How We Got Into This Religious Mess (Part 1)

Okay, let’s come to a man who has profoundly affected us. He was probably one of, if not the greatest, orators who ever lived. He got saved, unfortunately, and his name, even before he was saved, my understanding, his name was John Golden Mouth. He got to be…boy, this man has affected us…he got to be head of the church in Antioch. His sermons still exist. They are pagan to the core in their floweriness, in their beauty, in the way they captivate you. Do you not understand the power of great oration? If you do not and have not, then go listen to a great British preacher. Not an American. “Oh, brethren, we are gathered today here in the presence of God to worship our dear Lord Jesus.” Man, that’s good oratory.

(John Chrysostom) He’s the father of the funeral. Christians didn’t have funerals until John Chrysostom came along. He loved to preach at a funeral. So today, we Christians, Protestants though we may be, we’re going to funeralize you. We’re going to put you in a casket. I’m going to bring a message. Then we’re going to take you out and bury you, and I, the minister…you might as well put a priestly robe on me…I’m going to pray over the grave. You’re going to come by, shake my hand, and thank me. I’m going to enjoy that. I have comforted the sorrowful. That’s not church life. That’s a heathen funeral.

Anyway, John Chrysostom, so profound, is the father of the Protestant sermon. We have two great heroes, John Chrysostom and Charles Haddon Spurgeon. Just about half of the sermons you have ever heard preached in your life were preached initially in the Metropolitan Church in London, England, by Charles Haddon Spurgeon; at least half of them. Honest. He is our great hero.

Alright, we’re going back again to pick up some more. Another one of those philosophers who got saved was a gentleman named Ambrose. Have you ever heard how Ambrose became a Christian? You don’t know about Ambrose? He’s the mayor of Milan, and they were trying to pick a new bishop for the city of Milan. He came, and he was the mayor of the city, to see who they were going to pick, and a little boy said, “Let’s have Ambrose.” And everybody said, “Yeah, let’s have Ambrose.” And Ambrose said, “I’m not a Christian.” Well, they said, “That’s all right. Just go ahead and be our bishop. You’ll get saved somewhere along the line.” And he did, and he did a lot of writing. Now, we’ll hold on to that, too.

Then there was Augustine, who lived in a town called Hippo. Does anybody know where Hippo is? You ignorant people. No wonder we preachers get away from it so much, huh? Where was Hippo? That’s right. Thank you very much. North Africa. He wrote extensively. I’m not sure, but he either died right at 400 A.D. or 500. I’ve forgotten which, and maybe somebody could help me here… 500 A.D., thank you very much. Now listen very carefully. A man was born in about 500 A.D., or just as Mr. Augustine was dying. He grew up in Rome, which had a population of about 7,000 at the time, but nobody knew that, because very few people travelled. He became the bishop of Rome, and he is considered two things: the first pope—real, genuine pope—and the first medieval mind. If you don’t know what that is, that’s a mind filled with darkness and goblins, ghosts, and spirits. It’s a combination of the extreme heathenism and the Christian faith mingled together. He rose to be pope. He’s called Gregory the Great.

Gregory made a statement: everything written by Christians previous to me is equal to Scripture. This is the classic era. Later, because of Augustine’s writings, it has been said that Augustine and Thomas Aquinas baptized Aristotle and made him a Christian. You don’t understand that. Aristotle must have died around 300 B.C. Okay. Because these men were such students of Aristotle, everything written in that era, from before Gregory the Great back all the way to the New Testament, the writings of Augustine were as strong and as powerful as the Book of Romans, and that’s still true to this day.

For instance, Augustine stated: “If a man were to…” How did he say that exactly? “If a man were to force you through physical pain to become a Christian, you should be grateful to him.” And upon that sentence was built all the persecution, all the state burning, all the decapitations, and all the drowning of Roman Catholic history. You think that’s dead? Then you ought to be a Christian worker outside the organized church, and you will find out that evangelicals can kill, too. That they are absolutely ruthless. Now you don’t know that. You go to the nice church on Sunday morning and cannot believe that. Get out here in my world, and you’ll find out how vicious the evangelical world can be. And God help us all. May the Lord save us from the Internet. I have no idea where we’re going to go from here, but all I can get from my impression is that there are a whole bunch of madmen getting on the Internet just slicing everybody that exists.

Let me tell you what else Gregory the Great did. He blessed the monks. He raised Augustine up to being inspired Scripture. He said all priests must be celibate and all nuns must be celibate. They must not have a husband. They must not have a wife. He invented—no, he didn’t invent, he stole from paganism—the idea of bones and relics, meteorites and things like that being sacred, and made the statement there could be no… Well, it actually came later. There could be no cathedral unless you had the bones of a saint in it. He’s the man who invented all this stuff of healing by touching these relics and giving great power to them. There was a dark, heathen mind at work, and he wrote voluminously, and he’s in some ways the father of Roman Catholicism. He turned it in that direction and established it with a structure.

He claimed to be the Vicar of Christ. He’s the brother who came up with the idea—if he was a brother—he came up with the idea that he was the direct descendant of Peter, and the church in Rome was the very place where all things had to be said, and that anything that he said was equal to Scripture if he was speaking cathedral, that is, with his hat on. His tri-hat, three things: ruler of Hades, of death; ruler of earth; ruler of heaven. One other thing that man did—we’re never going to live it down—he wrote a thesis on the pastoral duties of a priest. I used to have, and lost, a list of all the books I could find… and I’m not going to do this again… it was three or four or five pages of all the books now in print by Roman Catholics on the pastoral duties of the Roman Catholic priest. And this is the root of the present-day pastor, Protestant pastor. He didn’t come to be out of the Scripture. He came to be out of Roman Catholicism and the writings of Gregory, and when Martin Luther came along, he began speaking of the pastoral duties of a Lutheran priest.

There was a brother named Hubmaier, who later became an Anabaptist, who wrote letters home. He was training under Martin Luther and was telling about one of the things Luther was teaching: the sevenfold history and the pastoral duties of a Lutheran priest. Out of that has grown up the evangelical pastor who has absolutely no scriptural grounds for existence.

Every once in a while, I make that statement, and this shows how bad off we are. Someone will say, “But Gene, pastors are mentioned in the Bible, in the New Testament, in the Book of Ephesians.” What’s wrong with us? Because some obscure word, never used any other time in the Scripture—pastor teacher, or pastor, comma, teacher, depending on how you want to look at it—one word, and then we take everything we’ve got today that evolved out of heathenism and Roman Catholicism and take that and put that into that word and say, “The present day pastor is scriptural because that word exists in the Bible.” Do you understand what I’m saying? This shows some of the problems we’ve got.

Now, I’m going to do a quick run-through, which I consider extremely important. Hold on to your hat. Martin Luther. Let’s go back and find out about us Protestants. Martin Luther just happened to be a certain kind of monk. Do you know what order he belonged to? Very good. The Augustinian monks. And who is Augustine? He’s a guy from Hippo who was a philosopher who got saved. And what was the philosophy he was following? Aristotle.