of God for us.

Ephesians 5:2, we are to “walk in love, as Christ also has loved us and given Himself for us.”

Ephesians 5:8, Paul writes again about walking, “For you were once darkness, but now you are light in the Lord. Walk as children of light.”

Notice the contrast. The Gentiles walking in darkness; their understanding has been darkened. Now we are positionally light in the Lord, and we are to walk as children of light. The problem is a lot of believers are walking in darkness because they don’t understand the contrast. They’re never taught. They don’t understand how to think about what’s going on around them.

The sad thing is that a part of the movements in the last 200 years against Christianity, to destroy the impact of Christianity, is to destroy the education of people. Because if you’re not educated very well, you can’t think about the Bible, you can’t read the Bible, you can’t understand the Bible, and you can’t think your way through a lot of things.

This is extremely sad. It’s very difficult when you go as a missionary from our culture to India, Africa, Southeast Asia, or even Ukraine or Russia and try to talk about biblical things and realize they don’t have the theological vocabulary, even from Scripture, to understand what you’re talking about.

In English-speaking countries, going back to the Protestant Reformation and even before, we live in a world that has been so impacted by the Bible and the Bible has so impacted literature, that much of what we’ve read in school, especially if you’re over 40, used many different idioms that have their source in the King James Bible.

If you don’t understand the Bible then you can’t understand those idioms, so if you don’t have that kind of a heritage, it’s very difficult. You really have to reduce things to basics and build that.

I remember when Jim Myers and several others went to Mogilev, Belarus for three weeks in January 1994, how difficult it was working with translators, because you had to teach the translators theology, you had to teach them the Bible, and you had to teach them what all these words meant.

In 2000 George Meisinger and I went over to Almaty, Kazakhstan for a pastors’ conference. The room was longer than this room, a little bit narrower. It had one small 15,000 BTU window unit in the back. The external temperature was 112°, the internal temperature was 98°, and the room was packed with people.

Half of the room spoke Kazakh, no Russian or very little Russian, and the other half spoke Russian and very little Kazakh. I had a Russian translator on the Russian-speaking side of the room and a Kazakh translator on the Kazakh-speaking side of the room.

The fun day was when the Kazakh translator—who was really good, spoke in five languages, a pastor’s wife—had to take some of the students down to deal with VISA issues and things like that. So the best they could come up with was a student who could speak Kazakh and Russian but no English. So whatever I said was translated into Russian, and you weren’t really sure how accurate that was.

We fired that guy and brought in Margaret in from Kiev to straighten things out. The Russian translator was translating what I said into Russian, and then the Kazakh translator was translating what the Russian translator said into Kazakh. I have no idea what they got out of anything.

Another bad thing was that the Kazakh Bibles only had a New Testament. I was dealing with spiritual warfare in Isaiah and Ezekiel and other Old Testament passages. But the Kazakh people had never even read the Old Testament nor knew anything about it.

Welcome to the mission field! And that’s your neighborhood now, especially here in Houston. We have about 170 languages spoken in HISD. We are the most ethnically diverse city. We don’t have to go on the mission field, the mission field has come to us!

But we see that the Gentile world has no frame of reference for understanding truth, and we are light to them.

Slide 7

Ephesians 5:15, “See then that you walk circumspectly, not as fools, but as wise.”

That’s how our life is supposed to be. It is a contrast from the kids you grew up with in school, the kids with you in sorority or fraternity in college, those that you work with. There’s something different about you, and sometimes that’s going to cause problems and other times it’s not.

We have to be reminded that we are in a warfare. We are soldiers of the cross, as the hymn says. We are in warfare and we have three enemies; the world, the flesh, and the devil. The flesh is our sin nature—that’s the internal enemy. The devil is the enemy of God and he is constantly working through various systems of thought to oppose God and to destroy whatever God is doing, and that’s what we’re talking about. We have to keep this in mind.

Slide 8

2 Corinthians 10:4, “For the weapons of our warfare are not carnal but mighty in God for pulling down strongholds.”

This is not demonic strongholds—that’s how charismatics interpret this, if you didn’t know. These are strongholds of thought; that’s what he’s talking about.

2 Corinthians 10:5, “casting down arguments—that’s mental, that’s thinking, that’s logic—and every high thing that exalts itself against the knowledge of God …”

What’s opposing the knowledge of God? It’s other knowledge; it’s all about thinking. This is not about doing battle with demons or about other things that come along that are just as paganized as they can be. 2 Corinthians 10:5, we have to bring every what into captivity for Christ? Every thought.

That means the Christian life is about thinking, it’s not about emoting. But we have to learn how to think, not just what to think. It’s not just content, its methodology.

I was at lunch yesterday with some unsaved Jewish friends, and we got kind of into this topic, and just the comprehension of thinking about how you think was getting way beyond the context of lunch. But that’s what we have to do.

We need to recognize that these arguments: this high thing that exalts itself against the knowledge of God, all of these thoughts, are what make up culture. The culture is what surrounds us. There are many different cultures that we are all involved in. The culture of your home, the culture of your business environment where you work.

There’s a culture of your hobbies as you’re with different groups, whether it’s bowling or quilt-making or the NRA or something like that, every group has a different culture. They have different values; they have different ideas. Then everything in our nation is part of Western civilization.

Culture involves how we think about things: the way we live, and the way we conduct our lives, our marriages, our families. It involves government, laws, businesses, business practices, entertainment, singing, music—everything is affected by culture. There is no neutrality.

When Adam sinned everything that was part of human life was affected by sin. There’s nothing that I mention that is somehow neutral or not affected by sin and corrupted by sin.

1.      The first thing we need to remember: what culture is, how we think about things, and the values that we choose.

2.      We have to recognize as background—and I’ve heard other people say this—that culture is downstream from religious beliefs.

I describe that when I teach about worldview using the iceberg illustration where nine-tenths of the iceberg is below the surface. It starts with what we think about God, then how we know what we know, then the values that we have.

Eventually that works itself out to what’s above the waterline, which is politics, law, family life, entertainment and it all starts with what we think about God. So culture is always downstream from religious beliefs.

Another author I recently read defined culture as “religion externalized.” It’s the outworking of our religious beliefs. So whatever people say they believe may not conform to what they actually think, say, or do. What they actually think, say, or do reveals more about their fundamental core beliefs than anything else.

That’s a conflict for believers because when we are operating on the sin nature, what we think, say, or do is coming out of that sin nature, and that is in contrast to what we do believe. So there’s a conflict there for every one of us, which is the problem, the warfare that’s inside the Christian life.

3.      When we look at what we do as a society and as a culture, we see what has influenced our views of the individual, what makes a person a person: their value.

Are they in the image and likeness of God or are they just the result of an accidental electrical discharge on a gooey substance? That’s going to make a big difference. How you look at people is going to be determined by these underlying ideas. It affects law, how you view law: is law based on absolutes?

Some of these wacko district attorneys across the country in various blue states are releasing criminals left and right, and it’s happening here right now with the district attorney in Houston. They’re operating on these ideas, “They’re really going to do better if they’re out in society.”

“Wait a minute! What about the victim? What about the fact that they broke the law and there’s supposed to be punishment?” Going to prison and to jail is supposed to be punishment. This idea that it is somehow going to reform them comes out of progressive views and evolutionary views of mankind.

What undergirds the whole penal system of the United States is an absolutely bogus view of mankind, humanity, and what causes crime. It denies sin at the very get-go: crime and punishment, entertainment, music… we’ve gone through this many times.

I’ve done studies on the relationship of music to culture and to biblical worldview as well as literature, economics and politics. There has been a radical revolution over the last 150-200 years in each of these areas.

Slide 9

In the little time I have left giving this introduction, we will try to understand this. I may go over into next week, but that wouldn’t surprise you at all.

This is a timeline from the beginning of the Church Age in AD 33 up to the present.

• Across the top is the dominant worldview of western civilization through time.
• The black downward arrows show the source of the pressure against the church.

When Romans 12 says, “Don’t be conformed to the world,” the world, the Zeitgeist, the spirit of the age, is pressuring us into its mold. So every generation, every century has a worldview that is pressuring us.

• The Church is below the blue timeline.

Starting off, the Early Church, which is not a term that is technically used for the New Testament Church. It’s for the Post-Apostolic Church from about AD 100 to 1200, covering the Early Church, AD 100 to 600 and the Early Medieval Church, AD 600 to 1200. During that time period the thinking of the world was dominated by Neo-Platonism.

Slide 10

I won’t have a show of hands as to how many of you were taught anything about Platonism and Neoplatonism in high school, but I was, and I still think that’s the way it is. I know it’s different now, but that’s the way it was when I grew up.

Definitions:

Platonism is the philosophy of the Greek philosopher Plato. He was from Athens, dating to 427 to 347 BC. What’s going on in the Bible during that time? Putting it in context, this is after the return of the Jews to the land, so in the period of the restoration of the Jewish state.

Plato was Socrates’ pupil and was convinced that there were absolute standards of virtue and truth, but he didn’t know where he got them. He doesn’t really have a foundation other than his own thinking. That’s why, eventually, Rome collapsed.

He knew that absolute standards of virtue and truth existed, and that goodness came from the Greek view of wisdom [intellectual, philosophical thinking, not the skillful living of the spiritual life, which is how the Jews used the word “wisdom,”] and that evil came from ignorance and folly. That’s as defined in the dictionary of theological terms.

Plato’s system is basically one of idealism or rationalism. That’s really the terminology you have to get. He’s saying that what’s in front of us—what we see, taste, touch or hear—none of that is real. The ultimate reality is in the realm of the ideal.

If you see a triangle, it’s not perfect, nothing in this world is perfect, so there has to be a perfect triangle somewhere. That’s the realm of perfection; that’s the ideal world. So anything that’s physical and material is somehow less than ideal.

In his view anything material is corrupted; therefore, marriage is somehow corrupted because that’s physical. It’s based on a sexual intimacy and that’s got to be somehow evil. This works itself out in all kinds of different ways, but the realm of the spirit, the realm of the ideal is where ultimate reality is.

Platonism has a significant effect upon the thinking of the philosophers and theologians in the early part of the church in the early 300 or 400s,

Slide 11

It’s mostly through what came back as Neo-Platonism, which describes a philosophical school that started in the third century lasting until the sixth century. I’m quoting from the Pocket Dictionary of Church History and I would disagree with that. The influence of Platonism is not overthrown in Christianity as an external influence until you shift to Aristotle in about the 13^th century.

Slide 12

Plato is rationalism and the shift to Aristotelianism is a shift to empiricism, that you don’t have this ideal world. We come to know truth from what we hear, what we see, what we taste, what we smell; the senses; what we analyze.

There’s nothing wrong with empiricism or rationalism, but has to be under the authority of God. It can’t be autonomous, it can’t function independently of divine revelation. But in their view there is no divine revelation, so it’s the influence of Aristotelian philosophy, and it’s made most popular in western civilization by Thomas Aquinas. He opened the door, but he didn’t step through it.

The problem I have with some people like Francis Schaeffer, who said what I just said, but people get the idea that he puts more weight on Aquinas’ shoulders. I’ve got a Master’s Degree in Thomistic philosophy, so I can speak with a measure of informed knowledge on the topic.

But he opens the door to raising what we know apart from revelation to the same level as revelation. And the issue in the Bible is that the fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge and the beginning of wisdom. It is not the fear of the Lord plus your experience or plus your independent reasoning ability. The Scripture is the ultimate authority.

People throughout this time period were really working and struggling to make the Bible the ultimate authority, and in many areas they did, but there’s always this pressure and this influence from the philosophical systems around.

Slide 13

In these first 1,600 years we see the incremental ascendancy of Christian thought. It didn’t happen overnight. It took from the death of the last apostle in AD 95 until AD 325, roughly 225 years, for the church to come to a clear, solid statement explaining the relationship of Jesus Christ to the Father in terms of the Trinity, and that was done at the Council of Nicaea in AD 325.

You’ve heard about the Trinity, if you’re a believer like me, and I’ve heard about the Trinity since before I was saved. To think that this is a difficult concept to grasp is far from my understanding. It’s familiar to me in many, many ways. But that was only because these guys really sweated it out mentally to try to figure out how to articulate and explain what the Bible is teaching.

The word “Trinity” is not found in the Bible. It was coined by a theologian by the name of Tertullian in the second century, beginning of the third century. That means when you think of the Trinity and define it, you can think about the Trinity in a way that the Apostle Paul couldn’t think about the Trinity, because he didn’t have a vocabulary word for it.

That blows a lot of people’s minds. Many of you have heard about the hypostatic union your whole life. You understand what that means. That’s the union of the deity and humanity of Christ in one Person. One Person with two natures, 100% humanity and 100% deity.

I remember the first time I honed in on that. I was 14 years old. Some other kids from Berachah were sitting in the bus going to Camp Peniel started talking about the hypostatic union, and I went what? I’ve been thinking about that ever since, but for most people, they don’t have a clue.

Paul did not have that terminology. So with that terminology you can think more clearly about that than he could. It’s not that he didn’t hold to that, it’s that there wasn’t a vocabulary word for it.

There was this incremental ascendancy of Christian thought through these ages, where western civilization was being built and transformed. The external influences were pagan, the Celtic warriors who were worshiping ancestors and the Vikings who were worshiping the pantheons of Thor and all of the others in the Marvel Universe that are now becoming transgendered.

So they were dealing with that; it was a challenge, and it took centuries to embed into the culture Judeo-Christian ideas, values, and thinking.

Slide 14

In this early period were men who were influenced by Neoplatonism or rationalism, idealism, mysticism. These are all part of that mentality. People like Origen, who was considered a great church father for a couple of things that he did, most of which was wrong and heretical.

He’s the one who shifted from a literal interpretation to a spiritual interpretation. Now why did he do that? Origen said that the world under Platonism is composed of three things: You have the physical, the soul, and the spiritual. In the same way, any writing has three levels of meaning:

• The physical: the literal, historical, grammatical meaning of the text.
• The next level is the soul, so you have that meaning.
• But the really “good” meaning is the spiritual meaning, and it has absolutely nothing to do with the literal, grammatical, historical meaning of the text.

It just completely allegorizes it and there’s no objective qualifications. He basically brought allegorical interpretation into Christianity, which dominated until the Reformation.

Next is Augustine. I was reading a book dealing with a lot of these topics and the author is so reformed, it really bothers me in places. He’s always quoting Augustine who is extremely Neo-platonic. He says the real problem came with Aquinas. No it didn’t! The real problem started with Origen and Augustine in the second and third centuries because they were compromising the integrity of Scripture with Neo-platonic rationalism.

You can trace Calvinism directly back to Augustine. Calvin went to an Augustinian school in Paris. Luther was an Augustinian monk. They were deeply influenced by these entrenched Neo-platonic ideas that were there. They got away from a lot of them, but not all of them.

Next, the missions movement, which I don’t have time to really develop everything on that, but there’s some fascinating stories here, such as those of St. Patrick of Ireland.

Thomas Cahill wrote an excellent book, even though he’s Roman Catholic. And there are some problems because Patrick has been absorbed by the Catholics, but he was not a Roman Catholic. He was a Celtic Catholic; there’s a difference.

Patrick became the missionary to Ireland after he was kidnapped by pirates and taken there. He had been reared in a Christian home. Cahill calls his book “How the Irish Saved Civilization,” and that’s true. How did the Irish save civilization? Because when Patrick went back to Ireland and took the gospel to Ireland, it transformed the culture of Ireland.

They built monasteries around Ireland, and then as it made its way to North Ireland, missionaries went across and founded under Columba a monastery and a seminary for training and sending out missionaries to England on the Island of Iona, which is an island off the coast between Northern Ireland and Scotland.

They sent missionaries across to Scotland, going south. Later on they ran into the problem of Roman Catholic missionaries coming up with whom they clashed and Roman Catholic theology won.

Ulfilas took the gospel up into the Scandinavian countries. It took 200 or 300 years before the Scandinavian countries become really influenced by Christianity in terms of their culture. Boniface took the gospel into Germany, many others that I can’t even think of; King Alfred was in England.

When I was in the seventh grade [I think bit off more than I could chew] and read Winston Churchill’s four-volume set, “A History of the English-Speaking Peoples.” I didn’t know why, but at the time I remember being impacted by the fact that Alfred the Saxon was just unbelievable.

He got a rabbi to come and teach him Hebrew, then translated into Saxon parts of Exodus, parts of Deuteronomy, the Psalms, and the Book of Acts. That was the first time that there was anything translated close to the language of the people.

The reason he did that was he understood that in the history of Israel, God gave them law. Law has an objective basis in God. The first thing he translated was Exodus 20, the Ten Commandments. He translated the law and developed a legal system called the Dooms of Alfred.

“Dooms” is Saxon for law and is the foundation of English common law, which became the foundation for American law, the thinking behind the founding documents. You can’t attack the Constitution and the Declaration unless you’re dealing with about a thousand years of the influence of biblical Christianity on English thinking in terms of jurisprudence.

All of this is happening in the early period before 1000. Then around 1000 or 1100 some of the monastic orders developed and the rise of the Dominicans who were working out their understanding of the rights of the individual, property rights and where these rights come from.

Some of the language that they developed stays within western civilization, stays within the Protestant church after the Reformation, and ends up in something called the Declaration of Independence.

People want to trace it back to John Locke, but John Locke didn’t come up with that. It goes back to the 12^th-13th century with the Dominicans. This is what built western civilization, which continued into the Reformation. The high watermark was at the Protestant Reformation—called “Protestant” because they were protesting what the Roman Pope was doing.

Along the same way, by the mid-300s the Roman Empire made homosexual activity illegal because it attacks marriage and family. As Christianity influenced the Greco-Roman world, they realized some things about behavior, ethics and about morality, so they began to outlaw homosexuality.

This becomes embedded within Roman Catholic thinking, which of course is the only Christianity until the Protestant Reformation in 1600. (This is the rise, we will talk about the fall next week).

Jeremy Bentham was a philosopher, who was openly hostile to God. An atheist, he rejected the Bible and any legal theory that’s based on the Bible. He hated Blackstone’s commentaries. Every single Founding Father in America read Williams Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Laws of England. It came out in the 1760s, and Bentham was totally against it.

He was also pro-homosexual and he laid the groundwork. Homosexuality was practiced, but you didn’t have anybody trying to bring it out of the shadows from the fourth century until Jeremy Bentham. That’s amazing! That’s the influence of Christianity.

It changed how people thought about the divine institutions, about marriage and family. It changed how they thought about government and about nations. Were there distortions and abuse? Of course there was, because we’re corrupt people and nobody’s going to have a perfect government or a perfect country. Fast-forward a minute to where we are today.

What made America great was Christianity, because that’s what made Western Civilization great. That’s what transformed the ancient world in the early Church, the ancient Church, and the Medieval Church. It was transforming Western Civilization, then through missionary activity, it transformed the world,

It was through a clear understanding of the Church and Christianity, and it all has to be Bible-based. We live in a world today when most churches don’t even know what it means to be Bible-based.

I’ve been a pastor for 40 years. I don’t have a church office phone at home, so I don’t get these kinds of calls anymore. But when I was a pastor in my first and second churches, I had a church phone on my desk and I would get all kinds of calls.

People would call and say, “Are you a Bible teaching church?” “Yes.” “Oh! I just love to learn the Bible.” Then they would show up and never come back because what they thought of as a Bible lesson wasn’t a Bible lesson. It was this garbage that dominates the airwaves.

I got a story from one of my favorite chaplains in the jail department. He wrote me yesterday and said, “I had to tell an inmate bad news today, and in doing so I told him he needs to get into a good Bible-based teaching church, so he can know how to stand on God’s promises and walk in truth through trials and tribulations. Motivational speaking doesn’t do anything for you.

I told his mom that I gave him a study Bible and that he needs a good Bible-based teaching church.” His mother said. “Thank you so much. We go to Lakewood, so he is a member of a Bible-based church.” Really? If God was still striking people dead with lightning for blasphemy, she’d be dead, she’d be a goner.

That’s why we are where we are. The church is now all about motivation and emotion, details of which we will get into next time.

Slide 15

It’s important here to see the rise of the church through the Middle Ages, and this development of the principles of individual freedom, private property. The beginnings of a “back to the Bible” movement with John Wycliffe, who was translating the Bible into English in the 14^th century.

John Hus in Czechoslovakia wanted to put the Bible into the language of the people. The Protestant Reformation’s high watermark was the English-speaking peoples.

Imagine in your mind a picture of a world map, draw a line between all the Christian countries and the non-Christian countries. Pretty much Europe, North America, and South America are Christian, and almost everything else is not, except for Tonga and Zambia which are Christian nations. Everybody else is Muslim or pagan or Hindu, etc.

Then look at that area influenced by western civilization and separate that which was influenced only by Roman Catholicism: Spain, France, Italy, and the Balkans. Other areas east of there would be influenced by Eastern orthodoxy.

Draw a line there, Germany as Protestant, Holland, the British speaking countries, Scandinavia, all influenced by Protestantism. Then take a line and separate the English-speaking peoples. They took this study of the Bible to heights no one else did in terms of its cultural impact on law, economics, literature, and everything.

That’s not racism, that’s biblicism. What made English-speaking people great was the Bible. People who want to come along and make some comment about racism, have distorted history. They are the products of a progressive education.

Does it mean they were perfect? No, it does not mean they were perfect, but they were better than anybody else. That’s why people want to come to America. That’s why people wanted to go to England and be under that kind of government, because they had freedom, they had liberty, and they had prosperity. It wasn’t perfect, but it was better than everybody else because they had a greater impact from the Bible.

The progressive thinking today—we will see how that developed next time—has led to the fall. There are people today who have already written the obituary for western civilization. I think that’s premature, but if nothing happens, if there’s no spiritual change and shift to the gospel, then these obituaries will come true. Because Christianity made western civilization what it was.

The people who lived there in those areas originally were barbaric. They were involved in human sacrifices, in pantheism, worshiping Mother Earth, all of these horrible things were going on. They practiced slavery and all kinds of things. It was the impact of Christianity that changed things, so we have to keep that in mind.

That’s what Paul’s talking about here. And he is saying that we can’t live like that, we can’t think like that, we can’t act like that as Christians. We have to stand against it, we have to tear down the strongholds. That’s the battle today.

This will lead us into understanding that and why it’s so important to understand what he says about the spiritual life in the coming section. Next time we will look at the decline and fall of western civilization and Christendom.

Closing Prayer

“Father, thank You for this opportunity to think about these things, to see in the laboratory of human history the consequences of biblicism and the results when biblicism is compromised with the thinking of the world. We know that there’s only these two options: We think like the devil or we think like You. There’s no other option.

“Father, we pray that if anyone here is not saved, that if they were to die today, tomorrow, the next day, they don’t know where they would go, the Bible is very clear that everyone of us is born dead in our trespasses and sins, but if we trust in Christ, then at that instant God makes us alive together with Him, raises us with Him, and seats us positionally with Christ at the right hand of the Father.

“So that when we die physically, we are absent from the body and face to face with Him. We don’t do it by good works. We don’t do it by achievement. We don’t do it through morality. We don’t do it through ritual. We do it by simply trusting in Christ, the Jewish Messiah: the Lamb of God who took away the sin of the world.

“Father, we pray that You would make that clear to anyone who needs to hear that. We pray this in Christ’s name, amen.”