Corrupt

Sacramentalism

Montgomery chronicles what he calls “the damnable epochs of church history,” or the times when the church was sending people to hell instead of sending people to heaven. And the church has done that. And by the way, still does that under the name of Christianity, certainly not under its reality. There have been damnable epochs in the life of the church. Now, these can be identified, says Montgomery, at least starting from the Dark Ages. And I want you to follow the flow because I think it will give you an understanding of where we are today.

The first dangerous episode in church history, he calls “sacramentalism.” The era of sacramentalism. From about 500 A.D. until about 1500 A.D., a full thousand years, the church was engulfed in sacramentalism. What we mean by that is a religion of ritual and ceremony without reality. What we mean by that is a church that has become Christ so that the focal point is not to worship Christ but to worship the church… not to have a personal and intimate relationship with the living God, but to function through the ritual, ceremony and rites of the church…this was known as the Dark Ages.

It was dominated by the Roman Catholic Church. There was also the existence of the Eastern or Greek Orthodox Church. The Church prescribed certain sacraments, certain ceremonies, certain forms of religion, rituals involving candles and beads and penance and all kinds of external functions by which through some automatic operation in outward form, a person could be made right with God.

Martin Luther came along in the 1500’s, as you know, and attacked the heretical and blasphemous institution and its sacramentalism successfully. And what prompted his heart was what he said to the Diet at Worms when he had to defend himself, when he said, “My conscience is captive to the Word of God.” He found that the Word of God ran contrary to sacramentalism.

It had a ritual without a relationship. It had penance without forgiveness. It had ceremony without Christ, a disastrous dangerous time in which the hearts and souls of men were kept in bondage and the church was more aggressive in sending people to hell than it was in sending them to heaven.

Rationalism

And then Montgomery points out that a few hundred years after the Reformation, in the 18th century there came a second dangerous epoch in the church which he calls “rationalism,” rationalism. By the time of the 18th century, the time of Napoleon in the 1700s, the enlightenment had come and men were beginning to come out of the Dark Ages and they were beginning to look at the creativity and the ability and the genius of the human species. And they followed that path until they determined that man was ultimate and the mind of man was the ultimate determiner of truth, and reason superseded revelation and the mind of man sat in judgment on the Word of God.

You had to be able to understand everything rationally, and reason said whether revelation was true or not. The Bible had to bow to the mind of man. Certainly the most well-known and influential book during that time, as far as Americans are concerned, was one written by Thomas Paine, a patriot of note, who lived from about 1737 to 1809. The title of His book, The Age of Reason. And in the book by Paine, he basically split his book into two parts. The first part of the book was advocating rationalism

The second part of his book was an attempt to debunk and discredit everything about the Bible. In fact, he said it had blasphemous conceits in it that masqueraded as if they were the truths of God.

Now during the Age of Reason people went so far as to deny God altogether and what we know today as modern atheism. On one occasion in Paris, in an act against believing in God, there was a veiled female brought before a group of leaders. One of the leaders of France taking this veiled female by the hand said, and I quote, “Mortals, cease to tremble before the powerless thunders of a God whom your fears have created. Henceforth acknowledge no divinity but reason. And I offer you its noblest and purest image. If you must have idols, sacrifice only to such as this.” And he pulled off a veil and there was a woman.

They took that woman, mounted her on some kind of carriage down to Notre Dame and put her on the altar there as the reigning deity to be adored. And maybe we shouldn’t wonder why French morality has been what it’s been.

This was a deadly time in church history. And what made it even worse was that sacramentalism wasn’t dead either. And so you have sacramentalism and rationalism.

Orthodoxism

Montgomery likes to point out that there was a third epoch of danger in the life of the church, he calls it Orthodoxism. A hundred years later by the time you get into the nineteenth century in the 1800s, mass printing has arrived. And for the first time in the history of the church, everybody has a Bible. The Bibles are being mass produced, even to the extent that they have been reduced in size and that a person could carry with him a New Testament.

But according to an analysis of the time, they had a Bible, personally, but they had very little interest in what it contained. The legacy of sacramentalism and rationalism was a lack of confidence in the Bible which was now available but treated with shallowness and indifference, a lack of depth, a lack of zeal. Orthodoxism, having a correct theology of which you are ignorant and to which you are indifferent. His perception was that people were possessing but not willing to live by the Bible. This, too, was deadly to the church in Europe. The church in Europe was still buried under the pile of sacramentalism and rationalism. And now it gets the Bible and it has orthodoxy in its hand but it is a dead cold orthodoxy.

Politicism

A hundred years later came another dangerous epoch. You see the danger to the church from politicism, politics. And it comes in a curious way, according to Montgomery. He says it shows up in Nazi Germany under Hitler.

the first line of attack that Hitler made was against the theology of historic Christianity. The church had to be politicized. And so, he sucked the church into national socialism. And then began to alter its theology. The church was politicized. There was a movement within the Nazi Party to change the character of Christian theology.

At first it was as simple as the movement being called “Deutsche Christen.” If you were a German Christian, which that means, you were a Nazi. All Nazis were true German Christians. It was even called the German Christian Faith Movement. Swallow up the church. The second thing was to eliminate the Old Testament because the Old Testament celebrated Jewishness. It talked too much about the Jews and their relation to God, so they eliminated the Old Testament. The higher critics, the rationalists helped them with that somewhat.

And then they eliminated the parts of the New Testament that speak of the Jewishness of Jesus. What they were left with was an emasculated message. What was left was their Deutsch Christianity, tolerated by national socialism. Typical of the German Christian Faith Movement was Hans Krull who gave a speech in 1937. He had been appointed by Hitler as the minister of church affairs. He was in charge of the church in Germany.

This is what he said in 1937. “Positive Christianity is national socialism. National socialism is the doing of God’s will. God’s will reveals itself in German blood. Christianity is not dependent on the Apostles’ Creed. True Christianity, represented by the Party and the German people, are now called by the Party and especially the Fuhrer to a real Christianity. The church has not been able to generate the faith that moves mountains but the Fuhrer has, the Fuhrer is the herald of the new revelation.” End quote.

In spite of great opposition from true believers, who as you know were many of them put in prison, many of them lost their lives, the church got involved, was sucked in. when you look at history of the danger of sacramentalism, the danger of rationalism, the danger of Orthodoxism, the danger of politicism –

We have rationalism. We still have elements within quote/unquote Christianity where mind is over the Bible, where reason is over revelation. And we have plenty of dead orthodoxy, correct theology connected to unholy living. And we have politicism where the church has been blended with the state and the state is supreme. We’ve accumulated all of it. And, therefore, this is the most dangerous of all times.

Sacramentalism still abounds in Roman Catholic, Greek Orthodox, some Anglican areas and in many other kinds of churches where a less sophisticated kind of ceremonialism reigns supreme. Rationalism abounds in liberal theology being espoused in all kinds of places, in neo-orthodox theology, in the new redaction criticism theology, denying Scriptural inerrancy. Orthodoxism abounds in churches with the right theology who spend their time defending their dogma while ignoring holiness, love, and compassion and Christ’s likeness. And politicism is still here with the social gospel, the gospel of politics

Ecumenism

And I might even go a step further and tell you that there’s a – there’s another epoch danger that’s come even in the last lifetime. That is ecumenism. Go back to the ‘50s. And in the ‘50s was spawned the mentality, let’s not talk about theology, let’s talk about love. Let’s all get together. And giving birth to the World Council of Churches, the National Council of Churches, the Cooperative Evangelism efforts.

Everybody get together, don’t talk doctrine. Let’s not make that an issue, a sentimentalistic attitude called love became the reigning principle of the Christian life. It tolerates sin, it tolerates error, it tolerates everything, let’s all get together. And ecumenism is a danger to the church because it sucks its strength, it sucks its doctrine, it pulls out its conviction, it makes it compromise. That came in the fifties.

Experientialism

And now, they’re coming faster than ever. In the ‘60s came what I like to call “experientialism.” The new Charismatic Movement which says that that which reigns supreme is my experience, not the Bible. But have I seen God, touched God, seen Jesus, heard angels, gotten a revelation from heaven, had an experience? Experientialism is a danger to the church. It came like a wave in the ‘60s. It’s still with us, we just keep accumulating them.

And what is it in the ‘70s, folks? We’ve got another in the seventies, subjectivism. Montgomery says this. “Our time is possibly the most subjective period in all of church history. Today everybody talks in psychological terms. We enjoy nothing better than to probe our inner life and its real or imagined frustrations. We wallow in our own misery. We go to psychologists, we go to psychiatrists, we go to counselors.

We enjoy our problems. Someone has called our epoch the age of analysis. And it is that, for we want to solve all our problems by subjective concentration on them.

Luther in diametric opposition to hyper subjectivism says, “Christianity in its entirety lies outside us in the righteousness of Christ and in the mercy of God. The man who has spiritual problems will never solve those problems by looking in upon himself. There is no solution inside, rather the solution is outside. The solution lies in what God did for us on the cross and that depends not upon ourselves but only upon the Christ who while we were yet sinners died for us.” End quote.

They come in sacramental robes. They come in rationalistic attire with their intellectual mindset and all their degrees and their academic garb. They come in the form of orthodoxy but they are dead and without life. They come with their political goals and dreams and ends. They come with their ecumenical agenda, they come with their experiential approach to everything. They come with their overriding subjectivism. Whatever it is, they are spiritual phonies. They lead the church away from the truth. And they accumulate. They get worse and worse as time goes on.

We saw who they are in verses 1-5.

We know what to do about them - avoid them. But why? How dangerous are they?

In these verses we see what they do.

1. They Creep

2 Timothy 3:6 NASB95

6 For among them are those who enter into households and captivate weak women weighed down with sins, led on by various impulses,

This is not a commentary on all women. Some are weak willed. They are the ones who are easily captivated. It is a strong woman indeed that stands on the firm foundation of God’s word and holds to the gospel of Jesus Christ.

The cults usually target women like this.

These women are weak, they are weighed down with sins, and led by impulses.

2 Timothy 3:7 NASB95

7 always learning and never able to come to the knowledge of the truth.

2. Oppose the Truth

2 Timothy 3:8 NASB95

8 Just as Jannes and Jambres opposed Moses, so these men also oppose the truth, men of depraved mind, rejected in regard to the faith.

We must avoid them and their theological fads

3. They Stall

2 Timothy 3:9 NASB95

9 But they will not make further progress; for their folly will be obvious to all, just as Jannes’s and Jambres’s folly was also.

They can only go so far until they hit a spiritual wall. They cannot grow in the knowledge of the grace of God. Also their power is limited. They seem powerful and impressive but it all a sham. They can only go as far as the illusion allows. They cannot produce true spiritual fruit.

Galatians 5:22–23 NASB95

22 But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, 23 gentleness, self-control; against such things there is no law.

This is an extremely encouraging verse. How? It sets a limit on the spiritual con artists. They can only progress so far!

Jesus said,

Matthew 16:18 NASB95

18 “I also say to you that you are Peter, and upon this rock I will build My church; and the gates of Hades will not overpower it.

Just as a wave brings the next heresy, so it will fade and accumulate with the other, but it will pass.

Find courage brethren and fight on where the battle is the thickest.