Drinking from the Poisoned Wells of the Cultural Revolution
E-Book, Englisch, 224 Seiten
ISBN: 978-1-73219-527-1
Verlag: Isaac Publishing
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1 INTRODUCTION The Church in the West once blazed strongly. For centuries, the Bible was at the heart of European culture and the cultures of North America and Australasia. Society at all levels recognised God at work in the world and gave allegiance, even if nominally, to the Lord Jesus Christ. From the stronghold of ‘Christendom,’ the Gospel was carried across the globe. The fire is now dying. The flame is faintly flickering. It has burned down to the embers, though not extinguished. In pockets, the Church burns brightly. Many evangelical and Pentecostal churches are growing. Christianity burns strongly in the Caribbean and amongst Afro-Caribbean communities in the diaspora. Eastern Europe Catholics remain robust in their faith a generation after communism ended, and bring the blaze with them when they move to western Europe, North America or Australasia. Middle Eastern Orthodox Christian refugees show their Western hosts that they are not ashamed of their faith. Sadly, these are exceptions. The Christian Post reported a 2017 study revealing that for each person in the UK brought up with no religion who later embraces Christianity, there are 26 people brought up as Christians who turn agnostic or atheist. In 2011, The Independent estimated that as many as 5,000 British people convert to Islam every year. The Western Church is rapidly declining and, if trends continue, many who are reading these pages in 2017 — the 500th anniversary of the Reformation — will live to see it die — unless God graciously intervenes. Why is Christianity dying? When a fish goes bad, the rot starts at the head and then spreads to the body. Since the 1960s, Christian leaders have progressively betrayed the Gospel. The starkest example of this is aping the culture to affirm, bless and engage in pansexual lifestyles. This, lamentably, is merely one example of a wide-ranging liberalism that readily bends the beliefs of historic Christianity to avoid any confrontation with secular society. Many ordinary Christians, clergy and pastors struggle to remain faithful, but they are betrayed by the treachery of the hierarchy. In 1517, Martin Luther nailed his 95 Theses to the church door in Wittenberg, sparking off the Reformation. Luther was doubly troubled by corruption within the Church and the Ottoman armies marching across Europe under the banner of Islam. Half a millennium later, the same twin threats confront the Church in the West, albeit this time Islam is advancing by mostly non-violent means. There is also a third threat that Luther did not have to face — humanism. The New Civic Religion (Patrick Sookhdeo, 2016) charts the trajectory of the bold yet subtle strategy of humanism. The humanist leaders were zealous and creative evangelists, surpassing the fervour of Christian missionaries. The results are now plainly visible. In less than a generation, the humanists successfully uprooted Western culture from its Judaeo-Christian foundation on rock and transplanted it to a humanist edifice built on sand. Humanism atomised Western society to the cult of fragmented individualism, making the word society sound strange and unfamiliar. Humanism bulldozed Biblical morality and replaced it with licensed permissiveness. Humanism offered a new distorted prism through which the brave new West could view the Church. Christians were no longer seen as the ‘good guys’ but as the ‘bad guys’ or at best the ‘laughably foolish guys.’ The Old Testament prophets condemned ‘those who call evil good and good evil’ (Isaiah 5:20). A more accurate description of our society is not possible. The leadership of Anglo-Saxon Christianity charge down the hill like the Gadarene swine, eager to keep up with or even outdo contemporary culture as it swiftly dissolves into decadence. We are seeing the horrifying prophetic vision of debauchery in the Jerusalem Temple where the 70 elders continued their placid worship while the walls were crawling with forbidden and detestable animals (Ezekiel 8:6-11). Western Christianity has sold its identity for a mess of pottage. Christians no longer know who they are and so cannot withstand the multipronged attacks on their faith. People who have forgotten their past have no hope of a future. We will examine this all-important loss of Christian identity in Chapter 8. Meanwhile, we grasp at metaphors to describe the comatose and life-threatening nature of the Church’s predicament. The Church has been poisoned. The flames have been doused and all but quenched. The rot is endemic. Christianity is decaying and going down the gutter because the God of modern Christianity is not the God of the Bible. — A. W. Tozer (1897-1963) On 8 April 1966, Time magazine’s cover page shouted out a three-word question: ‘Is God Dead?’ The death of God article asked if religion in general and Christianity in particular was relevant in an age where communism, science and technology were making great strides. Then, 97% of Americans believed with absolute certainly in the existence of God. Fifty years later, that number has been whittled down to 63%, says a Pew study. God may not be dead, but Christianity is dying out across the Western world (Lipka, 2015). The projections are alarming. Popular publications scream out scary headlines. ‘Christians are leaving the faith in droves and the trend isn’t slowing down’ (Business Insider, 28 April 2015); ‘US Christians numbers “decline sharply”’ (BBC News, 12 May 2015); ‘Church attendance drops to lowest rate EVER as UK faces “anti-Christian” culture’ (The Express, 13 January 2016) and ‘2067: The end of British Christianity’ (The Spectator, 13 June 2015). Adapted from Aggregate Religiosity Index, updated from Grant, Sociological Spectrum, 2008 One of the most comprehensive studies measuring the religiosity of the United States from 1952 to 2013, was conducted by sociologist Professor Tobin Grant (Grant, 2014). After reviewing a number of measures of religiosity based on information about attendance at worship services, church membership figures, prayer, and feelings toward religion, Grant concluded that the United States is in the midst of what he described as the ‘the Great Decline.’ Grant contrasts this with the period he calls the ‘the Great Awakening’ shortly after the end of the Second World War, during which Christianity experienced a revival of sorts. American Christianity nosedived in the 1960s and 1970s, partly as a reaction to the Vietnam War. People began to question authorities and institutions, Church and state. After the 1970s, Christianity in the US remained relatively stable until the turn of the millennium. Since then, Christianity has plummeted far more sharply than in the 1960s and 1970s, and twice as fast. The number of atheists and ‘nones’ (people who are not atheist but who have no religious affiliation) is growing dramatically. Christianity plays far less of a role than in any other period since the 1950s. Correspondingly, the number of those professing belief in Christianity is plunging at an alarming rate, not just in the US, but right across the West. In the UK, fewer children are being born into families calling themselves Christian. The British census found that the number fell by 5.3 million between 2001 and 2011. ‘One day the last native-born Christian will die and that will be that,’ commented The Spectator, calculating that, if 2015 rates of decline continued, Anglicanism would disappear from Britain by 2033 and indigenous Christianity by 2067. According to the British Social Attitudes survey, in 1983 over two-thirds of the population said they were Christian, but in 2017 this figure was down to 41% while 53% said they had no religion. In 1983, 40% of the population identified themselves as Anglican; by 2017 this had fallen to 15% (3% for the 18-24 age range). Between 2012 and 2014 some 1.7 million souls abandoned the Church of England, averaging 16,000 per week. (Thompson, 2015; Rudgard, 2017) In March 2016, the British Mennonites held their last service, ending 400 years of history. Ed Sherit, a Mennonite elder, explained, ‘As with many Christian churches, we failed to convince the next generation that following Jesus is the best way. We lost the next generation.’ Reporting on the Church shutting its doors forever The Guardian (Sherwood, 2016) commented, ‘Another factor in the church’s decline was the changing attitudes towards religion in society generally. In the 2011 census about a quarter of the UK population reported that they had no religion, up more than 10 percentage points since the previous census in 2001.’ A significant proportion of the declining UK Christian population describing themselves as belonging to the Church of England admit to being ‘cultural’ Christians. The actual attendance figures of the Church of England paint a dismal picture. In 2016, the number of people attending weekly services dropped to...
