Title: 13
Author: Joe G
Last saved by: Auth User
Company: GDC

© 2004 Joe Griffin		04-12-05-B.CC02-376 /

Zionophobia: Poor Hermeneutics Result in Pluralism, Syncretism, & Skepticism in Protestant Theology; Pastors Interpret & the Holy Spirit Illuminates

		33.	This led to a loss of accurate doctrine and invited the insurgency of secular thought into the theology of the church.  How this situation developed is the subject of another excerpt from:
Tarnas, The Passion of the Western Mind, 240:
While the Reformation’s essential character was so intensely and unambiguously religious, its ultimate effects on Western culture were profoundly secularizing.  By overthrowing the theological authority of the Catholic Church, the internationally recognized supreme court of religious dogma, the Reformation opened the way in the West for religious pluralism, then religious skepticism, and finally a complete breakdown in the, until then, relatively homogeneous Christian world view.  Although various Protestant authorities would attempt to reinstitute their particular form of Christian belief as the supreme and exclusively correct dogmatic truth, the first premise of Luther’s reform—the priesthood of all believers and the authority of the individual conscience in the interpretation of Scripture—necessarily undercut the enduring success of any efforts to enforce new orthodoxies.  (p. 240)
		34.	Notice the author’s comment closely: “the authority of the individual conscience in the interpretation of Scripture.”  The believer-priest is not involved in interpretation of Scripture unless he is a pastor-teacher or an evangelist.
		35.	Interpretation of scripture may be defined as hermeneutics and includes the recognition of the principles upon which a true analysis must proceed.  We have spent months delineating these principles.
		36.	The believer does not act independently in his evaluation of the subject matter taught by his pastor.  Filled with the Spirit he is able to understand the supernatural information of the Bible on an academic level.
		37.	Then he may choose to believe or reject the information as taught.  He must depend on the guidance of the Holy Spirit and the inventory of doctrine he knows to make these decisions.
		38.	The end result is not his “interpretation” but rather the “illumination” of the Holy Spirit through the Grace Apparatus for Perception.
		39.	With this clarification in mind we continue with Tarnas’s remarks on page 240ff:
Once the Mother Church had been left behind, no new claims to infallible insight could long be regarded as legitimate.  The immediate consequence of the liberation from the old matrix was a manifest liberation of fervent Christian religiosity, permeating the lives of the new Protestant congregations with fresh spiritual meaning and charismatic power.  Yet as time passed, the average Protestant, no longer enclosed by the Catholic womb of grand ceremony, historical tradition, and sacramental authority, was left somewhat less protected against the vagaries of private doubt and secular thinking.  From Luther on, each believer’s belief was increasingly self-supported; and the Western intellect’s critical faculties were becoming even more acute.  (p. 240)
A further effect of the Reformation on the modern mind involved a new attitude to truth. … from the Protestant perspective, the truth lay finally and objectively in the revealed Word of God, and fidelity to that unalterable truth alone could render theological certainty.  In this view, the Roman Catholic tradition was a long and ever-worsening exercise in subjective distortion of that primal truth.  And the Catholic mind had become especially distorted by its theological integration of Greek philosophy, a system of thought intrinsically alien to biblical truth.
Protestantism’s reclamation of the unalterable Word of God in the Bible thus fostered in the emerging modern mind a new stress on the need to discover unbiased objective truth, apart from the prejudices and distortions of tradition [tradition here referring to the dogmas of the Catholic Church].  But in time, the Word itself would become subject to that new critical spirit, and secularism would triumph.  (p. 242)
Indeed, the very foundation for the reformers’ appeal to objective truth would provoke its dialectical collapse.  Luther’s stress on the literal meaning of Scripture as the exclusive reliable basis for knowledge of God’s creation was to present the modern mind with an impossible tension as it confronted the distinctly unbiblical revelations soon to be established by secular science.  Two apparently contradictory—or at least incongruent—truths had to be maintained simultaneously, one religious and one scientific.  The fundamentalist’s Bible was to hasten the long-developing schism between faith and reason experienced by the Western mind as it attempted to accommodate science.  The Christian faith was far too deeply ingrained to be readily sloughed off altogether, but neither could the scientific discoveries be denied.  Eventually the latter would far outweigh the former in both intellectual and practical significance.  (pp. 242-43)
		40.	According to Tarnas, a major cause of the theological confusion that emerged from the Reformation was the Protestant’s move away from the traditional dogmas of the Roman Church replacing them with doctrines determined by literal interpretations of Scripture.
		41.	But when the Bible was literally interpreted its claims came into direct conflict with the rapidly advancing discoveries of the scientific community.
		42.	The effort to discover absolute truth from the Bible was accompanied by a similar delving into the mysteries of natural science which often produced contradictory conclusions.
		43.	In a desire to make the Bible agree with science, Protestant denominations drifted toward a secular interpretation of Scripture.  This, in essence, was a subtle return to the allegorical system of hermeneutics from which they had been supposedly reformed.
		44.	Once the standard of literal-grammatical-historical system was compromised, then demonic influence entered into the theology of the church and false doctrines again corrupted the message.
		45.	Among these was the advent of Replacement Theology which saw the church as the recipient of the promises given to Israel.  No longer were the Jews a peculiar people to be protected and revered but just another race of people and a troublesome one at that.
		46.	The modern mind sees no difference between the Jew and any other race.  All races are considered to be equal.  Religious absolutism which stresses a literal interpretation of religious writings is considered disruptive to the progressivist’s vision of the world.
		47.	Thus, when the Jew asserts that the area called Palestine is his ancestral home granted him by a decree from God and confirmed by a literal interpretation of Scripture the secular world scoffs while the Arabs are motivated to engage in murderous jihad.
		48.	This is the circumstance into which the British infused the Jews into Palestine under the Balfour Declaration and the “white paper of 1939.”

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