How We Got Into This Religious Mess (Part 1)

Now I’m going to make an outrageous statement. I doubt that there is a man this morning in America who’s standing up preaching the Scripture. There are men preaching verses, but Scripture, no. Why would you say that, Gene? Because they don’t know the story, and if you don’t know the story, the Scripture becomes a tool in your hand, for which you can do anything and come up with anything, because we are fascinated, enamored with, focused on, and addicted to the individual sentence, out of which we just create all sorts of things, and that’s where that is.

Now, let me go back to Aristotle and to that age. We’re going to make several runs through history to pick up different lines. Here is the Aristotelian mind; in comes the Christian faith. The Aristotelian mind is a schematic. No matter what it hears, it doesn’t matter—it runs it through a schematic. That schematic will corrupt and pervert anything it hears. If you don’t know what a schematic is—they don’t do this anymore—but when television sets first came out, there was always a schematic on the back. It showed the little plug on it, showed the screen, and then all these little lines were running everywhere. Electricity comes in. If the lines run this way, you’ve got a TV set. If they run that way, you’ve got a radio. If they run this way, you have a CD. You run another way; you have a camera. That’s the course of the electricity that creates something here.

There was the Aristotelian schematic, and they received the Christian faith, and they brought it through their logic, their thoughts, their patterns, their reasoning, their inductions, their deductions, and they came up with something that was an invention of man—and that’s theology. Theology was called during the Middle Ages, “The Queen of Sciences.” There’s no science to theology, but the fact of the matter is, theology, which I was taught in the seminary—and you would be if you went there—theology is the child of philosophy, Aristotelian philosophy.

You come to the Bible, and you pick this out and this out and this out and this out, and you gather it together, and you look at it, and you begin to make logical conclusions. Unfortunately, you are saying, when you make your logical conclusions, “This is the Word of God,” when in fact it is nothing in the world but the leaps, the gymnastic contortions of philosophy coming to certain conclusions. Theology is the child of pagan philosophy. Now, this played havoc with the Christian faith, and one of the things it played havoc with is knowing the Lord. How can you possibly know the Lord when basically you are analyzing God to death? You’re analyzing church to death. There is ecclesiology, which comes from the word ekklesia, meaning “assembly” or “gathering”; we unfortunately use the word “church”. The study of the church. This, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, put it together—ecclesiology—preach it, that’s what it is. It is not: it is a series of verses put together, interpreted by leaps of logic, and presented to you as the Word of God.

I went to the Christian Booksellers Convention last week, and so that’s why I’m all tied up in knots here. At no time did anyone ever make any effort to find out what the first-century story was. If I had my way, I would pass a law that no man in the world could minister without first creating a complete, total, absolutely finished model of the first century. We have models in science. We have models on the debate between creation and evolution. We have models in education. We have models in medicine. We have models in thermonuclear astronomy. We have models in everything, but we don’t have a Christian model.

Therefore, when we are turned loose out of the seminary, or you go to a Bible class, you’re just shooting right, left, and middle. And every time a problem comes up, you get a verse, and you shoot somebody with it. New problem, another verse—shoot somebody with it. Where is the totality? Where is the overriding fence that holds us within sanity? It’s not there. You can’t keep up with a preacher. You can’t keep up with a home Bible class. Every time there’s a problem, there’s a verse. New problem, different verse. There will always be new inventions to take care of this problem that just came up, knock you over the head, and make you feel guilty because you are not obeying the Word of God. Are you following me? Does this make any sense? This is not the Word of God. This is a verse used as a spear to scare the living daylights out of you and to get you to conform. You don’t need to conform. All you need is a brother’s meeting. Honest to goodness, that’s the truth. You can just turn brothers and sisters loose. Just as long as you have brothers’ meetings, the church will hold together. You don’t need a bunch of verses.

Let’s go back and take another look at this. We’ll go back to our origins here. As early as Tertullian, as early as Ignatius—I know most of you have never even heard of these people. Oh boy, as early as Origen, that’s a man down in Egypt; interesting fellow. He took over his father’s class in teaching the Bible and teaching theology when he was 17 years old. I’m reluctant to tell you this, but I just want you to be shocked this morning. He had himself castrated so that he would not be concerned about his flesh, and he has built a large part of Christian theology. I don’t want a 17-year-old kid who’s missing bodily parts affecting my understanding of the Word of God. Excuse me.

Then came Jerome. I’m sorry, y’all forgive me, but have you ever heard of Jerome? He was—I’ve forgotten which country he came from, maybe somebody can tell me—but he moved to Jerusalem. This is in about the 300s. Have you ever read any of his writings? He was the meanest, most legalistic human being. According to what’s left to us, he would teach every day, and mostly he would rant and rave against marriage and sex. Will Durant, who is the dean of historians, said, “I think this man probably had a lot of lust inside of him.” And Jerome gave us the Latin Bible with this kind of mentality coming out of it. He was a legalist, legalist.

Then there was… oh gosh, what was the guy’s name who was the first monk or priest? Was it Domitian or was it the other fellow? I get the two of them mixed up. I’m doing this obviously without notes. Anyway, there was a lot of Eastern influence on a movement back during those days. Some people began to assume the Christian faith was corrupt, so they decided that they would get away from it and live a pure life. This was the beginning of the monks in the monastery. Do you know where they went? They’re called the Desert Fathers and are really looked up to in the Catholic religion. They moved out into the Sinai Desert, lived in caves, and fasted. Have you heard of the town of St. Simeon in California? It’s named after a man who got up on, I think, a 50-foot pillar, had a three-foot square. He stayed up there his entire adult life, and every day, some other monks sent him up three figs in water. He lived up there to get away from sin, and he has been sainted by the Roman Catholic Church. There’s a story told of a man who… Y’all forgive me, but sometimes church history is funny and paradoxical. These guys all vowed to stay away from women, and there’s a story about a caravan going through the desert, and for some reason, a woman was left alone out there, and she was lost, and she came to one of these caves, and this man had not seen a woman in so very, very long, he raped her. Let me tell you something: celibacy is a dumb idea.

Now, I’m going to ask you to hold the monks for just a minute, and we’ll come back to them and how they have profoundly affected our lives, but the next time you hear somebody standing up and saying, God’s people are not pure enough, and we’ve got too much of this and too much of that, and there’s too much sin going on, just remember this: whoever’s preaching sure does think an awful lot about sex. Once you go back and meditate on that, it will change your life. It really will.

So that is another outgrowth of those early days. Now we have to look at another one. All of these early philosophers got saved and wrote. Now, unfortunately, their writings are about all that survived the later invasion of the Muslims. There was probably a great deal more written, but it was not circulated as much. There’s probably another story, but that’s all that’s left. Unfortunately, historians have read these stories… these philosophers-turned-Christians… have read their writings and made a really ridiculous conclusion: that, based on what these writings are, that’s what the Christian faith looked like. Someone said that if the only thing that was left in writing in the 20th century was Paul Tillich…have you ever heard of this man…what kind of conclusions would you come to as to what the church looked like? It would be very distorted. Paul Tillich is a well-known philosopher. Wrong, but a philosopher. Christian philosopher. Those writings profoundly affected the Catholic Church, and we really still are Roman Catholics. Whether you realize it or not, we’re still Roman Catholics. And if you don’t believe that, you should have been with me last week.

Did you ever hear of the man Tetzel? Do you know who he was? He was a guy coming through Worms, Germany, selling indulgences. So, if you bought the indulgence, you could go out and sin. It let you indulge, and he was selling these trinkets: buy them, and you would be absolved of what you were going to do. They were trying to enlarge the Catholic Church, St. Peter’s Cathedral in Rome. I expected that Tetzel to be down one of those aisles any minute; that whole building is full of indulgences. Wear a T-shirt for God. Oh, I’m not going to get into this. That mentality is still with us.