How We Got Into This Religious Mess (Part 1)

This is Sunday morning. Why on earth aren’t you in church? And it’s about 9:45… Okay, it’s Sunday morning. It’s about 9:45… We’re in Ohio, and today’s my birthday.

I want to tell you how we got in the mess we’re in. I think the first thing we need to understand is that there is a Western mentality, and it is neither sacred nor holy. In fact, it’s not even superior to an Oriental mentality. The Oriental mentality in America right now has been getting some hard licks. You know, the Oriental religion has gotten into the Christian faith, etc., etc., etc. Well, I tell you, I can’t think of anything better, and I’m going to get hung for this, for the Oriental mentality to get into the Christian faith in the West, for the simple reason my Lord was an Oriental. Are you aware of that? Anything east of Constantinople, that’s Istanbul, is Oriental. Have you ever heard of the Oriental Express? It ended, well, it actually ended in Vienna, but then you caught another train over to Istanbul.

The Western mind is not conducive to the Christian faith. We are Westerners, and we’re hauling the Western mind around. I’m not excited about getting into it—Chinese stuff or Japanese or any of that—but I am telling you that the Jewish people were saved from being Western. And it goes a little deeper than that. We have established, without realizing it, that the only way to appreciate, understand, and be part of the Christian faith is with a Western mind, and this has been so destructive, so I’m going to talk to you a little bit about the origin of the Western mind. I want you to listen really carefully.

This all goes back to the Greeks and to the Greek islands. Let’s go back to about 500 B.C., when so many things that we do today were solidified. There were two major schools of thought at that time, and one triumphed over the other, and we’ve been suffering from it ever since.

There was the Pythagorean school, and there was the Ionian school. This is the Ionian school—it derives its name from the Ionian Islands off the coast of Greece. One can be simply explained as the thinkers, and the others would be explained as the investigators or the experimenters. The thinkers triumphed over the—may I use the word—the empiricist. There was that which was the empirical and that which was not the empirical. The Pythagoreans said that you can think without even moving and, using logic, you can understand and figure out just about everything in the universe. The Ionians said, “Watch the stars move, figure them out, cut a frog open, see what it looks like inside.” If the Ionians had won… I am convinced that we would probably have gone to the moon around 600 A.D. I will repeat that: if the Ionians had won, we would have probably gone to the moon around 600 A.D. How I came up with that is that from the time the Ionian school came back during Roger Bacon and Francis Bacon, it was from that point until July the 18th, 1968, that we went to the moon.  600 years. That’s how long it took. That’s all it took.

Until Francis Bacon and Robert Bacon came along, there was the triumph of the—and I’m going to use the Pythagorean Aristotelian mind. The Pythagorean Aristotelian mind. Now, Pythagoras, you know his theorem; you had to learn it in the ninth grade. Well, he believed that all things could be figured out mathematically and logically. This was picked up by Socrates. You know, you’ve heard of Socratic philosophy. I’m trying to appeal to your intellect here. Then along came Plato, one of Socrates’ students, a little more mystically inclined. He wrote The Republic, and he wrote that and was financed by it for the simple purpose of presenting and writing what a republic would be, but justifying the fact that that republic, that democracy, that republic, could still have slaves. Now, I’m just tearing open those things that most of us are not aware of.

Now there came after him perhaps one of the three or four greatest minds in human history. Let’s see if I can list all the great minds of human history: Aristotle. Thomas Aquinas. Augustine. Einstein. I bet I’m leaving out some. Newton, thank you. Madam Curie. Well, I’ll throw in Madame Curie. That’s fine. Who else? John Darby. And, of course, Gene Edwards. (laughter)

You have to have a very high IQ to even begin to comprehend, let alone think you comprehend, what Aristotle said. Aristotle gave us, for instance, the sermon. He gave us the outline. He was the gentleman who said that everything you talk about must begin with a definition, and then he simply gave us logic: inductive, deductive reasoning. Now, Aristotle is in this room, and you may not know it, but he’s in the head of every human being here. You probably met him for the first time in the third grade when your teacher got up there and taught you how to outline something. That’s fine. So now we outline every book in the New Testament, which kills it right on the spot.

Aristotle walked through a grove speaking, and his students followed him and wrote what he said. It was a grove of trees. They were Academia trees, and that’s where we get the word academics. He is the father of the university; he is the father of classrooms. He is the father of universities, colleges, and high schools. Unfortunately, he is also the father of seminaries and Bible schools. He’s the father of every Bible dictionary you’ve picked up; he’s the father of just about every sermon you’ve ever heard. Begin with a clear introduction and have a very clear conclusion. Use illustrations. Have three or four main points. These are the subjects of his dissertations on rhetoric. Or, if you don’t know what rhetoric means—making a speech. Are you impressed yet? I mean, is this making any sense to you? You might be a little shocked here.

He and his thoughts were sitting across the Western world the day that Paul of Tarsus landed in the city of Philippi, and that mind was waiting to receive the Christian faith. It was not a mind that had universities and colleges. It was not a mind that had sermons. Men made speeches, but they just made speeches. They were not captured in an outline. Now, you must understand that, as a seminary graduate, I sat in class and was taught, and even my professors did not know that I was being taught Aristotelian rhetoric. We used to joke about what we were taught: the sermon has a clear introduction, three points, a conclusion, a deathbed story, and a poem. That’s not all. The movie stars of that age were the orators. The only places where orations are left are in politics and in the Christian faith, and every Sunday morning, you are treated to an oration, which, by the way, virtually never has anything to do with the Scripture. Most of it is topical rather than exegetical, which means he can speak on anything. We get up on Sunday morning, and he brings a message that brings you to tears. It’s got nothing to do with the Bible. You could have heard it—take the words of Jesus and the Lord out of it—and you could have heard it down somewhere in some secular place.

We were taught in the seminary that the preaching of the Word of God was everything. Preach the Word. Preach the Word. Forget the fact that you never functioned. Forget the fact that you’re sitting there with calluses on your posterior end. Forget the fact that you have no idea what he’s saying. The sermon, the preaching, is everything. Preach the Word.