The Paper Pope

With the advent of the printing press in the 17th century, the Bible was made available to ‘common’ men, not just clergy. The Roman Catholic Church opposed this as reckless, calling these translations a “paper pope,” meaning that Protestants had abandoned papal authority and replaced it with a “pope” on paper—the written Word.
 
Over the 2,000 years of church history, the authority of the written Word has repeatedly come under attack. Now again we are witnessing the decline of respect for the authority of Biblical teaching. I am not referring to liberal theologians, but to 21st century pastors who no longer teach the authority of God’s Word. They teach things like “Become a Better You: 7 Keys to Improving Your Life Every Day,” i.e., what people want to hear, not what they need to hear.

There is still a remnant that refuses to compromise the Biblical message. The infallible Word of God is the last word, the final authority; and they will submit to no other. It is time for a “new” protestant movement, a new generation of believers for whom the Holy Bible is indeed their “pope” on paper!

Evolution: the Greatest Paradigm Shift in Human History

Before Darwin introduced his ideas on evolution, there were few atheists. Men would look in to the Universe and see that everything had to have a supernatural origin. How else could you explain how things came into being? And that’s what Darwin did. He explained how man came into being without God. A product of the Age of Reason, he provided an alternative to God that gave people a reason not to believe. It was a paradigm shift unlike any other in human history. Satan had won a great victory. If there was a natural explanation for everything, how could anyone still believe in a supernatural God?

About the same time, Satan was raising up a generation of “enlightened” theologians who began examining the Bible through a “natural” lens.  No longer would rational men accept its supernatural stories.  Jonah swallowd by a whale, or the parting of the Red Sea were just primitive Hebrew stories, not unlike pagan mythologies. This, then, brought into question the reliability of all the historical records of the Old and New Testament. Their conclusion: the Bible was written by mere mortals—not by God-inspired authors. Score another one for the devil.

The Spirit-breathed inspiration and inerrancy of the Bible is no longer accepted in many Christian colleges and seminaries. Those that do are in the minority—and they are viewed as intellectual midgets. Within another generation or two, the remnant of people who still believe in the inerrancy and infallibility of the Bible will be so small that evangelicalism as we know it today may no longer exist.

Are You a Fundamentalist?

I just finished a class on the history of fundamentalism. For years, no one has wanted the label 'fundamentalist.’  Up through 1980s, it became a ‘bad’ word, having connotations of back-water hayseed preachers and snake handlers, narrow-mindedness and ignorance.  In the last 30 years, then, the word has fallen out of common use.  No intelligent person would call himself a fundamentalist anymore!   But did you know that fundamentalism was born out of a doctrinal controversy with religious liberals of the 19th century who questioned the inerrancy and infallibility of the Scriptures?

In his book “Battle for the Bible,” published 40 years ago, theologian Harold Lindsell wrote: “A great battle rages today around biblical infallibility. To ignore this battle is perilous. To come to grips with it is necessary… When inerrancy goes, it opens a small hole in the dike, and if that hole is not closed, the levee will collapse and the whole land will be overrun with the waters of unbelief.” Though those words were written almost 40 years ago, they are alarmingly relevant today.

The cultural wars of our generation demand that we defend the authority of the bible. Paul said we should “always be ready to make a defense to everyone who asks us to give an account… and to exhort in sound doctrine and to refute those who contradict it” (1 Peter 3:15; Titus 1:9). And those words, written 2,000 years ago, are more relevant today than ever.