THE HISTORY OF THE NEW TESTAMENT CHURCH

Preface

If we are to accept the Bible as the standard for all matters of faith, then we are to believe that there are seven main periods of church his­tory. The first of these (Ephesus, Rev. 2:1) can be denominated the Apostolic Period, beginning with the first local New Testament church called out in Matthew 10 and ending somewhere around 90 A.D. with the death of the last apostle. Church history, by Biblical definition, must be primarily the history of the local assemblies which start in the New Testament. Many of the church histories which have been written (Dollinger, Walker, Fisher, Neander, Mosheim, Schaff, Cairns, New­man, etc.) properly fall inside an area which should be called anti-church history. This should be anticipated, as most church historians elimi­nated the Bible as the principal guideline when they sat down to write. Philip Schaff (History of the Christian Church, eight volumes) is about as conscious of the power and authority of the Bible while he is research­ing and writing his history—a history of people who were supposed to have believed in it—as Madalyn Murray O’Hair or Westcott and Hort.

The second period of time (Smyrna, Rev. 2:8) corresponds gener­ally to the time between 90 A.D. and 325 A.D., and the third period (Pergamos, Rev. 2:12) from 325 A.D. to 500 A.D. In seeking brack­ets in which to place the historical events that deal with the church, the historians, saved and lost (of any profession), unconsciously adopt the brackets set up in the book of Revelation (Rev. 2-3) as found in the King James Authorized Version; they call the first section “Apos­tolic Fathers, ’ ’ the second section ‘ ‘Ante-Nicene Fathers, ’ ’ and the third section “Post-Nicene Fathers.’’ God often forces Bible rejecting “Christians” to adopt Biblical phrases, expressions, brackets, and sys­tems, and very often the Biblical time table. For example, when the Roman Catholic historians began to alter “The DARK Ages’’ to “The MIDDLE Ages ’ ’—an obvious attempt to wipe off the stigma of history, since the Roman Catholic church ruled all of Europe at that time, put­ting Europe into the most horrible condition it ever was in—they sim­ply blundered into a Bible trap. By calling 500-1500 the “MIDDLE Ages” they and the Protestant historians who followed their lead dated the Second Coming according to the charts found in Clarence Larkin’s Dispensational Truth (1918). These charts were constructed from the King James text. The Seven-Sevens system found in the Authorized Ver­sion (Lev. 23, 25; 2 Peter 3:8; John 2:1, Matt. 17, etc.) would put

five hundred years into the first “even watch,” one thousand years into the “midnight watch” and “cockcrowing watch,” and then the final five hundred years into the “morning watch” (Mark 13:35). Thus, any­one who plastered “MIDDLE” on the period running from 500-1000 A.D. admits (willingly or unwillingly—it makes no difference) that five hundred years are the “beginning,” and five hundred years will have to make the end. Latourette (A History of the Expansion of Christian­ity) stumbles into this trap as neatly and as blindly as any historian. He calls his second volume of church history “ONE THOUSAND YEARS of Uncertainty. ” The dates he gives are 500-1000 A.D.: the time that his church (Roman Catholic) was in control of Europe. This sets the time of the Second Advent of Jesus Christ at 2000 A.D. by those who don’t even profess to believe in an Advent, let alone a date for it. God has always been very adept at taking “the wise in their own craftiness” (1 Cor. 3:19). Recently the historians have sensed their clumsiness and have tried to pretend that the real DARK Age didn’t set in until around 800 A.D., and to slip out of the trap with a minimal loss of face, they have pretended that the Renaissance was not part of the “DARK Ages.”

The fourth period of church history (Thyatira, Rev. 2:18) runs roughly from Leo “the Great” to the times of the Crusades (approxi­mately 500-1000 A.D.). The fifth period (Sardis, Rev. 3:1) goes from 1000-1500 A.D., and the sixth period (Philadelphia, Rev. 3:7) will take history into the Reformation (1500-1900 A.D.). At around 1900 A.D. (1884 and 1901 will bracket the date) the seventh and final period (Laodicea, Rev. 3:14) begins. These seven church periods are denom­inated in the text of the Holy Bible (AV 1611) as: Ephesus, Smyrna, Pergamos, Thyatira, Sardis, Philadelphia, and Laodicea (Rev. 1:11; see Rev. 2, 3 in The Bible Believer’s Commentary on Revelation, 1970). According to the rules and laws governing man’s history already estab­lished by the Bible itself (concerning the way histories are to be written), each period must end in apostasy. Any serious student of the Bible knows as well as he knows his own name that every dispensation in history, as recorded by the Author of history, ends on a NEGATIVE note. This means that every Christian historian who wrote a church history with the “evolutionary” concept in mind (Augustine, Schaff, any of the popes, Neander, Latourette, etc.) approached his life work with a non- Biblical attitude and with a non-Biblical prejudice. Such a “start” would disqualify him from being able to interpret the facts before or after he found them.

The following history will not be attempted after the author has stripped himself of his Biblical convictions, which came from the Holy

Spirit’s presentation of Biblical truth. Rather, we shall take for granted that Satan has a lively interest in the affairs of men and has had his way with the majority of them since Genesis 3, and further, that he is alive and well and has his days of greatest power and authority yet ahead of him, not behind him (Rev. 13). From the standpoint of pre­senting the whole truth about these matters, most church historians are greenhorns. By this we mean that the author or authors pretend through­out their investigations and researches that no such being as Satan is operating in the sphere of church history, nor can anything be ascribed to him or his work (2 Cor. 4:4). Will Durant goes much further and presupposes that since Satan doesn’t exist, his work cannot be found anywhere in human history—secular or sacred. Either approach is fatal to interpreting the lessons of history, and if history cannot teach a man something, what can? After all, history is the recorded EXPERIENCES of the human race. If there is a being who deceives the whole world (Rev. 12:9), he certainly is going to have no more trouble with a church historian than with any other sinner on the face of the earth. A history (secular or sacred) that refuses to deal with the problem of an intelli­gent, active, persistent, aggressive perversion of the TRUTH (Gen. 3) is not a history to be taken seriously by anyone who is engaged in find­ing the truth.

After all, the Christian is supposed to be acquainted with the One who is “the way, THE TRUTH, and the life” (John 14:6), and he has been given a Book (1 Thess. 2:13) which purports to be “THE TRUTH” (John 17:17). If “the Spirit of truth” (John 14:17) in the believer was sent to guide and lead him “into all TRUTH” (John 16:13), what would he be doing taking any history book seriously where the author refused to deal with a worldwide, six millennia, supernatu­ral opponent of the truth who has the power and authority (Luke 4:6) to pervert the truth (2 Thess. 2:4-10) anytime he is given the opportunity (2 Tim. 2:26)? How does one account for church histories, written by professing Christians, that never indicate where this malevolent per­sonality worked, how he worked, when he worked, or whom he worked through? Does one suddenly drop his Biblical convictions about Satan when he begins to write a “church history”? Is a Christian supposed to have any convictions about Satan? Can they be put on and off like a pair of coveralls?

Obviously, the reason for not giving the devil “his due” when dis­cussing his world (2 Cor. 4:4) or his “Christs” (2 Cor. 11:1-14) is either ignorance of the devil and his wiles (Eph. 6:11)—which would be a deliberate sin for the child of God (2 Cor. 2:11)—or else the author

is in collusion with Satan due to cowardice and has attempted to sell books by “not taking sides” where Biblical issues appear in history. A church history which never involves Biblical issues is impossible to imagine. By maintaining a cool or neutral “objectivity” in dealing with the “facts” the reader will get the impression that all Satanic manifes­tations are due to ignorance and are merely human mistakes (see chapter 14, notes 121-125). One gets the most peculiar impression from read­ing the standard histories (Wells, Ridpath, Durant, Churchill, Caton, Rawlinson, Neander, Mosheim, Harnack, Dollinger, etc? that the authors either didn’t believe that Satan existed, or if they did, they didn’t want to antagonize him since he would probably control the publication and sales of their works. The standard historians (as the Alexandrian Cult, see chapter 5) present a beautiful, unified front of SPIRITUAL BLINDNESS: it may have been self-induced.

Now, no church historian or biographer can be completely neutral in his approach to his subject: if he were, he would be God. But many modern scientists and Bible teachers (see Hills’s work, Believing Bible Study, 1967) like to pretend that they have obtained this super “coolness” or objectivity like God. However, if there is one field where it is abso­lutely impossible for any sinner (saved or lost) to be neutral, it would be in a field that crossed Biblical truth at every other fence post. The bigoted infidels, agnostics, apostates, and atheists in The Age of Rea­son (Will Durant) and The Age of Enlightenment often exhibit in their writings the most vicious, subjective prejudices; many of the passages found in the works of Marx, Spinoza, Sartre, Dewey, Santayana, Hegel, Russell, Fichte, Nestle, Hort, Huxley, Darwin, Bakunin, and Nietzsche border on the lunatic fringe.

No one is completely free from “prejudice” (see Acts 22:2 and comments in that commentary), and the only fools to claim to be are educated fools who imagine that the length and breadth of their studies (which have seared their consciences and developed in them a “toler­ance” for ANYTHING) equips them to speak objectively. When you get to the point where you can tolerate ANYTHING—as long as it doesn’t hurt your income; oh yes, there are always “exceptions”!— you obviously can tolerate FALSEHOOD. Since the trail of the Serpent is found throughout 6,000 years of history (Gen. 3, Ezek. 28, Isa. 14, Job 1, Matt. 2, Rev. 13, etc.), we are certainly not going to be as stu­pid as some historians in assuming that he suddenly dropped dead in Matthew 27 and never showed up again in history. If God has a Book, Satan has a book (2 Cor. 11:4); if God has ministers, Satan has minis­ters (2 Cor. 11:15); if God has a Christ, the devil certainly will have

one (Matt. 24:5; Luke 21:8); and if God has a bride who is a church and a city (Rev. 21:9-10), certainly Satan is not going to call it quits at any point: he too will have a BRIDE (Rev. 17:1-5) who is a CHURCH and a city (Rev. 17:18).

In this history the King James 1611 AV will remain as the fixed standard and touchstone for the truth as well as for all “TRUTHS.” We will not depart from our previous position (1949-1980) taken in the writing of ten Bible commentaries in the Bible Believer’s series. Where distortion or perversion of the truth shows up in history, we will mention it and trace it to its source. Where opposition to the truth or persecution on those propagating it appears, we shall name names, list dates, and give locations. At no time should a Bible believer ever be found wandering around in the intellectual “boon docks” with Plato, Augustine, Aristotle, Socrates, or Hegel, asking little, stupid questions like “What is truth,’’ or “What is the supreme good?” These ques­tions are for the kiddies in the sandpile (Pilate, Heidegger, Tillich, Barth, Russell, Dewey, Marx, Freud, Voltaire, Rousseau, etc.). The Bible believer has the truth of God carnate (John 17:17) and Incarnate (John 1:1-3), and believing this, he is not going to make any ecumenical over­tures or adjustments to Buddhists, Taoists, Confucianists, Catholics, Moslems, Fundamentalists, or Liberals who think that a charitable tol­erance of error and a kindly acceptance of falsehood is the mark of a “godly” Christian. Christians are supposed to be faithful witnesses (1 Cor. 4:1-2), not professional politicians (1 Tim. 5:7, 17, 21). Con­formity to the world system (2 Tim. 4:10) is bad enough in a preacher or a Bible teacher (Rom. 12:1-3), without it being the guideline for a church historian who knows that “the only thing that men learn from history is that men never learn from history.”

Since all dispensations end on a negative note (Edenic, Adamic, Noahic, Abramic, Mosaic, Davidic, etc.), a student of history should be very attentive to any perversion or misapplication of the word of God in each period of church history, for apostasy cannot “spring out of the ground” (Job 5:6-7). A lie must have legs, a foundation, build­ers, promoters, advertisers, and buyers. The seeds of degeneration should be found in every period because, after all, it is the corruptible seed (1 Peter 1:23) in man that eventually puts him into the grave (Job 17:13-16 and comments in that commentary). Seed bearers, then, will be found in all seven periods of church history who will guarantee a downhill course for those who follow them (see chapters 4, 5).

Panegyrics and eulogies on “good men” are so plentiful in church history that you often wonder if the historian had ever noticed that no

writers in the Bible ever go overboard to brag about man s art, music, mind, knowledge, or even “man’s treatment of his fellow man.” When a Biblical writer documents Solomon’s writings (1 Kings 4:29-34), he does it in less than half a page. When Moses is bragged about (Deut. 34:10; Isa. 63:11), no writer goes into a long thing. “Evaluations” of the best men in the Bible (1 Kings 11:12, 34, 38) are always very brief and very conservative, and they are never lavish (1 Kings 4:34) unless they are discussing the individual’s relationship with God and what he did in line with what God wanted done. Paul is not “whistling Dixie” in his autobiography found in 2 Corinthians 11. In the same breath he mentions the devil working him over (2 Cor. 12:1-8). Paul wouldn’t think of disconnecting the devil with history, not even his own, personal history.

“Good, godly men, ” to quote the contemporary propaganda of the Alexandrian Cult (chapter 5), can always be found who are willing to attack the words of God (Peter, Matt. 16:22) and overthrow the final authority (1 Kings 13). There always has been a plethora of “good” men at hand, ready, willing, and able to be used by Satan for various purposes; and anytime Satan desires to pull off a lie, these men are the best “carriers.” A lie carried by Ignatius (see chapter 4, note 41) or Polycarp (see chapter 4, notes 42, 43) would always be more effective than a lie toted by Marcion or Celsus. Good, “godly” men who per­vert or alter the words of God are a good advertisement; more suckers will buy the product. Drunken atheists and immoral agnostics (or mod­em Liberal or Neo-orthodox theologians) cannot effectively carry a lie very far, at least not into the body of Christ. The best carriers of Bible perversion are always “in the camp” (Josh. 9:1-15). Goodness and god­liness (Noah and David) were never a foolproof protection against Satan anywhere in the history of revelation from the first line of Genesis 1:1 to the last battle of Revelation 20:9, at least not as far as the authority of the word of God is concerned. Catholic biographers of St. Francis, Thomas a Kempis, and St. Dominic are just as lavish in their praises of the Bible rejecting bigots as the Christian biographers of Westcott and Hort, A.T. Robertson, J.G. Machen, Gregory, Nestle, Green, Thayer, and John R. Rice. To presume that “goodness” and “godliness” in a dying sinner makes him more authoritative as a standard to follow than the God-breathed words of divine authority (see chapter 3) is to confess that one is really a sentimental “humanist” instead of a Bible believer. Many modern Fundamentalists (see Volume II) are Liberal Humanists when it comes to the issue of final authority. They will side with their friends (or those whom they “prefer” or “like”) where these stand clearly against what God said.

If a church historian is going to be as “objective” as some of the brethren profess to be, he certainly is not going to avoid censuring “good” and “godly” men where they speak and act for Satan in the interests of overthrowing the authority of God Almighty (see Satan’s Masterpiece: the New ASV, 1972).

The negative content of a church history written with such an approach will be vast, and this is apparent to anyone (see The Sure Word of Prophecy, 1970). For this reason we should never expect such a work to be a “howling success” with any compromiser or world pleaser, whether he be a Christ-rejecting Liberal or an apostate Fundamentalist (John 17:16). We shall deal primarily with church history and not ANTI - church history (the history of Roman Catholicism) or SEMI-church history (the history of political, social, and economic movements which affected the church). May God the Holy Spirit guide and lead the reader into all truth (John 16:13) so that he may learn more from history than its standard lesson: that the only thing men learn from history is that men never learn from history. May God protect him from having to repeat the lessons of history because he has not learned them properly. Church history is a forewarning and forearming of every Bible believer in the world against the foremost enemy of religious liberty the world ever hosted: ROMAN CATHOLICISM.

Introduction

“Let them bring forth, and shew us what shall happen: let them shew the former things, what they be, that we may consider them, and know the latter end of them; or declare us things for to come” Isaiah 41:22

The need for a Biblical history of the New Testament church is apparent to anyone who reviews the parade of church histories that can be found in the average “Christian” bookstore in the twentieth cen­tury. What these histories have written about is largely ANTI-church history; they have taken for granted that the ecclesiastical monster which controlled Europe during the Dark Ages was “the church,” and there­fore a history about Roman Catholicism would be a church history. You may as well suppose that Rome did not imprison Peter, exile John, behead James, whip and crucify Christ, and execute the apostle Paul.

It goes without saying that our brief two volumes of Church His­tory (making up less than 1,400 pages of material) can give little more than a sketchy outline of events; however, we will try to put enough “meat on the bones” to keep the reader in touch with true apostolic practices from 33 A.D. to 1980, and also to show him the difference between the Alexandrian line of apostate Fundamentalists that begins with Clement and Origen (chapter 5) and runs up to the New ASV (and the faculty members of Bob Jones University, Vol. II), and the line of Bible believing witnesses that runs from John and Ignatius (chapters 3, 4) up to Carl Hatch and Jack Hyles.

All apostasy begins with questioning what God said (Gen. 3:1), and all men who promote or tolerate (or aid or encourage) apostasy recommend conflicting authorities so that they themselves (or their friends or employers) can become the final authority. This will be so apparent in what follows that further comment should be unnecessary at this time. Conflicting authorities are set up in church history by Chris­tian scholars for the purpose of splitting and dividing the body of Christ and bringing it under the dominion of either an authoritative body of scholars (a school) or an authoritative ecclesiastical organization (a church). The Alexandrian Cult controlled the Roman Catholic church from 400 A.D. to the present, and in this century it controls every major Christian college and seminary in the United States, England, and Europe by means of the faculty members in those institutions. If the student

of history is often surprised to find Bible believing “soul winners” pay­ing, supporting, and promoting these apostates in their own institutions, he must remember that the American school system (Federal and pri­vate) is controlled in the classroom by the members of the Alexandrian Cult (see Vol. II). They will tolerate no interference by “soul winnners” in their efforts to indoctrinate every student with the teaching that there is no Book on this earth that is the absolute, final authority for anything.

Einstein (1879-1955) and the Logical Positivists (as all relativists) taught that all truth was relative. Relative truths are the “values” taught in the Federal school system to inculcate into every socialist cell the teaching that there is no final, absolute, MORAL AUTHORITY or eth­ical authority. This is called “values clarification” (1980) by the NEA. It means that the student must be reduced to the place where he has to look to the State (the government) for guidance and support as a “savior.” This deterioration in the individual students in the Federal schools is obtained by a simple expedient: conflicting authorities. By presenting multiple authorities (see how it is done in the modem Sun­day School with anASV, RSV, NewASV, RV, NewRSV, etc.), the Gov­ernment steps in as the final and deciding authority. Relative truth is the doctrinal creed of the president of Bob Jones University,1 and he will sign his name to this “conviction.” When we find men in church history like Torrey and Spurgeon occasionally yielding to the desper­ate temptation to back up a Bible truth by altering the words in the Bible,2 we must remember that the old nature in David and Hezekiah was no different from the old nature in Peter or Paul. The contemporary her­esy to the effect that if a man is “godly” or “separated” and “stands for the fundamentals,” his old nature is inoperative when moving into the area of Biblical authority, is a genuine heresy in itself (see chapter 9) and constitutes one of the most dangerous teachings in the history of false doctrine. The alibi to sin used by Bob Jones, III, (see note 1) and Dr. Wisdom (see note 2) is that the men sinning are “reverent Biblicists” or “men of God.” I don’t recall where any alibi for sin­ning was justified by any man’s character anywhere in the Bible: this is something new “under the sun.”

No godly man is immune from seeking to overthrow the authority of the universe when it comes to desiring to have his way instead of God’s way (Isa. 53:6). The modem Bible reviser, for example, who refuses to face this Biblical fact (2 Tim. 3:3, 4; 2 Sam. 11; Dan. 2:46; Gen. 26:7) and deal with it is self-deceived and has sinned against God (Prov. 8:8, 9). Relative truths instead of absolute truth is the founda­tion of every system of scientism, materialism, and evolution on this

earth. Those who can’t stand to be set adrift in this flotsam and jetsam of “relativity” invent parties (Fascism or Nazism), or authoritative economic systems (Communism or Capitalism), or authoritative intel­lectual systems (Positivism, Platonism, Hedonism, etc.).

This church history will approach the subject of the New Testa­ment church from the standpoint of one final, infallible authority, and where this authority is questioned by any school, or any church, or any political party, or any body of scholars, we will make note of it. There will be no pretending, for example, that the “problem” in the church since 1611 has anything to do with any “verbally inspired, plenary originals” that no one ever found. There will be no pretending that the last seven “reliable versions” in “modern language” (RV, ASV, New ASV, NIV, RSV, New RSV, Living Bible, etc.) accomplished anything for America but an increase in dope traffic, illegitimate births, legalized pornography and prostitution, social acceptance of sex perverts, destruc­tion of the public school system, a government takeover of churches and private schools, and a five hundred percent increase in the crime rate accompanied by more gross ignorance of the contents of the Bible than at any time in the history of the country.

The reader is encouraged to check all the notes in this work with their sources. May he understand that the “faith of our fathers” is liv­ing still “in spite of dungeon, fire, and sword” and that the “dungeon, fire, and sword” are the only weapons by which any apostate church can conquer a country made up of Bible readers who believe the Bible. There is no country on the globe in either hemisphere that was a Bible reading or Bible believing country when Communism took it over. Can­ada and Mexico fell out of that category one hundred to five hundred years ago, and Spain and Italy have not been in that category for over fifteen centuries. There is no way you can fool a Bible believing peo­ple about Communism, like Michael (Martin) Luther King, Jr.; Franklin D. Roosevelt; or Abraham Lincoln: you only fool a sucker who is believ­ing what he reads in newspapers and “history books” into thinking they were “Americans. ” There is no way you can fool a Bible believer into thinking that Communism and Catholicism are not “bosom buddies,” and that Califano, head of the HEW in America (1979), is leading the largest practicing Communist cell in the Western Hemisphere: with that stuff you only con some “touch” who believes what he sees on televi­sion and hears on the radio.

Our constitution is a Book, not an essay by John Locke or a document from the French Revolution (see Vol. II). We get our “Bill of Rights” from Romans-Philemon, and when those books are aban­

doned for “human rights,” there are no rights left but the civil rights and social equality found in any concentration camp. Church history shows that whenever and wherever the Book is abandoned or disre­garded or questioned or doubted or perverted, social, political, economic, and religious disasters follow (Gal. 6:7). Any authority accepted as an authority higher than the Book will inevitably lead to imprisonment, starvation, torture, demonism, and death. Church history is a demon­stration of that truth: the truth that even where a church professes to believe the Book and professes to be “going by the Book,” that it means absolutely nothing at all if they don’t really believe the Book. Eventu­ally the chickens of doubt and infidelity come home to roost, and with them comes litigation, foreclosures, taxes, loss of private property and liberty, arrests, death, torture, war, starvation, and demonism.

Every destructive and painful thing on this earth in 1980 came from a transaction that began by questioning the words that God had spoken (Gen. 3:1).

That one basic, bedrock truth of the Bible ought to be enough, stand­ing alone, to convince every child of God (educated or uneducated) that it is a dangerous thing to tamper with a Book that God called into exist­ence, used, honored, established, and blessed beyond any Book on this planet. Readers of The Bible Believer's Commentaries (Genesis, Exodus, Job, Proverbs, Matthew, Revelation, the Minor Prophets, Acts, etc.) are well-acquainted with our starting point in writing about anything. We begin by setting up the one absolute, final, and infallible authority that God has given us (the Holy Bible), and then we proceed to judge all data, facts, findings, theories, opinions, and ideas by that standard. That is, we habitually practice what Christian universities and semi­naries only profess to practice and actually do NOT.3 We never abandon the Bible as the ultimate standard forjudging truths simply because some educated idiot or group of educated idiots has eliminated it from his “field” of study. We believe that what the Book says, where it touches anthropology, integration, geology, prophecy, civil liberties, public speaking, health foods, national politics, the social sciences, psychol­ogy, and Hebrew grammar, is just as valid as where it touches history, ethnology, dogmatic theology, historical exegesis, higher criticism, New Testament introduction, art, music, sports, or cooking. No real Bible believer is going to lay his Bible down when writing a church history; as a matter of fact, he will need the Book more in this field than in any field of research outside of Biblical theology and textual criticism.

Our aim will be to show the Bible believer in the Laodicean church period (Rev. 3:14) that there has existed from early times (33 A.D.)

to the present time a continuous chain of Christians who believed the Book they had was the word of God and were actively engaged in try­ing to convert people to the truths found in that Book, and more exactly to the very Author of that Book. These Christians throughout church history often vary in some of their doctrinal beliefs, and they also have no one name by which they can be identified through twenty centuries (see chapter 6, note 78). They were never called “Christians” since the time that the popes became “the princes of the church” (570 A.D., see chapter 5), and later the term “Christian” came to be used as a label for International Socialists who professed to be the “peacemakers” of Matthew 5:9 (Kagawa, Pike, Peale, Blake, et al.), revolutionaries (Castro; Gandhi; M.L. King, Jr.; et al.), and Communists (Abraham Lincoln, Russell, Dewey, Reuther, FDR, et al.), as well as Catholics, Protestants, and Greek Orthodox. The term “Christian” was a signif­icant surname in Acts 11:26, but with the advent of Einstein’s nonsense into the college curriculum (and the inanities of the Logical Positivists from Vienna), the word “Christian” came to mean no more than “scuba diver” or “trapeze artist.” In the Associated Press words mean anything you want them to mean; this is also true in the National Education Asso­ciation. The term “Christian,” today, means a nice Socialist who believes in making a good living by getting along with everyone, including the devil. Politicians are all “Christians” by definition, and so are all the Communists engaged in leveling all classes to the lowest common denominator: a mongrel mass. The purpose of this is so that they can “share” with anyone—including the devil.

If the elimination of absolute truth is the desired end of modem Christian education, then Christian education is just one more tool in the hand of International Socialism. A modern school, as we have said, is set up to produce the maximum amount of unbelief in the student in regards to absolute authority. When an unsaved young person goes off to a school (Christian or otherwise), he is placed in an area where one Book is no longer the final authority, for the men who teach him that Book (saved or lost) do not believe that it is an infallible authority, nor do they believe it is the final authority as their school may or may not profess: from here on, for the student, it is a matter of “guesswork” on the basis of “preference” and “considered opinion.” The student graduates (public or private school) as any unsaved Liberal graduates from any state university in New York or California, and he goes out into the world with no final authority. As soon as he steps off the campus the potential and prospective “final authorities” are waiting to embrace and subvert him with open arms and jaws: the UN, the Welfare State,

the Vatican, the Scholars Union, the HEW, the Communist Party, the drug culture, etc. When they pin him to the mat, the “grad” must con­fess (if he has any honesty left after four years of brainwashing by the Alexandrian Cult) that he has no final authority: final authority is only a matter of opinion and preference (see note 1).

There are two things about church historians that must be kept in mind, in addition to their proclivities to avoid giving Satan credit for anything that happened in church history for twenty centuries. The first of these we may call “The Pauline Obsession,” which is the tendency for historians to rig up little “all-star teams” where the quarterback is Paul, the running backs are John and Peter, the center is Chrysostom, the guards are Luther and Wesley, the tackles Whitefield and Calvin, and the ends are BEECHER and FOSDICK. These cute little “groups” are constructed on the idea that as you approach the time of the writer the Pauline types have to get smoother and smoother and slicker and slicker until finally they no more resemble Paul (or Luther) than they resemble Peter the Great or Genghis Khan. The Pauline Obsession is a psychosis that comes from two perverse tendencies residing in the old nature of all the historians. The first of these is the tendency to view Paul as a writer and a theologian apart from his ministry (see Acts 20:21-24 and comments in that commentary). Stam, Baker, O’Hair, Bullinger, Greaterex, Ballinger, and Moore are perfect examples of “Fundamentalists” whose ministries are no more Pauline than the min­istries of Copeland, Gormann, C.W. Burpo, Dunn, Jimmy Swaggert, or Oral Roberts; however, they fancy they are Pauline because they have extracted two truths from something Paul WROTE (Eph. 3:1-6 and 2 Cor. 5:20). Once Paul has been degraded to the professor’s chair or the chair of the “learned Doctor of Divinity,” he must keep com­pany with tenderfeet who are no more his spiritual “match” than Demas or Diotrephes.

The term “Pauline Obsession” is chosen for want of a better one to describe the peculiar attitude with which the majority of Bible scholars, historians, and theologians approach Paul’s character and work. The tendency is to build a history of doctrine or collections of theologies and confessions, supposing that Paul was primarily an “original thinker”; that is, a theologian who developed original doctrines. This obsession to make an academic theologian out of Paul and then com­pare his “theology” with subsequent ones has obscured in every age the course that the Gospel took following the book of Acts. This point cannot be emphasized too strongly if a correct analysis is to be made of church history. The book of Acts shows an intensely practical peo-

pie going about to fulfill an intensely practical commission and obtaining intensely practical results. If it is possible to trace the real history of the New Testament local church, we must seek for Bible believers who are engaged in preaching, not silly faculty members who are trying to figure out “what was in the mind of the authors when they wrote the originals, etc.’’

The Pauline Obsession can be illustrated in a number of ways:

A. By promiscuously teaming him up, as a man, with men who were unlike him in every respect. For example: “Luther...Calvin... Thomas Aquinas"4 or “John...Paul...Luther...Augustine"5 or again, “Augustine...Luther...Calvin...Paul...Moses.. .Hodge... Warfield. ’’6 One “all-star team” put Luther and Calvin in the same bracket with Loyola.'1 These classifications, however innocently constructed, reveal the deep-seated obsession of someone either to be like Paul or else to make Paul (of Loyola) into something he was NOT.

B. By reducing the Pauline epistles to mere “Pauline” epistles and ignoring the fact that they are the inspired scriptures; they picture what GOD thinks about salvation, justification, regeneration, eternal secu­rity, and the Second Coming: they are NOT just “Paul’s theology.”

C. By overlooking or ignoring (or neglecting, or pushing aside, according to the subjective point of view) the results of Paul’s doctrines and beliefs. The beliefs of Machen, Warfield, Wuest, Robertson, Schaff, and the Lockman Foundation produce no city-shaking revivals, no aban­donment of false gods, no arrests or imprisonments, no whippings or revilings, and no establishment of New Testament churches. They produce a few baby sprinkling, A-millennialists and dead-orthodox Con­servatives who could no more preach on a street corner than on a surfboard.

The first of the three things listed above (A.) is the most danger­ous of the three, and here have been enumerated only the mildest of a series of “all-star teams.” Some classifications run “Moses...Jesus... Paul... Luther...Barth...Kierkegaard,” as though they had a common bond of Biblical affinity or theological virility. Barth is about as “Pauline” as Catherine de’Medici.

Luther is usually classified by dead-orthodox theologians as a theo­logian (along with Paul), although a professor at Stamford University stated that Luther was not a theologian and had not even made a thorough study of the theology of his times.8 (It is accepted by most historians that Paul did not write his revelations in a systematic or theological sense.) Seeberg says, “Luther created a new church, Melanchthon estab­lished a theology in harmony with it.”9 Gaussen omits Paul while list­

ing Origen, Eusebius, Calvin, and Hengstenberg. Some of the classifi­cations are sound, for example: “With Augustine and John Calvin, Tho­mas Aquinas shares the distinction of being one of the three master theo­logical minds of the world. ”10 Not a man in the list was a soul-winning evangelist, every man in the list worshipped philosophy, and every man in the list would kill a Christian as quick as look at him if that Christian didn’t line up with a Church-State theology (see chapters 6, 7).

Carl Henry ties Barth up with the theological line containing Berkhof, Engelder, Murray, and Chafer.11 This is sound; not a man in the list was a soul-winning preacher or Bible believing teacher.

Now, how could anyone drag Paul into such a lineup? And if he is left out, how can such a lineup be identified with New Testament Christianity? The Apostle to the Gentiles was Paul, who wrote letters to the New Testament churches. To read the New Testament, one would think that Paul had very little in common with the average Bible reviser or theologian. He is seen preaching on street corners and being stoned (Acts 14:19). He is found reasoning “of righteousness, temperance, and judgment’’ before a governor (Acts 24:25). He is jailed, whipped, shipwrecked, persecuted, and treated for all the world like a renegade anarchist (Acts 16:24; 24:5). If he were to appear preaching on the streets of the shopping centers and malls in America today at, say, Pensacola, Florida; Greenville, South Carolina; Chattanooga, Tennessee; or Spring­field, Missouri, would the “scholars” be so eager to include him among their renowned “theologians” and “qualified Biblicists”?

As Bible believing street preachers, Paul and his companions turned the world upside down with their preaching and their teaching: not merely the scholastic world, but the social world, the business world, the artisan world, and the imperial world. This must be firmly kept in mind when tracing the path of the New Testament church through the centuries.

The Pauline Obsession is also illustrated by the manner in which historians and theologians treat the Epistles, dealing with them as though they were only a “theology,” opposing or analogous to, say, “Johan- nine” or “Petrine” theology. A few illustrations will suffice.

1. In Revelation and Reason, Brunner confines New Testament preaching to “the picture of Jesus in the Gospels.”12 How about the “picture” in the Pauline Epistles, or how about at least admitting that the four Gospels do not contain the complete “picture”?

2. Henry Swete says of John, “The writer’s Christology leads him to....”13 But the “writer” of the book of Revelation is the third Person of the Godhead. In line with Swete’s semi-infidelity is W.M. Ramsay,

a typical dead orthodox apostate.14 Ramsay says that “the symbolism’’ of the book of Revelation was “imposed on the writer...by the rather crude literary model which he imitated, in obedience to prevalent Jew­ish fashion.” Is there anyone reading this page stupid enough to believe that the Holy Spirit had to “imitate a literary model” because it was “the Jewish fashion”? Ramsay did.

3. Geerhardus Vos, a reputable “Conservative,” says that “these statements of Paul were made under the stress of a...PHILOSOPHY. ”,s And again: “Paul’s PHILOSOPHY was a partial one. ” We are to believe that Paul “worked out” his “philosophy” from a retrospective stand­point and was at least correct “within the limited sphere in which he propounded it.”16

Well, it has proved to be correct for nineteen centuries in any sphere.

You see, Geerhardus Vos (a reputable, “reverent,” Conservative Biblicist, etc.) is intimating that the Pauline Epistles are only Paul’s theology (his ideas about doctrine), not the theology of the Holy Spirit.

The last part of the Pauline Obsession (for that is the best term to describe this attitude) is the overlooking of the results of Paul’s applied theology. The naivete of many writers in supposing that it is possible to rank Paul with Spinoza, Barth, Hegel, Tillich, or Augustine is abso­lutely ridiculous. It was Luther who said that the “Gospel” was the “preaching and crying of the grace of God,” and that it stood not in books and letters but more in oral preaching: “a voice that resounds into the entire world and is publicly cried abroad.”17 “Go ye into all the world and preach the gospel” is not a command to revise the God- honored text of the Reformation.

The use of strong adjectives in drawing the line between the thinkers who were doers, and the thinkers who wanted to be LIKE the doers, will frequently be resorted to in this history. This is absolutely neces­sary if one is to follow the persecuted, preaching, New Testament local church. The outstanding names involved in church history have been handled by many writers in such a way (though accidentally, perhaps) as to cast a New Testament halo over some characters (see chapters 14, 17) who were no more “Pauline” in stature than Judas Iscariot.

The second thing we will observe about all church historians is the difficulty they seem to have in locating “heretics” (see chapter 9). They seem to think that if a man believes the Apostles’ Creed—as all Papists do—that anything he writes to discredit the work of the Holy Spirit or to distort the Biblical convictions of a Bible believer is to be taken as historical fact. The historians, especially Philip Schaff, have a funny way of going half blind when they deal with historical fact that runs

contrary to their own particular religious hallucinations (see chapter 6, note 40). When Philip Schaff presents the “facts” that deal with the history of the New Testament Greek text,18 he disqualifies himself as a historian (which he was) and as a Bible reviser (which he was). Philip was the head of the American Revision Committee of 1901 that altered the King James Bible in more than 30,000 places. Schaff, try­ing to factually document the teaching of Pre-millennial believers in the early church, is like a Jew trying to document the orthodox beliefs of Adolph Hitler. It is even more ridiculous when Schaff attempts to justify his own “christening” in the “laver” where he was sprinkled (see chapter 9, note 92). Church history, from the standpoint of a Bible rejecting, A-millennial baby sprinkler is certainly not going to be a very objective church history because Bible believers are found baptizing adults, standing by the Book, and preaching the Pre-millennial return of Christ (see chapter 7, notes 34-40). Subjectivism—if not downright fanaticism— is not limited to writers like Froom, Sozomen, Mosheim, Orchard, and Armitage.

When George Dollar1’ lists the leading Fundamentalists in the back of his book on church history, he skips from Roloff (RO) to Ryle (RY). Evidently George couldn’t find a Bible believing Fundamentalist in Europe or America whose last name began with RU. Since George was honest enough to note that the first Fundamental Congress, which met to set up the “Magna Charta of Fundamentalism,” taught that there should be a “constant rejection of man’s opinions in ALL MATTERS OF TRUTH and constant reliance on plain scripture,”20 we are rather surprised to learn that George couldn’t find anyone in the twentieth cen­tury who believed exactly that—at least no one whose last name began with RU. George must not have looked too hard.

When Elgin Moyer wrote his work, Who Was Who in Church History (Moody Press, 1962), he omitted the man who set up four thou­sand Fundamental Baptist churches in America and forced Bob Jones, Jr., and Bob Jones, III, to change the faculty leaders of the staff at Bob Jones University from A-millennial Presbyterians (Whitte, Brokenshire, Payne, etc.) to Pre-millennial Baptists. He also omitted the greatest Bible scholar America ever produced: the man who taught Hal Lindsey, Salem Kirban, Weber, Jack Hyles, John R. Rice, Charles Fuller, Dr. DeHaan, Theodore Epp, Jerry Falwell, Jack Van Impe, and Perry Rockwood everything they knew about the Second Coming of Jesus Christ. These two omissions from Who Was Who were J. Frank Norris and Clarence Larkin. How did Moyer overlook these Bible believing Baptists when he did not fail to list Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, Ingersoll, Schiller, Fichte,

Voltaire, and Descartes in Who Was Who in Church History? George Dollar and Elgin Moyer seem to have a little trouble in tracing the “apos­tolic thread,” at least when it gets so close that it might reveal their own anti-Biblical position—Dollar was on the staff of BJU when he wrote—or their unwillingness to give credit where credit was due (Rom. 13:7). The line of history always runs right up to the time of the writer in the twentieth century, so when he sits down to write he pretends that the line went off in a different direction than it had been going for nine­teen centuries. Dollar began his work with a chapter entitled “THE ATTACK ON THE BIBLE” and stated that a Fundamentalist was one who believed in the absolute authority of the word, and where the opin­ions of men differed with it, they were to be rejected.21 George Dollar has never taught at a school a day in his life that believed anything of the kind, and he is not teaching in a school like that now. If you don’t believe it, write him and ask him. There is nothing like “objective neu­tralism,” is there?

Nothing is funnier to read than the average church history where the writer launches out boldly with Peter, James, and John, rides through the breakers with Chrysostom, Ignatius, Polycarp, and St. Pat, sails through the stormy Dark Ages with Berthold, Joachim, Columba, and Savonarola, sights land with Wycliffe, Luther, Calvin, and Huss, steams into port with Whitefield, Wesley, Edwards, Moody, Spurgeon, and Sunday, and then (God help you, child!) anchors with Beecher, Afman, Truett, Chafer, and Weatherhead! The ship must have floundered on a land mine while it was docking.

We will put great emphasis upon practical theology throughout church history rather than dogmatic theology, and greater emphasis on the lives of obedient believers than on the writings of “Christian” theologians. We will be looking for Spirit-filled evangelists and mis­sionaries, not garbage-filled bishops and archbishops. We will be more partial to Bible believing “heretics” (see chapter 9) than “Orthodox” murderers. Church history, to be an honest history—not an anti-church history—must be an extension of the acts of the Holy Spirit who con­tinues to operate in church history after the Acts of the Apostles cease (see Acts 28:31 and comments in that commentary).

11

CHAPTER ONE

The Nature of Church History

“Saying, I am Alpha and Omega, the first and the last: and, What thou seest, write in a book, and send it unto the seven churches which are in Asia; unto Ephesus, and unto , and unto Pergamos, and unto Thyatira, and unto Sardis, and unto Philadelphia, and unto Laodicea.”

Revelation 1:11

The only “apostolic” succession that history recognizes is a suc­cession of people converted under the apostles (Acts 1-28) who passed on to one another (2 Tim. 2:2) the seven great New Testament “mysteries” (1 Cor. 4:1-2) given to the body of Christ (1 Tim. 3:16; Rom. 11:25; Col. 1:27; 1 Cor. 15:49-52; Rev. 17:5; Eph. 5:32; and 2 Thess. 2:7). Since the signs ceased when God’s ministry to Israel terminated (1 Cor. 1:22), the apostolic “signs” (2 Cor. 12:12) did not exist much beyond 100 A.D. at the latest, for nearly all those who were converted under the apostles (Mark 16:17) had died out by this time; to be converted under an apostle while God was still dealing with Israel, one would have to be converted before Acts 28, that is, before 61-62 A.D. But even then there is little chance that anyone had the signs as late as 100 A.D., for Paul himself is losing the signs at the end of his own ministry around 68 A.D. (note carefully 1 Tim. 5:23 and 2 Tim. 4:20). This means that in order to counterfeit the power and authority of the New Testament apostles, a modern apostate must do one of two things.

One: follow Rome and pretend that the signs, power, and author­ity given to Peter extend beyond his own converts (33-70 A.D.) through the Italian politicians at Rome—all are Italians from Adrian (1159) to the Communist Pope John Paul II (1979)—ida a bachelor priesthood of professional politicians. To do this the “signs” and “miracles” would have to be invented, but Rome would never hesitate to invent anything

if it would expedite its political control over foreign nations through its “membership.”1

Two: follow the twentieth century “Charismatics” and pretend that a “Second Pentecost” is occurring (after 1,947 barren ones—the Holy Spirit did not come down on any Pentecost from 33 A.D. to 1980 A.D.) and that God has decided that the signs (1 Cor. 14:22) are no longer for unbelieving Jews (1 Cor. 1:22) but for Gentile ecumenical parties engaged in setting up one church under the Antichrist (Rev. 17). Any Bible believer who studies the Bible (2 Tim. 2:15) and believes the Bible (1 Thess. 2:13) knows that either of these stratagems amounts to noth­ing more than religious buffoonery. There is no “apostolic succession” of apostolic signs, miracles, and wonders in church history; if there is any “succession” of anything, it will have to be a succession of practice by those who attempted to obey the orders set forth for the Gentiles in Matthew 28:19, 20; 2 Corinthians 5:20; Acts 27:25; Galatians 5; Romans 10-14; Colossians 1-2; and Romans 3. That is, the main test of “orthodoxy” in a real church history would have to do with belief in the Bible and application of that Book to the contemporary scene in which the believer is to be found in each century. “Creeds” amount to little or nothing if they omit the Gospel Imperative to “go into all the world and preach the Gospel. ” “THE GOSPEL” in Roman Catholic mythology can mean anything from pretending that intoxicating liquor is Christ’s blood to “goodwill trips” to Communist countries (Pope John Paul II, Jan.-Feb. 1979) to encourage class warfare: the AP called Pope John Paul’s tour “SPREADING THE GOSPEL. ” There is no record in three years of the pope’s travels that he preached or taught “the gospel” (1 Cor. 15:1-4; Gal. 1:8-10) one time to anyone, in public or private, in any country he visited. “Creeds” are less than worthless when they are based on a Book that the Christian professes to believe in when he has never seen that Book, or read it, or heard it preached.2 The most hypocritical liar you ever met in your life is a Christian scholar who recommends as an infallible standard for your life and ministry a standard which neither he nor anyone else has seen a day in his life.3

One will notice in studying this history that “creeds” and “councils” rarely settle anything. Since every reference to a “coun­cil” in Mark, Luke, John, and Acts is a reference to a Bible-rejecting group dedicated to the suppression of the truth (see Acts 6:12 and com­ments in that commentary), the emphasis which historians lay upon these matters (see Seeberg, Neve, Ayer, LaGarde, Drummond, Schaff, et al.) is largely wasted paper. Practice has always taken the precedence

over profession (Matt. 7:21), whether a man is saved or lost (James 2:18). Where both match, there is no problem, but when we perceive, for example, “councils” of “Christian leaders gathered together to shut the doors of churches because they won’t submit to an outside ecclesi­astical authority,”4 there is not much point in taking their “profession” too seriously. Just because a man professes to believe that “the Bible is the word of God” doesn’t mean that he believes anything of the kind.3 Profession doesn’t end the matter.

Councils and creeds may settle the matters of outward profession of faith in regard to what the group of Christians is supposed to believe; as to how many of them believe it (if it is so) or as to how much of it they should have believed to start with (in case it isn’t so) is “some­thing else.” The infamous Council of Trent (1546) stated that every Roman Catholic Congressman in America (in 1980 or any other time) believes that Johnny Carson; Abraham Lincoln; President Carter; Benny Goodman; Dolly Parton; Billy Graham; and Martin Luther King, Jr., are under the curse (anathema) of God.6 Does any Catholic in America profess to believe that? If he did, would he let you know it? Would your morning newspaper print it? If a Catholic didn’t know that he was supposed to believe that, would his church inform him that unless he believed that, he was cursed, too?1 Of course not. Why tell the truth and destroy your chances of taking over a country? “Creeds” are con­venient props to be produced when necessary. Creeds and councils are usually politically motivated. They are carried out by the “chief high muckety-mucks”8 and rarely have anything to do with Bible believing Christianity in practice.

Our history will deal with practical theology: the practical outwork­ing of Bible truth in the lives of those who believed it. They (as Bob Jones, Sr., used to state it so well) believed that “whatever the Book said was so, even if they didn’t all agree as to what it said.” In such matters the man who leaves the words in the context in which they stand, without adding or subtracting from them, is always closer to the truth than the man who consults five translations to make the words “teach” what he has already decided they “mean. ”

Sometimes these Bible believing people are called Novatians, some­times Donatists, sometimes Paulicians, Bogomiles, Bulgarians, or other names. They are always associated with HERESY. Their contempo­raries in the world (and of the world) always escape the charge. The charge of HERESY is the standard charge from 60 A.D. (Acts 24:14) to the present against any group of Bible believers who will not ‘ ‘knuckle down” to the religious “powers that be.” No Bible believing group

ever escaped the charge (Vaudois, Brethren, Paterines, Cathari, Hugue­nots, etc.). To the modern, apostate Fundamentalist a genuine Bible believer is a “heretic” because he will not succumb to the propaganda put out by the faculty members of Christian colleges and seminaries that came straight out of Hell through Genesis 3:1 and Westcott and Hort.9 Bible believers have always been considered to be “heretics” by Rome.10 In our own “witch hunt” for “heretics” (see chapter 9) we will assume the position that a heretic is one who professes to believe the Bible is the “verbally inspired word of God” when he doesn't have ANY Bible that that is true of, and then he adds or subtracts from the Bible he has in order to teach something that is or isn’t so. In short: A BIBLE-PERVERTING LIAR. Our definition here will go much deeper and cut much closer to the bone than the ancient definitions which assume that one must deny some “fundamental of the faith” to be a “heretic” (Acts 24:14). We maintain that the “fundamentals” can be found in nearly every pagan religion," so belief in them is not a unique or distinguishing mark of a real Christian.

The thing that marks out the real “Christian” is his belief in what God said (Gen. 3:1; 1 Thess. 2:13; Acts 27:25; John 8:47). A real Chris­tian will not ADD to what God said (Prov. 30:6), nor will he subtract from it (Rev. 22:19). No “fundamental of the faith” is as important as the source it came from; if that source is corrupt, the fundamental could be just as corrupt. We all agree that certain “fundamentals” are true, but they are only true because God the Holy Spirit said they were true (2 Peter 1:2b, Ps. 119:89). Your opinion about whether or not they are true is immaterial; if God said it (Gen. 1:3, 6, 9), it is so (Num. 23:19), and if God said it in sarcasm (Matt. 23:24; Amos 4:4), He intended you to take it that way.

In this history we will see a cycle unraveling before our eyes that will repeat itself several times; at least enough times so that we can identify it as a law of history that operates independently of anyone’s analysis of it or their feelings about it. The cycle goes like this:

1. Preaching, which may be called “Evangelism.”

2. Teaching, which may stand for “Education.”

3. Culture, which means the introduction of science, philosophy, and tradition (Col. 2:8; 1 Tim. 6:20) into the teaching (or education).

4. Apostasy, which includes ecumenical overtures (compromise) with pagan religious systems or unsaved people.

5. Paganism, which means the original condition the populace was in before they were “evangelized” (point 1).

These five steps will be found in a reoccurring cycle throughout

the entire history of the church, and they may match another format which runs as follows:

1. A Man; this involves the preaching and evangelization.

2. A Movement; this involves the setting up of teaching facilities and institutions.

3. A Machine; this involves regimentation and patterning the sys­tem after the world’s system of education (colleges and universities).

4. A Monument; this means the Holy Spirit has departed, aban­doning the institution to paganism: discipline and academic standards are substituted for the liberty and power of the Holy Spirit.

5. Materialism; there is no shred of the movement left.

All religious movements begin with a MAN (John 1:6), and he is followed by a MOVEMENT, which becomes a MACHINE, which erects a MONUMENT: monuments are brick, stone, and mortar—they are MATERIAL. Now you have to find another “man” to get the train back on the tracks.

The terminology adopted for these steps may vary from age to age to confuse the reader and prevent him from learning the lessons of church history. For example, sometimes paganism is called “atheism” or “communism.” Sometimes it is called “Satanism” or “Catholicism.” Apostasy is sometimes associated with “integration,” “synthesis,” “enlightenment,” “higher criticism,” etc. Sometimes Culture enters as “rationalism,” “high academic standards,” high cultural standards,” refinement,” “enriched curriculum,” etc. Variations are endless. As a variety of names are applied to Bible believers (see chapters 6, 7) to prevent identification, so a variety of names are given for CULTURE PAGANISM, and APOSTASY to cover up the connections and con­ceal the cycle going on in the age in which the reader is living. Every Christian school or church in America, for example, is presently on one of those five lines (a man—preaching; a movement—teaching; culture in a machine; apostasy in a monument; or back to its original position: materialistic paganism). The “original position” is “having no hope, and without God in the world” (Eph. 2:12).

This circular pattern will explain what happened to European Christianity between 100-300 A.D.; what happened to the German Reformation between 1500 and 1800; what happened to the English Awakening between 1600 and 1900; and what happened to American Christianity between 1901 and 1990. The cycle rolls inexorably onward, and the only schools, churches, individuals, and institutions which sur­vive in any kind of scriptural condition for more than thirty years are the ones who refuse to go beyond Step TWO (Biblical education). Not

one step beyond that is safe, for that is the limit given in Matthew 28:19, 20 and the limit given in 2 Timothy 2:15 for Christian “growth.” “Culture” (1 Cor. 1; 2; Acts 17:21; Isa. 29:11) is never a factor to be considered (1 Tim. 6:20; Col. 2:8). Those who tread its gossamer path (see the NIV and the New ASV in Rom. 1:21, 25, and 28) must eventually stand up and attack the verses in the Bible (see the NIV and the New ASK on Gal. 3:1 and Rom. 13:9) that any unsaved atheist would attack. “Culture” means the instilling into the child of God the idea that there are authorities higher than the Book by which he was saved and enlightened. Culture sounds “May Day” for any individual, school, church, or nation on the face of the earth; and if there is one lesson that history teaches, it teaches THAT.12 If there is one lesson that his­tory teaches which church historians never learned, it is THAT; and, further, if there is one lesson which never could pierce the beclouded and egotistical minds (Rom. 1:21,25, 28) of the modern, apostate Fun­damentalist, it is THAT lesson. A fool who is wise in his own conceit will not be reformed with any amount of truth presented in any manner by anyone (see Prov. 27:22 and comments in that commentary).

The Pauline Obsession (see the introduction) will crop up time and time again in our study of history. Never is it more manifest than it is in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in the lives of dead ortho­dox, dry-eyed, pin-whiskered, bifocaled mutts sitting in the faculty lounges of Tennessee Temple, Springfield, Westminster, Bob Jones, Midwestern, Princeton, and Dallas. These change agents who talk forever about their “loyalty to the Word of God” no more resemble Paul in their personal lives than a Mexican Chihuahua resembles a Ger­man Shepherd canine guard dog. Going to seed on “fundamentals,” “doctrines,” “creeds,” and “beliefs,” these guardians of the “faith once delivered to the saints” (Afman, Custer, Panosian, Porter, Melton, Godwin, Walker, Newman, MacRae, Brown, et al.) are about as reliable as a burnt out cigar. They don’t preach on the street (Acts 7); they don’t go “house to house” (Acts 20:20); they are never caught in “weariness, cold, pain, fastings, etc.” (2 Cor. 11:27); and they could no more make a Roman governor tremble (Acts 24:25) than they could tie their shoelaces with their teeth. Their language (“a better transla­tion should be,” “an unfortunate rendering here is,” “the Greek brings out the tense more clearly,” “these words are not in the original,” etc.) cannot be found one time in either Testament, let alone in anything Paul wrote in his lifetime; you cannot even find anything in the Pauline epis­tles that resembles such language. Their language is babel; it is tongues; it is not merely non-Pauline, it is non-Biblical and non-Christian.

Theologians and grammarians like to fancy that they are “Pauline” (see Gen. 20:7 and comments in that commentary); it makes them feel like “reverent Biblicists.”

Material for this history will be gathered around the central idea that practice and application of Biblical truth is what marks the Bible believer throughout church history. Where there is no belief,13 as in the case of hundreds of faculty members of fundamental schools (1900-1980), and where there is no application of belief, as far as we are concerned, there is no Biblical Christianity in evidence. What is in evidence is a mongrel or bastard Christianity; it is never to be mis­taken for Biblical Christianity.

If the reader will study the book of Acts (2:41; 4:33; 5:15; and 6:8), he will find that every single time there is a real moving of the Holy Spirit, there is immediate Satanic opposition to the work (Acts 4:1; 5:17; 5:40; 7:54). You cross the mountain and there is only one way to go: downhill. The circular patter given above will explain this motion. Once you pass from Evangelism and Education, you have to “batten down the hatches” and “secure all bulkheads,” for once you say “Education,” up pops the Alexandrian Cult (see chapter 5), who invented and set up the modem Christian educational system: the first Christian college was at Alexandria, Egypt.14 This means that no matter how “soul-winning” and how “evangelistic” a founder of a twentieth century school may have been (or still may be), he has set up a nesting place for apostasy as soon as he sets up a curriculum. If he cannot clean out the rats’ nest without destroying his setup, he will have to tolerate it or even defend it—vigorously.15 This explains the typical demonic setup where the “soul-winning” promoter and founder defends the non-soul-winning apostates on his faculty, while the apostate faculty members brag about “soul-winning” being the “first thing,” when they themselves have not led a soul to Christ anywhere from one year to thirty years. While each of these characters are backslapping and protecting each other (and thereby alibiing each others’ sins), the class­room is departing from faith in the word of God at the rate of five hundred miles an hour. This explains why every school, with the passage of time, winds up rejecting the Bible.16 The soul-winning “founder” protects the dirty work done by his staff, and they hide behind his spir­itual success to convince the unwary that they are spiritual, too: they are NOT. Most of them don’t have a spiritual bone in their bodies. The damage they do to ministerial students in the classroom is absolutely incalculable, and only the Judgment Seat of Christ will reveal the gross sins of the “soul-winning” founder and the gross sins of his compatri­

ots who turned fifty to fifty thousand young people away from their faith in the Book by which they found Jesus Christ (Matt. 11:27). All will come out in the “wash” (Eph. 5:27), and the pious alibis abroad now will appear in their true light. There is a reason for the downward spiraling of history, spirituality, and Bible belief, but it is always found, in any century, in the apostatizing of educational institutions that were founded and built by Bible believing Christians. (The Lord will not be nearly as polite and as tactful in dealing with these matters as I have been.) The God of Truth is the God of History; the God of History is the God of the Bible.

Philip Schaff s sources for “worship in the Ante-Nicene age” naturally refer to what Harnack, Probst, Volz, Weizsacker, Zahn, and others thought about early worship.17 We, of course, understand the Jewish type of worship at this time that went on in the synagogues (the Shema, the eighteen prayers of Benedictions [Berachoth], the lesson from the Law [Parasha] and the Prophets [Haphthara], and the para­phrased readings in the Midrash, etc.), but this has nothing to do with a form of “service” in a New Testament Christian assembly after Acts 15, or possibly after Acts 7. The saved Jews of Acts 2-5 worshipped in the Temple (Acts 3:1-4); nothing is said about Christians assembling in synagogues. The synagogues where Paul preached (Acts 13:14) were Jewish assemblies. If Christians were present (Acts 19:8)—Gentile or otherwise (Acts 10:22)—they listened or stood up and preached New Testament truth (Acts 13:38-42). There is no New Testament record of any synagogue observing the New Testament ordinances in any service. When the church historians begin to lead you astray into the anti-scriptural maze of Roman intrigues, they take you immediately away from the scriptures into the Didache and the Epistles of Clement.18 That is, the guiding lights of Christian literature—the saved church histori­ans—will abandon the Biblical record (Acts 7-28) immediately and replace it with the heresy of two spurious documents that are no more scriptural than Tobit or Bel and the Dragon.

No sooner does John die than the “eucharistic prayers” suddenly enter into the local church, and with them, the church historians begin to talk about “liturgical rites” and “liturgical passages” (that’s what Philip Schaffs church calls them).19 Quite naturally Schaff, the church historian, refers to “sacred rites” as “sacraments,”20 although noth­ing of the kind is found anywhere in ANY New Testament. Then just to make sure that the great scholar writes the most objective church history one can obtain—with the most “neutral” observance of “fact”— Schaff tell us (Vol. I, p. 465) that the sacrament of water baptism

replaced circumcision as a “SIGN.” Baptism is never referred to as a "sign "anywhere in either Testament. Schaff has read a papal prejudice into the text before he got through one volume of “church history.” No local church in the New Testament practiced water baptism as a sign or a "sacrament. ” To teach otherwise is to teach FICTION, not history.

The preposterous proof that Schaff offers for infant baptism being a “FACT” in the early church, is the “fact” that it rests on “strong probabilities," although “that fact” is “not capable of positive PROOF.”

That was the Christian scholarship behind the ASV of 1901. Philip Schaff was the head of that committee. One will observe that when Schaff, as Westcott and Hort, refers to “facts,” he is never referring to any FACT that is found anywhere in history. When they say “fact” they qualify it by saying that the fact is a “strong probability.” The foundation “facts” behind the “accepted principles of the reconstruc­tion of the Greek New Testament” for the NIV and the New ASV were the theories of Westcott, Hort and Philip Schaff.22 They were no more “facts” than Philip’s baby sprinkling.

Schaff did not write “church history” in his first volume: he wrote fiction.

Not content with adding to the word of God at this point and per­verting the word of God at this point, the worthy historian tells us that the “eucharist” was “celebrated” (that is the Roman Catholic desig­nation for “taken”) daily.23 What is the authority for this? It is the Campbellite theory that Acts 2:46 is the “Lord’s Supper” in the face of the fact that Acts 20:7, 11 indicates that it was eating meals. Allowing his “tolerance” to overrule the truth of God, Schaff lists four interpre­tations of the communion (1 Cor. 10:16) and then tells us that the blessing of the ordinance does not depend upon Biblical understanding or Bibli­cal interpretation. One might as well say that damnation was a reward that a Christian received for not “discerning the Lord’s body” in the communion (1 Cor. 11:29). Some portions of church history, as recorded by the main Christian historians of church history, should be addenda to Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.

The standard way of handling four interpretations (see above) is to refuse to choose sides, or else play God and decide that one that con­tradicts the rest of scripture is the right one. Schaff accepts the Roman Catholic position on baby sprinkling and on the “sacrament” of communion. That is, you openly state that four choices are “matters of preference,” but that the words of scripture are not to decide which

of the four is absolutely right: then you go to work undercover to con­vince the reader that YOU are right and the words of the scriptures are wrong. That is the Alexandrian method.

To cite another example:

The words of scripture state that the “body of Christ” (1 Cor. 11:29) is made up of living people (1 Cor. 10:17); it is no longer a reference to a dead corpse (John 6:55). The words of scripture point to a memo­rial (1 Cor. 11:25), never a “sacrament. ” Therefore, three out of four of Schaffs “interpretations” may be discarded at once, unless the “Christian” is worried about social standing, political image, income, relatives, employment, publicity, or sales. In this case there is no point in Schaffs listing the four interpretations because his motive was wrong to start with: he had no intention of believing what the scriptures said about ANY of the interpretations. It is very similar to your Greek teacher giving you “four possible readings” for Romans 1:25 (NIV, ASV, New ASV, and AV) when the point to start with was how to get rid of the AV text and replace it with his own opinion, which was based on his desire to avoid the scriptural charge of SIN in his own life (see Rom. 1:21, 25, and 28). There is rarely any “problem” with any reading of the AV of 1611: the problem is in the life of the dirty rascal who resents its clarity.

Newman fares a little better when he uses Pfleiderer, Hort, Lightfoot, Allen, Bauer, Dargan, and Cremer as a starting point. How­ever, confounding James 2:2 with other passages, Newman thought that Christians met in synagogues.23 Ignoring the first words of the epistle (James 1:1), Newman pretended that the Epistle of James was written to Christians: Kenneth Taylor (Living Bible) did him one better and changed the whole first verse so that it said exactly that. There is no Greek manuscript on earth that says James 1:1 was written to Chris­tians: Newman and Taylor are down the rabbit hole with Alice and the Mad Hatter. The book of James was written “TO THE TWELVE TRIBES WHICH ARE SCATTERED ABROAD.”

All of the writers used by Newman, however, agree that the New Testament church was an independent body of baptized believers (Hatch, Harnack, McGiffert, Weiszacker, Conybeare, and Howson). They met on the first day of the week for obvious scriptural reasons (Exod. 12:16; Acts 2:1; John 20:1; 1 Cor. 16:2; and Acts 20:7), and they operated as individual entities without supervision from any “area” or territorial “bishop” (Cunningham, Hamack, Schaff, et al.). There is no contro­verting the fact that the local New Testament church was self-governing, self-propagating, and self-sustaining. No writer, not even the worst of

the Jesuits (Bellarmine, Nobili, Loyola, et al.) or the most radical of the International Socialists (Pike, Kagawa, Peale, Weigle, Sockman, Oxnam, Blake, Weatherhead, et al.), would deny that a Bible believ­ing New Testament church was completely independent and was never given orders (let alone demands) by any group higher than itself. Acts 15 produces a set of recommendations (not orders) and suggestions (Acts 15:23, 25, 29).

Church polity, to Philip Schaff, is so flexible that he claims 50% right and 50% wrong for Presbyterians, Congregationalists, Episco­palians, and Catholics when they stake their claims on the New Testa­ment method of operating a church.26 Schaff does not mention the Baptists at all. In his zeal to prove everything is “50-50,” Schaff appeals to the RV readings of Acts 20:17 to replace the Authorized Version. Here Schaff insists that the /IL has obscured the identity of the bishops in the local church.27 But he had no intention of accepting the Bible any place where it disagreed with his own opinions. Since 1 Peter 5:1-6 interpreted Acts 20:17 (in the AV of 1611), there was not much sense in Schaff making the change. However, before we get through with church history we will find a lot of this kind of thing going on. For example, after a lengthy exposition and a lot of going into manuscript evidence,28 Schaff comes to the conclusion that the angels of the seven churches (Rev. 1-3) are the local pastors! This ancient chestnut has sur­vived the fireplace to this day with God vomiting a pastor out of his mouth (Rev. 3:16). Always willing to give way to the devil if enough “preferences” are present, Schaff allows that the angels “might be” heavenly messengers (Origen, DeWette, Alford, and Lightfoot), or again they might be “deputies or clerks” (Vitringa, Lightfoot, Bengel, Winer), or again (if you “prefer”) they might be personifications of the churches (Arethas, Salmasius). Since not one man listed (including Schaff) believed that angels were thirty-three year old males without wings (see Gen. 18:2; 19:1 with comments in that commentaiy), there really wasn’t any point in trying to make any application in the first place.

The history of the local New Testament church is an impossible thing for Philip Schaff to handle. Overshadowing his brilliant mind, his vast learning, his diligent research into original sources, and his painstaking hours of laborious writing hovers a death angel carrying a pennant: it says “1CHABOD. ” You see, Schaff believed that the King­dom of God would be brought in through the visible churches by a slow, sure, steady, evolutionary process.21 With such a non-Christian, anti- Biblical prejudice against the Bible, Philip Schaff could no more find the real truth about church history than he could find a whisper in a

hurricane. To help “bring in the kingdom,” Philip introduces us to the New Testament “deaconess’ (see Amplified, Rom. 16:1). According to Schaff, since Eastern churches later (much later than New Testa­ment times) ordained women into the office of “deaconess,”30 the woman in Romans 16:1 (in New Testament times) has to be a deacon­ess. However, since the word in Romans 16:1 is not in the feminine gender but the NEUTER, Philip and his playmates must do something quickly: he does; he inserts a footnote to the effect31 that “afterwards” the word was not spelled like every Greek Biblical manuscript in the world had it spelled (NEUTER), but it was spelled in the FEMININE GENDER. This was the scholarship behind the ASV of 1901. Bible perversion to prove the theory of evolution is quite common among “Christian” historians.

Such are the ways of some of the greatest “church historians” the baby sprinklers ever produced. Philip Schaff, as his friends Westcott and Hort, was an ecumenical Catholic and the implacable enemy of Dean Burgon (1813-1888), who championed the Protestant text of the Reformation, so Schaff concludes his article on the “missing end of Mark 16” with the statement that everything is merely “conjecture”;32 that no certainty is possible in regard to whether or not you have the word of God in that portion of your Bible. Since that portion professes to have been given to the local assembly—in this case the first local apostolic assembly—we can certainly expect little or nothing from Philip Schaff where his pen crosses Biblical truth. We may make use of his investigations and researches into the fields of Roman Catholic liturgy, Roman Catholic politics, fanatical groups in the Dark Ages, Reformation polity and theology, Roman Catholic popes and other assorted crimi­nals, secular events, and dating systems. However when it comes to the local New Testament church, its nature, its standards of authority, and its development, Schaff is no more reliable than Dollinger (1799- 1899), Mohler (1796-1838), Hefele (1809-1893), Renan (1832-1892), or Neander (1789-1850). Historians such as Eusebius, Socrates, Sozo- men, Theodoret, Callisti, Cassiodorus, Migne, Theiner, and Facius can make contributions by informing us of ecclesiastical developments that are contemporaneous with the history and development of the Bible believing assemblies, but interpretation of these historical facts lies out­side of their grasp and ability, as all manifest a broad-minded tolerance for anti-scriptural expositions and a compromising “preference” for some of the most dangerous heresies ever extracted from the word of God, or (as in the case just listed) heresies derived by altering the scrip­ture to make it suit the heresy.

A church historian who begins his history with a false or distorted view of the nature of the local church will shortly find himself in water so deep33 that he cannot stay afloat without improvised life preservers. The local assembly of baptized believers, called out of the world sys­tem in which they live, is the essential unit to be studied in any church history. Not one of them in the New Testament baptizes infants, and not one of them would ever confuse regeneration of the sinner by the Holy Spirit with water baptism: that is a later “improvement”—if you look at it through the eyes of a Bible rejecting, religious evolutionist.

CHAPTER TWO

Putting the Church Back into Church History

“Then had the churches rest throughout all Judaea and Galilee and Samaria, and were edified; and walking in the fear of the Lord, and in the comfort of the Holy Ghost, were multiplied.” Acts 9:31

Church history, by virtue of Biblical definition, must deal with the history of the local congregations first and with organized denomina­tions secondly. The word “church” itself is well-known to all students of religion; it is the Western designation for feKKXr|aia (ecclesia), a called-out assembly; and although the word is occasionally a reference to the living organism of Christ’s spiritual body (Col. 1:18, Eph. 1:22, 1 Tim. 3:15), it is much more frequently used to indicate a local congregation of believers who have been called “out” of the world sys­tem for purposes of assembly (Acts 2), worship (Acts 4), prayer (Acts 4), mutual aid and assistance (Acts 11), teaching and preaching the Bible (Acts 13), missionary endeavors (Acts 16), and as a testimony for Jesus Christ to the pagan population among whom they dwell. The word for this “called-out assembly” refers to a local group of believers on this earth more than eighty times in the New Testament. Not once does any reader of the New Testament get the slightest whisper or shadow of the reality of a political hierarchy run by archbishops, cardinals, and popes, with “priests” and “nuns” trying to get tax money. The New Testament church is completely divorced from any church that is con­nected directly or indirectly with ANY of these people or their activities.

Now, it is absolutely essential to understand the New Testament picture of this “church” in order to write any kind of an honest church history. Where a church historian ignores the basic, primitive, Bible definition of what a New Testament church is, there will be no end

of confusion, misrepresentation, and “dead ends” in the historian’s research work. It would be quite impossible for Dollinger or Latourette, for example, to trace the New Testament church through any length of history, anywhere, no matter how many facts they had at their dis­posal, for neither man was ever a member of a local church in the New Testament sense, and neither man preached on the street (all the apos­tles did) long enough for a traffic light to change. Eusebius, the first church historian, is another very unreliable source for information where it deals with the New Testament assemblies. A half-Arian politician (see chapter 8), who denied the Pre-millennial return of Christ (chap­ter 7, notes 34-39), is not going to know much about the conduct of Christians in the New Testament who were expecting the immediate return of their Lord (Acts 3:19, 20; 1 Thess. 4:15-18; 1 John 3:2-3). Not once does the term (ecclesia) ever refer to any group of Christians anywhere who prayed to Mary, took mass, said “rosaries,” or sprin­kled babies: those are later “improvements”—if you are a religious evolutionist.

In the New Testament the local church is self-governing (Acts 6); it chooses its own pastors and deacons (1 Tim. 3:1-12); its pastor is its visible head on this earth (Heb. 13:17; 1 Tim. 5:17); it supports poor saints (Rom. 15:25-26; 1 Cor. 16:1-3); it immerses its converts in water (Acts 16:33); and it sends out evangelists and missionaries (Acts 13:1-4; 16:1-4).

Question: How does a Christian (any Christian in ANY century) improve on this pattern?

What do you suppose would possess a church historian (Eusebius, Schaff, Fisher, Migne, LaGarde, Walker, Newman, et al.) to think that following the completion of the New Testament and its record of the ministry of the apostles, that the next move (90-200 A.D.) would be a progressive move forward which improved the nature of the primi­tive church and “matured” it? When Fisher and Neander try to explain early Christianity to their readers, they use the Apostolic Constitutions and the Didachex to convince you that the worship services described in those corrupt forgeries are a progressive development beyond that found in the New Testament. Who could do such a thing but a Bible denying evolutionist?

Since every major denomination until 1900 professed that the Bible was the final authority (Rome accepting tradition as an equal author­ity, as usual), how would any historian but a Roman Catholic trace the history of a corporate ecclesiastical system involved in international politics through history as though that were the New Testament church?

That would be ANTI-CHURCH HISTORY. What motive would com­pel a church historian to do such a monstrous thing other than a desire to confirm a monstrous lie and cover up the truths of history? If one speaks of “the church” as “the body of Christ” (Eph. 3:1-6; Col. 1:18), what would such a body have to do with an ecclesiastical hierarchy of cowards (chapter 12, note 67) and fornicators (chapter 12, notes 86-88) controlling governments through “sacraments”?

Observe that in the New Testament the church has no cardinals, no novenas, no nuns, no abbots, no monks, no priests, no sacraments, no Christmas, no beads, etc. With no prayers for the dead, no rever­ence showed to Mary, and no statues as “aids to worship,” how are we to interpret the “expansion of Christianity” (100-500 A.D.) and the “growth of the church” (500-1000 A.D.) which follows the com­pletion of the New Testament? According to Dollinger and Latourette (and others), we are to assume that these items were part of a slow, DIVINE “leavening” (chapter 11, notes 58-59) which, being blessed of God, was a movement destined to convert the entire world to “Chris­tianity”—whatever that is.

The local church in the book of Acts is harassed and persecuted by Rome (Acts 24). It is Rome who cuts off James’ head (Acts 12) and imprisons Paul (Acts 28) and whips and nails Jesus Christ (Matt. 27). Did the Roman “cat” suddenly get turned around the other way when Constantine the Great got sprinkled (chapter 7, note 13)? Did Rome cease to kill and imprison Christians after 313 A.D. (the Edict of Milan)? I trow not. The church state organized under Constantine (325-500 A.D.) pronounced the death sentence on every Bible believing Christian in the Empire and every pagan in the Empire who did not subscribe to its own council decrees (see chapters 8 and 9).

The local assembly in the New Testament never commemorates anyone’s birthday, they never pray to Mary, and they are never caught sprinkling babies anywhere but in the kitchen sink. Such matters are not the subject of scholarly preference or sober discussion. There is not one case of infant baptism by sprinkling or immersion in any New Testament.2 Those Romans pressed to extremities to prove a Roman point might assume that there were infants in the household of a single woman (Acts 16:15), but, then again, you might also assume that there were polar bears present and possibly a Catholic priest with “holy water,” depending upon how much money there was in it for you to prove the point.

The local assembly in the New Testament has ordained elders and deacons (1 Tim. 3:1-4), no priests, nuns, monks, archbishops, cardi­

nals, or popes. An “archbishop,” according to Webster’s Dictionary, would be at least one spiritual rank higher than the Lord Jesus Christ (1 Peter 2:25), who was unable to attain to that illustrious position. Are we to assume that the positions of “cardinals” and “archbishops” within the Soviet-Catholic church be Biblical offices? Or than it is an improve­ment on the New Testament pattern? If contrary to the Bible (1 Tim. 2:1-10), are we to put up with them as being in line with “sound doc­trine”? If they emerged by way of “oral tradition” (John 21:25) and come into conflict with the writings of the apostles (1 Tim. 3:1-8; 1 Peter 5:1-6), how is a Bible believing Christian to take them? As tokens of good intentions paving the road to hell? As “progressive revelations” which the Lord didn’t have time to talk about? How does a group of popes and archbishops publish an Index of “forbidden books” (chap­ter 17, note 28) on the grounds that these books are “untruthful” when forgeries,3 holy grails, candles, beads, bells, rosaries, purgatory, and indulgences are just as untruthful to the New Testament as hexes, Easter bunnies, hired pews, simony, black magic, Vatican politics, pornogra­phy, and Catholicism?

Again, no matter what evidence to the contrary is produced in regard to the manner and the nature of worship in the local assemblies after 90 A.D., what is an honest man to say of them where they clearly con­tradict the TRUTH (John 17:17) as given (2 Tim. 3:16) by the Author of all truth (John 14:17), who promised to guide an honest man (John 7:17) into “ALL TRUTH” (John 16:13)?

This is the most serious theological question a Christian will ever have to deal with.

In regard to progressive revelation, any student of the Bible can see that truth is progressive to a certain point in the book of Acts (see Acts 2 and comments in that commentary). Expedients do have to be devised from time to time (Acts 6:1-6) to remedy certain situations that arise which are not covered in the Old Testament (Acts 14:23). On at least one occasion something resembling a council is called (Acts 15), although the Holy Spirit is much more careful in describing it than the church historians are: the Holy Spirit never refers to Acts 15 as a “coun­cil,” since that word, by Bible definition (Acts 4:15; 22:30; 24:20; and 6:12), occurs nowhere in Mark, Luke, John, or Acts without being a reference to a group of religious hypocrites assembled to carry out the will of SATAN in suppressing the truth (see Mark 13:9; Luke 22:66; John 11:47; and Acts 6:15). How is it then that we do not find this basic, fundamental, Bible truth mentioned one time in any church his­tory written by Neander, Drummond, Cairns, Walker, Moyer, Schaff,

Dollar, Fisher, Latourette, Hefele, or Vedder? Would not a real scholar call such a thing a “serious oversight”? Here are seven standard, official “church councils” noted by all the historians in all of their histories (Nicaea 325, Constantinople 381, Ephesus 431, Chalcedon 451, Con­stantinople 553, Constantinople 680, and Nicaea 787) without one historian knowing what the BIBLE says about a “council”! It’s a strange world, isn’t it? If the councils of Mark, Luke, John, and Acts were not a Satanic operation, according to the author of the other twenty- three books in the New Testament, what were they? Expressions of peace on earth to “men of good will”? Ecumenical overtures for “one fold and one shepherd”? You see, by taking the evolutionary approach (the positive approach) the church historians disqualify themselves when they sit down to write. There are no Christian “councils” anywhere in the New Testament; the councils in the first six centuries of church history are the inventions of ROMAN CATHOLICISM.

The common sense rule which the scriptures plainly lay down for us is that any teaching or practice that does not run contrary to the scrip­ture may be accepted to cover “doubtful cases” (Rom. 14; Col. 3). For example, one cannot condemn church buildings simply because they are not “in the scriptures,” although they certainly are not. One can­not throw the Sunday School out and wreck the buses simply because a verse does not say, “Go ye into all the world on buses and bus in the kiddies.” Some of the brethren are so “scriptural” they are unscriptural (1 Cor. 8:1-2).

However, when a clear case of violating or contradicting scripture arises—say, a “repeated sacrifice” (Heb. 10:8-14) that has no blood (Heb. 9:22) or the calling of a religious leader “father” (Matt. 23:9) or praying to more than one Mediator (1 Tim. 2:5) or saying that Mary was sinless (Luke 2:22)—then we have not only a horse of a different color but a snake of a different rattle (see Rome—the Great Private Inter­preter, 1969). The Satanic way to handle these matters (Gen. 3:1) is as follows: since “good men disagree” on these things, they are only matters of “preference,” not something to get excited about, and certainly not something to split the “one fold” with as a matter of doc­trinal controversy. That is, the word of God is not as important as peace, love, and “unity.” “Tolerance” and “love” are the great words (see Rev. 2:2 and comments in that commentary) used by every apostate Fundamentalist in America for adding to or taking from (or pervert­ing) the words of God. Oddly enough, these are the great words used also by all Liberals and Modernists in the National Council of Churches whose basic creed is Matthew 7:1.

Adding to and subtracting from the words of God caused the destruc­tion and depravity of the human race (Gen. 3:1-3). The first two sins ever committed on this earth were committed by a woman (ERA, Eve ruined Adam). They were, first of all, subtracting from the words of God; and secondly, adding to them. With this Biblical fact in bold face, block print, glaring in the faces of every man who ever read any Bible, why do you suppose it is that subtracting 128 words from the Greek text of the New Testament (see Nestle, Hort, Aland, Metzger) or add­ing 600 words to it (see Manuscript “D” used to correct Luke 24:51-52 in the ASV, New ASV, and NIV) is only a matter of “preference”?4 Eve preferred to believe a liar.

The local New Testament church was composed of baptized believ­ers who believed the word of God (1 Thess. 2:13) and the words of God (John 8:47). Their “communism” was a voluntary one (Acts 4:32) and entirely separate from the State. Since they were all capitalists (Matt. 20:11-16) and all believed in the ownership of private property (Acts 5:4), they never became “involved” in socialistic attempts by politi­cians to restore Eden to “mankind” via bills, taxes, sharing incomes, CARE packages, litigations, urban housing renewal, Metro government, and welfare programs: they took care of their own poor folk (Acts 11:29; Rom. 15:25-26); and “their own poor” (1 Cor. 16:1-5) was never a reference to the race-mixing Libertines (Acts 6:9) of their time, or Caesar’s politicians from the Senate. That is, there is nothing about the Christian, New Testament, local church that resembles the activ­ity, philosophy, program, or plans of the NCCC in 1980. This “vile” world has never been a “friend of grace” (John 17:14) for the New Testament local church, and none of them would ever have made the mistake of thinking that they or anyone else could “bring in the king­dom” (New Deal, Fair Deal, War on Poverty, The Great Society, ERA, Civil Rights, etc.)5 without the return of the KING (Acts 3:19). Trying to get God’s will “done on earth as it is in heaven” has always been the stock and trade of the pie-on-the-earth-bye-and-bye club (Napoleon, the Kennedys, Hearst, the Washington Post, Hitler, Carter, Rockefeller, Abernathy, Bishop Sheen, Pike, Castro, Franco, the Bilderbergers, Bloody Mary, and the popes). That is exactly what Jim Jones (1978) was trying to do in Guyana; if you don’t believe it, go talk to the peo­ple who heard him preach. Jim preached civil rights, gay liberation, ERA, social justice, sharing of wealth, communal economics, and abolition of poverty. Like all popes, he was called “FATHER.”

These matters have been commented on sufficiently in our publi­cation of 1970 called The Sure Word of Prophecy (The Kingdom of God

Versus the Kingdom of Heaven). For now, we should note only that the church in the book of Acts is pictured as a local assembly, called out of this world system to worship and serve God according to the instructions given orally by Jesus Christ (Acts 1:1-8) and finally writ­ten down by the Apostles. If anyone were to trace the history of this “called-out assembly” as it multiplied into innumerable “assemblies” (Rev. 2; 3), he would have to avail himself of every resource he could that is related to Bible preaching, Bible teaching, the attitude of assemblies towards science and philosophy (Col. 2:8; 1 Tim. 6:20), the attitude of Christians to the Second Advent, the attitude of assem­blies towards Rome and Roman satellites, and above all their attitudes towards FINAL AUTHORITY. To attempt such a church history after disregarding what the Creator of the church (Eph. 1:22-23) said about it (Acts 20:28), and what the Head of the church (Col. 1:18) did with it (Acts 3-28), is spiritual madness.

Since Jerome, Augustine, Schaff, Dollinger, Eusebius, Constantine, and countless others did just that, we should not be surprised to find within the confines of their “church histories” a long narrative of fraud, embezzlement, heresy, blackmail, torture, war, and murder. In the New Testament these things are always associated with the enemies of the church, whether without or within; they compromise ANTI-church his­tory. If the guiding dictum, given by our Lord, is “by their fruits ye shall know them’’ (Matt. 7:20), then certainly organized state religions like Catholicism, Anglicanism, the Reformed churches, Lutheranism, and Communism (all Communists are “do-gooders” and religious fanat­ics) are rooted and grounded in diseased muck up to their branches. Any church that would profess to be “the church that Christ founded”6 and have the audacity to publicly declare that outside of that church there is no salvation7—when all the fruit it can show for such a profes­sion is a fifteen century string of the bloodiest murders and the most diabolical political plots ever hatched on this earth (and pleading “igno­rance” after being caught in such machinations)—is a very worm-eaten “tree” indeed (Matt. 13:32). If the fruit of such a hybrid monstrosity were to fall to the ground and someone examined it, he would find that it tasted of a corrupt Bible, a corrupt leadership, a corrupt creed, a corrupt membership (Matt. 13:32), and a corrupt “Christ.” Its toxic seed produced the greatest poverty-stricken populations in the Western Hemisphere (Mexico, South and Central Americas, and parts of Canada), yet every decade its spiritual leader (“The Vicar of, etc.”) deplores Poverty, unemployment, the underprivileged, and the downtrodden (Pope John Paul n, Jan. 1979), while he himself lives in a palace with four­

teen hundred rooms, fifty dial telephones, a private bodyguard of two hundred armed men, four private automobiles, and a private plane.8 How sound could a tree be when it is pruned, planted, and plucked by a HYPOCRITE? With fruit to offer that would gag a buzzard, one is constrained to either cut down the tree (Luke 13:9) or spray it with rat poison. You could get something more nourishing off a mesquite bush or a chinaberry tree. Whatever “church history” may be, it certainly is not a preoccupation with the sordid artifices of a political conspiracy that spent 1,000 years trying to prove that the “gates of hell” couldn’t overthrow it simply because it made alliances and compromises with hell (and any of its gate keepers) on a regular basis—in order to insure that its converts were “twofold more the child of hell” than itself (Matt. 23:15). This will be very apparent when studying the background of the Thirty Years War, World War I, World War II, and Vietnam (see Vol. II).

Speaking aside, then, from the “fathers” (see chapter 4) and extra-canonical early “Christian” works, whether by apologists or polemicists, the facts are that the New Testament churches were Bible believing assemblies of baptized believers. They are marked by many practical characteristics (see Acts 2 and comments in that commentary), but the outstanding things that mark them off from Campbellite churches (in the nineteenth century), Communistic and Socialistic cells (in the twentieth century), and Roman Catholicism (in ANY century) is that:

1. They go by an Old Testament that does not contain one word of the Apocryphal books in it.

2. The New Testament they construct is written largely in Asia Minor, without one “original autograph” being written within fifty miles of Alexandria, Egypt.9

3. Their home base is Antioch of Syria, not Rome. From this area comes the Byzantine Textus Receptus of Martin Luther’s time and the time of King James. (The only New Testament epistles written in Rome are written in jail.)

4. They are occupied with prayer and the ministry of the word (Acts 6:4), and the latter includes the teaching of the word of God (Acts 13:1-4) and missionary endeavors to get the Gospel out to the ends of the earth (Acts 16:1-6).

5. They never baptize infants, and they never recommend water baptism in any form to any convert among the Gentiles as a means of salvation or regeneration (Acts 15). The official doctrines of salvation for the body of Christ (stated by the elders, apostles, brethren, and the Holy Ghost—see comments on Acts 15 in that commentary) declare

that a Gentile believer is saved by grace through faith (Acts 15:11) plus nothing. No one after the Jewish Pentecostal message on the Jewish feast day (before any of the New Testament was written) ever mistakes water baptism for regeneration and salvation; no Christian in the New Testament ever preached water baptism again as a means for receiving the Holy Spirit or the new birth (see Acts 2:38 and comments in that commentary).

6. The genuine church never gets “involved” with any govern­ment programs or goals of any kind to help (or hinder) any racial group. They never attempt to bring in any kind of “peace on earth” through any “demonstrations” or lobby to get the passage of any legislation connected with welfare handouts or ecological plans. They are not of this world (John 17:16).

7. Finally, no New Testament Christian ever calls any church leader “father,” nor is one New Testament church official ever called a “priest” to the exclusion of any other Christian in the congregation, even if he led them to Christ (1 Cor. 4:15). No man is a church “father” even if he is a “pillar” of the church (Gal. 2:9), and you couldn’t find a Roman archbishop or a “cardinal” in the New Testament if you searched it with a laser beam. The pagan Roman paraphernalia (see chapter 6) which accompanies Constantine’s usurpation of New Testa­ment authority has nothing to do with “church history” except as it is related to Satan’s efforts to corrupt the assemblies and prevent them from obeying God; it is to keep them from performing the task for which they were placed in this world (John 17:18; Acts 1:8). The cute little “addendas” and “embellishments” added to the New Testament from time to time by Tertullian, Cyprian, Justin Martyr, The Didache, and the so-called “Apostolic Constitutions’’ (and later little adornments by the popes) are to be taken with a ton of bicarbonate of soda. They are descrip­tions of assemblies that are trying to get around New Testament practice.10 However hallowed the holy “past” may be (see Exod. 16:3 and comments in that commentary), it is neither holy nor virtuous to place a halo over the lies and false teachings of good men who had a part in corrupting New Testament doctrines and practices. Where they were scriptural or did not contradict scripture (see above), we may thank God for their good sense and their contributions; where they have violated the sacred trust (2 Tim. 2:2) or kept their mouths shut (1 Cor. 9:16-17) because of having “men’s persons in admiration” (Jude 16), we certainly are not to “canonize” them. There are two natures in every

godly’’ Christian. To suppose that the “new creature” is in opera­tion twenty-four hours a day, in all spheres of thought and activity, is

fantastic. David could not always be trusted with someone’s wife, and Noah could not always be trusted with a bottle of grape juice. To think, therefore, that such semi-believers as Origen, Hort, Eusebius, Machen, Hymenaeus, Warfield, Wuest, Custer, Afman, Harris, Sumner, and Augustine could be trusted with the preservation of the words of God is to require too much credulity from an impartial student of history. Where an apostate Fundamentalist or apostate Conservative proves by his writings and his speeches that he is in agreement with Bible reject­ing heretics and Bible perverting Catholics, he is not to be applauded on the grounds that he is a “reverent Biblicist’’ or a “separated Chris­tian.” Demas was a Christian (2 Tim. 4:10), and so was Diotrephes (3 John 9). As someone has so aptly said, “If you Bible teacher doesn’t accept the Authorized Version as the Holy Bible, he is in agreement with Satan on that point: I don’t know on what other points they dis­agree.”

The only way to write a church history, according to the Author of Truth (John 15:26), is to come to terms with the Author (John 16:13) before one starts. A historian should agree with Him that all godly men have two natures, that all godly men are subject to Satanic attacks, that all godly men can be misled at times (see chapters 5,6), and that all godly men can be used by Satan at times (Matt. 16:23), even though all godly men have contributed something good, proper, or scriptural to the cause of the New Testament church. Furthermore, most of the godly men in history have been correct in believing the main things they should believe from the New Testament. However, the indiscrim­inate application of the word “godly” to an unregenerate philosopher or an unregenerate church politician (see Eusebius’ panegyric on Constantine) is blasphemy. In the New Testament an unregenerate man—no matter how prayerful or “godly,” no matter how pious and “spiritual” he is—is said to be a “child of wrath,” a “child of disobe­dience,” without strength, without God, without hope, and alone, without Christ in the world (Eph. 2:1-6; Rom. 5:6-10).

Opinions to the contrary are held by self-deluded Pharisees (John 3:36; Mark 7:7, 13; 1 Cor. 6:9-10).

Furthermore, a church historian should agree with the Author of history, and the scriptures, that no “Kingdom of Heaven” is about to come to this earth until the King of Heaven returns to this earth and gains His rightful throne (Matt. 19:28; 25:31) at Jerusalem (Luke 1:30-33; Matt. 5:35). Therefore, Post-millennialism and A-millennialism should be treated by any Bible believing historian as two of the most dangerous anti-Christian heresies in history: neither of them are treated

that way by Latourette, Drummond, Fisher, Vedder, Dollinger, Migne, Bettenson, Cairns, Walker, Neander, Albright, Bruce, D’Aubigne, Socrates, Sozomen, or Mosheim. Proof that either position is Satanic is by the fact that all professional politicians, all International Social­ists, all atheistic Communists, and all Roman Catholic theologians subscribe to one or the other. Post-millennialism, without its frills (see chapter 12), is the teaching that since man is basically good that he is “the measure of all things”; therefore he is perfectly able, without Divine intervention, to bring in a “Golden Age,” Thousand Year Reich, Fatima Peace Plan, War on Poverty, New Foundation, Soviet Intern, Holy Roman Empire, etc., by himself. All Post-millennialists are positive thinkers; they have to be to make a living. The A-millennialists include Mauro, Berkhof, Calvin, Truett, Spurgeon, Ladd, Beecher, Westcott, Nestle, Hort, and many members of the National Council of “Chris­tian” Churches. Strange bedfellows.

The internal enemies of the New Testament local churches are jealousy (1 Cor. 3:3), the desire for vengeance (1 Cor. 6:1-6), false apostles who profess to be Charismatics (2 Cor. 11:1-13), ambitious church leaders (3 John 9), teachers of false doctrine (Matt. 13:33), reli­gious sacramentalists (Matt. 23:1-33), religious leaders who make the word of God of none effect by “tradition” (Mark 7:1-13; Col. 2:8), puffed up egotists who think that science is of equal authority to the Bible (1 Tim. 6:20), ambitious would-be millionaires (1 Tim. 6:17) who think that gain is godliness (1 Tim. 6:5), schismatics who want to get the pulpit for themselves (Acts 20:30), pious professing Christians (Matt. 24:5) who profess to represent Jesus Christ (2 Cor. 11:10-14; Matt. 7:15), and educated asses who think that the sun rose and set on Greek scholarship (1 Cor. 1-3).

Where these enemies appear in church history, they are to be denom­inated as ENEMIES (Phil. 3:18, 19), not “brothers in Christ.” They are not to be honored for their “hallowed and sacred associations” or their “blessed succession from Simon Peter,” etc. They are to be marked (Rom. 16:17), rebuked (Titus 1:13), and dealt with (1 Cor. 5-6). They are to be dealt with in a Christian manner (2 Thess. 3:15): never in the manner prescribed and carried'out by the Roman Catholic hierar­chy or the Roman Catholic church or the Roman Catholic councils or the Roman Catholic priests.11 When it comes to dealing with enemies of the Bible, Roman Catholicism and Biblical Christianity have no more tn common with each other than soul-winning and skinny-dipping.

The local church observed two ordinances (1 Cor. 10-11; Acts 2:41; 9:18; 10:48) and no sacraments; it had two offices, and two only, requir­

ing ordination (1 Tim. 3:1-8). It supported its own widows (1 Tim. 5:9-10). Its main job was maintaining purity of life, thought, fellow­ship and doctrine, and its outward relationship to the world was that of a separated group of “fanatical” nonconformists (Rom. 12:1-2), who were considered to be a heretical “SECT” (see chapter 9). The church considered its job to be the evangelization of unsaved sinners (Acts 1:8), and its blessed hope was, to be found busy at the coming of its Lord (Luke 19:13). The church was waiting for the Rapture as a cure for its own evils (1 Cor. 15; 1 Thess. 4; 1 John 3; Phil. 2) and the Second Advent as a cure for the evils of Roman civilization (2 Thess. 2; Rev. 1; 14; 19; Isa. 2; etc.). It was a praying, worshipping, rejoicing, wit­nessing, testifying, persecuted, called-out “assembly,” and its history (church history) cannot be documented intelligently or understood with­out accepting the Biblical definitions for its origin, nature, character, calling, and work. Latourette, for example, states that any group that believes the nature of the New Testament church to be as we have just described it here is a group (or a person) that has an “EXTREME” view of the church.12 Since this is the view of the Holy Ghost who wrote the New Testament, it might pay Latourette to learn how to read his Bible before he accuses God of intemperance; that is quite a presump­tion for a “church” historian.

There is a reoccurring phrase in the works of Latourette, Durant, and others that is so overworked it should be allowed to retire on a pen­sion. That phrase (with variations) runs something like this: “We do not know how or when Christianity was first introduced into such-and- such a country....” A standard way of putting it is: “The beginnings of Christianity in such-and-such a country are shrouded in darkness....” The trouble that historians like this have is the terminology of the Bible. To begin with, “Christianity,” in church history books,, means anything from sprinkling babies to kissing crosses. In standard works it means Roman Catholic ecclesiasticism. Latourette will go so far (without know­ing what he is writing) as saying that “conversions” in South America and Mexico were water baptisms. With this “conversion to Christian­ity” (what Latourette calls “the True Faith”)13 among the Jews, Latourette uses the term conversions to refer to water baptism enforced with the alternatives of exile or death.'4 What does water sprinkling at sword point have to do with THE CHURCH? What church? No church in the Bible.

Schaff, for nearly three volumes, assumes (without any grounds whatsoever) that orthodox Christianity is Roman Catholicism; if by this he means “that at that time it was,” he is still so far off base he is

out of the ball park. Orthodox Christianity in the Bible is New Testa­ment Christianity: not Roman Catholic Fascism.

Neither Harnack nor Neve seem to have any idea of how “ortho­dox Christianity” or the “true faith” gets into a country because both men insist on thinking that the terms must refer to some missionary or monk sent from Rome to convert the nation to Roman Catholicism; thus, the only records they have for many countries are Roman Catho­lic records which the Catholics themselves made of their conquests of the nations. Didn’t Schaff and the rest of these men even stop to con­sider what they were saying when they said, “WE don’t know how...”? Whom are these men speaking for? None of them were evangelists or soul-winners, none of them were missionaries, and none of them were members of a New Testament local church. Why should they know “HOW” the Gospel got into ANY country?

Any Bible believer who believed the Bible knows perfectly well how the “true faith” (Gal. 1:8-10; 1 Cor. 15:1-5; Acts 20:1-28; Eph. 3:1-6; 1 Tim. 4:1-6) enters ANY country. Negatively, it never enters any country through a baby-sprinkling sacramentalist who thinks that water is the Holy Spirit; it never enters a tribe or populace through a Mary-worshipping, idol-kissing “priest,” and not once in the history of the universe did the “true faith” penetrate a heathen or pagan nation in the person of a Campbellite (one who believes in baptismal regener­ation) who had just been commissioned by an archbishop to go and gain some more subjects for a Fascist dominion. If the “true faith” ever entered a country, it entered as it did into Ethiopia (Acts 9), Samaria (Acts 8), Greece (Acts 17), or Rome (Acts 28): it came in by way of mouth from a Bible believing witness who was preaching the blood atone­ment of Jesus Christ (2 Cor. 5:14-21) as the way to Heaven, apart from any kind of works (Acts 15:1-5). That “Plan” was established by the Apostles themselves,plus the “elders,” and including “Blessed Simon Peter” (Acts 15:7), more than a hundred years before Origen and Eusebius were born and more than three hundred years before any “pope” showed up anywhere. Therefore, what men like Latourette and Schaff don’t understand is the propagation of BIBLICAL CHRISTIAN­ITY through evangelism and teaching. This is primarily because the church historians never were evangelists; Schaff and Latourette couldn’t preach the Bible long enough to keep a German Shepherd awake. Their first person plural (“WE do not know....”) is very much like modern books that people read these days on “How WE got our Bible” or “OUR God-breathed Book,” etc.16 Let the agnostics speak for themselves, but let them not presume to speak for Christians who have more sense,

more experience, and better equipment (the Bible). “WE” know exactly how Christianity was introduced into Mexico, Malaysia, China, Rus­sia, England, Germany, Iceland, and Africa (if it was the “TRUE faith”) no matter what Jesuit or Franciscan got credit for establishing Roman ecclesiasticism in that territory LATER.

If the “true faith” entered, it entered the first time through the mouth of a Bible believing witness (Acts 1:8) for Jesus Christ (John 15:19-25). Any other “entrance” of any other “Christianity” comes under the heading of Galatians 1:9 and 2 Corinthians 11:15. The Bible can help a church historian a lot if he will consult it instead of his own imagination.

The great truth that one learns from studying such histories as Durant, Dollinger, Schaff, Latourette, Vedder, and Walker is that no matter how brilliant the researcher is and no matter how thoroughly he goes about the task of gathering, assembling, and presenting his mate­rial, he is still unable to understand the material, interpret it, or apply it to his reader in a Christian fashion. These men have laid the Bible aside before they sat down to write, and they do not intend to pick it up again and let its opinions, preferences, commandments, admonitions, analyses, and applications supplant their own. Nowhere is this more in evidence than when approaching the Philadelphia period of church history (Rev. 3:7-8), where the local churches “kept God’s word” and consequently had an open door for worldwide Bible preaching. Latourette is completely unable to understand this phenomena, although it was prophesied and put into writing a 1,800 years before he was born and printed in the universal language of the twentieth century three hun­dred years before he finished his education. The mighty revival brought about by the recovery and publication of the Syrian Textus Receptus (the Greek texts of Erasmus, Beza, Stephanus, and Elzevir), translated into English and German and preached to the ends of the earth,17 caused intellectual, moral, industrial, social, artistic, and economic revolutions on a worldwide scale. Latourette lamely attributes the whole operation to what he calls “THE CHRISTIAN IMPULSE.”18 There is no such thing known to God or man. Latourette’s fantastic invention was his substitute for the convincing, regenerating (and hindering) power of the HOLY GHOST (John 16:8-11). In vain does Latourette attempt to analyze the Reformation and what followed. With a thousand books listed in his bibliography he can no more tell you what is going on between 1400 and 1900 than a Jesuit priest. (Schaff gives up the ghost and doesn’t even attempt a history after 1600.) Latourette finally ascribes the gigantic moral and spiritual upheaval (which affected attitudes

towards jails, insane asylums, slavety, the treatment of women and children, laborers, etc.) to “the Christian CONSCIENCE of SOCI­ETY”18—presumably unsaved, Bible rejecting humanists and philoso­phers with “Christian IMPULSES” who grew up in nations and governments that had “Christian consciences.” There is not a case in the Bible where ANY nation had a Christian “impulse” or a Christian “conscience,” and if a man who can read two thousand books can’t find that truth in a dimestore Bible, he has no more business posing as an educated man than as an author. The two terms “Christian con­science” and “Christian impulse” are two Alexandrian myths: like priests and sacraments.

CHAPTER THREE

The Constitution for the Churches

“All scripture is given by inspiration of God, and is profit­able for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruc­tion in righteousness: That the man of God may be perfect, throughly furnished unto all good works.”

2 Timothy 3:16-17

There is no way that a student of church history can prepare him­self for the jolt that he receives when turning from Acts 28 to the next samples of so-called “Christian literature” (Clement, Barnabas, the Shepherd of Hermas, the Didache, Apostolic Constitutions, etc.) that are supposed to deal with the subsequent development of the church. The gap between what the Bible says and what he finds written and practiced between 100 and 325 A.D. is so startling that he may despair, as the Bogomiles (1100-1200), of ever finding any continuation of real apostolic witnesses. He is most likely to presume that New Testament Christianity disappeared altogether and was replaced with “Catholic” Christianity. To understand what took place within the body of Christ during this “Smyrna” period (Rev. 2:8), one is forced to start by exam­ining the sources and compilation of the very Book which defines the church. Although a church history is not the proper place for a detailed discussion of manuscript evidence and textual criticism, this is certainly the area where those subjects affect church history as no other schol­arly disciplines do. We have settled the matter of definitions regarding the church in the previous chapter; those definitions concerning the local church were found written in a Book. Where did this Book come from? With thirty thousand books on How We Got Our Bible, The Books and the Parchments, Are the New Testament Manuscripts Reliable?, Which Bible?, and Biblical Introduction, it would seem that a Christian should understand something about where this series of writings came from how they came to be accepted as the final authority in all matters

The Bible issue in church history becomes even more controver­sial when we realize that the leading church historian Philip Schaff rec­ommended 35,000 changes in the Biblical text of the Reformation (ASV, 1901) and admitted he did this while following Westcott and Hort’s grossly corrupt version (RV, 1884) and its predecessors (Lachmann, 1850], and Tischendorf, 1872).1

The New Testament local church in the early part of the book of Acts had no book called a “New Testament”; they had the books that run from Genesis to Malachi. Furthermore, the mythological Septuagint (the LXX), which they were supposed to have used,2 can be found nowhere in evidence in any manuscript before 150 A.D.3 Since Schaff, as well as Tregelles, Davidson, Chemnitz, Berbeck, Zahn, Credner, Kirchhofer, Charteris, Gaussen, Reuss, and Westcott, believed that the local church of the Acts period used a Greek Old Testament (translated supposedly in 250 B.C.), we have a right to be highly suspicious of their “histories” where they deal with the TRUTH. When Schaff tries to bolster up the sagging theories of Westcott and Hort (1881-1884) in regard to the true Biblical text, he fumbles around as pitifully as a man who never held a historical document in his hand.4 This is a sad thing to see in a man who could read and write at least ten different languages; but it is no sadder than watching Robert Dick Wilson (1856-1930)—who could handle twenty-six different languages—pre­tending that God was all through with Israel (see 1 Thess. 2:16 in The Amplified Version, put out by the Lockman Foundation) and that there would be no Millennial reign of Christ. “Great men are not always wise” (Job 32:9). If a man gives a false start in his church history on where the New Testament was written, and then gives a false lead as to who questioned the canonicity of certain books in it,5 and then goes into a false sprint on who preserved it and where it was preserved,6 one should be very suspicious about accepting his conclusions when he finally “breaks the tape.” Such a race (2 Tim. 4:7) was never run on a course (Heb. 12:1) that God set up.

Since the church “fathers” quote the Holy Bible more than 35,000 times (19,368 from the Gospels alone),7 it is perfectly evident that the Book was around somewhere in the first three centuries of church his­tory. Latin translations from it were made around 180-200 A.D.8 Since many of the ancient Syrian and Latin translations agree with the King James text of 1611, men like Schaff, Lightfoot, Driver, Ellicott, and Hort were hard pressed to prove that certain AV readings didn’t exist as far back as that.9 Several lies and several theories were resorted to. The Westcott and Hort theory (and it never was anything more than

a theory) on how the ancient “Received Text” became the text of the Protestant Reformation runs briefly as follows:

1. Since it came from Syria, it should be called a “Byzantine” or “Syrian” type of text, or possibly “Antiochan.”10

2. By dividing all the Greek manuscripts up into “families” Griesbach eliminated thousands of “Syrian readings” from the manu­scripts by pretending that all “Syrian” readings found in other families were there BEFORE they were in the Syrian or Byzantine family.11 This is called “Christian scholarship” at Bob Jones University and Moody Bible Institute.

3. Westcott and Hort then pretended that no church “father” before 400 (or at least 360 A.D.) quoted any “Syrian readings” because they weren’t exclusively Syrian:12 that is, they couldn’t belong to their own family if any other family corroborated the readings. This is called “scholarship” at Wheaton, San Francisco, Lynchburg, and Piedmont.

4. Having erected this Disneyland system of textual criticism they now had to explain how these “Syrian” or “Byzantine” readings sur­vived the Dark Ages—while the Roman Catholic church was retaining the Alexandrian readings of Jerome, Origen, Eusebius, and Constantine —and showed up in time to give the church the greatest Biblical, mis­sionary, evangelistic, and soul-winning period it ever experienced (1500-1900).

5. This was done by pretending that a presbyter named “Lucian”13 revised the New Testament at Constantinople or Antioch and got some­one there to officially sanction and recommend it as the standard Bible for the entire church.'4 It was put together by “recensing” and “conflating” Alexandrian and “Western” readings.15

Now, aside from the fact that there are papyrus fragments from the second and third centuries that have many of the King James read­ings (Syrian) in them, and aside from the fact that the church fathers BEFORE 350 A.D. do quote them,'6 and aside from the fact that the family classification is a hoax,17 and aside from the fact that no auto­graphs of the New Testament were written in Alexandria (and those in the “West” were written from a Roman jail), and aside from the fact that the official and sanctioned text of the church for the next thousand years was NOT Lucian’s “recension,”'9 is the notable absence of any historical account that even mentions any assembly at Constan­tinople or Antioch in the fourth century authorizing ANY Bible or Bible revision. In addition to this is the fact that no historian (secular or sacred) has ever found one particle of evidence that “Lucian” worked on a New Testament “recension” any more than he did a Model-T Ford.

But that is how the pipe dream was concocted in 1881-1884 by Westcott and Hort, and that is how the suckers at Bob Jones University (1940-1980) inhaled the fumes.19

When we arrive in our history at the period 325-400 A.D., we will talk about these matters at length; at the present time (33-90) our concern is with the original autographs versus the oral traditions which arose to contradict what these Bible manuscripts had to say. The twenty-seven books of the New Testament which came to be accepted by the body of Christ as inspired scriptures (2 Peter 3:16) are laid out in the proper dispensational order, indicating the transition from the Old Testament to the New {Matthew—dealing with the King of the Jews), the transition from Israel to the church {Acts—the Jewish apostles), the transition from the church to the tribulation {Hebrews—dealing with Jewish Christians), and the consummation of all things {Revelation). This order has been perverted in the Greek New Testament published by Westcott and Hort for the purpose of misleading the reader in regard to Bible prophecy; in Hort’s grossly corrupt New Testament (1884), the Hebrew-Christian epistles (Catholic epistles, James, and Hebrews—with Jude BEFORE Hebrews) have been placed between the book of Acts and the Pauline epistles. This, dispensationally, would make the church age follow the great tribulation. We might expect such bungling from dead orthodox apostates who invented the Mickey Mouse theory outlined above.20

Of the twenty-seven books of the New Testament, seven are called ^antde^ome^jby church historians on the grounds that they were “disputed” books by someone and therefore could not be admitted to the canon until “later.”21 Naturally the historians keep a close watch on their mouths when talking about WHO it was that questioned the authority of these books (Gen. 3:1). You are innocently led to believe that the majority of Bible believing Christians “disputed” them because four or five “church fathers” don’t quote them; that is, you are led to the bottomless pit as quickly as the historian can lead you. The seven “disputed” books that are classified as “antilegomena” were Hebrews, James, 2 Peter, 2 and 3 John, Jude, and Revelation. Everyone of these, except Revelation, was misplaced in Hort’s New Testament.22

Now observe: all seven of these books are the so-called “Hebrew- Christian” (or Catholic) epistles. Note also that one of them deals with the mark of the beast, two of them deal with false prophets, and two of them deal with carnal church leaders. Further, two of them (James and Hebrews) seem to conflict with the Pauline epistles (Rom. 4; 5; Eph. 2; etc.).

Without going into a long analysis (which is properly the subject *■ »T — —- * and historical criticism), we may note

that the book of Hebrews, for example, was not written by Paul, accord­ing to the North African church or the Roman Catholic church.23

Now, when the Christians at Carthage (387 A.D.) discussed matters of canonicity, they professed to determine them (after the Holy Spirit had already determined them) by these rules: Was the writer an apos­tle? Is this made clear in the writings themselves? Does the Holy Spirit in the believer bear witness to these writings? Do any of them contradict anything else found in the scriptures? Are they in line with the general tenor of revelation up to now? How has the body of Christ felt about them up to now?

One can see immediately that if it can be proved that Paul didn’t write Hebrews, the question would come up: What apostle wrote it? If no apostle wrote it, should it be in the canon?

In speaking of antilegomena (disputed books) one should observe how certain books could be disputed because they said things that an apostate would not like.24 For example, Dionysius (after Origen) tried to get rid of the apostolic authority of Revelation because neither he nor Origen were Pre-millennialists.25 Gaius (213) likewise rejected the book of Revelation because he was Post-millennial.26 It is Eusebius and Origen (see chapters 5, 8) who put 2 and 3 John on the “disputed” list. Now, Eusebius (see chapter 7, notes 8-17) and Origen (see chapter 5) are not exactly the ultimate in intelligence if judged by either Testa­ment; you probably couldn’t pick two poorer authorities on matters of canonicity unless you picked Clement of Alexandria and Augustine. When you find people like theAlogi and Epiphanius (315-403) disputing New Testament books, they are often just picking up the “party line” from men like these. Eusebius (260-340) quite naturally vacillated in discussing the authorship of Revelation because even with the weight of evidence for it being an apostolic work, he had to reject it due to his relationship with Origen and Constantine. So he blamed the matter on Papias (60-130), who had said it was written by some elder named “John,” but not “John the apostle” (see Problem 7km, 1980).27 Undoubtedly, the book of Revelation was missing from the Syrian Peshitto after Origen set up his school of destructive criticism in Caesarea (216-222). When a man like Origen says that a book is “disputed” one must never forget that he himself accepted the Apocrypha as inspired and thought that Christian instruction for children should not begin with the inspired New Testament books but with Judith and Tobit.26 How reliable is such an “ancient authority”?

The book of Hebrews, Nicols says, was considered to be “in some sense” a work of Paul, by the school at Alexandria.29 The only evi-

dence that it ever was “antilegomena” was that ORIGEN (184-254) knew that “other churches” criticized Alexandria for admitting Hebrews into the canon of scriptures.30 What "other churches”?

Now, the truth (which Philip Schaff sails by like a hydroplane) is that Marcion "the heretic" (110-160) was the man who rejected all seven books of the antilegomena.31 A Roman document from Milan, Italy, doesn’t mention “Hebrews” (Muratorian Fragment, supposedly written around 280 A.D.), but this “fragment” was not written until AFTER Origen (184-254) and Marcion had wavered in regard to believing 2 Peter, and 2 and 3 John. Origen’s pupil (Dionysius of Alex­andria, 265) rejects 2 Peter and Jude, and Cyprian (195-258), who elevated the office of the bishop to a place near the Trinity,32 remained silent about the canonicity of Hebrews, 2 Peter, and Jude until he died. A “disputed book,” then, can be a book which an unsaved infidel didn’t like, and he presented his arguments against it in such an appealing man­ner to the educated, Christian fools who worshipped philosophy13 that suckers like Origen and Eusebius would have doubts about the book.34 Again, a Nicolaitan like Cyprian might question any book (even though he was saved) if it implied that “bishops” are sometimes conceited ras­cals. Since no one knows who wrote the Muratorian Fragment35 and since Origen couldn’t be trusted in matters of Biblical authority as far as you could throw your mother-in-law,36 the discussions about “antilegomena” rapidly assume the proportions of Haeckel’s Ontogeny: an inflated gas balloon.

\‘Pseudepigrapha")refers to those books that were never admitted into the New Testament canon. They are published in a book called The Lost Books of the Bible37 and constitute such gems as “The Acts of Andrew,” “The Apocalypse of Paul,” “The Gospel of Thomas,” the “Acts of Thaddeus,” and so forth. New Testament Apocrypha refers to such extra-canonical books as “The Teaching of the Twelve,” “The Didache” (100 A.D.?), “The Epistles of Clement” (?), “The Shepherd of Hernias,” “The Gospel of the Nativity of Mary,” “The Gospel of Nicodemus,” “The Epistle of Polycarp to the Philippians,” and so forth. Strangely enough (or not so strangely if you keep your ear to the ground for the truth), two of these fairyland books are found in the Sinaiticus manuscript used by Tischendorf to correct the King James New Testa­ment in about 5,000 places. Vaticanus (B) contains Old Testament Apocrypha as part of the Old Testament38 and Sinaiticus (R) contains New Testament Apocrypha.39 Quite naturally neither Hort, Aland, Metz­ger, Nestle, nor Souter or any other “editor” dared print these Greek manuscripts in their entirety, even though they availed themselves of

them to correct the AV (1611): gutless Conservatives are standard twen­tieth century equipment.

C“Homologoumena *7 is the jawbreaker given by historians to indicate that the twenty-seven New Testament books were accepted as inspired. Athanasius (296-372) lists these twenty-seven books in a pastoral letter, and Gregory of Nazianzen (330-390) lists twenty-six of them (omitting only the book of Revelation)40 before the Council of Carthage ever met. The Council of Carthage (397) was only forced to recognize what God had already established: twenty-seven inspired books.

Schaff has implanted the deadly notion among the scholars of his day (and after his day) that the New Testament canon was formed “on the model of the Old.”4' This deadly poison is inserted with full knowl­edge that the Old Testament scriptures were formed into a canon and preserved by an official priest-class from one tribe.42 The New Testa­ment knows no priesthood but a priesthood of believers (1 Peter 2:5); any book written and preserved by them would be unofficial43 and subject to the universal acceptance of the body of Christ, apart from .any ecclesiastical tribunal or council.44 So, Schaff has inserted into real history the Roman Catholic fiction of an official “guardian of the canon, ’ ’ and this is placed into a make-believe “history” which began by mis­representing the nature and work of the New Testament church (see Acts 2 and comments in that commentary).45 Exactly as the AV of 1611 proved itself to be the infallible word of the living God by virtue of its own intrinsic merit (plus the Holy Spirit’s use of it in history), so the twenty-seven books of the New Testament prove to be the inspired words of the living God by virtue of their own merit and the witness of the Author (the Holy Spirit, John 15:20) to those words: and those words only (Rev. 22:19).

Arguments arising in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries con­cerning the authority and power of those living words (see Vol. II) came from the source that all infidelity comes from (Gen. 3:1), and in the “church age” it is inexorably connected with Christian education and the first Christian university at Alexandria, Egypt, through the devas­tating “ministries” of Origen, Eusebius, Jerome, Constantine, Clement, and Augustine.

Polycarp (69-155) quotes Matthew, Luke, John, Acts, and ten of Paul’s epistles. The anonymous Catholic forger of 2 Clement46 quotes Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John and shows familiarity with Acts, Rev­elation, and six Pauline epistles.47 Irenaeus (125-192) quotes all four of the Gospels and the book of Acts, plus thirteen Pauline epistles. Clement of Alexandria (150-217) quotes four Gospels, Acts, the Pauline

epistles, 1 Peter, 1 John, Hebrews, Jude, James, and Revelation. When these quotations are combined (plus Tertullian, 150-200), we find all twenty-seven New Testament books in use before the year 200 A.D. With an Old Latin version being quoted around 150-180 A.D. and an Old Syriac version being quoted about the same time,48 there is no doubt about the existence of a New Testament in the local churches. They have it. Since it had to be copied by hand into thousands of copies,49 the original manuscripts were so battered with being carried about and copied that they could not have lasted fifty years if they had been writ­ten on India paper.

The current fable (check any of the twentieth century theories by any man connected with Bob Jones University or the Lockman Foun­dation) that this New Testament was preserved in a “pure” or “neutral” state in Alexandria, Egypt, is really too funny for words.30 In the Bible, Egypt is a type of this world, and God would not tolerate His Son (Matt. 2), or His nation (Exod. 12-15), His saints (Gen. 50:5), or even the bones of His saints (Exod. 13:19) to stay there. Not one writer ever got close enough to Alexandria to salute the Sphinx. If such a thing as an “Alexandrian family” of manuscripts ever did exist, it was a fam­ily of outlaws instead of “in-laws,” and it would be about as related to purity of belief and practice as a worn out set of the works of Homer.31

Authors and scholars differ about the dates for the various writings of the New Testament books. Undoubtedly, the book of James and the book of Hebrews were written much earlier than most authors give them credit for: dates for those books before Acts 12 would not be inappro­priate. In the case of Hebrews, 35-40 A.D. would not be too early. The so-called “Synoptic Problem” is dealt with in our work on Problem Texts, and the ton of floss candy spun out by “leading authorities” on the subject (see for example thirty-three pages of ring-around-the-rosy in Schaff32) is about as enlightening for a student of church history as following the path of a leaky balloon.

The New Testament was written; it was written on cheap paper called “papyrus.” Undoubtedly it assumed the modem book form (codex) long before Vaticanus and Sinaiticus were written, since the copies of the originals were made by ordinary people, not professional scribes.33 Ordinary people in those days were proclaiming the “GOOD NEWS” publicly on the streets and in the marketplaces. It would have been a little ridiculous to have to take a fourteen foot scroll and roll it back and forth before a “prospect” to show him the cross-references between Matthew, Paul, Isaiah, and James. Soul-winners have always had more sense about these matters than scholars, and that is why no

consistent soul-winner is ever caught with a new version (ASV, New ASV, IV, New IV) that erases the clear verse markings in the New Testament. These fancy new “paragraph” Bibles are not made for mil­itant street preachers or aggressive soul-winners: they were made for hothouse “Biblicists.”

What the Christians had between 100-325 A.D. was not the “divinely inspired originals” from the “plenary, verbal autographs,” etc., for there was only ONE original for each of these books. What they had was a BIBLION (“a little book”). This little Book, in the New Testament, sets forth the Greek orthography and Greek grammar of Greece, not the Alexandrian Greek of ROME.54 It displayed the Syrian type text found in Asia Minor, not in Rome. It was borne witness to at Pella in Palestine (80 A.D.), in Antioch in 100 A.D., in Syria in 150 A.D., in the Italic church in Italy in 180 A.D., in the Gallic church in southern France in 200 A.D., in the Celtic church in England in 300 A.D.,33 in the Balkans and Germany in 400 A.D.; and it is corrobo­rated throughout the history of every Bible believing group that rejected infant baptism from 400 A.D. to 1980. It is the Received Text of the Albigenses, Vaudois, Petrobrusians, Bulgarians, Paulicians, Paterines, Bogomiles, Baptists, and Huguenots,36 and it bears no resemblance to the ghastly counterfeits of the twentieth century (ASV, New ASV, IV, NIV, RSV, NRSV) than to a Roman Catholic missal.

The modern Bible believer, then, has a historical document in his hand that can be traced back to the remotest antiquity; that is, if he possesses a King James 1611 Authorized Version. The witnesses to “the original Greek text” appear in the German translations from Erasmus, in the French translations from Olivetan and LeClerc,37 in the Italian translations from Diodati,58 in the Old Latin of the Waldenses and Albigenses, in the Gothic of Ulfilas, in the Greek uncial manuscripts (W and A), in the vast majority of cursive manuscripts (98%),39 in the lectionaries of the primitive church,60 and in the writings of the church fathers as far back as two hundred years before Vaticanus and Sinaiticus were forged at Alexandria (or Caesarea).61 The papyrus (second and third centuries) bear witness to this text.62 The Old Syriac (180) bears witness to this text.63 It is the God-honored Greek text preserved through Erasmus, Colinaeus, Beza, Elzevir and Stephanus, and the God-honored English text as found in Tyndale (1525), the Geneva Bible (1562), and in the King James 1611 Authorized Version. Its corrupt counterfeits come from the “Alexandrian” text (see chapter 5) out of the greatest sink­hole of corruption known in the ancient world. This depraved, gnostic Bible” is represented in modern times by the Greek texts of Tischen-

dorf, Hort, Aland, Metzger, Nestle, Lachmann, Griesbach, and Scholtz. It is represented in modem English translations by the RK, RSV, New RSV, ASV, New ASV, NIV, and the NEB, plus the last thirty “updated versions. Its patrons were Origen, Eusebius, Constantine, Hitler, Loyola, Walton, Fell, the faculty members at Pensacola Christian College, Bloody Mary, Castro, Torquemada, Jerome, Tully, Metternich, Cardinal Spellman, Mill, Hort, Ted Kennedy, the faculty members at Bob Jones University,64 Wallenstein, Napoleon, and Pope John Paul II. We shall deal with it in more detail in our chapter on Africa’s Most Unusual University.

We now turn our attention to more practical matters. When we last saw the local church (Acts 28), Paul, its leading preacher and evange­list, was in jail; it was a Roman jail. This is very important to remember, for it was Rome which whipped and nailed Jesus Christ (Matt. 27) to the cross (Acts 4:27); it was Rome who imprisoned Peter (Acts 12:3-4); it was Rome who had James’ head cut off (Acts 12:1-2); and it was Rome which exiled John to Patmos (Rev. 1:9). Those are not the religious theories of a bigot or the denominational beliefs of a “trouble maker. ” Those are the black and white, documented facts of a bloody history recorded with the inspired pen by the eyewitnesses who observed them.

So, church history not only must begin with a description of the nature and work of the local assembly and the origin of its infallible constitution, it must also begin with Rome: Augustus (31 B.C.-14 A.D.), Tiberius (12-37 A.D.), Caligula (37-41 A.D.), Nero (54-68 A.D.), Galba (68-69 A.D.), Vespasian (69-79 A.D.), and Domitian (81-96 A.D.). That is, the New Testament local assembly of Bible believers (a “church”) is first found in direct conflict with a CHURCH STATE.65 It is a ROMAN church state which is denominated as a “WHORE” in Revelation 17:1-5. This “woman” (Rev. 17:3) is also identified in Matthew 13:33 by our Lord Jesus Christ. She is identified as the implanter of false doctrine (Matt. 16:11-12) which is designed to cor­rupt an entire loaf of “good meal” (Gal. 5:9). The words are no sooner out of the mouth of the Lord Jesus Christ than Philip Schaff, Dollinger, Alford, Ferrar, Calvin, Latourette, Augustine, Origen, and Thomas Aquinas slap them back into His mouth and insist that the Whore just identified is the Bride of Christ, and the corrupting leaven is the Gos­pel of the Grace of God! That is, before the New Testament has been completed (2 Cor. 2:17) Satan is already in position with his “GODLY” men and is ready to operate (Gen. 3:1). In our chapter on “Africa’s Most Unusual University” we will note that he had begun to corrupt

Old Testament books before the first New Testament books were ever penned (2 Cor. 2:17).

Rome and Jerusalem are the focal points in church history until the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 A.D. under Titus.66 Since all his­tory moves from east to west (see Gen. 4:8-16 in that commentary), Jerusalem practically drops out of sight after 70 A.D. and the narrative of church history moves us into Asia Minor (Rev. 1-3), and thence to Greece (Acts 16; 17), and then finally—not at the start, or near the start—to Rome (Acts 28). The Bible has clearly identified Rome and things “Roman.” Whatever counter-publicity she may have obtained through the popes, the Associated Press, the BBC, Bing Crosby, the Kennedy family, Notre Dame, the Oxford Movement, Perry Como, and Loyola University is easily offset by the Divine record written and preserved in eternity (Ps. 119:89; Matt. 24:35). Rome, as a spiritual or religious entity, cannot be credited with one righteous or moral act (in the Biblical sense) since the city was founded, if we are to believe the God-given record (Matt. 2) as given to us by the Holy Ghost (Acts 12:1-5; 18:2). If “all roads lead to Rome,” then the road to Hell will have to be paved with Alexandrian manuscripts and Christian scholarship.

The zenith of the Roman Empire is between 46 and 180 A.D. At the same time there is the rise of the New Testament local churches— the called-out assemblies of baptized believers. When Rome receives its Bible, it receives the corrupt North African “bible” of Alexandria.67 When Rome plays host to the apostle to the Gentiles (Rom. 15:16), she jails him the first time and beheads him the second time (2 Tim. 4:6). When Rome tries Jesus Christ (John 19), she releases a murderer (John 18:40). When Rome has custody of an apostle, she seeks to mur­der him (Acts 12:4). Since Peter never set foot in Rome before 60 A.D. (see Rom. 15:20-22), Paul was very careful not to address him when he wrote the epistles to the Romans (Rom. 16:1-16); he addressed nearly everyone else but Peter. When Rome is faced with her bloody crimes (Rev. 17:4-7), in and out of the Biblical record, her answer is that these crimes were actually committed by PAGAN Rome, not PAPAL Rome; that is, Rome before Domitian (96 A.D.). Foxe ’s Book of Martyrs, which lists the countless crimes of papal Rome (400-1800 A.D.), more than answers this lying alibi. Papal Rome has murdered more Christians in fifty years than pagan Rome murdered in a hundred years (70-170 A.D.). Any church history, therefore, that ignores what the Bible says about Rome is covering up for Satan in the interests of falsehood.

If “Rome never changes” as the “eternal city,” then the murders Colombia (1953-1959)68 and the murders hv the nanal in

1940-1944 were to be expected.69 No one should be surprised to find that Adolph Hitler (a Roman Catholic) had Hermann Goering (a Roman Catholic) set up the first concentration camp at Dachau under a Roman Catholic (Rudolph Diels, and later Eicke), who in turn obeyed Himmler and Heydrich (who were both Roman Catholics). Franz Stangl, the Com­mandant of Treblinka, was a Catholic as was Koch at Buchenwald and Rudolph Hoess at Auschwitz. Rome never changes. A Communist “pope” (John Paul II) will not improve matters, for Communists are dialectical materialists who believe that human beings are advanced animals without souls,70 and therefore they are fit subjects for concen­tration camps bigger than Buchenwald and better than Auschwitz.

CHAPTER FOUR

The Fiery Furnace

“Beloved, think it not strange concerning the fiery trial which is to try you, as though some strange thing happened unto you: But rejoice, inasmuch as ye are partakers of Christ’s sufferings....” 1 Peter 4:12-13

Simon Peter says that our example in suffering is the Lord Jesus Christ, whom we are to “follow” (1 Peter 2:21). The only sinless man this world ever dealt with was “a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief” (Isa. 53:3). His greatest follower (1 Tim. 1:16) had to fill up the measure of those sufferings (Col. 1:24). When God saved Paul, He had his work already cut out for him (Acts 9:16); it was to be a ministry of SUFFERING (2 Cor. 11:23-28). No attempt by any mod­em theologian or scholar of any profession of faith can ever remove this plank from the platform of New Testament faith or whittle it down to the size of a broom handle. The apostles suffered (Acts 12:1-5). They encouraged their followers to bear up under suffering (1 Peter 2:19-24) and to endure hardness as soldiers (2 Tim. 2:3-4). The battle-scarred veteran who has been “bloodied” in a dozen “fire fights” is the pat­tern held up for the New Testament believer (1 Cor. 11:1) to follow, even down to the armor and equipment (see Eph. 6:10 and comments in that commentary).

These elementary matters should be noted, as it is the custom these days for scholars, historians, and theologians alike to fashion Paul after their own image or the images of their bookish friends, forgetting that they themselves do not preach on the streets, do not get involved in nots or court actions, do not witness to kings by “telling them off’ about their sins, and have done nothing “publickly, and from house to house” (Acts 20:20) but eat cake and drink coffee. Paul’s lambast­ing the leading Greek scholars of his day (see Acts 17:23 and comments in that commentary) and calling them “superstitious” idolaters (Acts

17:22) hardly puts him in a class with A.T. Robertson, S.E. Anderson, Yaeger, Trench, Kenneth Wuest, Spiros Zodhiates, and Hort (see the Pauline Obsession, introduction). The word “witness” is the transla­tion of papTup^co—transliterated, this is a MARTYR. Stephen, the first New Testament martyr, is from Lx6<pavo<; (Stephanos), which means “a CROWN.” God’s witnesses are marked by the disturbing effects of their lives (Acts 21:27-32) and, often, their violent deaths (2 Peter 1:14), not by their ‘‘love for each other’ ’ and their tolerance of Christ- dishonoring Bible translations. They are marked by their cheerfulness under persecution (Acts 7:59), not their “scholarly exegesis” and their “grasp of the original languages.”

If we are to believe the historians of early church history, the first real Christian witnesses were fanatics in the exact sense of the word.1 One writer has stated that they committed the crime of bringing Jesus Christ out of the Temple and scattering Him all over the neighborhood. They lived like sheep, they prayed like saints, they preached like lions, and they died like flies. Ignatius is so anxious to get his head in the mouth of a lion2 that he goes to the cage in the Coliseum and hollers: “Come on out! Come out of there!”3 Foxe’s Book of Martyrs (pp. 13-33) is replete with witnesses who “sailed through bloody seas” to win the prize (Rev. 2:10). Paul’s conduct itself, if one considers it seriously (see Acts 14:20 and comments in that commentary), resembles that of a maniac depressive with suicidal tendencies (Phil. 1:23). If this type of personality is not pictured in 2 Corinthians 11:22-28, what is? Could any man have that many things happen to him who was trying to be “careful” like David Nunn, Marvin Gormann, Jimmy Swaggert, Kenneth Copeland, or John R. Rice? Paul is not just careless, he is down­right reckless at times (Acts 20:22-23). In spite of Origen’s later defection from the faith, due to his “Christian” education (see chapter 5), Origen at one time was ready to die on the spot for Jesus Christ. Polycarp (69-155) is finally stabbed to death after several unsuccessful attempts to bum him.4 According to tradition, all of the apostles died violently,5 and although we cannot prove this, we may well expect it. Certainly Peter, James, Paul, and John (as well as Stephen) received treatment in the New Testament that wouldn’t exactly meet UNESCO standards fora “bill of human rights.” Christians never “demonstrated for their rights” anywhere in the New Testament; they considered themselves to be bond slaves of Jesus Christ (1 Cor. 6:20), knocked down on the block. They would have no more thought of saying, “Iprefer this read­ing” or “this is the church of my choice," than they would of saying, “a better translation should be” or “it is unfortunate the tense is not

brought out in this verb,” etc. No Christian talked that way or thought that way. Those expressions are removed from apostolic Christianity by more than eighteen centuries.

When we focus our observations on the ten imperial persecutions (67-313 A.D.) under Nero, Domitian, Trajan, Marcus Aurelius, Severus, Macrinus, Decius, Aurelian, Diocletian, and Galerius, we see clearly the difference between an orthodox Christian theologian and a dedicated Bible believer; or to put it another way, the vast difference between an educated Christian scholar and a Bible believing preacher. If they could ever get together (as they certainly did on the translation committee of 1611, under King James), they would produce a transla­tion that would not only be accurate and readable; they would produce a spiritual masterpiece forged in fire and hammered out on the anvil of practical experience. All things being equal, what possible competi­tion do you suppose any American revision committee from 1900-1980 would be to a committee set up just after the reign of Bloody Mary and the fires of Smithfield (1553-1558)? If Rome remains true to her character as described in the Bible, don’t you know that God’s method of cooperating with a Bible committee who knew that, recognized it, believed it, and had experienced it (1611) would be different than His attitude towards a committee of egotistical, air-conditioned, heady, high- minded, apostate stuffed shirts, basking in a country with the highest standard of living in the world, a country that until 1979 had never been controlled by Rome? There wasn’t one man on the committee of the King James Bible who didn’t know someone who had a friend, or the relative of a friend, who was burned at the stake for calling the Roman Catholic mass what it was: a blasphemous fable and a dangerous deceit (Anglican Articles of Faith, no. 31). All things being equal—that is, assuming the members of the AV committee were as smart as any of your teachers and as “godly”—why wouldn’t God have blessed their translation more than some commercial gimmick out of the USA, pub­lished by a bunch of hucksters who wanted to gain prestige and royalties?

Now, all things were NOT equal (see chapter 18). The AV trans­lators were much more intelligent in dealing with the corrupt readings of Vaticanus (B), which they had on their tables in the Jesuit Rheims version of 1582.6 Origen and company didn’t fool them for a minute.7 All things were certainly not “equal.” The AV translators recognized Constantine and Jerome’s footprints immediately,8 and they absolutely refused to put the Apocrypha in their translation as part of the inspired and sacred text.9 Furthermore, they were not hoodwinked for a moment y such Alexandrian readings as those found in Luke 23:42; Luke 2:33;

Luke 24:51, 52; Colossians 1:14; Acts 8:37; 1 Timothy 3:16; etc., which succeeded in bamboozling the superstitious scholars on the Lockman Foundation (New ASVand Amplified Version). All things were certainly not equal when a comparison is made between the spoiled, well-fed, over-paid, top-heavy apostates of 1901-1980 (ASV, NIV, and New ASV) and the anti-Roman Catholic veterans who sat down in 1607 to place the living words of the living God into the hands of the English speaking people. Their motive was different, and this is manifest in their Dedi­catory remarks; their method was different, and this is manifest in the “Preface to the Reader”;10 their attitude about themselves was different; their attitude about the material they were handling was different, and, above all, their attitude about GOD was different.

Now, the peculiar obsession which the modem apostate Fundamen­talist has, to project himself back into the role of a “militant witness” or “battle-hardened soldier” we have called the Pauline Obsession (see introduction, notes 4, 5, 6). In brief, it means the attempts of historians (especially church historians) and scholars to rig up little “roll calls” where they themselves, or their friends, fall into the ranks which include the real soldiers of the cross. (See “The Campfire Girls” in Problem Texts, 1980.) The obsession, as it is related to Paul, seems to be that since he did so much important writing (and he did), and since he pre­sented so much New Testament doctrine (and he did), and since he was an educated theologian (and he was), that Tillich, Barth, MacRae, Laird, Harris, Afman, Archer, Weniger, Walvoord, Olson, E.S. English, Brunner, Panosian, and Lewis Sperry Chafer are like Paul. They are not in the least like Paul. They are no more “Pauline” in their minis­tries that what we call “the dry cleaning establishment” (Greaterex, Moore, O’Hair, Stam, Baker, Bullinger, Sharpe, etc.) who fancy that because they preach two truths extracted from two New Testament epistles (2 Cor. 5 and Eph. 3:1-4) that they are “like Paul.” They are not in the least like Paul; the nearest thing to Paul alive on this earth today would be someone like Lester Roloff, Richard Wurmbrand, Haralan Popov, or Alex Dunlap (recently deceased), and even these men have wives and children. Paul had no wife, no children, no home, no camel, no car, no church, no school, no stocks, no bonds, no social security, no pension, no insurance, no buses, and no tax-exempt prop­erty; as a matter of fact, he didn’t even have a burial plot. To liken such a Christian to a modem Christian in America or England—know­ing that Paul’s “standard” of living was “food and raiment’’ (1 Tim. 6:8)—is an absurd comparison that only a conceited imagination could cook up. The apostle Paul, standing alongside men like Bob Jones, HL

Oral Roberts; John R. Rice; Jimmy Swaggert; Bill Gothard; Arlin Horton; or Rex Humbard would look like a German Shepherd on the flanks of six Chihuahuas.

A man with 195 whip lashes on him is not to be classified with overweight promoters of tax-exempt corporations or smooth, slick kiddie teachers (2 Cor. 11:24). Somebody has gotten their wires hooked up wrong or disconnected altogether. Augustine (see chapter 6) could not have gotten close enough to a man of Paul’s stature to pick him up on a telescope. When we have to speak of men “like Paul” in church his­tory, we will be taking second and third “bests” every time, but even these “also-rans” (2 Tim. 4:7) should never include such a motley crew as Beecher; Weatherhead; Tillich; Michael Luther King, Jr.; Abernathy; Fulton Sheen; Popes Pius IX, X, XI, and XII; Barth; Brunner; Pope Paul VI; or Pope John XXIII. The Catholic popes are entirely out of the question, as none of them resemble Paul in any way, shape, or form. Paul wouldn’t let anyone think of crowning him (Acts 14:15); Peter wouldn’t let a man even bow in front of him (Acts 10:26). Paul on a gold throne, mouthing pious platitudes to the press about “peace,” “human rights,” and the “downtrodden masses” would be funnier than a Porky Pig cartoon. Imagine the apostle to the Romans (Paul—Rom. 15:16) wearing a gold ring and carrying bejeweled statues around11 to give to political rulers so that he could get a chance to use United Nations tax money for parochial schools!12 Imagine that!

Paul is called to suffer (Acts 9). Peter says that we are to follow those steps (1 Peter 2). In the first and second centuries of the church those steps were followed, and many a child of God, male and female, young and old, rich and poor, had to place his bare feet into the foot­prints of the nail-pierced soles of the Saviour and follow Him through Gethsemane, into the judgment hall (John 18), and eventually to the stake (John 19). God crowns his children amidst the splashing of blood, the roaring of flames, and the howling of wild beasts. Nearly all Chris­tians are familiar with the famous painting called “The Last Prayer.” There stands the “bishop”—the ordained elder of the flock (1 Tim. 3:1-8). Is he clothed in purple and scarlet? Does he sit on a marble throne in a basilica? Where is his triple tiara crown?13 No beads? No maniple”? No “cincture”? No “humeral veil”? No gold rings? No: he has been stripped down to “food and raiment,’’ and now the lions are about to eat him for their food and leave his blood-soaked raiment m the sand for the slaves to rake up. Who is it that has brought him to this place? IT IS ROME (Rev. 17).

Most Christians are familiar with (or should be familiar with) Foxe’s Book of Martyrs, edited by Forbush. Since this book was on the Roman

Catholic “Index” as forbidden reading, it could not be used in the pub­lic school system in America as a textbook for church history. Bigots are deathly afraid of any negative truth in history that exposes their devilment. The documented facts in Foxe’s book, testified to many times by eyewitnesses, must be shoved under the rug for the sake of “peace” and “unity.” This is done by either saying that the historical facts were lies written by people who wanted to “spread hate,” or that since past is past, it cannot possibly happen again. For example, the way that mod­em historians get rid of the documented negative facts presented by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (testified to by eyewitnesses) is that they simply say they are “FICTION.”14 You throw away the peel and eat the inside and pretend that bananas don’t have skins: they do. J. Edgar Hoover of the FBI never stated it more truthfully when he said that all Commu­nists accent THE POSITIVE.15 The way to ensnare every generation is just pretend that the past historical events didn’t really happen, or else pretend that they have no bearing on the future (Eccl. 1:1-10).

Who are these multitudes in Foxe’s Book of Martyrs (pp. 11-40)? Are they Christian celebrities? Are they members of the scholars union? Do you suppose that any of them were smart enough to correct the Bible in 36,000 places (RV, ASV, NASV, RSV, NIV, NRSV) ? Who are these nameless thousands who are torn to pieces with hooks, laid on red-hot grills, rolled on broken glass, pulled apart by horses, eaten by wild beasts, whipped, and starved to death? They were baptized Bible believ­ers who believed in standing for their Biblical convictions in the face of a Church State16 that rejected the Bible as the final authority for human conduct on this earth. Where the Bible said one thing (Acts 5:29) and the “powers that be” said another, these Christians stuck to the Book and paid for it with their lives. To them the imperial decrees of Caesar were sawdust alongside the oracles of God (Rom. 3:1-5) when they dealt with religious matters. The issue between them and Caesar was the same issue that arose in Genesis 3:1 and continues to this day. Did God say it or did He not? If He did, it is the highest authority on the face of this earth and it is to be obeyed without question (James 4:17; 1:22). If He said it, then what some church thinks it ought to be or should be is immaterial. If any church doesn’t agree with it, then that church is in error at that point. Authority was the original issue (Isa. 14:10-16, Ezek. 28:11-17). It never had anything to do with “the fundamentals of the faith” or the “teachings of Christ” or “life-styles’ or “Christian values.” Sacraments and “liturgy” were not even secondary issues. The issue in the beginning was AUTHORITY (Isa. 14:11-15), for the words spoken in Isaiah 14:13 were spoken before

there was any human life on this planet (Job 38:4-8). Rome, as a polit­ical state, claimed religious authority17 as a divine government. When Augustine transferred this lying profession to the Catholic Church (see chapter 6), he was merely restating Rome’s ancient blasphemy in “Cath­olic” terms (see The Sure Word of Prophecy, 1970). The structure of the Catholic and Orthodox churches is the structure of the pagan Roman Empire from top to bottom:

1. The Emperor, whose counterpart became the Pope.

2. The Senate, whose counterpart became the College of Cardinals.

3. The Imperial Governor, who became the Patriarch or Archbishop.

4. The Provincial Governor, who became the “Metropolitan” or Bishop.

5. The Civitas, which became the priests.

6. And then beneath all, on the bottom of the pile, HUMANITY.18 Now, the Christians who came up under the domination of this

Christ-killing (Acts 4:27), apostle-jailing (Acts 12:1-4), Bible-rejecting (Acts 24:25), Jew-hating (Acts 18:2), apostate Whore (Rev. 17) were the primary targets for several reasons, but by far and away the crucial complaint was nonconformity to the world system. Bible believing Chris­tians would not “fall in line”;19 they were nonconformists (Heb. 13:13-14). In the first place they would not conform to the HEW regu­lations of OSH A and UNESCO in their day. Loyal subjects of the State were often required to offer incense and prayers for the lives and welfare of the bureaucrats in the government as well as for Caesar.20 Many Christians would not conform to these government “guidelines.” Christians often had night assemblies (Acts 20:7), so these after-dark meetings were looked upon by the Roman IRS and the Roman HEW as sources of potential revolt against the government.

Not to be outdone by Rome, Soviet Russia today (and since 1921) imprisons anyone suspected of potentially planning something that might later possibly “become” an anti-government movement.21 The trick is absolute control of the private life of every citizen so that those in power can stay in power. In Soviet Russia, for example (1980), the constitution (1936) states that women have equal rights with all men, that there is freedom of the press and freedom of speech, and that there is racial equality.22 What does this mean PRACTICALLY or in actuality? Well, it simply means that if you pray in front of your family at your table and your children tell the NKVD about it, you get ten years in a concentration camp.23 There is no exaggeration or “overstatement.” ose who did it are THERE. There are no articles in the Russian con­

stitution that guarantee freedom of RELIGION: only freedom of speech and press!

In addition to “after-dark services on Sunday night,” there was a notable lack of idols, figurines, pictures, and beads in the houses of the Bible believing Christians. The Romans had as many gods as a mod­em television viewer; there were gods who taught the baby how to stand, gods who taught him how to talk and walk, gods who protected the house at night, gods who blessed the veranda, the hearth, the table, the prison, the stable, and even the “cat houses.” Brothels were blessed by pagan priests with generous amounts of holy water and prayers.24 In such an environment, with a shelf of gods in every house, the Chris­tian appeared in the role of an atheist: he could not produce his “God” (John 4:24).

Since idol making was an international industry (Acts 19:27), Chris­tians were not “good for business.” They hurt the “market potential.”

But above all, as we have said, the main objection to a Christian was the fact that he would not conform. If all of theQroops jp the army stepped forward to offer incense to Diana (so the army could win a military campaign), the Bible believers in the ranks refused to step forward; consequently, many of them were executed on the spot. If the contemporary^dfess styles)were seductive or immodest (1 Tim. 2:9), the Christian women refused to be “stylish.” If everyone went to the ffiiper BowT)(Coliseum) on Sunday to watch the “play-offs” between the gladiators and the wild beasts, thd£hristians were noticably absent, The government made up for this loss in attendance by requesting them to be present in the arena as the star attraction. What Rome had against the Christian was what the Pharisees and Sadducees had against Christ: He wasn’t one of them (John 5:18), and He wouldn’t fellowship with them. Satan will forgive a Christian anything as long as he will conform to the world system (John 17:14). What Satan requires is CONFOR­MITY ; without conformity it is impossible for the devil to bring in his own kingdom (Dan. 11:21) and put his own “Christ” (Luke 2:26) on the throne (Rev. 13:1-6). Conformity must be enforced in Satan’s system (Rev. 13:14-18) because the tares have to be “bound in bundles” (Matt. 13:30) before they are burned. Rome set out to enforce conformity to its political and religious system, which in the New Testament is stated as belonging to Satan (Luke 4:6; 2 Cor. 4:4).

The first organized persecution (officially) took place in Bithynia during the governorship of Pliny the Younger (112 A.D.). Pliny would have the Christians brought before his tribunal and would ask them three times if they were a Christian. They could “chicken out” anytime during

these three interrogations, but if the answer was “yes” three times in a row, they were sentenced to death.25 There were, of course, spas­modic persecutions by Roman emperors before this time (Nero and Domitian: 51-96 A.D.). Paul was beheaded during Nero’s reign (90-96 A.D.). The charge brought against Bible believing Christians in nearly every case was simple: odio humani generis,26 which means “hatred of the human race.” Thus the outstanding mark of a Bible believing Christian turns out not to be “behold how they love one another,” but rather “behold their hate literature,” and “the hatred in their preach­ing” and their lack of a “sweet spirit of Christ”; they were hell-raising, antisocial troublemakers. They were against “THE people” (see Acts 21:28 and comments in that commentary). The accounts of the Neronian persecution are found in the works of Tacitus, Suetonius, Dion Cassius, Tertullian, Severus, and Clement of Rome. The persecution was so vicious that apostates later (Jerome and Augustine) read Revelation 13 back into the past and pretended that the Antichrist had already come and gone (Nero), so the Whore of Revelation 17 could not possibly be the Roman Catholic church state: rather she had been pagan Rome, in the past.27 Philip Schaff, the head of the ASVcommittee (1901), quite naturally took this position.28 With him are three apostates of the RV committee (1881-1884), Lightfoot, Hort, and Westcott, and, quite nat­urally, all the unsaved German rationalists of German higher criticism (1700-1900) take exactly the same viewpoint. DeWette (1780-1849) and Ewald (1840) take the same view, and Schaff confesses that DeWette is a SKEPTICAL CRITIC.29 Siding with these formidable opponents of the Protestant Reformation text stand all the popes, all the cardinals, the Society of “Jesus” (Jesuits), plus Eichhorn, Clericus, Wettstein, Davidson, and the authors and promoters of the Graf-Wellhausen “humpty-dumpty theology” for the Old Testament (see Gen. 16:7-10 and comments in that commentary). It also happens to be the position (by the wildest coincidence) of B.B. Warfield, A.T. Robertson, and J G. Machen.

The emperor Diocletian, as the popes, liked to be called “lord” and “god.”30 As the popes, he fancies himself to be God’s representa­tive on this earth,31 and therefore he is above criticism or judgment.32 Domitian exiled Christians and had them killed right and left. Mark and Andrew were supposed to have been martyred under his reign. Ignatius was thrown to the lions on December 20, 115 A.D., which during Trajan’s reign was a mercy; he was known to have prescribed the rack for women under eighteen years old.33

Ignatius (50-115 A.D.) was a bishop of Antioch (Acts 11:26; 13:1-2) and therefore should receive special attention in a Biblical church his­

tory, for as we have seen, Antioch (not Rome or Alexandria) was the center of Bible believing Gentile Christianity.34 From this location came the Syrian texts of the Syrian-type Greek New Testaments35 which later made up the Textus Receptus of the King James Bible. Ignatius was brought before Trajan, the Roman “holy father” at Antioch, in the ninth year of Trajan’s reign. With regard to the sentence passed upon him, Ignatius said that he would pray for the beasts to be ready for him, and that he would go up and pat them if they didn’t get aggressive. If they didn’t fall on him, he would “bring them to it by force.”36 Schaff calls this desire for martyrdom a “morbid fanaticism.”37

Calvin calls the Ignatian epistles (see the letters to the Ephesians, the Magnesians, the Trallians, the Romans, the Philadelphians, Smyrneans, and to Polycarp of Smyrna) “abominable trash.”38 Why would Calvin do this? It must be that not all that is called “Ignatius” is “of’ Ignatius. Now, the small print on the Epistles of Ignatius runs into five pages in Schaff’s history.39 Schaff accepts as “genuine” seven short GREEK epistles and rejects as genuine three short SYRIAN epis­tles. The seven short GREEK ones are the ones that Calvin put on the manure pile. All of this should be highly instructive to the Bible believer who knows where Antioch of Syria is (Acts 11:26). It is not in Greece: it is in Syria. Furthermore, adhering to the Westcott and Hort ecclesi­astical dictum that the “shorter reading is to be preferred over the longer one,”40 Schaff accepts a shorter Greek copy over a longer Greek copy but refuses to accept the shortest of all because that copy was in SYRIAC. If Ignatius was bishop of Antioch in Syria, why would not this copy be the “closest to the originals”—to borrow the standard alibi used by Bob Jones University for promoting Roman Catholic Bibles (ASV, New ASV, etc.)? Simple: the Syrian copy did not contain the magic word “CATHOLIC, ’’ which appears for the first time in the history of the church in a forged Greek copy of “The Epistles of Ignatius. ”41 The church historian will violate his own principles of textual criticism and manuscript evidence in order to prove something that isn’t so.

It is also the Syriac copies which omit the panegyric on the episcopal hierarchy; the Bible also omits it. The word “Catholic” was borrowed from Greek philosophy (see Col. 2:8 and comments in that commen­tary). Not only do the Syriac originals omit this essential word of death, hell, and destruction but they also omit the statement that the “Eucha­rist” is the dead flesh of Jesus Christ’s corpse “resurrected. ” The Bible also omits both items. In short, Antioch of Syria (Acts 11:26) is not a good place for Romans to go to unless they can change Syriac into Greek and then appeal to Greek philosophy (Col. 2:8) to drive home

a point. In this case, the entire system (the Roman church from 325-1980 A.D.) is named after a Greek philosophical term found in a forged doc­ument: there is no such thing as a “Catholic” church in ANY Bible. More than that, the term means “wholly given to a CAT,’’ and the “Cat” (alone) is the word for “MOTHER” if one traces the Greek back into Sanskrit roots. “Holy Mother Church” (see chapter 14) is named after an animal which appears nowhere in either Testament: the word “CAT” is found nowhere in the scripture (see Mark of the Beast, 1959, 1970).

The next emperor, Hadrian (117-138), erected temples for Jupiter (see Acts 14:12 and comments in that commentary) and Venus on the Temple site at Jerusalem and on the supposed site of the crucifixion.

Poly carp (69-155 A.D.) was martyred under Antoninus Pius (137-161)—note the famous surname “Pius,” adopted by so many popes. The material on his death is found in the works of Waddington, Wieseler, Keim, and others. He was burned at the stake at the age of eight-six years, and tradition states that he had to be put to death with the sword before the flames would kindle on his body.42

Like Ignatius, Polycarp is courted by the Great Mother Cat. Rum­maging through a variety of “epistles”—some spurious and some genuine—the later popes found the expression “faith is the mother of us all.”43 Since this blatantly contradicted the clear statement of the Bible about the matter (Gal. 4:26), it was adopted immediately. Later, this anti-scriptural heresy was developed into the following formulas:

1. God is your Father; the church (Catholic) is your mother.

2. Since “FAITH” is your mother, only the Catholic faith can be a mother.

3. A mother gives birth, so the new birth is confined to “THE FAITH that is the MOTHER of us all,” i.e., Roman Catholicism.

4. Holy Mother Church (CAT) can give a sinner the new birth.44 If this seems like misrepresentation by one who is “prejudiced,”

let the skeptical bigot who believes everything he reads in newspapers (and nothing he reads in the Bible) obtain any standard Roman Catholic catechism (nihil obstat) printed by any Catholic publishing house at any time in the sixteenth, seventeenth, eighteenth, nineteenth, or twentieth centuries. The position they give is the position of Cyprian (195-258), who was no more a Bible believer than F.F. Bruce or Norman Vincent Peale.45

At this point in history (100-200 A.D.), where the corpses of the martyrs begin to be venerated as religious objects (fetishism) and martyrdom becomes the test of a true “saint,” the dangerous seeds of

heresy find fertile ground, for who could resist believing a man’s the­ology who loved God enough to die for Him? Isn’t such a man pretty “godly”? Who would be a better carrier of false doctrine than such a man—a “good, godly” man who loved the Lord enough to lay down his life for Him? Wouldn’t false doctrine from such a man act much quicker in the leavening process (Matt. 13:33) than doctrine from a man, say, like Marcion the “heretic”? Or a “Liberal” (1900)? Or a “Neo­Evangelical” (1970)? So, at this point, the body of Christ makes preparations to start down the road into Bible rejection even before Constantine grants his imperial decrees of toleration (313 A.D.). The ground is paved by the Ante-Nicene “fathers” (Matt. 23:9)—“call no man your father upon the earth”; and although we cannot throw stones when it comes to the spiritual and devotional life of many of these men or their personal purity and courage, we are betraying the word of God and the truth of God (John 17:17) if we allow them to prevail upon us with their opinions and “preferences” that clearly contradict God Almighty (John 17:17; Heb. 4:12; Prov. 30:6). No Bible believer can afford to adopt the modern religion (1980) or humanism as a substitute for believing God, no matter how “godly” the “humans” are. Human­ism is the religion of the Communists and Catholics (1980-1990) who are dedicated to the total annihilation of every Bible believer on this earth.

There are no divided loyalties in these matters. Loyalty to God is never to be displaced for the Second Commandment, even if the “neigh­bor” involved is a martyr. Where divided loyalties are courted, a dual authority is erected, and this is exactly what the Council of Trent (1546) stated to be the truth for every Roman Catholic in America, under the pain of damnation by God. The decrees of all authorized councils in the Catholic church are as binding as the inspired words of God,46 according to every pope, priest, cardinal, bishop, nun, and monk in that organization.47 The Catholic who denies that is either extremely ignorant or he is a liar who is afraid to publicly state what his church really stands for and what the church really believes. (Observe that iden­tically the same thing can be said of any member of the Communist Party here or abroad.48)

It is during the ten imperial persecutions (81-313 A.D.) that three Bible issues arise which determine the future course of the local assem­blies for the next fifteen hundred years. The persecutions themselves developed a unique situation. They could not help but lead to a super­reverence for spiritual leaders who suffered martyrdom (see note 36). This super-reverence gradually developed into something akin to idolatry, and this meant that any egotist who came along later could

obtain worship and reverence by pretending that he was connected with these men, either by “apostolic succession” or by “laying on of hands.” The Pauline Obsession, therefore, is first manifest in history by the apos­tate popes at Rome pretending that they were kin to the martyrs (like Paul) who suffered and bled and died for resisting a church state. They are no more kin to than the Hapsburgs and the Tudors. Rapidly the bishop or elders (called PRIESTS by Cyprian49) became accepted as minor “gods.”50 With this trend came the second complication: what does one do with a spiritual leader who defects under persecution and denies “the faith”? Or how about a spiritual leader who is immoral or worldly? These three problems led to the defection of several groups of Bible believers from the group of assemblies who called themselves “Catholic”—after the forged Greek “Letter of Ignatius’’ (see above). These groups were called the Montanists, Novatians, and Donatists, of whom we shall have much to say later on. Ignatius’ harmless little word “Catholic”—if he ever said it to start with, which he probably didn’t—was converted into the expression “THE CATHOLIC CHURCH” by Polycarp before his martyrdom (1 Epistle Smyrna), at least according a “slightly legendary account”51 preserved and pro­moted by Roman Catholics three hundred years later. “Slightly” is hardly the word for it.52

Marcus Aurelius ascended the throne in 161 and reigned until 180 A.D. He was a bloody tyrant and a vicious persecutor of Christians, although he is given credit by some historians as being a “just, kind, and amiable emperor.”53 Notwithstanding, he refused all advice or requests to tolerate Christians; he exiled anyone who preached on judg­ment or hell, since he himself was a Greek Stoic philosopher (Acts 17:18) who didn’t believe he would ever have to stand before God and give account for any of his deeds (see Acts 17:32 and comments in that com­mentary). It would take a volume to describe the bloody acts of this “kind, amiable emperor” and several volumes have been written (Arnold Bodek, E. Renan, Eusebius, et al.). The names of Pothinus (ninety years old), Blandina, Ponticus (fifteen years old), Symphorinus, and “The Thundering Legion” in Hungary are all associated with his reign. Chris­tians were blamed for military disasters, earthquakes, and even floods, and the wrath of the populace fell heaviest on the local assemblies in Lyons (south France) and Vienne (south France). This is very instructive to anyone who is seeking to learn something from history (see chapters 13, 14).

During the reign of Marcus Aurelius (121-180), a group of “holy rollers” appeared called “Montanists,” after their leader. They were

active mainly in southern France (see above) and North Africa. They were decided Pre-millennialists,54 and being contemporaneous with Origen (184-254), who hated Pre-millennialism,55 they were immedi­ately branded as heretics by every follower of the Alexandrian school and by every member of the Alexandrian Cult (see chapter 5).56 Eusebius, the church historian, could certainly not be counted on for too much objective reporting in regard to them, for he, as Origen and Augustine (and Machen, Warfield, and Robertson), was against Pre- millennialism.57 One must never forget that the eminent church historian of this period (Eusebius) was the right-hand man of Constantine at the Council of Nicaea (325 A.D.): he was one of the greatest apple-polishing, toe-kissing boot-lickers in the history of religious politics (chapter 7). Since he and the emperor were both Post-millennialists in their politi­cal philosophies (the Millennial issue is always a political issue because it deals with governmental authority on earth: Luke 3:1-20; Matt. 19:28; 25:31; Rev. 11:15, John 18:36; etc.), there is not much chance that the Montanists would get a “square count” from Eusebius, let alone a square deal. Pre-millennialism teaches that every human government on the face of the earth will fail and will eventually join Satan to bring in “peace on earth” (Rev. 13). As we have stated in our preface, if the church historian has omitted Satan as a guiding light in ecclesiastical and governmental movements, he has disqualified himself as a Chris­tian historian. No Christian historian could ignore Luke 4:1-8 or 2 Corinthians 4:4 unless he was a Bible rejecting “Christian.”

Commodus takes the throne in 180 and reigns until 192 A.D. He does not actively persecute the Christians, but this is due not to his con­victions but is due largely to the influence of one of his concubines who persuaded him to lay off the churches. However, one Roman senator (Apollonius) was executed during Commodus’ reign for professing Christ. Septimus Severus sits down on Satan’s seat (Luke 4:5-6) in 193 and stays until 211 A.D. Although he himself did not become actively engaged in the persecutions, Severus certainly tolerated them and did nothing to stop them, and it is certain that the law he passed in 202 A.D. against the spread of Christianity had a great deal to do with the bloody persecutions which broke out in Africa about 211 (Alexandria and Mauritania). At this time, Origen’s father (Leonides) was beheaded, and a long list of martyrs appears (Felicitas, a slave; Perpetua. a noble lady; Potamiaena, a virgin; Basilides, her executioner; and scores of Montanists). Clement of Alexandria says, “Many martyrs are daily burned, crucified, and beheaded before your eyes.”58

The next two rulers, Caracalla (211-217) and Heliogabalus _ mipr« Thev however, tolerated

Christianity through indifference to Christian doctrines (see Acts 18:17 and comments in that commentary). Caracalla surrounded himself with philosophers and women lecturers whose strong suit was Oriental mys­ticism.59 As social distinctions were torn down one after another, due to the extension of Roman citizenship into all territories, the Christians were not as “standoffish” as formerly and they began to permeate all classes, whereas for nearly two hundred years their converts had largely been slaves, housemaids, soldiers, sailors, dock workers, servants, and attendants. Caracalla was assassinated by Macrinus,60 who took the crown for fourteen months. Julia Moesa induced the army to kick Macrinus off the throne and installed in his place an effeminate profli­gate named Heliogabalus; this latter gentleman was a sun worshipper in the best Baalite tradition.61 So, he set up a Roman ecumenical movement to integrate Christianity and Judaism with the ancient Roman mystery religions which came from Babylon via Pergamos (see note 13). He brought the standard, required item (a black stone) from Edessa to Rome and was about to have people “kiss the blarney” (Ps. 2:12; Hos. 13:2; Matt. 26:48; and 2 Sam. 15:5) when the Roman army ran him out and put Alexander Severus (222-235) on Satan’s seat.

Severus placed statues of Abraham and Christ into Gabalus’ magpie’s nest, along with Orpheus and Appolonius of Tyana and some other Roman emperors: it was a sort of Roman Riverside Baptist Church with Severus as pastor instead of Harry Emerson Fosdick (1878-1969).62 According to Lampridius, Severus wanted to build a temple for Christ at Rome: since he was unable to accomplish this at that time, the Cath­olics did it for him later. Severus’ mother (Julia Mammaea) studied under Origen, although there is no evidence that she was ever converted or that she ever succeeded in winning her son to Christ.53 Origen, at this time, was busy corrupting Receptus manuscripts in Alexandria, and it is remarkable to note that the first real “break” he got—he was in danger of losing his life under Severus (Septimus, not Alexander) eleven years before this—was under a pagan integrationist who wanted to gather all “faiths” into one ecumenical movement. During Severus’ reign the Alexandrian Cult flourished in Alexandria (see chapter 5), for it was like-minded” with the unsaved Roman emperor (see chapter 5, notes 59, 60). It would appear that at this time the first “church buildings” Were erected, simple “meeting houses” where the Christians could assemble without filling up private homes.64 Maximinus the Thracian (235-238) assassinated Severus.

Maximinus ordered only the death of elders and pastors in Africa, a estine, and Asia Minor, but he had Pontianus and Hippolytus (offi­

cials of the Roman churches) banished to Sardinia. At this time (235-238), Origen ran for his life; while hiding he wrote a book on “Martyrdom. ”65 He may well have been “led by the spirit,” for at this time Origen was able to get away to Caesarea and finish his life work by corrupting the Caesarean family of manuscripts (234 A.D.) as he had corrupted the Receptus in Alexandria before that time. Ambrose’s pagan library accompanied Origen to Caesarea, and Ambrose provided him with all the shorthand experts and stenographers he needed to compose the originals of Sinaiticus (R) and Vaticanus.66 The damn­able results of this perverted scholarship will be found in the extant Latin (corrupted at Alexandria)61 and Syrian (corrupted at Caesarea) manuscripts which depart in certain readings from the Receptus.68 Informed Bible believing scholars (not Afman, Yaeger, Wuest, Custer, Porter, MacRae, Martin, Newman, Anderson, or Olson) believe that the fifty copies of the Alexandrian Bible copied out for Constantine (containing the Old Testament and New Testament Apocrypha) are rep­resented by their sole survivors,69 Sinaiticus and Vaticanus: the two manuscripts used by Bob Jones University for justifying 5,888 “corrections” in the New Testament (1950-1980).

Gordianus (238-244) left the churches undisturbed. Philip the Ara­bian (244-249) took over, and there were no outstanding examples of persecution under his reign.

Now, while all this was going on there was a movement of Bible believing people in the eastern end of the Roman Empire which Philip Schaff dismisses as “radical” fanaticism.70 (Newman makes a few com­ments, but not many.) Here, back in the area where the original New Testament manuscripts were written, there arose a group known as ‘ ‘Messalines ” or ‘ ‘Euchites ’ ’ who immediately began to run afoul of the local assemblies who allowed worldliness in their congregations.71 The term “Euchite” among Greeks was a general name (“a praying people”) for dissenters such as the English word “nonconformist.” The problem seems to be that the Euchites would rebaptize a man on his confession of salvation if he said that he had been baptized BEFORE he was really saved, which, incidentally, was exactly how the Montanists (see above) handled such matters. One of the opponents of the Euchites said: “Instead of being immersed in water they ought to be plunged in hell.”72 Evidently someone had been baptizing people prematurely without any confession of faith, or if a confession, no evidence of con­version. Further, the Euchites must have been a terrible irritation to unconverted church members, living like the devil, who wanted their baptism to pass off as conversion. These early Greek “puritans were

also called Poblicans, Poplicans, and Philopopolitans; sometimes they were simply called by the name of the country where they migrated (Phrygians, Bulgarians, Armenians, etc.).73 In history they are con­nected inseparably with a Bishop of Antioch (not Rome or Alexandria) named Paul ofSamosata. They were called heretics and fanatics because of their unorthodox attitude toward “adoptionism” (see chapter 9), but several things about them are much more outstanding than that.

First of all, they came to be called Paulicians because of the empha­sis they laid on the Pauline epistles.74 instead of the “Hebrew-Christian” epistles. After 325 A.D., they viewed the Roman Catholic church and the Greek Orthodox church as Satanic, and they refused to tolerate images of any kind in connection with their services. However, the most significant thing about them was their wholesale rejection of the educated scholars at Alexandria and the theological teachings that came from that “most unusual university.” It is most instructive to notice that these Euchites (or Messalines) immigrated to Thrace and Bulgaria and from these roots and from this stock came the Paulicians, Cathari, and Bogomiles of the next six centuries.75 The Cathari were evangelical “Puritans” within the Catholic church, but they agreed with the Bogomiles that the Roman church was the fornicating Whore of Reve­lation 17 and that the pope was the Antichrist (see chapter 14, note 70). The Bogomiles quite frankly declared that the apostolic, Ante-Nicene and Post-Nicene “fathers” were false prophets.16

By the time of Decius Trajan (249 A.D.), the local churches were beginning to branch off into groups that demanded separation and that demanded a congregation of baptized believers only, opposed to con­gregations that would baptize anyone (or anything) and that would go along with the world in “order to be totally involved” in “bringing in the kingdom” and in “establishing a just and lasting peace” to “end man’s inhumanity to,” etc. (See The Sure Word of Prophecy, 1970.)

Decius Trajan was the bloodiest murderer of the lot, almost equal­ling the Roman Catholic popes of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. In 250 A.D. he passed an edict to all governors of all provinces ordering all of their subjects to worship the state religion under threat of torture, death, confiscation of goods, or banishment, exactly as the popes in die fifteenth and sixteenth centuries handled it. Decius Trajan was slain in battle with the Goths, but not before killing thousands of Christians and killing scores of local pastors. Among those slain was Cyprian (200-258 A.D.), who, in spite of his zeal for Christ, was probably more responsible for the destruction of New Testament Christianity than any man outside of Origen himself.77 It was Cyprian, the African bishop

of Carthage (next door to the Alexandrian Cult) and a contemporary of Origen, who stated that the church was built on Peter, that Peter was in Rome, and that the Roman church was not Satan’s seat but “THE CHAIR OF PETER.’’78 In the carnal mind of Cyprian’s unregenerate nature, the Roman church was the “fountain of unity and the MOTHER of the Catholic church.”79

Here, in Cyprian, we have a genuine perverter of Biblical truth who loved the Lord enough to die for him. Who could resist the theology of such a “godly” apostate? In such a situation, the duty of a fellow apostate is clear: believe him on the grounds of his moral courage and to with the Bible; accept his opinion as infallible truth on the

grounds that you LIKE it. So, from here on, every communicant in the Roman Catholic church for the next eighteen hundred years is to take Cyprian’s words in these matters to be verbally inspired80 in spite of the fact that Peter was never in Rome (Rom. 15:20-22), was not a Gentile (Gal. 2:15), was married (Matt. 8:14), preached in the east, not the west (1 Peter 5:13), would let no man bow down to him (Acts 10:26), and taught salvation by grace (Acts 15:11) before water bap­tism (Acts 10). But since Cyprian “died for what he believed,” why make a liar out of him? Why not just make a liar out of GOD? (You can be right about the Virgin Birth and the Deity of Christ and so wrong on the new birth that you can spend eternity with those who didn’t believe in either “birth” or the Deity of Christ.)

So, here (200 A.D.) begins a long, long trail of pagan tradition by “godly Fundamentalists.” Cyprian, as Origen, believed in all of the Catholic fundamentals; he was just a liar when it came to Biblical authority on certain matters. And authority is and has been (and always will be) the issue (Gen. 3:1; Isa. 14:13-14). Cyprian’s martyrdom served to reinforce his Satanic teachings: they entitled him to credulity when he lied. A martyr makes an excellent vessel in which to carry lies (Jack Kennedy; Martin Luther King, Jr.; Che Gueverra; et al.), for it is assumed that “these noble dead died not in vain, for their spirit lives on in,” etc. “The devil has his martyrs among men ” (old Dutch prov­erb). Cyprian’s “spirit” lived on in the Roman Whore on seven hills—the very city which had him slain. (Nor is this anything new; thousands of members of the Iron Guard and the Russian Army who fought to save Russia and Stalin from Hitler and the “Czars” were imprisoned for life when the got back to “Mother Russia.”81)

The seeds of the pagan papacy are not to be found in 325 A D. at Constantine’s council: oh, no, by then the plant is well above ground, the seeds of the papacy are found in the writings of Cyprian and the

New Testament Apocrypha ofSinaiticus (N) in a work called “A Letter from Clement"forged about 98 A.D. Strangely enough, 1 Clement says “God hates those who praise themselves.’’ Quite an “infallible source” for a man who thinks that he has replaced God on earth (see notes 30-32). In this forged letter, dreamed up by an anonymous writer, an ecclesi­astical officer in Rome is undertaking to correct another church eight hundred miles away and give it advice as a superior instructor.82 Furthermore, the author professes to be a Roman bishop in the west trying to straighten out a church in the east: this is highly significant (see chapter 3), for this is where the Pauline epistles were written, except­ing those of course written in jail at Rome, where “Clement” professes to be writing from!

The germs of the papacy can also be found in the writings of Irenaeus (120-192), who calls Rome the “greatest” and oldest church “acknowledged by ALL” and founded by Paul and Peter.83 What is Irenaeus’ scriptural authority for saying that Peter helped found the Roman church? Quite naturally it was none: Peter in Rome is the figment of someone’s conceited imagination. There is nothing in the New Tes­tament that would even suggest that Peter was in Rome, or near it, or had any contact with anyone living in it. To the contrary, the epistle to the Romans is written by Paul (not Peter), and the Christians at Rome (Rom. 16) do not count Peter as a member of any church in Rome, let alone a founder or even a bishop.

As early as 190 A.D. a certain “Pope Victor” (the title is highly fictitious) broke fellowship with the churches of Asia Minor (the loca­tion of the majority of “original autographs”) when he decided that the date of Easter was the big issue among “Fundamentalists.”84 This same issue arose again in England in 597; on both occasions the Cath­olic practice (Roman Catholic by 325) was contrary to the practice of Bible believing Christians, who went by a different Bible than the one the Catholics adopted (see chapter 3).85 By the time of Hippolytus (235 A.D.), the Roman bishop was not only claiming absolute power in his own jurisdiction but was saying (Callistus) that a Roman bishop can never be deposed or compelled to resign no matter what kind of sin he is committing.86 This later became the official Roman Catholic posi­tion and has been for over fifteen centuries.87

Gallus (251-253) continued to persecute Christians. Valerian (253-260) ascended the throne of the Roman sun-god. He began under e guise of being “mild and friendly” toward Christians; however, as the Roman Empire fell apart through excessive taxing, military e ense> lavish amusements, immorality, and inflation (see Gibbon, The

History of the Decline and Fall of the Rornan Empire, 1788), Valerian began to look for a scapegoat. As usual, the Christians were handmade to order. In 257 A.D., Valerian commanded all Christians to conform to the Roman church state or be banished (exactly as Pope Gregory XIII did in 1572, and exactly as it was done under the French Roman Catholic Louis XIV in 1685). He directed that pastors of local churches be separated from their congregations, and he prohibited Christian assem­blies of any kind. In 258 he issued an edict that all bishops and deacons should be put to death and that all Christian converts should be deprived of their property.88 The list of martyrs is too long to enumerate.

Gallienus (260-268) came to the throne; he continued to steer the rambling wreck of the Roman Empire downhill. With the wrath of God on a God-hating, Bible-denying, Christ-rejecting populace of “human­ists,” the empire fell apart piece by piece, blaming its troubles on every­thing from the invasion of the Goths to the Christians offending Venus and Jupiter. The trouble was obvious (Ps. 9:17) if one believes in the authority of God (Prov. 14:34); however, where human authority (scientific or religious) has usurped this authority, the “wicked” don’t even know what they are stumbling over (Prov. 4:19). Gallienus tried a policy of appeasement (having seen that Valerian got nowhere with persecution), and from this time till the time of Diocletian (284) the Christians were allowed some respite. The grew in numbers, wealth, and worldliness, and as they grew in worldliness, more “hell-raising trouble makers” (Bible believing Christians) within their ranks began to “split” again from the main assemblies; worldly Christians (Rom. 16:18; Phil. 3:19) have always been plagued by Christians whose heav­enly home was more real to them than their earthly “stop-over.” Pagans flowed into the churches and brought their idols with them. The school of Alexandria had now completed most of its dirty work under Philo, Pantaenus, Clement, and Origen, and the revised Greek, Syrian, and Latin manuscripts of the Lockman Foundation and Kenneth Taylor (all “bibles”from the Lockman Foundation and all “paraphrases”from Mr. Taylor are translations of the Alexandrian texts) were floating all over North Africa, Palestine, and Asia Minor. The alibi which Pope Damasus and Jerome used later (see chapter 11, notes 45-58) for drum­ming up a “standard” version was the confusion that these texts caused.

In 281 A.D. a group known as the Novations arose. They insisted upon adult immersion of believers only and a pure discipline in the local church; they rejected anyone’s baptism who had been baptized by an immoral bishop (Callistus, for example) or anyone who had defecte under persecution by denying the Lord Jesus Christ. Since Philip Scha

fails to notice these Novatians are the “Cathari” of a later date (1000-1200), we shall make a special note of them.89

The last Roman Emperor before the demoniac Constantine was a man named Diocletian (284-313). He began his reign with mild threats against a group of “Manichaeans” (of whom we shall speak later) and then went from this to a decree compelling all of his soldiers to sacrifice to the state gods. This was followed by a decree in 303 A.D. to throw all pastors of local churches into prisons, to level all church buildings to the ground, and to burn up every copy of the scriptures that could be found. Those who turned over their Bibles to this Fascist monster were called “traitors,” and this became the cause of another split in the local churches, producing what historians call the "Donatists. ”90 We will hear from them again, for they are linked in church history with the Paulicians, Albigenses, and Waldenses; the outstanding thing about the Donatists was that they rejected infant baptism in every form at a later time when the Roman Catholic church accepted it. They would baptize no one but adult believers, although, at the time they practiced this, every Roman Catholic congregation in Africa, Asia, and Europe was dunking (or sprinkling) babies and even waving wet branches over the heads of armed troops.91

By the time of Diocletian there were Christian martyrs suffering for their beliefs in Spain (St. Vincentius, Eulalia) and Great Britain (St. Alban). Not content with his vicious decree of 303 A.D., Diocletian declared in 308 that those who sacrificed to the state gods had to eat of the offerings after they were offered or killed (see 1 Cor. 10:25-33), and, further, that all of the goods in the marketplace of every city had to be sprinkled with the “holy wine” from off the pagan altar; this meant that if a Christian ate anything he had to “drink” the sacramental “holy Eucharist” that was poured on the item. Conservative estimates would indicate that around ten thousand Christians were killed and twenty thou­sand tortured, imprisoned, or exiled during the reign of Diocletian. Although this debacle could in no wise match the slaughters under the Roman Catholic Popes Gregory XIII or Paul III (see chapter 14), Diocletian at least “had his hat in the ring.” According to Eusebius there were bonfires made of the holy scriptures, and undoubtedly these bonfires finished off thousands of copies that were only two or three writings removed from the original manuscripts. No one has yet started a bonfire to bum the Alexandrian, Jesuit text of Roman Catholicism: to the contrary, when a young Baptist preacher in 1979 (Gary Ginsky;

aneohe, Hawaii) applied to the IRS and the Treasury Department of e United States to gain tax-exempt status, he was denied it by the dis­

trict director of the Internal Revenue (W.A. Couvelt) until he explained to the Federal government why he didn’t accept the Jesuit Rheims Bible of 1582, which is the Alexandrian text of the Cult (see chapter 5). This correspondence (1979) marked an epoch in the history of the decline and fall of the United States Constitution, for it implied, without stating it (yet!), that churches in America could not be tax-exempt unless they subscribed to the official Jesuit Bible of the Roman Catholic Church.92

There are no Roman Catholic “bibles” from Origen’s manuscripts burned by ANY ruler in church history, unless the Saracens touched off a few of them when they burned down the library at Alexandria; Origen’s manuscripts are “safe” because the Holy Spirit never bears witness to them. We have no trouble in finding these “beautifully bound,” handsome, vellum codices from the fourth century (one in the Vatican and one in a wastebasket in a monastery) that are in “excellent condition”—not even after twenty years, let alone two hundred years. The Bibles found in anyone’s house in the sixteenth, seventeenth, eighteenth, nineteenth, or twentieth centuries that are in “excellent con­dition” are the Bibles that have been sitting on the shelf: any fool knows that.

The rest of this chapter on “The Fiery Furnace” will have to take care of itself. We have dealt here briefly with the tunnel of fire through which the early church passed. The next man to take the throne is “Constantine the Great,” of notorious memory, who succeeded in stopping the local churches where fire, thumbscrews, pincers, pulleys, racks, whips, nails, swords, and jails had not. Constantine almost succeeded in wiping Biblical Christianity off the face of the earth for twelve hundred years, and with the exception of a few radical “fringe” groups and minorities made up of internal “dissenters,” the face of the church as a whole was so drastically altered that it became accepted as the final authority in all matters of faith and practice instead of the Bible. The Bible was abandoned as the final authority, and in the future was only used as a textbook for references to be drawn out in times of disunity in order to keep the church hierarchy in a position of con­trol over the world system.

With the advent of Constantine (313 A.D.), the Biblical authority of the local church disappears from the major works of the major historians. The separation of church and state disappears altogether, and the purpose for which the church was created vanishes into thin air. Historians, from 313 A.D. on, write ANTI-CHURCH HISTORY. Instead of “food and raiment” (1 Tim. 6:8), the members find them selves in gold, silver, and diamonds; instead of being “the offscourmg

of all things” (1 Cor. 4:13), they find themselves worshipping in million dollar cathedrals; instead of being outside the camp “bearing his reproach,” (Heb. 13:13) they are found inside the camp consorting with the ones who whipped Him, nailed Him, and buried Him (Matt. 27:29-30, 35, 66). We call this the Pergamos period of church history (Rev. 2:12), since “Pergamos” indicates a marriage between the world and the church. In Biblical terms, it is a married woman who is “one” with her husband (Eph. 5:24) and then suddenly steps out on him and offers herself to the highest bidder (Ezek. 16:30-33; 23:30-38) for favors. In short, a WHORE (Rev. 17:1-9). The Greek expression for a man’s action under these circumstances is found in Matthew 19:7—he is to give his “spouse” an APOSTATE BIBLE. This is the reading of Mat­thew 19:7 in any Greek text (|3iPA.iov dnooTaoiou, biblion apostasiou).

So, as every Greek scholar in the Alexandrian Cult devotes his time (1880-1990) to getting rid of the God-breathed words of divine authority, the very Greek text being muddled with has already pronounced its judgment on him and his fellow revisers. They can produce nothing but an apostate Bible no matter what “eclectic” texts they reconstruct. An apostate “book” is the inheritance of a church that God cannot stand to live with. The apostate Bible given to Constantine (fifty copies) came from the pens of Pamphilus and Eusebius,94 and since Pamphilus suffered martyrdom, who would dare to question a translation or a version put out by such a “good, godly, dedicated man” whose “unquestioned loy­alty” to the “verbal, plenary, inspired originals” was confirmed by his faithfulness unto death! Hmmm?

The fiery trial ends with the Edict of Milan (313 A.D.), but not before thousands of Bible believing people had paid for their faith with their lives. The blood of the martyrs ran down the gutters of small villages; it soaked the fifty yard line of the Coliseum; it dripped out of windows and doorways and “cried for vengeance” (Heb. 11:4; Num. 35:33). The Lord answered, and in less than a hundred and fifty years after the church sold its blood-bought inheritance to a Roman sun wor­shipper, the Lord sent in the heathen (Jer. 52) to wipe out the Whore °n seven hills (Rev. 17).

Constantine (272-337) and the Council of Nicaea belong to another chapter, but before we can properly evaluate Constantine’s “conver- S1°n and his “religious convictions,” it will be necessary to retrace 0Ur stePs from 313 A.D. back to 100 A.D. again and see what went on down in Egypt during the ten imperial persecutions. Here in Egypt ? world), under the noses of imperial disfavor, there

veloped the most Satanic force in the history of Christendom, and

it survived Constantine, the Roman Empire, the Holy Roman Empire, the Napoleonic wars, the French and Spanish dominions, the British Empire, the Third Reich, and Soviet Russia without the least bit of trouble. As everything Satanic in the Christian realm, it professed “orthodoxy,” held to the highest moral standards (the Pharisees had the highest moral standards of any religious group in the first century), used and quoted “the Bible,” and professed to be engaged in “explain­ing the scriptures”95 and making them “easier to understand.” To do this, quite naturally, both “scientific methods of exegesis” and “textual criticism”96 of a philosophical nature (1 Tim. 6:20; Col. 2:8) had to be resorted to. Naturally also, those involved in such a movement had to be very intelligent (Ezek. 28:12) and highly educated (1 Cor. 1-2; Isa. 28-29; Luke 10:21). Further, none could enlist for such a work unless he took for granted at the start that his own native wisdom and intelligence (plus his superior education) made him capable of sitting in judgment on the authority of God—the Bible—which most of them professed to believe. This Cult arose from the Gnostic hotbed of Egypt (Alexandria) in the best tradition of the sun worshipping Egyptians, brain worshipping Greeks, and sign observing Jews.97 It arose to suggest to the body of Christ and the later church “Fathers” the most insidious and damnable doctrines the local assemblies ever had to combat: the

teachings that babies needed to be regenerated by sprinkling water, that this sprinkling took away “original sin,”98 and that a New Testament bishop was a priest who belonged to an organization destined to rule the political, economic, and social world before Jesus Christ came back. All four of these non-Biblical, non-Christian teachings originated in the school at Alexandria.

With these teachings came the schisms of the Donatists, the Novatians, the Paulicians, the Bogomiles, Henricians, Petrobrusians, Waldenses, Anabaptists, Albigenses, Vaudois, Paterines, and many Cathari." With these teachings came the development of a church membership of over 18,000,000 people who didn’t know where they were going when they died, and if ninety percent of them were count­ing on baptismal regeneration to get them to heaven—and according to Catholic teaching, one hundred percent of them would have had to count on it—meant that there were 17,000,000 “Christians” in Europe before 1000 A.D. who were just as lost and as dead in trespasses and sin as the worst heathen who ever offered a human sacrifice. By L there were over 18,000,000 people in Europe who (if they really believ what the “church” taught them) belonged to a church composed o unregenerate members: the Bible calls them “children of wrath an

“children of disobedience” (Eph. 2:1-4). The men responsible for this remarkable “church” were Plato (427-347 B.C.), an unsaved Greek philosopher); Philo (20 B.C.-50 A.D.), a Bible rejecting Jew; Pantaenus (145-200), a heathen philosopher; Clement of Alexandria (150-215); and Adamantius Origen (185-254). We call this elite fraternity “THE ALEXANDRIAN CULT,” and from them came the foundation beliefs for the Jehovah’s Witnesses,100 the Roman Catholics,101 the Church of Christ,102 Unitarians,103 and religious Liberals.104 In addition to this, their textual criticism and revisions of the Bible so influenced Eusebius, Jerome, and Augustine that those worthy gentlemen set up the text for the New American Standard Version (1960), the New International Version (1978), the Revised Standard Version (1952), and the “Living” Bible (1966) more than fifteen hundred years before those pious coun­terfeits were recommended by Bob Jones University, Liberty Baptist Seminary, Pensacola Christian College, Wheaton College, the National Council of Christian Churches (1900-1980), and the Treasury Depart­ment of the IRS (see above, note 92).

The Alexandrian Cult was involved in the first attempts at Christian education and the first attempt to set up a school of “higher learning” in order to make Bible believing Christianity “respectable. ”105 Its foun­dation was Genesis 3:1, its guiding principle was John 5:44, and its curriculum depended upon pretending that Colossians 2:8 and 1 Timothy 6:20 were not in the New Testament. It managed to maintain its integrity for fifteen centuries by playing “middle man” between two conflict­ing, “final” authorities. Since this is exactly how the Roman Catholic church has maintained its integrity for the same length of time,106 we may honestly suspect that the roots of the Catholic church are in North Africa (Cyprian from Carthage, Augustine from Hippo, and Origen from Alexandria) and that the principles of the Cult were adopted and practiced by the hierarchy for fifteen hundred years. With the modem emphasis on “back to the jungle” and “roots in Africa” (1976-1980), who could resist the temptation to prophesy that shortly the pope will have to be a BLACK"” man (see Mark of the Beast, 1959, 1970)?

CHAPTER FIVE

Africa’s Most Unusual University

“Professing themselves to be wise, they became fools”

Romans 1:22

At this point in our history we have observed three stages of the eternal, spiritual “cycle” rolling by us. First, there appeared the pagan setting of the first local New Testament church. In one of the most worldly setups the world has ever known (the Roman Empire), the New Testament Christians enter the stage (Acts 1-28) to collide with the “god of this world” (2 Cor. 4:4). The great, sprawling Roman Empire sported rulers who murdered their mothers, brother, sisters, nephews, and uncles,1 sacrificed to Satan under such names as Jupiter, Zeus, and Apollos, and prayed to the universal Mother Whore (Rev. 17; Zech. 5:7, 8) under such names as Venus, Diana, Astarte, Artemis, etc. The Greek world which preceded this (500-149 B.C.) was about the same moral caliber and about the same spiritual tone.

As historians approach the birth of Christ in their writings (Williston Walker, F.F. Bruce, Cairns, Durant, Baker, Latourette, Wegener, and many others), they summon all the powers of positive thinking of which they are capable (see chapter 4, note 15), trying to convince someone that they are approaching a “mountain peak of truth” gradually. This is done because the historian has hindsight and knows what happened following the Greek age: a new dispensation was ushered in. However, these attempts to smooth over the ghastly apostasy between Xerxes and Caesar is only “more of the same,” if one has read Charles Darwin ®nd the philosophy of the Fabian Society (England, nineteenth century).

vain the historians try to prepare their readers for the coming of the essiah by pointing out everything they can get their hands on of a Po-ntive nature to prove that in the dispensation preceding John the Bap- „ *** things work together for good” to the unsaved masses in

n s world system. Gradual Divine intervention into an unholy,

ungodly cauldron filled with mass ignorance, superstition, and cruelty is not the “format” for a good “church history” because the church’s Book—supposedly the Book by which she lives and has her being— clearly states on at least seven occasions (Gen. 3; 6; 11; Exod. 15; Judg. 24; Jer. 52; Matt. 24) that every period in history in the story of mankind ends in APOSTASY. There are no gradual “preparations,” accidently or on purpose, coming off for any subsequent dispensations that are blessed of God, or are God-directed; they are God-permitted (see Acts 20:23 and comments in that commentary).

The “preparation” for the garden of Eden was not the “providen­tial” work of the sons of God in the vicinity, nor the creation of the animals: it was the watery destruction of a group of Satanically led and Satanically inspired “gods” (Ps. 82; Job 38; 2 Peter 3:3-8; and Gen. 1:2-3). The “preparation” after the Fall was not due to “the infinite wisdom of God” in His goodness directing man “to prepare for a second deluge” (Gen. 6-7): it was due to an earthly people who loved this life and had no use for the next one, since they and their ancestors were city dwellers (Gen. 4:16-17), murderers (Gen. 4:23), and polygamists (Gen. 4:23) who used the fine arts for sensual purposes (Job 21:12-15: see Gen. 4:20-22 and comments in that commentary). The “high point” of civilization “preparing the way” for Abram (Gen. 11) was the tower of Babel and God’s judgment on the nations. The high point of civili­zation “preparing” the way for the Second Coming of the King of Kings and Lord of Lords has nothing to do with the work of the HEW, UNESCO, the CFR, or the United Nations (Zeph. 3:8), for they are to be gathered into bundles (Matt. 13:40) and BURNED (Matt. 13; Mai. 4:1-3).

With these demonstrable truths set forth in the clearest language, in the Book, the secular historians (Will Durant, H.G. Wells, et al.) pretend that they are of such little consequence they do not have to be consulted as a guideline when writing history. The church historians suddenly decide that the “preparation” for the first coming of the Mes­siah was so God-directed it was little less than perfect. The horrendous lie put forth in this interpretation is not manifest to a student until he suddenly realizes its implications: it implies that the preparation for the Second Advent will be nothing short of perfect. The preparation for the Second Advent is the worldwide dominion of Satan, incarnate in the flesh, as head of the UN, in a Roman capacity (Rev. 13-17). „

The truth (instead of historical novels) is that the “preparation for the first coming of the Messiah was a unified kingdom (Rome) that God determined to destroy as far back as 890 B.C. (Dan. 2), f°ur

hundred years of silence from God, without a single piece of inspired literature given to mankind by Him (Mai. 4); four hundred years of Greek philosophers rewriting Solomon, Proverbs, and Ecclesiastes from the standpoint of amoral evolutionists and pretending that they had created a body of wisdom which was actually in print more than five hundred years before any of them were born (see preface to The Bible Believer’s Commentary on Proverbs).

Jesus Christ appears in the midst of a captive nation occupied by a foreign military power, and He appears in the midst of a backslidden people torn apart by sectarian and religious strife (Herodians, Sadducees, Pharisees, Ebionites, Essenes, Zealots, etc.) under the leadership of blind guides (Matt. 23:16) who have no more “final” authority to lead anyone by (Mark 7:6-13) than the faculty members at Tennessee Temple, Harvard, Pensacola Christian College, Yale, Liberty Baptist College, or Columbia. Dual authorities that conflict (Mark 7:8) leave the one

who recommends them as the final authority.2 Any fool can figure such a proposition out without taxing his mentality .

When Jesus Christ appears, He comes into a degenerate nation led

by spiritual apostates under bondage to a pagan church state system.3 The only good thing we can say about such a “preparation” is that one spoken language (Greek) made communications a little easier and the

vast Roman system of outposts, roads, and trading routes made trans­portation a little easier. Improvements in communications and

transportation are the marks of all material and humanistic progress and have little or no effect on improving the moral character of man in the aggregate or of any individual man. In the nineteenth century,

unsaved scientists, scholars, teachers, and preachers were so impressed by these material improvements,4 in the material world system (2 Cor. 4:4), they thought that either “the kingdom was a’coming” (see Vol. II: Talmage, Beecher, Tennyson, Emerson, and the Deists) or else that

man had evolved to the place of a god and henceforth could control his own destiny, without God (see Vol. II: Haeckel, Huxley, Marx, Einstein, Heidegger, Sartre, etc.). Aside from the standard materialis­tic improvements—transportation (Telstar, Star Wars, rocket to the

moon, DC-lO’s, etc.) and communications (telegraph, telephone, telewoman, television, radio, etc.) which have marked the departure of man from God in every age (Deut. 32:8, 17; Gen. 11:1-8; Isa. 5:8, )—the only “preparation” for the first advent was a spiritual and m°ral blackout that would stand your hair on end. It is true that one oan emphasize cute, little “high points” in the period if one searches Or t*lem whh a microscope, and little neat and nifty details may be

gleaned by the positive thinkers5 in an effort to convince the student that a lie is the truth;6 however, the treatment afforded to the Messiah (Isa. 53) and His forerunner (Mark 6:27) and His church (Acts 12) and His disciples (Acts 16; 27) pretty well states what went on in the four hundred years of “preparation” preceding His Advent; the bare facts of the New Testament would identify the positive thinkers as LUNA­TICS. It was “progress” (400-4 B.C.) in the sense of a United Nations Assembly (1945-1989) and its “war prevention program” .forty-eight wars in less than fifty years.7

This brings us to our starting point: New Testament Christianity begins in a pagan system during a nighttime of spirituality and Biblical truth. Our cycle (Paganism, Evangelism, Teaching, Culture, Apostasy, Paganism: see the preface) is in operation. The Evangelism obviously takes place in the Acts period, and this is so apparent (Acts 2; 3; 7; 8; 9) that it needs no comment (Acts 13; 14; 15; 16; 17). The “Teach­ing” is not only mentioned in the original apostolic commission (Matt. 28:19-20), but it shows up in evidence in Acts 13:1-3 at Antioch (not Alexandria) and again in Acts 18:11 at Corinth (not Rome). The only “eloquent orator” from Alexandria is handicapped by his partial knowl­edge of the truth (Acts 18:25) and a Christian man and his wife (Aquila and Priscilla) have to bring him “up to date” (Acts 18:26). Following the preaching and teaching ministry of Christians (33 A.D. to 200 A.D.), in the midst of the most depressing and discouraging circumstances (see chapter 3), the inevitable shows up: CULTURE. From about 200 or 222 (the reign of Alexander Severus) to about 250 (the reign of Trajan), the local assemblies enjoyed comparative ease—“ease” for a Chris­tian (Amos 6:1) means “look out” (2 Sam. 11:1). At this time, Origen’s school in Alexandria, Egypt, gets into full swing (at this time Origen would have been about 27-30 years old). No one could misread Origen’s approach to the Bible. He was the first “Bible believer” in a long string to come who believed Christianity would (by continual growth andpro- gressive evolution) come to rule the world through “priests."8 This heresy is called Post-millennialism and comes from pretending that the Harlot church of Matthew 13:33 and Revelation 17 is the body of Christ.9 In view of this doctrinal “conviction,” Origen’s approach was that Chris­tianity had to be made respectable so that the unsaved rulers of the world system would court it as a superior religion (and eventually yoke up with it to help it rule the world). Origen’s basic idea was to compro­mise with Satan (Luke 4:6) in order to gain ground. “Having men s

• persons in admiration because of advantage” (Jude 16), Origen decided that “pastor” was a poor term for an ordained elder (1 T,rn- I

B B B B B !

5:17): he really should be called a “PRIEST.”10 This matched Rome’s system perfectly (pagan or papal) before and after the Edict of Milan (313 A.D.). Adamantius Origen also decided that since Genesis 1-3 was not literal history, that it must be “Urgeschichte”" (supra-history), and since no one could believe that Luke 4:5 took place literally, it was perfectly all right to remove half of Luke 4:4 from the Received Greek text.122 This he did (see the ASV, NASV, RSV, NRSV, IV, NIV, etc.). Origen also had some very peculiar ideas about infant sprinkling which we will talk about at a later time. But the most outstanding things about Origen’s “fundamentalism” were his beliefs in transmigration of souls (while believing in the Virgin Birth), no literal hell (while believing in the Crucifixion), no physical resurrection (while believing in Christ’s Resurrection), the universal salvation of all men after a time in purgatory13 (while believing in “inspired originals”), and the fact that if one receives the mystical “KISS OF PEACE,”14 denies himself fleshy pleasures, and “holds the end of his life,” he will earn eternal life by good WORKS.15 Of course, Origen believed that God wrote the Bible, that Christ was the virgin-born Son of God, that He died on the cross, and that He was buried and rose again and some day will come in judgment.

All Fundamentalists believe that.

What Origen didn’t believe was what God said in His BOOK.15 Now, Adamantius Origen was not the first “godly man” to correct God Almighty. Balaam—a Spirit-filled, truth-telling, Christ-magnifying prophet (Num. 23; 24)—did it by “updating” the “conflate text” (Num. 22:12-13); that is, he threw out two-thirds of the original manuscripts. Jehudi did Balaam up “brown” (Jer. 36). Jehudi took away all of the original. If Jehudi had been able to sit down with Westcott and Hort

(1881-1884) or the faculty at Bob Jones University (1945-1980), he would have replaced the Authorized Version with his own “bible”—

an Alexandrian Bible from Adamantius Origen.17

Unbelief in the words of God is so universal, so standard, so habit­ual, and so intense in any age that it is found documented throughout the written word of God from cover to cover. The first attack made

on the words of God were made in Genesis 3:1; so this verse may be used as a starting point for the founding of what might be called the fa Hath God Said? Society” or "The Scholars Union. ” Some of members of this union do not believe a blood atonement is better n works (Gen. 4); many of them didn’t believe a flood was coming en they had been told that it was (2 Peter 3; Gen. 6); some of them don t believe the Lord is coming “with ten thousands of his saints”

(Jude 14). Many of them didn’t believe that lightning would get their cattle (Exod. 9:20-21); they didn’t believe God’s laws were to be taken seriously (Lev. 24:11); they didn’t believe the Lord could provide food when people were starving (2 Kings 7:1-2); they don’t believe God can feed anyone in the wilderness (Ps. 78:19); they don’t believe God will supply all their need through His riches in glory by Christ Jesus (Phil. 4:19); they don’t believe Israel is going to be restored (Rom. 11:25-27); they don’t believe a man will go to Hell if he lives a good life (Matt. 7:20-24); they don’t believe Jesus Christ will sit down on a literal throne of David at Jerusalem (Matt. 25:31); they don’t believe God can pre­serve a Book He wrote Himself (Ps. 12:6-7); they don’t believe that the Roman Catholic church is the bride of Satan (Rev. 17:1-6; Judg. 18:19-28; 1 Kings 18:22-28; Judg. 2:13; Jer. 44:17, 19; Matt. 23:9; John 17:11; 1 Tim. 2:5; Heb. 10:8-12; and Matt. 13:33). They believe what they want to believe. If they don’t like the peeling, they take it off the orange, eat the inside, and spit out the seeds and then insist that oranges don’t have seeds or skins: they do. These smart alecks who would accuse a Bible believer of “Bibliolatry”’ in a minute have so many things they do NOT believe that to call them “believers”—on the basis of a profession to have believed in Romans 10:9-10—is pitiful. They believe five to twenty things taken out of a Book they don’t like and don’t believe, and which they would not hesitate at any time to correct (and in every place) where they objected to it.18

The “Yea Hath God Said? Society’’ is as old as mankind.

It is as old as sin, death, and hell.

When Adamantius Origen appears on the scene nearly 4,184 years after his father (John 8:40-44) appeared (Gen. 3:1), he leads the church into the fourth stage of its historical cycle: CULTURE. “Culture” means simply ‘the act of developing the intellectual and moral faculties, espe­cially by EDUCATION” (Webster’s Dictionary). Beyond that, it means “enlightenment and excellence of taste acquired by intellectual training or “acquaintance with the broader aspects of SCIENCE” (1 Tim. 6:20). The etymology of the word has other sidelights which are much more revealing; for example, a “culture” in biology is “growing something in a prepared medium. ” However, when dealing with the Christian edu­cation going on at Africa’s Most Unusual University, we can find in the term “Culture” a much more basic and primitive root. You see, the root of the word “CULTURE” is “CULT.” Culture produces CULTS. The Guyana cult of Jim Jones (1978) believed in Marxist PHI­LOSOPHY (Col. 2:8), race-mixing, equal rights, gay liberation, and “social justice.” No one in Jim Jones’ cult took the Bible serious y

where it spoke against anything they wanted to believe: they wanted to believe that oranges and bananas didn’t have skins; they do.

So, he we must examine the greatest leavening factor in the his­tory of the Christian church, remembering, of course, that those who deposited this leaven into the body of “whole meal” (Matt. 13) had to cover their tracks (see Rom. 1:18, 21, 25 in the X5Kand New ASV)

by piously pretending that the “leaven” was not false doctrine (Gal. 5:9,; Matt. 16:12) but the good news of salvation, by the Grace of God (Gal. 1:8-10; 1 Cor. 15:1-5). No operation carried out in the history of the Christian church, including the massacre on St. Bartholomew’s Day or the bloody murders of Ante Pavelic,” could do more damage. It was Darwin, fifteen hundred years ahead of his time: Darwin with a Bible in one hand and a diploma in the other. It is the teaching that regardless of one’s theology where it deals with depravity (Matt. 7:11; Gal. 1:4; Rom. 3:10-18; Gen. 6:5), one has the right to assume that

the “truth” (and especially the truth of God) is “marching on” (The Battle Hymn of the Republic),20 after being told that “TRUTH is fallen in the street” (Isa. 59:14) and that the characteristic of Origen’s time will be a “synagogue of Satan” (Rev. 2:9) who claim to be “Jews” (Rom. 2:29), followed by religious fornication and sacrifice to idols (Rev. 2:14). With the New Testament on the table in front of him (Rom. 16:18; 1 Tim. 4:1-6), Origen simply assumes the positive view that the Christians would conquer the world: without a shred of evidence for thinking that. In Origen’s mental fog he probably thought that his “radiant testimony,” “vast learning,” “brilliant intellect,” and “unquestioned loyalty to the word of God”21 would influence those in high places: to cite a particular case, Julia Mammaea, the mother of the Roman emperor Alexander Severus. That is, for the sake of the ministry or “to win lost souls” (that is the modern way of stating Origen’s compromise), Origen simply declared that the word of God is not to be taken literally on certain points, and that he was smart enough to determine where those points were.22 Origen (as Jerome and Augustine) knew perfectly well how “the truth” was to fare at the end °f his dispensation (1 Tim. 4:1-6; 2 Tim. 3:1-6) because the Book he as teaching, reading, revising, preaching, and writing about told him. 'lere isn’t any Christian reading this page who doesn’t know how his own age ends. Origen just taught that God Almighty didn’t know what .e as doing when He inspired those words.23 Whether Origen or . u8Ustine justified themselves by saying that they were not “in the orig- F. is the modem method) or that they were not to be taken “lit- F" y (all teachers at the school of Alexandria were “allegorizers”24),

the fact remains that Origen—“the greatest scholar of his time,” “the greatest Christian philosopher the world ever knew,” a genius of “eru­dite talent” and vivid imagination “whose vast labors” in the field of exegesis entitle him to the name of the “father of textual critic­ism”25—accepted Old and New Testament Apocrypha as inspired (Barnabas, Judith, Tobit, etc.26), taught baptismal regeneration, and taught that the whole pagan world would be converted to Christ since Jesus Christ was reigning over the world now through His “priests.”

The response of the modern, apostate Fundamentalist to all of this barrage of God-dishonoring claptrap is, “Well, back in those days they didn’t have the light we have now, and in those dark days of ignorance and superstition [see the evolutionary complex already in operation!] we can be thankful that he was as orthodox as he was; let charity con­trol our judgments and let us not slander the sacred memory of those who did their best by the light they had,” etc. This is the position of the modern religious Liberal (1980) exactly. This is the position taken now (1980) by Christian educators when called to face the monstrous perversions of the word of God carried out by Lachmann, Tregelles, Tischendorf, Nestle, Alford, Metzger, Hort, Robertson, Green, Schaff, Olson, Weniger, the Lockman Foundation, Anderson, Warfield, Yaeger, and Afman. Origen was eighteen centuries closer to the original auto­graphs than any man reading this page, and he himself quotes the New Testament more than 17,900 times: what “light” do you have that he didn’t have? Origen had access to a battery of stenographers and short­hand experts which you do not;27 he had martyrs dying before him and in front of him, yearly, which you do not; Origen knew that the “fathers” who preceded him (Irenaeus, Barnabas, Hermas, Ignatius, Polycarp, and Justin Martyr) were all Pre-millennial,28 and he knew that infant baptism was found nowhere in the New Testament from cover to cover because he spent his lifetime correcting the New Testament and proba­bly the Old Testament as well.29 What light do any of you have that he didn't have when it comes to SOUND DOCTRINE? None: if you would cover up the sins of Origen, you would cover up your own.

Ignorance is no excuse for making a liar out of God (Rom. 3:4).

Now, it would be unjust and improper to heap all of this calumny on one man. Surely Origen wasn’t an “original thinker” (Eccl. 1:10) any more than any Bible-rejecting relativist (see Vol. II: Einstein, Mach, Jung, Marx, Engels, Freud, et al.). If we are to be factual and objec­tive in our analysis of Africa’s Most Unusual University, we will have to do some rooting and grubbing into the past. This is all the more necessary in view of the fact that when Clement of Alexandria (150-215)

heads up the university, it is passed off automatically as a “CHRIS­TIAN college,” and yet neither Schaff, Hefele, LaGarde, Latourette, Mosheim, Migne, Dollinger, Bettenson, Newman, Fisher, Froom, nor Eusebius can tell us when it became a Christian institution; it was any­thing but a Christian institution when Philo and Pantaenus (145-200) were fooling with it.30

In 1520 a map was drawn by someone; it is called the “Peri Reis” map. It is remarkable in that it seems to be an aerial view, and it shows topographical features on the continent of Antarctica which were not known in 1950. But the most startling thing about the Peri Reis map is the fact that when cartographers projected it onto a grid (using the reference points on the map), it appeared to be identical with a USAF “map of the world” on an equidistant projection based on Cairo, Egypt.31 Cairo, in the land of the Sphinx (see Mark of the Beast, 1959, 1970) is not eighty miles from Alexandria.

The history of this sinkhole of intellectual depravity is well known. Like New York, London, Rome, Chicago, Los Angeles, and other Cainite centers (Gen. 4:16-17), it was a “great city” in the ancient world. Founded by an epileptic demoniac, Alexander the Great (332 B.C.), it had the most famous library in the empire. It was at this spot that Ptolemy Philadelphus was supposed to have sent for seventy-two Jews (and only got seventy of them) to translate the Hebrew Old Testament into Greek. Preserving this fairy tale legend through twenty centuries of church history, the Alexandrian Cult (who manufactured the legend to start with32) humbly took the credit for inspiring BOTH Testaments. Alexandrian theology taught that the “Septuagint” was verbally inspired.33 But the “sacred” associations with Alexandria do not end here; they could not, for, after all, the city is in “the land of HAM” (Ps. 105:27; 106:22) and heir to a history (Gen. 50:26 and comments in that commentary) that places it next to Rome as the creator and sustainer of lies (Rev. 22:15). God would not let the bones of Joseph remain in this land (Exod. 13:19); Jacob would not allow himself to be buried there (Gen. 49:29); the Jews were warned over and over not to go there (Jer. 42; 43); and God would not even tolerate HORSES brought up from there (Deut. 17:16); God not only called the nation °f Israel out of the land of Ham (Exod. 15), but His own Son as well (Matt. 2:15).

. Surely such Biblical associations are enough to warn the most reck- . s Christian that Alexandria is not to be approached “neutrally” just ■ scholars and historians will think that you are tolerant or intelligent £ a f*ne chap.” You are not intelligent just because you refuse to

accept the Bible’s judgment on a matter. Intelligence got the Greek schol­ars nowhere (1 Cor. 1:23; 3:19), and tolerance finished off a whole navy (1 Kings 22:48) and cost a king his life (1 Kings 20:42). Intoler­ance was the redeeming grace of the Ephesian New Testament local assembly (Rev. 2:2); the Lord approved of them because they couldn’t tolerate certain “Christians.”

Philo (20 B.C.- 50 A.D.) was supposedly the Rabbi of the “Great Synagogue” in Alexandria.34 As a renegade Jew, under the condem­nation of God Almighty (Jer. 42; 43; and Deut. 28:68), he did not believe the Old Testament, and he did not attend the mandatory feasts (Deut. 16:16) or sacrifices (Lev. 17). He followed Plato (427-347 B.C.) in his thinking and his writings,35 and he allegorized everything in the Bible he didn’t like. If we are harsh in our judgments of him, then we must remember that we are examining the Alexandrian Cult in the advanced light of the Book that they perverted: the Holy Bible. By God’s stand­ards (1 Cor. 1; 2; Isa. 28; 29; Prov. 30:6; and Luke 10:21), Philo was a God-defying fool (Luke 24:25). But “fools rush in where angels fear to tread,” so no one should be surprised to find more than one fool in “cahoots” with Philo.

The Satanic philosophical system (Col. 2:8) which later gave the “church fathers” so much trouble (100-300 A.D.) was called “Gnos­ticism,” which simply means “smart aleck.” A “Gnostic” was a “knower,” in distinction from an “agnostic,” who would be a non­knower (Latin: ignoramus). Since this was Eve’s original problem (Gen. 3:1-3), and since every mystery religion in Rome, Greece, Babylon, and Syria had a place for a “super-elect,”36 and since these super-elect were always characterized by advanced knowledge and higher light of a “higher nature than you poor, common peons,” etc.,37 it was inevitable that the Gnostic system, following Platonic guidelines, should eventu­ate into “higher education”: in this case, higher “Christian” education.3’

Gnosticism, according to Schaff,39 was the grandest and most comprehensive form of “speculative religious syncretisrti” known to history: it was a chemical mixture of Oriental mysticism, Greek phi­losophy, Alexandrian and Philonic Judaism, and Christianity combined. That is, if it had a book to go by, it would have to have adopted a New ASV which caters to mysticism (Matt. 12:6), scholarship (Rom. 1:18, 21, 25), infidelity (Luke 2:33), modernism (Luke 23:42), salvation by works (Gal. 5:4), salvation by grace (Eph. 2:8), orthodox Christianity (John 3:16), and Catholic Christianity (Col. 1:14), plus asceticism (Co . 2:23). (All references are to be read as found in the New ASV or the old ASK or the NIV, exactly as they are recommended in 1980 by Chris

Origen (184-254) lays down his formal theory of Bible interpreta­tion according to Philo.40 There is no evidence that that Philo was a saved man in an Old Testament sense (David, Hezekiah, Jeremiah, et al.) or a New Testament sense (John, Peter, Paul, et al.). Origen’s teacher and instructor, Clement of Alexandria (150-215), even accepted the writings of Plato as inspired because they “contained the truth.” Any reader of Plato’s Republic will be in a good position to say how “inspired” the rascal was after comparing Plato’s work with the books of Proverbs and Isaiah, both of which were written more than three hundred years before Plato was born.

The all-star team for Alexandria, chronologically speaking, would look like this: Plato (427-347 B.C.), Philo (20 B.C.- 50 A.D.), Pan- taenus (145-200 A.D.), Clement (150-215 A.D.), and finally Origen (184-254 A.D.). These are the founding fathers of the Alexandrian Cult. They are all educators and teachers; they are all “scientific” and “phil­osophic,”41 and any one of them would correct the word of God, in the originals or otherwise, as quickly as they would take a breath of air. If anyone doubts that their progeny is not still active and that their descendants are not “alive and well,” let him read Acts 17:22 in the NIV or NASV, where the reading of Clement of Alexandria (57 A.D.) stands in 1960 and 1978 (see Acts 17:22 and comments in that com­mentary), or let him read John 1:18 in the New ASV, where the vulgar and blasphemous manuscripts from Origen have condoned two “Gods,” one “declaring” the other. The Jehovah’s Witnesses do not begin with Pastor Russell or Judge Rutherford (see Vol. II): they are well on their way a hundred years before the Council of Nicaea (325 A.D.).

The Alexandrian Cult, founded and sustained by Gnostic Greek philosophers, comes to invade every branch of science, philosophy, reli­gion, and education in the western world for twenty centuries, and its members range from out-and-out atheists and Communists (see Vol. II: Lenin, Celsus, Marx, Porphyry, Engels, Ingersoll, Nietzsche, et al.) to Fascists and Catholics (Hitler, Mussolini, Charlemagne, Bloody Mary, Castro, Himmler, the Kennedy family, Califano of the HEW, Wallen- stein, Metternich, et al.) on through dead orthodox theologians (Barth, runner, Berkhof, Tillich, Miller, Machen, Warfield, Lightfoot, et al.) Neo-Evangelicals and apostate Fundamentalists (Sumner, Ockenga, oberts, Swaggert, Robertson, Afman, Custer, Waite, Martin, Trench, mcent, Wuest, Ramm, et al.). The Creed of the Cult identifies its members:

1 • There is no final written authority on this earth: there may have but it got lost.

2. There are multiple “final authorities” with preference and opin­ion determining which is right, under different circumstances,42 depend­ing on what you think, how you feel, and what you intend to prove.

3. The more education a man has, the better equipped he is to usurp the place of final authority because he has access to more information (i.e., more tricks to get rid of the final authority).

This is the real meaning of the word “CULTURE.” It is the fourth stage in every cycle of the history of the church, and it signals APOS­TASY every time it appears. Its first appearance in church history is between 220 and 250 A.D. It first appears in Alexandria, Egypt, coming to surface from roots that extend back to Genesis 3:1 through Pharaoh, Balaam, Saul, Solomon, Ahab, Zedekiah, Geshem the Arabian, Noadiah the prophetess, Plato, Jezebel, Socrates, Demas, Aristotle, Diotrephes, Herod, Pilate, Felix, and a renegade, apostate, Bible-denying “Jew”— Philo of Alexandria, the “Rabbi” of the “Great Synagogue.”

Briefly, let us examine the seed and roots of this mighty tree (Dan. 4), which became a lodging place (Matt. 13:32) for demons and is des­tined to be cut down (Ezek. 31) by God Himself.

Plato was an unsaved Greek philosopher (Col. 2:8) who thought that wisdom was the highest good (1 Cor. 1-3). He glamorized mind and reason and held that the “social mind”43 was the ideal mind. Since Plato hated democracy in any form, he conceived of a Fascist Utopia where evolution was the guarantee of progress. He taught that the state should take children away from the parents (as they have done in Soviet Russia for fifty years) and give them twenty years of “reeducation” (as the Communists did it in Vietnam and Cambodia). This consisted of a “values clarification program”44 where the state decided what was valuable and what wasn’t (exactly as it has been done in Soviet Russia for fifty years). Selective breeding (Adolph Hitler) and “guardian pools” for raising children (IRS and HEW in America) were to be installed. Subsequently, all the ills of cities and even the human race would be solved not by believing in God, or on God, or even believing God (that is Cain’s trouble: he believed in God, but he didn’t believe God), but by setting up men like himself (philosophers, 1 Cor. 1-3) as the rulers. All people would be forced by a police state to attend a church state temple under “priests” (exactly as the Roman Caesars tried to set it up). Capital punishment would be dealt out to people meeting in homes for “secret devotions” (as it has been done in Russia on numerous occa sions), and since he didn’t believe in heaven, hell, judgment, or the resurrection, Plato believed that land animals evolved from men an that God was a neuter “force.”45 Of these depraved, pseudo-scienti ic.

and Socialist doctrines, the great Deist, Emerson (1803-1882), said, “Bum the libraries, for their value is in THIS book!’’ When he said

“this book,” Emerson was not referring to the Bible or any book in the Bible: he was referring to Plato’s Republic. A more rabid and fanat­ical statement cannot be found in the entire history of the Third Reich (1933-1945) by any Nazi, including every speech that Hitler made and every release that Goebbels printed.

Now, Plato is the man whose philosophy was the guiding light at the first “Christian” school. One can see at a glance that the philo­sophical elite at such a school would be the faculty members (see note 36). The students would be “wards of the state” who were there for “reeducation,” and any “Christian” with less than ten years’ educa­tion would fall into the classification of a commercial fisherman (see Acts 4:13 and comments in that commentary). Twenty years was the requirement set down by Plato: that is, six years of grammar school, three years of junior high, three years of high school, four years of college, and then four years of postgraduate work: these are the years in America (1950-1960) required for earning the Ph.D. degree—twenty years. No, the Alexandrian Cult did not die out with Origen, nor did it cease to operate simply because Diocletian burned up some Bibles.

Pantaenus (145-200) left no writings behind. He was the leading light of the school at Alexandria until 190 A.D., but the only informa­tion we have on him is from a man who thought that Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle wrote inspired literature.46 However, Clement, who followed him, always speaks of Pantaenus in terms of the very highest respect.47 He quite frankly states that Pantaenus was NOT a Bible believing Christian: he was a deep “gnostic” who had a “perfect insight into Christianity.”4* Having given us this for an anchor of trust and confidence, we are to believe that Pantaenus, the founder of the catechetical school at Alexandria—CATechetical—was a genuine Chris­tian. You are to further assume that from his time on the University °f Alexandria had to be a “Christian” institution: that anyone would assume this is beyond belief. There isn’t one historical document pro­duced by one historian in the history of the church that would indicate ~Jat Pantaenus knew any more about Jesus Christ than Herod or Pilate, ■f as much.

According to the school ’ s next president (Clement: 150-215 A. D.), was God who gave the Greeks their philosophy (see Plato’s Repub- ,c’ above). Clement considered star worship (Acts 7:42) to be God’s *ay of “helping people to a purer religion.”49 The fact that the New I cstament (Acts 7:42) flatly contradicted this blatant lying meant noth­

ing to Clement: where the Bible crosses the opinions of Christian edu­cators in the Cult, they are not the least concerned about what it says: they will simply alter the words to “teach” what they themselves have predetermined the scriptures “mean.”50

Clement of Alexandria was clear on the “gift of God is eternal life” (Rom. 6:23). In opposition to the Holy Spirit, he stated that a sinner gets to heaven by overcoming sensuality51 (see Col. 2:20-23 and comments in that commentary). Clement was also very clear on salva­tion: according to him there was no salvation outside of the church52 (and so say all orthodox Catholic popes). There is nothing in Clement’s writings, philosophy, teaching, or curriculum that shows he had any knowledge or acquaintance with the Holy Spirit at all. He cannot even quote a single passage where the Holy Spirit is mentioned except the one found in the King James Bible (1 John 5:7), which he refers to more than two hundred years before the corrupt Greek uncials (Vaticanus and Sinaiticus) removed it, fashioning their manuscripts after the third century manuscripts which Origen corrupted.53 Even then, Clement is only mentioning the Holy Spirit as a member of the Trinity. Having quoted the New Testament more than 2,400 times, Clement knows

nothing about the work of the Holy Spirit in creation (Gen. 1:2-3), regen­eration (John 1:13), sealing (Eph. 4:30), preserving (John 14:16), comforting (John 14:26), transforming (2 Cor. 3), or teaching (John 16:13). The reader may again attribute this to Clement’s ignorance, but when any educator quotes the Bible 2,400 times while he is engaged in proving that he is smart enough to correct God Almighty (see above) on such basic matters as salvation, he no longer can “abide in his stall. ”54 By virtue of his presumption and ambition (1 Cor. 8:1) he has placed himself in a garage with the “knowers” (gnostics), not the “unknowers” (agnostics). Why any Christian should blanch at judging a Bible perverter severely, after that perverter has assumed he is smart enough to per­vert the Bible, is a great mystery.

Origen (184-254) was very clear about the matter of sin: you have to have water sprinkled on you to wash away inherited sins55 (and so say all Catholic bishops and popes), and further, “we become united to Christ” not by 1 Corinthians 12:13, and not by the new birth, but by a “MYSTICAL KISS.”56 Bible students “who take their Bible studies seriously ’ ’ (to quote the Madison Avenue gimmick used in the twenti eth century to sell religious trash) know that a KISS (2 Sam. 15:5) can be a dangerous thing (Matt. 26:48), especially when it is “mystica (Hos. 13:2) instead of direct (Ps. 2:12). According to Origen s e* Testament—he quotes it more than 17,000 times—the Christian shou

study until he has a perfect knowledge of the “mysteries” (see any pagan religion), and then he can “attain a perfect likeness to God” before he dies and thus regain Adam’s image. According to Origen’s Old Tes­tament, the sun was not made on the fourth day (Gen. 1:15) because “no intelligent person” would believe that.57 This explains why both Scofield Reference Bibles (twentieth century) explained the verse away, exactly as Origen would have done it: the Alexandrian Cult did not die out in 300 A.D. It didn’t even get sick.

Adam and Eve ate nothing because it would be “childish” to believe that the account given in Genesis 3 was literal.58 So Westcott and Hort (1884) handled Genesis 1-3 exactly as Origen handled it. The Alexandrian Cult didn’t die out in 300 A.D. It didn’t even get feeble. The “Plan of Salvation” which Origen preached would appeal to any unsaved Roman emperor: “Let us then grasp eternal life and grasp it with all our force. God DOES NOT GIVE IT TO US: He offers it to us. It is in our power to stretch forth our hand by GOOD ACTS, grab hold of life, and place it within our soul.”59 Which, if Origen meant what he said, means that he has been burning in hell now for over sev­enteen centuries: that is, if the Bible is right instead of YOU (Matt. 23; Matt. 13; Eph. 2:1-4; John 3:36; John 3:16; Rom. 6:23; and Rom. 10:9-10). We shall assume that Origen was speaking in levity, or at the time he wrote these words he was getting “nervous in the service” while dealing with Servetus’ mother (chapter 4, note 63), who believed exactly the same thing. All unsaved Roman emperors believed in sal­vation by works, and, like Origen, none of them believed in a physical, bodily resurrection.

Origen’s method of handling the “hillbillies” of his day, who believed Luke 4:5 literally, was to tell them that only a “careless reader” would believe it while an “observant reader”60 could detect innumer­able places in the Bible like it (the building of the temple, etc.) where you could believe what you wanted to believe and discard the rest: that •s, after peeling the apple and spitting out the seeds you could announce that apples don’t have seeds and skins: they do. To this day (1980), this is the standard method used in advertising corrupt Bibles by Chris- tianity Today, The Sword of the Lord, Faith Magazine (BJU), Moody onthly, etc. You tell the reader that if he is “serious” or “conscien- tous, this “new” Bible is for him. “Observant” scholars prefer anything over a King James Bible, although the presidents of schools 1 e to be “associated” or “identified” with the King James Bible in er to con the suckers into coming to their school.61 Origen, while ” °wbeating the “careless” and “insincere” students of the word, used

the term “Catholic” in reference to 1 Peter just like he thought it was a Biblical expression.62

This, then, is a sample of the Christian culture propagated by the first “Christian” university. The reader may judge for himself how “Biblical” the curriculum must have been. But matters do not end here; if all Origen and his playmates had done was simply allegorize Genesis 1-3, lie about salvation, ridicule Bible believers, and correct the Bible in 30,000 places (see Vaticanus and Sinaiticus from the fifth column of Origen’s Hexapla),63 “reason would that we could bear with him” and his friends, as with any Bible-rejecting sinner. However, the school at Alexandria found itself in such a theological position with its pupils— many of them were very young—that it finally resorted to an Alexandrian expedient (from Plato) that marks the beginning of the end for Biblical Christianity in the west. You see, Plato constantly speculated on what he called “the prehistoric fall of the individual soul.”64 It was his own private reinterpretation of Genesis 3, by misplacing it into Genesis 1:1. Plato’s speculations about the soul were naturally taught at any Platonic institution, and the school at Alexandria set up by Pantaenus, follow­ing Philo, was PLATONIC; to this all historians agree. The problem that came up when Origen got up to teach was “how do the souls of BABIES or INFANTS get back up through the abyss of their ‘prehistoric fall’ if they die before they can climb up the trellis of the ‘mystical kiss’ (see above) and by good works ‘grasp’ (see above) eternal life?” Now, here would be a beautiful place for a tolerant Christian who has ‘ ‘broad­minded charity” toward those who “disagree” with him to exercise tolerance and understanding on a nonessential article of faith which could not be classified as a “fundamental.” The fundamentalist movement in America (1920-1950), though led by Baptists (Norris, Riley, Shields, etc.), had leaders who were somehow skittish when they constructed the “fundamentals” about naming immersion in water of an adult believer as one of the fundamentals. The reasoning behind this was obvi­ous: Luther and Wesley didn’t teach it, and weren’t they “godly”? Like Ignatius and Cyprian? Yes. Calvin and Bob Jones, Sr., didn’t teach this. Weren’t they godly? Like Irenaeus and Polycarp? Of course. Then why make an issue of something that the Bible “isn’t clear on”? Why ‘ RIDE A HOBBY HORSE”?

Well, in the first place, the issue might become connected with regeneration and the new birth, which it does; the new birth and re generation are essential issues and cannot be classified as theologica “hobby horses.” in the second place, if it is going to be discussed in relation to “nonelect children” going to hell—which it IS (Calvin a

Augustine)—and children going to Limbo—which it IS (all popes)— then it is imperative that the Bible believer get the matter settled and become as “fully persuaded in his own mind’’ on that subject as he is on the plan of salvation or the security of the believer.

Now, since the school of Alexandria had already rejected the Bible in scores of places (see above) and substituted speculative, Gnostic phi­losophy for the facts of scripture in those places, it is not surprising that neither Pantaenus, Clement, Origen, nor anyone they graduated nor anyone they influenced (Eusebius, Augustine, Constantine, et al.) could solve Plato’s “problem” with an open Bible in thirty years. Infants (and imbeciles and morons, for that matter) are said to be in a state of innocence (Deut. 1:39) until they have a knowledge of the law (Rom. 5:13). Where knowledge of sin as a violation of the law is not present (Rom. 4:15), sin is not imputed to individuals (Rom. 5:8), even though they were bom “dead in trespasses and sin” and inherited a sinful nature (Ps. 51:5). Neither John Calvin, Kuyper, Dabney, Hodge, Gill, Ross, Pink, Mauro, Warfield, Machen, nor Spurgeon could grasp that sim­ple, elemental, basic, fundamental truth of New Testament salvation. They were raised on Cult literature when it came to the subject of water baptism.

If a child died because of Adam’s sin, then he died for someone

else’s transgression, having committed none of his own; that is, he died without committing an act of sin. It therefore follows, as light follows darkness, that he can be saved without an act of receiving Christ. Christ’s righteousness can be imputed to the infant without works (Rom. 5:8) on the basis of his condition, which is innocence (Gen. 2; Deut. 1:39). Where he has an inward knowledge of the law (Rom. 7:8-10; 3:19), he has “had it,” as the expression goes; he must, by a deliberate act of faith, choose God’s righteousness. Again, let it be said with emphasis, that water baptism doesn’t enter the picture one time, before or after birth, with “elect” or “nonelect” infants from heathen or saved families, in ANY set of circumstances anywhere in the world. Water baptism doesn’t enter the discussion of the problem once: it is as irrelevant as a discussion of tennis balls.

The scriptures on these matters are clearer than the lens of a tele­scope, and the wasted (and Satanic) efforts of the school of Alexandria circumnavigate these plain Biblical truths—given by God in their own anguage (they all spoke Greek and had Greek manuscripts)—is an ever­sting testimony to the failure of Christian education to understand the rd of God when it is saddled up with science, religion, philosophy, e*tual criticism, and culture. Machen, Warfield, Wilson, Mauro,

Calvin, Augustine, and the popes never understood the problem, let alone the answer. With an army of stenographers and shorthand experts, with manuscripts in their hands that were copies from manuscripts removed from the “verbal, plenary, inspired, original autographs” by only one generation, Origen and Clement could no more expound the truths of God in dealing with New Testament salvation than Trajan, Nero, Domitian, or Diocletian.

The disastrous development which followed this blind arrogance and sanctified stupidity was the construction of the legend that babies are regenerated when they are sprinkled with water.63

We shall deal with this subject of baptismal regeneration at length in our next chapter. At this point, however, we should stop for a moment and sum up the work of the Alexandrian Cult, who founded and oper­ated Africa’s Most Unusual University, in the second and third centuries.

1. There is no indication that any teacher in it (or connected with it) was a born again, Bible believing child of God.

2. There is no indication that although Origen was a Greek grammarian, a textual critic, a Greek exegete, a Greek teacher, and a collator of manuscripts, that he had any more sense than a brass monkey when it came to understanding ninety percent of the Old Testament in Greek (or any other language), if he ever saw it.

3. There is no indication that any teacher or pupil in the school ever led anyone to Christ during the time of its operation, with the possible exception of Gregory Thaumaturgus.

4. There is no indication from any history that Origen knew any­thing about salvation as it is presented in the New Testament (Romans and Ephesians).

The crowning tribute to this apostate hell hole of “Christian” edu­cation was paid by the head of the ASV committee of 1901, Dr. Philip Schaff, who said (without blushing) that Origen was a man of “keen penetration,” fertile thought, and glowing imagination, and that as a “true divine” his brilliant talent and vast learning embraced all departments of philology, philosophy, and theology, making him the “most gifted, cultivated, and greatest scholar of his age.”66 A bald confession that the “age” which followed the apostles was a descent backwards into the midnight of heathen ignorance. We could expect a panegyric like this from the head of the translating committee of the ASV (1901), whose publication was recently likened to Joseph (the great est type of Christ in the Old Testament) by the apostate Lockman Foun dation (1960) when they issued the New /45K( 1960), recommende Y the Alexandrian schools in America. Of such fanatical flattery a

sacrilegious boasting we may say with Amos, “Hold thy tongue” (Amos 6:10); there are still some sane people left in the body of Christ in spite of “Christian scholarship.”

The end product of the Alexandrian Cult is the last thirty-five Alexandrian “bibles” that have been translated from Nestle’s Alexandrian text (the same as Hort, Aland, Metzger, et al.: multiple authorities, Matt. 6:24). These “eclectic texts,” representing the bound­less confusion in the minds of two of the most confused apostates who ever lived (Clement and Origen), are the contemporary survivors of seventeen centuries of church history: the everlasting witness to man’s infidelity and unfaithfulness in believing what God said (Gen. 3:1). Africa’s Most Unusual University has branches in every state in the union in 1980.

CHAPTER SIX

Water, Water Everywhere

“And the serpent cast out of his mouth water as a flood after the woman, that he might cause her to be carried away of the flood” Revelation 12:15

Personal workers and personal witnesses for Christ in the twenti­eth century are familiar with the vast network of water lilies that cover the pond of professing Christendom. Although not all of these are “water babies,” they are certainly hypnotized by the thought that H2O and black magic are a part of New Testament salvation. The teaching, briefly (which is adhered to by 50,000,000 Catholics, “Church of Christ” elders, Methodists, Presbyterians, Episcopalians, Reformed churches, and Lutherans), is that sprinkled water or immersion in water, in the name of certain formulas (Matt. 28:19-20; Acts 2:38), produces a mag­ical transformation in a sinner of such a character that it brings forth a “new creature in Christ” who has been regenerated by the Third Per­son of the Godhead.

The standard scriptural alibi for this African set-up (see below) is that John 3:5 is not a reference to the first birth—although physical life first originated in water (Gen. 1:20), and family genealogies are streams, and a man’s wife is his “fountain" (Prov. 5:16-17), and the context of John is birth by flesh (John 3:6)—no; John 3:5 is a reference to water BAPTISM, if we are to believe the standard creeds of the Catholic church (Catechism on Baptism), the Church of England (Thirty-nine Articles), the Presbyterians church (Westminster Confession), the Methodist urch (Handbook), and the Campbellite “elders.” Further, we are supposed to believe that Romans 6:1-3 and Ephesians 4:5 are refer- y68 to water baptism although the word “water” occurs nowhere in er epistle. The master scriptural “tool” for mishandling these Plages is Acts 2:38, which is read into Romans 6; John 3; Galatians ’ P^es>ans 4; and Titus 3:5. And this outrageous interpretation (all

Roman Catholic interpretation is private interpretation) and wresting of the scriptures to destruction has existed and persisted from the sec­ond century following Christ’s birth until this present moment. With the progressive revelation of the New Testament before the face of every man involved in the Alexandrian perversions, the Cult continues to teach the lie right into the Great Tribulation. With Acts 15:9, 11 showing clearly that water baptism had nothing to do with salvation, with 1 Peter 3:19-21 showing that water baptism was only a figure of salvation (never a “sign” or a “seal,” as circumcision: Rom. 4:11), with no water in Ephesians 4 or near it, with no water in Romans 6 or near it, with Gentiles being baptized in water AFTER they were saved (Acts 10), with the Gospel defined (1 Cor. 15:1-6) as a doctrine excluding water baptism (1 Cor. 1:14-16), and with “obedience” to that gospel defined as “exercising faith in it” (Rom. 10:9-10; 1:5; 16:26), the African black magic, conjured up in Africa, went right on through seventeen centuries of church history as “Christian” doctrine and right on into the twenti­eth century.

According to most church historians (Mosheim, Robinson, Armitage, Vedder, Newman, et al.), only adult believers were immersed up until the year 200 A.D.1 Tertullian2 says in 216 A.D. that adults only are the proper subjects for baptism, and later he rejected water baptism as a means of regeneration and said that it was a teaching of the devil.3 Clement of Rome, as far back as 96 A.D. said that no one could be baptized until he had first received instruction and has been examined.4 Not even the grossly corrupt Epistle of Barnabas makes the mistake of thinking that infants can be baptized: it states that a believer must “put his trust in the cross BEFORE he is baptized.”5 Justin Martyr (100-165), who believed implicitly in baptismal regeneration, discus­ses in his Apology6 the matter of raising children. Not once in his discussion does he intimate that any child should be baptized to become a Christian. Although Justin believed that water baptism regenerated a “believer” (and Justin cites the Campbellite proof text, John 3:5, exactly as Philip Schaff and his family believed it all of their lives), Justin is not in favor of baptizing babies. Although Clement of Alexan­dria is so far out in the bushes mentally that he thinks the Old Testament saints in Hades had to be baptized by Christ or the apostles after they had been dead for a hundred to two thousand years,8 he cannot bring himself to baptize babies yet. Even in this atmosphere of Bible rejec tion and Bible perversion, no one is foolish enough to think that babies are the proper subjects of baptism. Dionysius of Alexandria (254) wi not baptize until a profession of faith is made.9 Hilary of Poitiers (3 <1

Athanasius (360), Jerome of Dalmatia (378), and Basil of Caesarea (379) taught that no one should be baptized until they openly and publicly professed faith in Jesus Christ.10 Likewise said Chrysostom (400), Gregory of Nazianzen (386), and Ambrose of Milan (390).

Historians from 90-300 make no mention of infant baptism as being practiced anywhere, although it is noted that Clement of Alexandria and Origen were teaching doctrines that could only end up in that kind of operation. Philip Schaff says that Origen was responsible for the acceptance of infant baptism. G.H. Orchard says that the first indica­tion of infant baptism as a “Catholic” belief (to prove Catholic faith in line with “Holy Mother Church”) was stated by Aurelius Augustine (354- 430), an African, who thought, as Origen (an African), that the Septuagint with the Apocrypha was inspired.12

Now, although Clement and Origen would not actually baptize babies, it was at Alexandria that water baptism was first associated with the Christian education of children. Here baptism of “minors” began with boys of ten and eleven years old and gradually went down to the DVBS age, where “Aunt Becky” with her flannelgraph was trying to get the parents of her children to make out their wills to the school: children in the department were six, seven, and eight years old.13 In Alexandria by 220 A.D. baptism was taught to be the “sacrament” by which a person becomes a church member; before, it had only sig­nified a profession of faith in Jesus Christ.14 These little boys under Clement made up an “academy” of choir boys who put on little skits and “vespers,” highlighting songs that Clement himself composed. While engaged in his official duties. Clement wrote a book called Pedagogue.15 In this book Jesus was the "Pedagogue, ’’and all the dis­ciples were children instead of grown men; after all, it is easier to flannelgraph the kiddies into day care centers than it is to tell grown men they are going to hell for their devilment. When Clement baptized his choir of “infants” (that is what he called them), they were given honey and milk as “visible signs” of “invisible grace”16 which was supposed to constitute a “sacrament.” Obviously, Clement was not reading anywhere in the New Testament when he drummed up this inno- tion: any New Testament. This helped to open the door wider at exandria for Egyptian images, pagan rites, and the Oriental sciences,

^gan there in the first place (see previous chapter). With the ^®ux of this great, universal, pan-religious movement had come $accas (175-242), with his library,17 and his fellow faculty ance,,Crs' Since aA °f them believed in exercising “love and forbear-

I toward those who had different “preferences” or used “different

versions” or had ‘‘different life-styles’” (and different interpretations about Biblical passages), they decided that Christianity really consisted of using FALSEHOOD to teach the truth.18 After all, they had already decided that Genesis 3 was a falsehood, but it “taught great truths.” Falsehood, then, in the cause of virtue was harmless. Or to put it as the Cult members of the twentieth century (Robert Sumner; John R. Rice; Bob Jones, III; et al.) put it: ten attacks on the Virgin Birth of Christ, His Deity, His atonement, and His plan of salvation in a trans­lation is perfectly all right, if one at the same time makes the “word of God” CLEARER, or if the man engaged in the devilment is a “godly Fundamentalist” who professes to believe in verbal inspiration. Another twentieth century version in the same Satanic vein (Matt. 13:33; Gal. 5:9) runs like this: if you can find the fundamentals or major doctrines of the faith SOMEWHERE in a garbage can or a sewage disposal unit, then it is a reliable can (or unit). This is how garbage cans and sewage disposal units are converted into “bibles.” Both of the above concepts are taught as Christian doctrine in fundamental colleges, seminaries, and universities in 1980.

According to F.F. Bruce19 we can recognize quite clearly at the end of the second century the Catholic church, the Catholic canon, and the Catholic faith. Although this is absolutely true, F.F. Bruce (as ninety percent of his fellow Cult members) fails to inform his reader what this means. It means: 1. The Catholic church at the end of the second cen­tury (300 A.D.) is a body of Bible rejecting traditionalists who have accepted the teachers of philosophy and the church fathers where those gentlemen contradicted scripture. 2. The Catholic canon in 300 A.D. is the Alexandrian canon created by the Cult, containing both Old and New Testament Apocrypha (later they dropped the New Testament Apocrypha: Clement, the Shepherd of Hermas, and Barnabas).20 3. The Catholic faith is a combined synthesis of Alexandrian Gnosticism, apostate Judaism, dead orthodox Christianity, and philosophical spec­ulation. In short, there appears at the end of the second century (300 A.D.) a “great tree” in which the fowls of the air find a lodging place; these fowls are denominated as devils or demons in the New Testa­ment (Mark 4:15; Matt. 13:19; Rev. 18:2) and in the Old Testament (Eccl. 10:20; Gen. 8:7; Isa. 34:11-15). It is no more “the faith which was once delivered unto the saints” (Jude 3) than Rosicrucianism or Communism.

Baptismal regeneration and infant baptism both begin with what apostates call “oral tradition,” and since the Catholic “faith” (see above) always sets tradition against the word of God to eliminate it as Chris

tian teachers set the N1V and NASV against the A V to eliminate it—the two fables need careful examination.

There are evidences that the group called Donatists (also called Montenses) were being killed for “rebaptizing” adults before Aurelius Augustine gets up the Council of Numidia (415) to state that people who reject infant baptism are accursed,21 Augustine’s concern about the “infants” is well-founded, for if the Donatists were rebaptizing peo­ple, they were proclaiming to the world that their first baptism wasn’t any good. Why not? According to Augustine, the only true baptism was water baptism in the Catholic church, and any baptism out of the Catholic church was heretical.22 If anyone was getting rebaptized, some­one was claiming that Catholic water baptism could not REGENERATE or give the NEW BIRTH. It became imperative to prove that Catholics could get an extra lap on anyone by sprinkling the baby as soon as he was born, and then on no one could “rebaptize” him later. To estab­lish this ghastly lie, Augustine had to prove that infant baptism was not only scriptural, but that ADULT BAPTISM was heresy if the adult had already been baptized as an infant.

Shouldn’t we follow Augustine? Don’t his Confessions prove he was something a little short of an angel? After all, didn’t Martin Luther accept that part of his theology where he dealt with grace and faith? After all, could two men so “greatly used of God” lead us astray? Well, if Cyprian and Polycarp did, and if Justin and Irenaeus did, why would any Bible believer think that any man couldn’t lead him astray (Rom. 16:18; Rev. 12:9) under certain pressures and conditions?

It is apparent that the body of oral traditions, which eventually leav­ened and corrupted the Christian church and transformed it into the Papal church, came from the “church fathers,” of whom Augustine was one.

The first of these “fathers” was Papias (60-130 A.D.), who attempted to get the book of Revelation out of the canon of scripture by denying its apostolic autograph.23 Some other anonymous “father” drummed up a little story about Christ being born in a cave.24 These y111*658 bttle “opinions” by “godly, qualified authorities” enter into camp as softly and as politely as the proverbial camel who got his ^ead into the tent. It we are to believe the fable called “The Acts of

I. we are to believe that the apostle Paul was a bald-headed, gOoked-legged, long-nosed man “full of grace” who often “had the . of an angel.”25 (Exactly where this puts an angel from a photoge- ^P°int of view is rather difficult to say.) The Millennial reign of Jesus i. Was Questioned by many as they associated the teaching with a

heretic called Cerinthus.26 However, the greatest and foremost Bible perverting philosopher of his day was Irenaeus, the Bishop of Lyons (130-202), who tells us that Matthew was written in the Hebrew dia­lect, that Mark wrote from the mouth of Peter, and that Peter preached the Gospel in Rome.21 From this lump of sourdough came the fanatical teaching of Westcott and Hort (1884) and Eberhard Nestle (1960) that a hundred words should be removed from the New Testament because Matthew copied Mark, or Mark copied Luke, or Luke copied Matthew, or Mark copied Matthew, or Luke and Matthew copied Mark. This “two document theory’’ was accepted by Dr. A.T. Robertson of Louisville, Kentucky, who taught the Greek grammarians in the United States (1900-1940).

Clement of Alexandria has Peter in Rome and Mark writing down Peter’s words.28 Thus two genuine fables became part of the Christian curriculum at a “Christian” university. There is as much historical evidence that Napoleon was in Cuba as there is that Peter was in Rome, or within four hundred miles of it in any direction. Jerome (340-420) picks up the other end of Irenaeus’ little fairy tale and adds that Mat­thew wrote the Gospel in Judaea in the Hebrew language.29 He adds a cute little note about Mark, however, and tells us that Mark was actu­ally the first Bishop of Alexandria.30 This ties the bundle neatly together, for it makes the School at Alexandria, under Origen and Clement, the second highest authority in the Roman Empire, aside from Rome, since they got their information directly from Peter through Mark. There is no more evidence that Mark was in Egypt or that Peter told him any­thing about the Gospel than there is evidence that Christ was crucified on a dogwood tree. Augustine preserves these “sacred traditions” of “Holy Mother Church” and nudges the old Matthew-Hebrew-Gospel story gently along31 just like he thought it was safe to add a little momentum to a lie. But once the freight train has started downhill, with the brakes off, there is no turning back. In erecting her monstrous super­structure of “tradition,” the Catholic church builds so feverishly on these little fables that by 400 A.D. no one could recognize Biblical Christianity anywhere in the building.

Here is John, “a virgin chosen to serve the Virgin.”32 Mark, by baptism,” was the son of Simon Peter.33 Papias and Pantaenus both say that Matthew wrote in Hebrew.34 “Babylon” actually means "Rome, ’’according to Jerome and Kenneth Taylor (Living Bible, although this must be limited to PAGAN Rome in the past in order t a no one will confuse Christian-killing Caesars with Christian-killing popes. It is our old friend Philo (20 B.C. - 50 A.D.) who hears t a

Mark was in Alexandria preaching “what Peter taught him,”35 so even­tually Mark will have to be the first Gospel written and have the preeminent place if one is going to get along with the Alexandrian Cult: every faculty member of every Christian college in America (1980) believes that Mark was the first one written, so the first two verses have been altered in every corrupt version (ASV, NASV, RSV, NRSV, IV, NIV) recommended by apostate Fundamentalists. The readings in Mark 1:1-2 in the ASV, NIV, and NASV are the African readings of the Alexandrian Cult.

Downward goes the midnight express; the engineer, brakeman, and fireman have gotten out of the cab “way back.” The Lord’s Supper is now a “heavenly sacrifice ” instead of a “memorial” (Cyprian);36 Jude, Hebrews, and Revelation are to be disputed because Clement of Alexandria is worried about how certain educated heretics and infidels

“feel” about them. Having become convinced that New Testament Christianity was Jewish (Peter, not Paul; Matthew, not John), it was decided by the school at Alexandria that Peter’s work at Rome (fol­lowed by Mark’s at Alexandria) had officially determined where the most important centers of New Testament Christianity were to be found. The fact that Paul came from Asia Minor (Acts 9:30), that Antioch was

in Syria (Acts 11:26), and that Rome and Alexandria in the scriptures picture Satan and the world system, never dented these “devout Catholics” once. They were busy courting Holy Mother Tradition in order to prove a political point (Col. 2:8), in violation of their Divine commission and instructions (Col. 2:8). Consequently, when these self­deceived fanatics read their “first Gospel” (Mark) and got to Mark 16:9-20, they saw a tremendous problem. If New Testament Christi­anity in Rome and Alexandria came from the Jewish apostles, and the leading Jewish apostle at that (Simon Peter), and if at least one of the Gospels was written in the Jewish language (Matthew), what could one do with the Jewish SIGNS (Mark 16:17) that were recorded in Mark (1 Cor. 1:22), when not one teacher on the faculty at Alexandria or one bishop in Rome could produce one SIGN (Mark 16:17-19)! Why, y the beard of St. Bernadette, the Jewish signs were in the book which Was written by the apostles to Alexandria—Mark! The solution to this Problem was simple in the extreme: the faculty at Alexandria went back • _^eremiah 36, recovered Jehudi’s penknife, and cut off the ending

™ Mark 16. Consequently, all the manuscripts copied thereafter by P®®Ple who trusted Alexandrian “higher education” omitted the lng. Unfortunately for Alexandria, this depraved act of misguided ticism also enabled every real Bible believer from 200 A.D. to the

present time to identify the corrupt manuscripts of the Cult whenever and wherever they showed up: Vaticanus and Sinaiticus, recommended by Bob Jones University, omit the ending.

What began with questioning the authorship of a book in the Bible (Revelation) ended with the critical mutilation of the living words of the living God.38

A little leaven leaveneth the whole lump.

But by far the worst damage done to the local assemblies of the early church (excluding, of course, the hideous persecutions of Domitian, Trajan, Hadrian, Pius, Aurelius, Severus, Maximinus, Decius, Valerian, and Diocletian) was done by what we call “the water dogs” (Campbellites), who insisted on preserving an oral tradition that violated the entire New Testament: the tradition that the new birth occurred by black magic when a “candidate” was put into water.39 New Testament water baptism was by immersion according to Philip Schaff,40 the his­torian Liddon,41 Dr. Cave, Dean Goulburn, and the standard doctrinal

folio (the Pedalion) of the entire Greek church.42 Queen Elizabeth of England (1533-1603) was immersed in water, and even the baby­sprinkler Jo/in Calvin (1509-1564) admitted that primitive baptism was by immersion.43 They descended into the water in 48 A.D., if we are to believe what the Epistle of Barnabas says about it.44 Men are still “descending INTO the water” in 95 A.D. according to Hennas.45 Mosheim, Danver, Benson, Horne, Ellis, Robinson, and G.H. Orchard

bear witness to the facts of history that the early converts were immersed following a profession of faith.46

The first indication that something has gone wrong with the H2O is the appearance in the Didache (the Teaching of the Twelve— supposedly written about 120 A.D.) of a peculiar passage. In this fab­ricated document we are told that the water in which sinners are to be

baptized has to be “living water,”47 and if the bishop can’t find enough “living water” to immerse the candidate in, he is to pour water three times upon the man’s head.48 The authority for this is quite naturally the opinion of the writer. How reliable is this Didache (the Teaching)? Well, the rest of the document says that a Bible believer must fast on Wednesday and Friday because only hypocrites fast on Monday and Thursday.*9 A Bible believing Christian must pray “the Lord’s Prayer three times a day.50 Only baptized people are to take the “Eucharist because Matthew 7:6 is a reference to a priest giving a Eucharist to an unbaptized person.51 The body of Christ is made up of tribulation Jews (Matt. 24:13) who will have to be gathered together from the four winds, from one end of heaven to the other” (Matt. 24:31)- 1

The Didache states that the negative Golden Rule of Brahmanism is the law for New Testament Christians under grace.53 The Lord’s Supper in the church age is the Jewish sacrifice of Malachi 1:11 (which takes place in the Millennium, see Ezek. 40-48).54 The blood atonement of Jesus Christ for sinners is not the means of justification and redemp­tion at all: salvation is by observing a series of eight “thou shalt nots”:33 salvation is by works.56

Of such a nature is the original “apostolic authority’’ of “Holy Mother church” for pouring water on a self-righteous sinner instead of immersing a saved child of God in water.

The Didache agrees slightly with the Shepherd of Hermas and the Epistle of Barnabas in “orthodox” teaching, but its closest semblance (as we should have taken for granted) is to an EGYPTIAN work called “Apostolical Church Order. ”57 The first thirteen chapters of this Coptic (Memphitic) work, from North Africa, correspond exactly to the “ortho­dox” teaching of the Didache.

History may accept both forgeries at face value: if the Didache professes to be “The Teaching of the Twelve,” it may well be “The Teaching of the Twelve,” but it is certainly not the teaching of the twelve apostles (Matt. 10:2-4), nor is it the teaching of any one of them or any combination of two or more of them. “The Twelve” of the Didache are more likely twelve unclean spirits who managed to get out of the pigs (Mark 5:13) before they ran down the hill and committed hogicide.

The next man down the tube is Justin Martyr, who tells his readers that a sinner is regenerated according to John 3:5 by being immersed in water.58 Justin calls the Lord’s Supper a “eucharist” and joins Acts 2:38 to Titus 3:5 as good as any Campbellite in Abilene, Texas, ever did it (1980).59 By disconnecting the word “regeneration” from the “Holy Ghost” (Titus 3:5) and tying it up with “water” (which doesn’t occur one time in the entire book of Titus), an overflowing “flood” wells up which regenerates the sinner. Water, water, everywhere, and not a drop to drink. There is no water in the Epistle to Titus, nor in * e Epistle to the Galatians, nor in the Epistle to the Romans. Some- °ne is preaching with a “water fixation.” He is reading words into the

1 le that occur nowhere in ANY set of Bible manuscripts, Greek, Coptic, Synac, Latin, or otherwise. The head of the ASV (1901) committee quite naturally accepts the Campbellite position,60 and he also insists that water ^>tlSm *s a sP'ritual circumcision and a SEAL (Rom. 4:11); it is nei- r of them, nor has been, nor ever will be, world without end, amen.

R. nce this false doctrinal position was taken—that water regener- Tr*a Slnner—the obvious corollary followed: it must have only cleansed

him from PAST sins (Heb. 9:6-20) committed before he was baptized (Acts 22:15-16). What then has to be done about future sins? Since Christ’s death was not going to be enough to redeem and justify the sinner in this system, he had to “tote his own” the rest of his life and “endure to the end”61 by “observing his baptismal vows.” This brought about the development of two more heresies: no assurance of salvation and the Roman Catholic doctrine of penance.62

A little leaven leaveneth the whole lump.

What began by questioning the authorship of the book of Revelation wound up producing the greatest anti-Biblical, God-defying ecclesias­tical system in the entire western world.63

Along with this mania for liquid salvation came the mania for liquid communion. Before the local assemblies had progressed a hundred years beyond the completion of the New Testament, the Lord’s Supper was being turned into another African rite of black magic which was des­tined to be performed by “priests” and priests only. Pastors and ordained elders were out of the question, for only a priest could perform a sacri­fice. “Thy Holy Table”64 became “Thy Holy ALTAR,”65 which hosted “Thy Holy Bloodless SACRIFICE,”66 given by an officiating priest instead of an “elder.” The final act of blasphemy in this “dangerous delusion”67 was a sinner actually calling a piece of bread “The Lamb of God...SACRIFICED.”68

In this hysterical lunacy, Irenaeus cries out: “The Eucharist is the human organism of Jesus Christ, made up of his flesh, sinews, and bones, and the cup is His blood and the bread is His body! It nourishes our literal flesh and bones because it is literal flesh and blood”!69 (This is the “medicine of immortality,”70 which Schaff calls “the Eucha­rist” after Cyprian’s advice.71) “Do thyself no harm: for we are all here” (Acts 16:28). Neither Cyprian, Schaff, nor Irenaeus paid any more attention to 1 Corinthians 11:26 than Origen or Clement.

By now the student of church history should begin to “get the drift’ in regard to the subsequent history of the church (325-600 A.D.). The foundations of the harlot church have been laid before 300 A.D.; when all of these fairy tale cement blocks, legendary bricks, delusory stones, and leavened mortar are combined, one beholds the twentieth century Roman Catholic church as a complete edifice. Only prayers to Mary, a few candles, teachings on clerical celibacy,72 and addenda on “purgatory” are needed to complete the tower; Origen and Clement both believed in purgatory.73 Summing up the teachings of the ‘ fathers of the church” (Matt. 23:9), we have now (300 A.D., the time Constantine) a set-up where all Satan needed was a politician to absor

the church into the state, thereby producing an anti-scriptural state church with full political power to kill Bible believing Christians; this time in an acceptable manner, that is, with the approval of the “Christian” church. This is exactly what happens (see chapter 9). What is produced is a religious monstrosity, a two-faced political cobra which professes to be the church that Jesus Christ founded (Matt. 16:16-18). “Holy” Mother church to this point had no political world ruler to sponsor her and enforce her false doctrines on the local assemblies which are scat­tered all over the empire; she had not yet defected (200 A.D.) far enough from the truth to be worthy of that honor. However, with the Alexandrian school in Egypt, “Holy” Mother church begins to qualify for the “play­offs,” for she becomes intellectual enough and cultured enough to hobnob with emperors; in such a fellowship some Roman ruler with a keen sense of political expediency74 would see a great “potential.” It is not that the Roman Empire was “converted” in the fourth and fifth centuries; it was simply that there arose so much disturbance and trouble from real Christian witnesses in the second and third centuries that a wise pagan ruler would eventually see that victory lay in sub­verting them. Conversion was never a factor in Constantine’s mind: at least not in the Biblical sense. Constantine believed to the end7S that salvation was attained by “entering the mysteries” through sprinkling of water.

So, by the time of Constantine, after 267 years of fiery trials (33-300), there appears a “Catholic” church with “Christian” theo­logical ideas running somewhat as follows:

1. Mark wrote at Peter’s dictation: Matthew wrote his gospel in Hebrew.

2. John the apostle didn’t write Revelation: a “presbyter” did. g 3. Salvation is by works after being sprinkled with water, or hav­ing water poured on oneself, or after being immersed.

g? 4. The Lord’s Supper is an unbloody sacrifice offered by a priest, but it is really “unbloody” blood.

| 5. Philosophy and science are both equal authorities with the scrip­ture. tradition is ALSO of equal authority (Mark 7:1-13).

I 6. Infants must be baptized in water to get them regenerated.

I '■ After a season in purgatory, everyone mayeventually get saved.

A bishop is the supreme authority, even if he is a fornicating, uquor-headed reprobate.

I 9. Plato, Socrates, and Aristotle wrote God-breathed literature.

• There is no literal heaven or hell, and possibly no bodily resurrection. J

11. The name of the New Testament local assembly is “THE CATHOLIC CHURCH.”

12. The “Bible” includes Bel and the Dragon, Tobit, and Judith, and possibly the Shepherd of Hermas and the Epistle of Barnabas (Sinaiticus).

13. The pastor of a local assembly is a priest.

Now, Roman Catholics would be the first to deny that they were ever connected with numbers 3, 7, 8, 9, 10, and possibly one other, however, the history of Catholicism is a long history of casuistry, soph­istry, camouflage, and double-talk.76 There is a way to talk your way around everything, but history is quite brutal when it comes to FACTS (see chapter 13, 14, 15). The purpose in exalting tradition to an equal place of authority with the scripture is so as the rascal in charge of spread­ing lies can prove anything he wants to prove that is contrary to the scriptures. By setting up conflicting authorities, the church can arbitrate as the final authority. The traditions listed above are blatant refutations of the word of God, and there is nothing in the list that will meet the demands of Biblical revelation, no matter who interprets what passage which way (see Rome—The Great Private Interpreter, 1969). The traditions of the church fathers (and other traditions similar to them) prepared the local assemblies to accept conflicting authorities. Since the state was always an authority (Rom. 13:1-5), they are getting in position to succumb to state church domination, under an unholy force as murderous and as false as any church state in pagan Rome which operated under the Caesars. If they do not submit to this new “Rome,” they are in a position where they must run for their lives to “the wilderness” in order to maintain their purity of doctrine and practice.77 The Bible believing pastors and their churches do not submit to this new Rome; they run.

Every local assembly throughout this period (100-300 A.D.) that desired to follow the scriptures, instead of the traditions of men, had to eventually break with the real apostates who were calling themselves “Catholic.”78 These groups (Montanists, Novatians, Donatists, Paulicians, Paterines, Picards, Lionists, Bulgarians, Montenses, Messalians, Euchites, etc.) became the offscouring of “Holy Mother church” and became branded by Protestant historians, as well as Cath­olic historians, as “heretics.” Since ninety-nine percent of the histon ans of early church history (100-1600 A.D.) were Catholics, they amass evidence to the moon to prove that anyone who was not a “catholic | was a heretic. To give the student of history the impression that ^eret^ are only “splinter groups,” a number of names were invented tor t

Bible believers, who actually formed one unit—BIBLE BELIEVERS. But to help propagate the Satanic “mystery of iniquity,” they were given as many names as the Catholic mind could invent: this was to present a lineup where the reader beholds, on the one hand, a large, unified body of “orthodox believers” (Roman Catholics who are “apostolic in faith and practice”) and on the other hand, a thousand sects or “cults” which are “heretical schismatics.” As it turns out in reality (325 A.D.), the lineup is thousands of Bible believing people on the one hand, being persecuted by one heretical, anti-scriptural, pagan hierarchy hiding behind a church-state setup on the other hand. Whenever a group of Bible believing people abandon this pagan bride of Satan (Rev. 17:1-6), they must be called by a name to separate them from Roman “ortho­doxy.” A few of these names are Dispensationalists, Fundamentalists, Separatists, Methodists, Norrisites, Lutherans, Episcopalians, Ruck- manites, Waldenses, Albigenses, Darbyites, Arnoldists, Vaudois, Cathari, Petrobrusians, Paterines, Hussites, Quakers, Calvinists, etc. Observe further that if any of the groups listed above apostatize from their belief in the Bible, then that group sets itself up as a second “apos­tolic standard for orthodoxy” and begins to label all Bible believers outside of it as heretics. The modern standard of Orthodoxy is called FUNDAMENTALISM. Apostate Fundamentalists look upon Bible believers as heretics: members of a cult. This view is as old as the Roman Catholic church (325 A.D.) and does not (in essential outlook) vary from it a bit.

We know the relative doctrinal purity of any group listed above, for two outstanding differences within the groups themselves show up exactly as they showed up in 100-300 A.D.: it is their attitude toward WATER and church states. The issue among Bible believing ‘schismatics” was never, at the time of their defection from “Cathol­icism,” the Deity of Christ or the Blood Atonement, nor was it the Virgin Birth or the Bodily Resurrection. The issue was their attitude toward a church state (313 A.D.), and even before that it was the issue °u ^2<^' Whatever differences they may have had among themselves ~°ut Pre-millennialism or eternal security, their major defection can judged by the distance they moved away from Rome in regard to sprinkling babies. Those who retained members of the Alexandrian Cult . ^ePt near to Rome kept on sprinkling babies. Those who made a ® break absolutely refused to baptize babies under any conditions °'^tians, Donatists, Bogomiles, Albigenses, Paulicians, etc.).

ow, the man who was responsible more than any other man in rc history for the Satanic teaching that unbaptized babies could go

to hell was Aurelius Augustine (354^30 A.D.).79 Of this wretched, lying tyrant and perverter of the Bible, John Lord says80 he was “the most intellectual man of his time, the oracle of the Latin church.” Further, Augustine was such an immortal “benefactor of mankind” that no church council could do anything without his presence. Being a “master of words,” he was a man of boundless influence and authority. He “won every heart by love,” and his death left the world in “darkness and tears”!

He also caused the murder of several hundred Christians during his lifetime and was directly responsible for the death of several hun­dred thousands after his own death.81 He also shut up the kingdom against men and prevented them from finding Christ by teaching them that the new birth was water sprinkling in the Roman Catholic church. In short, he was a Bible perverting liar.

Of this deluded, fifth century Torquemada, Philip Schaff, the his­torian, says that there was no teacher of the ancient period who was more "consistent in his views unless it was ORIGEN.” Schaff would give Augustine the highest rank in philosophy (Col. 2:8) and science (1 Tim. 6:20) and would also give the self-righteous despot credit for advancing psychology. He, like Origen, was “above his times.”82 By this you are to gather that science (1 Tim. 6:20), philosophy (Col. 2:8), and psychology are advances beyond believing the divine warnings you just read in the Biblical passages just listed. If Augustine was “in advance of his times,” then the Catholic massacres of the twelfth to sixteenth centuries are the “times” that finally caught up with Augustine.

Augustine’s "consistency of view”83 was this: he, as a five-point Calvinist, believed that the eternal decrees of election by a sovereign God were conditioned, or at least modified, when a Catholic priest sprin­kled a baby: this “elected” the baby.84 Augustine’s “consistency of view” in regard to the Second Coming of Christ was remarkable; and since there are more than twice as many verses in the Bible dealing with this doctrine than any other two doctrines, we should make much of it. Augustine believed that Jesus Christ’s Second Coming was a thou­sand year “process” where He came one piece at a time, on a Roman Catholic “holy table,” as the priest offered up the “sacrifice”82— evolutionary ubiquity. But undoubtedly the most “consistent” thing about the man, who was the “greatest Christian since New Testament times, was his attitude toward the water babies.87 Augustine boldly proclaime in public: “ALL who affirm that young children receive everlasting life albeit they be not by the sacrament of grace or baptism renewe , and will not that young children which are newly born from their

mother’s womb shall be baptized, taking away ORIGINAL SIN, that they are ACCURSED” (anathematized).88 In view of the Bible—which Augustine quoted more than four thousand times—and its clear teach­ing about these matters (see chapter 5, notes 64-65), what would a Bible believing historian be doing raving about Augustine’s “consistency” and his being the “greatest Christian since New Testament times”? Why, such a confession would mean that no Christian from 70 A.D. to 400 A.D. believed enough Bible to tell a man how to get saved. With the church fathers quoting the New Testament more than thirty-six thou­sand times in that period, how does the “greatest Christian” since the New Testament wind up with the most depraved, godless piece of nonsense that a pagan could dream up? Obviously, Augustine was not reading the Bible when he developed his philosophy: ANY Bible.

Augustine and his Catholic friends at the Council of Mela in Numidia (415) agreed that children are saved from hell and get eternal life by sprinkling water89—provided they have a conversion of heart LATER! To show how consistent he was, Augustine then decided, after the

council, that although water sprinkling could regenerate, take away orig­inal sin, and put the baby into Christ, it didn’t do it to every baby- only elect babies.90 Since no one (including the baby!) knew who was elected until he was dead,91 no Bible believing Christian could claim John 5:24, Romans 8:28, Romans 8:38-39, 1 Corinthians 1:8, or Jude 24. Augustine simply yanked the rug of faith in the promises out from under the feet of every child of God who was “standing on the prom­ises.” That is, he put forth his own philosophy as a substitute for the Bible. Or, to put it ‘“consistently ” (see Schaff, above): a sinner is saved from hell and “born again” by sprinkling, but he can still be lost and go to hell after he is sprinkled if he is NOT one of the “elect.” This is the “consistent” position of John Calvin (1509-1564) and the Reformed churches of Holland, Michigan (1980). This is the “consis­tency” which Schaff (ASV, 1901), J.G. Machen, Benjamin Warfield, Md Berkhof admired so much. When Robert Sumner appeals to the duplicity put forth in the church writings of Warfield and Schaff, trying to Prove to the reader that the New ASV and the NIV and the ASV followed e majority of manuscripts in their translating, he cited men who are more honest or consistent in dealing with salvation and regenera-

on than Augustine or Origen.92

Augustine’s theology is the extra coal car that derails the freight The Council of Carthage (fifth council) in North Africa backed ? ugustine, in 401, to turn his theological hallucinations in an “ortho- x decree (Council of Mela, 415 A.D.). In 789 A.D., Charlemagne

(Charles the Great) made infant baptism compulsory in a state law. But even long before Charlemagne (413), the “Catholic” church got the emperors Theodosius and Honorius to declare capital punishment for Christians who wouldn’t baptize infants or for anyone who would rebaptize adults. Saint (dig that) Augustine says that any man who doesn’t believe in infant baptism (J. Frank Norris, Billy Sunday, George Truett, Dr. DeHaan, Charles Spurgeon, Jack Hyles, President Carter, Mordecai Ham, Johnny Cash, and Dolly Parton) is an INFIDEL.93 In “saint” Augustine’s sick mind the “sponsor’s” faith (the “godfather” and “god­mother”) will save the baby because water sprinkling in the Bible took the place of circumcision. This teaching was propagated in the face of 1 Peter 3:21 and Romans 4:11 and in the face of the fact that Baron Bunsen said that baptism of newborn infants, accompanied by the vicar­ious promises of parents and other sponsors, was utterly unknown to the early church, not only down to the end of the second century, but “indeed, to the middle of the third.”94 What happened in the “middle of the third’’? Why, that’s easy: the graduates of Africa’s most unusual university were going out from their hellhole in Egypt (and from Caesarea) after being taught by Origen (184-254 A.D.).

The historian Grotius locates the cause of the trouble to be at the

Council of Carthage (North Africa), held in 252 A.D.95 Neander assents to the truth that North Africa was the location of the origin of infant baptism. The only question was (according to Neander) whether the child ought to be baptized immediately after its birth or “should we wait until eight days after his birth” as in the case of circumcision?96 A little leaven leavens the whole lump. Having taken this reckless and disastrous course, contrary to every verse in the Bible in every passage dealing with circumcision or baptism (Rom. 4:11; 1 Peter 3:21)—water baptism is never a sign or a seal; it is only a “figure”—the Catholics now had to go temporarily insane, for now they had to pretend that they couldn’t read. You see, in the Bible only MALE children could get the “seal’’ through the “rite. ’’ Such are the psychotic ways of “godly, dedicated men”—who was more “godly” than Augustine.—, when they decide that they have more integrity than God Almighty- Along these lines, the student should remember that when it comes to matters of final authority, the “consistent scholars” of the nineteen and twentieth centuries are no more dependable than Augustine w e they decide they are able to correct the God-given text. Their go ness does not affect their lunacy. (-ncj

This brings up a serious problem; what should we do when w e God using Presbyterians and Episcopalians? How about John eS

Wasn’t Jonathan Edwards filled with the Spirit several times? How about H.C. Morrison and Francis Asbury (see Volume II)?

Now, this real and genuine problem is the basic cause for compro­mise and defection in every generation of church history. Basically, it amounts to “humanism”—the reverencing of men’s persons (2 Peter 2:18) to the point that when an issue arises between what those men taught and what God said (Rom. 3:4), what God said is abandoned (Gen. 3:1-5). For example, James Gray, A.T. Robertson, Robert Sumner, John R. Rice, Benjamin Warfield, and Curtis Hutson all taught that 2 Timothy 3:16 referred to the “original autographs.” Anyone read­ing the verse at one reading knows that it doesn’t (see the context, v. 15).

The sentiment seems to be that one would hurt the feelings of such men, if they are living, or dishonor their “sacred memory,” if they are deceased, and thereby incur the wrath of God.97 Why it never occurs to such tender souls to consider that the wrath of God is aimed at Bible rejection and Bible perversion (Rom. 1:18, 21, 25) is a great mystery. If a Christian would take the words of a man against the words of God simply because that man had a great spiritual experience (Augustine), or because he saw the falsehoods in Rome (Luther), or because he lived a passive life of prayer (Thomas a Kempis), or because he stood up against modernists (Warfield and Machen), or because he believed in the fundamentals (Wilbur Smith and A.T. Robertson), or because he loved the Lord enough to die for him (Polycarp, Martyr, Cyprian), that man is a deceived FOOL (Num. 23:19; Rom. 3:4; Isa. 8:20; John 8:40-44; 1 Thess. 2:13; and 2 Peter 1:16).

Whatever the “good” and “godly” Augustine may have done in his day—mainly opposing Pelagianism and talking about “grace”— his ungodly and unholy attitude toward what God SAID (Gen. 3:1) and his unchristian and beastly attitude toward those who believed what God said should not be emulated by a Mohammedan.

The outcome of Augustine's unscrupulous lying about scriptural baptism was a florid statement made by Pope Leo (440-461) not fifty years after Augustine’s death: “Baptism makes a change not only in e water but in the man that receives it; thereby he receives Christ I and Christ receives him...he is REGENERATED.”98 He is “regener- I ated like Adolph Hitler, Hermann Goering, and Teddy Kennedy (all n? °**C sPr*nkled)- The Council of Carthage stated that the “water” , _^fbe sanctified by prayer before “THE PRIEST” can make it wash a^,S*n’ HolY water.99 Black magic: North African voodooism.

E ow (415) a Bible believing Christian is cursed by God if he doesn’t

> Pt this Catholic voodooism as Christian doctrine; at least, that is

MM

the official Roman Catholic position on the matter.100 There are four­teen curses pronounced against every Baptist in the United States of America by the official councils of Rome, which are (according to all nihil obstat publications) due the reverence which one is to give to the Holy Scriptures.101

So, out of its watery grave the beast appears (Job 41:31-33), more formidable than Moby Dick and more voracious than Jaws. He surfaces in 415 A.D., dripping water from head to foot. In the watery orgy that follows (500-1980 A.D.), water sprinkling is accepted as the Biblical doctrine of regeneration (Acts 2:38) and the washing away of sins (Acts 22:16) by every major, recognized religious group on the earth but the Baptists. You will find it in every catechism that is connected with the origins of the Greek Orthodox church, the Roman Catholic church, the Lutheran church, the Anglican church, the Reformed churches, the Pres­byterian church, and the Methodist church.102 This one non-Biblical heresy has probably caused more bloodshed than any other single doctrine wrested from the word of God (2 Peter 3:16) outside of the so-called “mass.” It becomes a means of maintaining a church state (see The Sure Word of Prophecy, Bible Baptist Bookstore, 1969) for sixteen centuries. England h&s, a state church (Anglican), Germany has a state church (Lutheran), France has a state church (Catholic), Spain and Italy have state churches (Catholic), Ethiopia had a state church (Coptic), Greece has a state church (Orthodox), and so did Russia (until 1918). America was the only major country to escape this demoraliz­ing and cancerous plague in the western world, and the Puritan “fathers” had not been here a hundred years before some of them had set up a church state modeled after the Puritan-Reformed pattern of John Calvin (his church state at Geneva, Switzerland); with it they revived an ancient Catholic liturgy: burning “heretics” at the stake.103

Infant sprinkling for admission into a church controlled by a church state guaranteed a number of things: 1. A large membership, because if resident members are threatened with death or excommunication if they don’t bring the babies in, they will bring them in. (If no political threats are made, you simply tell the parents that the baby may go to I hell, or at least “Limbo.”) 2. Families will join the church on the basis of the first birth (physical—not spiritual), thereby guaranteeing, with the passage of time, a packed-out congregation of hell-bound sinners parading around as “Christians.” The poor fools are deceived into thi ing that physical water applied by a physical sinner can produce a sp'r itual birth. 3. Absolute control of the consciences of the members, they will always date their “conversion” at their water baptism, a

since baptism can’t guarantee salvation absolutely to anyone (see above), the sinner never knows whether he is saved or lost as long as he lives. This insures further that no member of the church will ever attempt to win anyone to Christ, for salvation is not going to come about by an adult accepting the finished work of Jesus Christ; it is going to come to pass by unconscious submission of a baby to a “priest” before he can know what redemption is, or even who is throwing water on him, for that matter. Infant baptism (properly, “sprinkling”) thereby becomes a real unifying power within the unregenerate Roman Catholic church for the next sixteen centuries.

The Holy Spirit and the Bible were small factors in the operation. So strong was this delusion upon the world system in which it operated that not even the Reformers (Calvin, Zwingli, and Luther) could com­pletely escape the snares of the deadly Alexandrian Cult.104 The real Bible believers, even during the Reformation, must remain as “splin­ter” groups of “dissenters” and “schismatics” who are classified by Catholics and Reformers alike as “heretics.”106

Having passed through the watery “deeps,” we come now to Constantine (313 A.D.) and the Council of Nicaea (325 A.D.). This was the first official “council” anywhere in the history of the church (Acts 15 is never called a “council” anywhere in the New Testament). Nicaea sets the pace for every council to follow. Ignoring the issue of absolute authority (the Bible), the issue of the autonomy of the local church (independency), and the issues that are related to the command­ment to preach the Gospel and win people to Christ (Acts 1:8; 20:20; 2 Cor. 5:20), the council settles down to argue delicate theological points and define them. (“What do you mean by PLENARY?” “What do you mean by VERBAL?” etc.) This will enable the church state in the future to imprison or kill anyone who doesn’t subscribe to the doctri- na* points.” When the martyred church became the imperial church (325 A.D.) and ushered in the Pergamos period of church history (Rev. •12), it had already had nearly a hundred years’ practice in forming Creeds which were as pagan and as irrational as the teachings of the worst heathen before the time of Christ. Not content with this accumu- . trash, the “fathers” (this time “Post-Nicene Fathers”) allow a gK^hoice tidbits to slip into the church: prayers for the dead, prayers

ary, veneration of relics, and Easter bunnies. At Nicaea, pagan converted to papal Rome, and papal Rome turns out to be by Ig, bloodier and more hellish106 of the two (see chapters 13, 14, confe We are tO ^now trees “by their fruits” (Matt. 7:20), we must

«ss that the Roman Catholic church turns out to be the most corrupt

and poisonous plant that ever grew on the surface of the earth: a reli­gious organization whose history would make an anarchist or nihilist blush for shame. The history of the Caesars from 100 B.C. to 325 A.D. would look like a Fellowship “cookout” alongside what took place after the popes seated themselves on Caesar’s vacant throne.107 No torture found in the concentration camps of Germany (Diels, Goering, Eicke, Kramer, Franz, Himmler, Koch, Hoess, and Palitzsch were all Roman Catholics) could not be found in practice by Catholics three hundred years before Adolph Hitler showed up. Hitler, a Catholic (as Metternich, Talleyrand, Jack Kennedy, Castro, Batista, Napoleon, Franco, Ted Kennedy, Charlemagne, Allende, and Bloody Mary), did not get his “swastika” from India (B.C.): it was painted on the entrance of the Catholic school where he was raised.108 There is nothing going on now in the “Archipelago” (Solzhenitsyn, 1977-1980) that was not in vogue three hundred years before Russia became one gigantic prison. With black magic involved in the lives of its members as soon as they were bom, and then black magic performed before their eyes every Sunday morning—as the black-robed priest went through his routine—it is no wonder that the character of this North AFRICAN religion brought forth its characteristic color from the DARK continent.

We call the thousand year reign of this voodoo mother, “THE DARK AGES.”

Infant sprinkling and the “mass” were the keys to Rome’s politi­cal and religious unity. With water splashing from a thousand “lavers,” she subjugated the heathen nations to do her bidding: power politics, excommunication, imprisonment, torture, and murder, “in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost,” of course. Nothing succeeds like godliness and piety.

CHAPTER SEVEN

Easter Bunnies and Christmas Trees

“Full well ye reject the commandment of God, that ye may keep your own tradition....Making the word of God of none effect through your tradition, which ye have delivered: and many such like things do ye.”

Mark 7:9, 13

The standard work on the life and death of the emperor Constantine is the famous panegyric written by Eusebius in his Ecclesiastical His­tory: it is called “The Life of Constantine.” Constantine’s first act of favor toward the churches after his victory over Maxentius at the Milvian Bridge, near Rome, was to erect a statue of himself in Rome.1 The “favor” that this was supposed to demonstrate to the churches was the fact that in this idol’s hand was a cross. Crosses come in four styles: the St. Andrew’s cross, which was the letter “X” (see Mark of the Beast, 1959); the Egyptian cross, which was the capital letter “T”; an upright Latin cross, which was a regular cross “f”; and the Greek cross, which was a square shaped “ + ”.

This design is an ancient one, for it symbolized cursing and bless­ing among ancient Egyptians, Indians, and Mexicans.2 Rejecting the Bible definitions relative to the sign immediately (Gal. 3:13), all of the Catholics” accepted it as a sign of a “blessing.” Bible rejection nat­urally is the first step in forming proper “Catholic” creedal statements (see Rome: the Great Private Interpreter, 1969).

.. ®ut Constantine’s “cross” was a very peculiar thing.3 It looked e a Greek Rho with a Greek Chi at the bottom of it: thusly

S ch*ef form of this is quite similar to the Egyptian crux ansate, or symbol “~”.4 jn Roman Catholic mythology you are to believe t the Rho and the Chi must refer to Constantine’s “conversion” to l^Us Christ because the two letters given happen to be the first two rs in Xpia-coq (“Christos,” Greek for “Christ,” which means

“anointed”).5 To obtain this ludicrous private interpretation, the Bible had to be rejected at once; for the Bible spoke of four “anointed” ones (Ezek. 28:14, Zech. 4:14), only one of whom was the “Lord’s Christ” (Acts 2:26-27, Luke 2:26). The “Christ” of “Chi-Rho” was very much like the “Teachings of the Twelve” —or, as they say in Christian schools (1980), “the original text” or “the original Greek text.” You pretend a thing is something that it is not: i.e., oranges and apples don’t have seeds or skins. Since the Bible denominated several “lords” (1 Cor. 8:5), and several “gods” (2 Cor. 4:4), and several Jesuses (2 Cor. 11:4), we don’t have to guess about multiple “Christs.” They are given in Matthew 24:24.

Constantine, the Roman emperor, was supposed to have seen this sign in a vision, or something like it,6 during a battle; at that time he heard some UFO occupant from a flying saucer say, “In this sign con­quer” (In Hoc Vinces). Since the signs are for the JEWS (1 Cor. 14:22), because they “require a sign” (1 Cor. 1:22), the first thing for a good “Catholic” to do with this incident is to pretend that Constantine was

a Jew being talked to by an apostle (Mark 16:17) who had the “signs.” The Catholics promptly made this correction in the New Testament

(although they couldn’t vouch for the UFO). If Constantine really did

hear what he said he heard, it brings up the question, “conquer WHAT?” Eusebius, who is writing the original account, fails to answer this question; as a matter of fact, he doesn’t even mention it. To tell the objective truth, he doesn’t even dare to ask it. Constantine pretended that it meant “conquer Maxentius, thereby liberating Rome” (see Castro, Hitler, Lenin, “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” etc.). Eusebius calls the sign a “saving symbol”7 and says that Connie had it put on his

spears and shields.

Constantine then proceeded to exempt the clergy from taxes (313), to abolish a few pagan practices that were offensive to Christians (315), to enjoin the observance of Sunday by all unsaved pagans (321), and then (324) to promise to every “convert” to “Christianity” twenty pieces of gold and a white robe. Naturally, there were record-breaking Sun­day school attendances in the next year, and the First Catholic Churc of Rome had a record number of baptisms to report—12,000 a yeap or more than twice as many as Jack Hyles and Jerry Falwell combin

However, Constantine did not get baptized himself. .

The last hours of Constantine are described by Eusebius. Naturey the church historian is prejudiced in his writing to the place of delinu » for Constantine had done him an eternal favor by asking him to PreP s| fifty copies of an African Bible for use in the Roman palace.8 Euse

and his friend Pamphilus went back to North Africa immediately (Eusebius was the bishop of Caesarea) and laid their hands on Origen’s Hexapla’ and his NASV of the New Testament, 5,800 changes from the Received Text of Antioch. Copying the fifth column out of that crit­ical and destructive work, they sent it to Connie with the Apocrypha in it as part of the Old Testament.10 To this day (1980), Origen’s “Bible” remains as the official Catholic Bible of Roman Catholicism. In the twen­tieth century it was published as the American Standard Version (1901), the New American Standard Version (1960), and the New International Version (1978). To encourage sales, the Old Testament Apocrypha was omitted in the modem frauds, although the “eclectic” manuscripts these “eclectic” texts came from (the Eusebian-Origenistic text via Caesarea) contained the scandalous forgeries as part of the inspired Old Testa­ment. 11

With such an honor bestowed upon him, Eusebius had to award kudos and kisses in his biographical work: so, he showered bouquets and bonbons until the “Life of Constantine” looked like a biography of God. Mark it: the first really subjective, prejudiced, lopsided piece of pagan propaganda in church history was written by the first church historian. A sample will suffice to convince the reader that not all of the loonies are in the “bin”:

The blessed Constantine was the only mortal man who continued to reign after his death. He was the only man in history whom God had so rewarded. He was the only monarch who in all his deeds had honored Almighty God and Christ. God made clear to all who do not lack INTELLIGENCE [see chapter 5, note 58] that the soul of Constantine would enjoy an ageless and endless reign.12

Did Constantine believe in salvation by grace through faith in the finished work of Christ? Of course not. He doesn’t mention the name of Jesus Christ one time in his letters to his bishops, nor does he mention Kon his death bed. He doesn’t even profess to have obtained salvation until a week before his death, and then he obtains it by being sprinkled ^water, which he says “confers IMMORTALITY.”13 Constantine ght that water baptism was “the SEAL which gives salvation.” tjnjer be>ng sprinkled he prayed, without using the name of Jesus one e, and then he said that in his own estimation he appeared to have tOr^Sep/ed immortal life.”14 If he did, he was the first man in the his- a<j. ° me human race who ever deserved it, and Eusebius should have tiiat record breaker to his list of “the only man who...etc.” pk en Constantine kicked the bucket, the “baths and the market-

Were closed.*’ and thne^ whn kori i.--- —

walked the streets in gloom.”15 The spearmen and bodyguards threw themselves on the ground tearing their garments and beating their heads while screaming at the top of their lungs.16 People ran around the city wailing and shouting and mourning for the death of their protector and “SAVIOUR.”17

This disgusting and revolting scene could only be equaled in mod­em times by the pagan lamentations that accompanied the death of America’s number one Communist (Michael Luther King, Jr.) or the death of a fornicating dopehead (Elvis Presley) who was “all things to all men that by all means he might damn some.” Eusebius seems to have either mistaken the death of Constantine for the death of Christ, or at least he has tried to write the account to give someone that impres­sion. He seems to have forgotten, if he ever knew it, that the greatest follower of Jesus Christ (who had founded the church in Rome and had written to the Romans) died alone and was buried in an unmarked grave. This apostle (the apostle to the Romans) said that he, himself, was the Christian example that Michael Luther King, Jr.; Elvis Presley; and Constantine were to follow (1 Tim. 1:16). Bible rejection produces some strange “Christians,” doesn’t it?

At any rate, the corpse was deposited in a gold coffin and then placed between twelve coffins representing the twelve apostles18—making Connie the thirteenth apostle: Paul was the thirteenth apostle. So, accord­ing to Eusebius (see The Mark of the Beast, 1959), thirteen coffins were put on a “high place,” and Constantine’s coffin was “ringed with golden candlelight and was a marvel to those who saw it, a marvel such as no man under the sun had ever beheld on earth since the world itself began.”19

So much for the credibility of the first church historian. Constantine’s funeral had evidently put Solomon’s temple (1 Kings 10:5, 16-27) out of business.

During the twenty-four years that Constantine reigned, he never managed to attain the status of a “church father.” In view of the fact that he called himself a “Bishop of Bishops”20—that is, an ARCH- bishop—and in view of the fact that all of the Catholic bishops accepted him as the final authority in religious disputes,21 it is rather strange that “no man called him father.” If he was spiritual enough to teaC theology22 and to call religious councils and to mediate between parties who were disputing about orthodox doctrine, what was defrocked angel? Not even Ignatius, Cyprian, or Polycarp ever had t e exalted spiritual privileges that Constantine had. A “bishop of bishops who cannot qualify to join the ranks of Papias and Irenaeus is a strang I nnAmuk/

n

ii

i

Now, the sudden reversal and shift by the Roman emperor from an aggressive policy of persecution to a cooperative spirit of tolerance naturally produced some remarkable changes in the character and con­duct of Christians and Christian assemblies. (Material for the times can be found in the works of Lactantius, Socrates, Sozomenus, Mosheim, Gibbon, Arendi, Milman, Heinichen, Keim, Latourette, et al.) The Roman coliseum was converted from a Super Bowl for gladiatorial combats into a county fair; the temples were converted into church build­ings; the statues of Venus, Apollos, Jupiter, and Aphrodite were replaced with statues of Peter, James, Mary, Joseph, and John; the smoke of heathen sacrifices was replaced with “incense” burned by a Christian “priest”;23 “water baptism into the mysteries” was replaced by baby sprinkling into the church; heathen candles were replaced with Chris­tian candles; and the type of books which were burned at Ephesus (Acts 19:19) were replaced with the North African forgeries of Origen and Eusebius. Schaff innocently refers to the whole operation as “the down­fall of heathenism.”24 It would be more properly called (by someone more exact and demanding in defining Christian practice) “the down­fall of the New Testament church.”

The influx of pagans into the local assemblies at this time was beyond belief. To “go with the tide” now meant to “become a Christian.” Christianity had become “popular” (Luke 16:15). It had never been popular (Acts 5:13) heretofore, at least not in the Biblical brand of it. In comes Constantine’s mamma (Helena) with the original cross that Christ was crucified on.25 She got this while divining for the healing of a sick man.26 Over to Jerusalem goes Constantine and builds a tem­ple inside the city (Heb. 13:12) and pretends that Christ was crucified “inside the gate” (Heb. 13:13). (This temple is called “The Church of the Holy Sepulchre” in 1980.) When Constantine called the Coun­cil of Nicaea together, he did so by virtue of the fact that in pagan Rome die Pontifex Maximus (the emperor) was the final judge and authority in all matters of faith.26 Constantine also called a council in 313 (Octo­ber) over which he presided as the supreme judge of religious matters.

. e New Testament scriptures had nothing to do with the calling of either religious council: it was an established practice before 100 B. C.

e called together another council at Arles (314). At these councils nstantine—unbaptized and counting on a future sprinkling to save pan later—stated that he was called of God to decide Biblical issues . ere diey dealt with correct doctrine28 and that UNITY was the most thaT*'1ant ab°ut New Testament Christianity. It was so important Hi Visions” among Christians (Novatians, Donatists, Montanists,

Paulicians, etc.) were not to be tolerated. In short, the Roman emperor was now ready, willing, and able to exterminate any Bible believing Christian who didn’t believe what a Roman Catholic was supposed to believe.

When the heathen joined the church, they brought their Christmas trees (Jer. 10:3-6) and their Easter bunnies (Acts 12:4) with them. The history of these items is well known.29 Vestal virgins, robed priests, wedding bands, religious processions, panoplies for statues, and prayers for the dead accompany the whole operation.30 With church member­ship made so easy that sprinkling with water upon a profession of faith in “Christianity” entitled the neophyte to join—plus the inducement of the twenty pieces of silver and the new suit (notes 7, 8)—who could keep unsaved pagans out of the local church? If you had to close shop of Sunday (and under Caesar’s decree you had to), why not attend the “church of your choice”? Especially since, in Rome, it was the same one the emperor was a member of.

The Catholic church rapidly became the only church, and when Constantine left town and headed for Istanbul (Byzantium) to rename it after himself (Constantinople), he left the Roman bishop in Rome (330 A.D.) with not only a “splendid residence,” but a “new, Chris­tian Rome. ”31 The expression is from Schaff, and thus a modem church historian (see Eusebius, above) is guilty of propagating one of the gross­est heresies ever taught or suggested in the history of the church: the utterly incredible notion that a city or a town can be a Christian city or a town. From this unfounded notion, Calvin presumed that he could make Geneva a Christian city, and many of the Puritans (1620- 1680) assumed that you could make the Massachusetts Bay Colony into a Christian colony and Salem into a Christian city. Since a little leaven eventually leavens the whole lump, the Catholics, from the time of Augustine on, carried this absurd fantasy to the extreme and actually spoke seriously of Christian “nations.” And as if this weren’t the height of nonsense, the popes carried it one step further and declared that there was a “Holy Roman Empire,” as though an empire could be “holy.

The only holy things on this earth since Acts 2 are the Holy Bible, the Holy Spirit, and the temple of the Holy Ghost which is the believer s body. Any child in Africa, Asia, Europe, or the Americas could have found that out in less than thirty minutes if a Bible believing Christian had been his guide (Rom. 1:2; 1 Cor. 2:13; 3:17).

Gregory Nazianzen (330-390) says that Rome was loaded with trea­sure and became crowned as the “queen” of cities.32 A huge basilica (building program) was created for the Roman bishop, and down he

B 1X1 B

sat clothed in purple and scarlet (Rev. 17) with his crown on his head (Rev. 17) and his scepter in his hand (Luke 4:6), and therein began the “Millennial reign’’ of God’s “will be done on earth as it is in heaven” (see The Sure Word of Prophecy, 1969). Adultery was pun­ished, concubinage was forbidden, women were given some rights, and marriage of near relatives was restricted.33 Later, with the help of Augustine’s book, The City of God, the populace and members of the local congregations were encouraged to believe that Rome was the New Jerusalem, and that the bishops and priests of the Catholic church were the earthly rulers destined to conquer the world for Jesus Christ (Rev. 6:2; Matt. 13:33; see comments in those commentaries) and reign on thrones (Rev. 20:2-4). The advancement of civil liberties and human rights and all phases of humanistic socialism effectively convinced the Bible rejecting apostates of the times that the kingdom was coming, or that having already come, it was rapidly being “spread” as “His truth is marching on,” etc.

Perhaps the most damaging result of Constantine’s decrees of tol­eration was the effect that they had on Catholic theologians and Bible teachers, for until this time nearly every church father (with the excep­tion of the apostates in North Africa—Origen, Clement, and Dionysius) was what we now call “Pre-millennialist.”34 In early times, the Bible doctrine was called “Chiliasm.” Briefly, Chiliasm was a negative view of human nature expressed by the following beliefs in eschatology (the future);

1. Man in his natural state, or even regenerated by the Holy Spirit, is still so evil in his nature (Luke 11:13; Gal. 1:4; Gen. 6:5) that he is unable to do God’s will “on earth as it is in heaven” (Matt. 6:10) with ANY amount of time or resources.

2. Therefore, the thousand year reign of perfect peace, spoken of in both Testaments (Isa. 11:1-12; Joel 2; Amos 9:14; Zech. 14:1-10; Matt. 19:28; 25:31; Luke 1:30-33; Rev. 20:1 -6), cannot come in upon this earth until the King of this earth, the King of Kings (Rev. 19:16), The Lord Jesus Christ, returns visibly and bodily (Acts 1:11) to set up that kingdom. To do this He will destroy (Dan. 2:44) every form of religious and political government that man has set up on this earth (Zeph. 3:8), and this will be done brutally and without mercy (Joel

This layout of Biblical doctrine was espoused by Barnabas, Papias, Justin Martyr, Irenaeus, Tertullian, Lactantius, Commodian, Victorinus, Methodius; the list of Pre-millennial witnesses, therefore, runs Un r°ken from 120 to 311 A.D. Origen, however, called this major

Paulicians, etc.) were not to be tolerated. In short, the Roman emperor was now ready, willing, and able to exterminate any Bible believing Christian who didn’t believe what a Roman Catholic was supposed to believe.

When the heathen joined the church, they brought their Christmas trees (Jer. 10:3-6) and their Easter bunnies (Acts 12:4) with them. The history of these items is well known.29 Vestal virgins, robed priests, wedding bands, religious processions, panoplies for statues, and prayers for the dead accompany the whole operation.30 With church member­ship made so easy that sprinkling with water upon a profession of faith in “Christianity” entitled the neophyte to join—plus the inducement of the twenty pieces of silver and the new suit (notes 7, 8)—who could keep unsaved pagans out of the local church? If you had to close shop of Sunday (and under Caesar’s decree you had to), why not attend the “church of your choice”? Especially since, in Rome, it was the same one the emperor was a member of.

The Catholic church rapidly became the only church, and when Constantine left town and headed for Istanbul (Byzantium) to rename it after himself (Constantinople), he left the Roman bishop in Rome (330 A.D.) with not only a “splendid residence,” but a “new, Chris­tian Rome.”31 The expression is from Schaff, and thus a modem church historian (see Eusebius, above) is guilty of propagating one of the gross­est heresies ever taught or suggested in the history of the church: the utterly incredible notion that a city or a town can be a Christian city or a town. From this unfounded notion, Calvin presumed that he could make Geneva a Christian city, and many of the Puritans (1620- 1680) assumed that you could make the Massachusetts Bay Colony into a Christian colony and Salem into a Christian city. Since a little leaven eventually leavens the whole lump, the Catholics, from the time of Augustine on, carried this absurd fantasy to the extreme and actually spoke seriously of Christian “nations. ” And as if this weren’t the height of nonsense, the popes carried it one step further and declared that there was a “Holy Roman Empire,” as though an empire could be “holy.

The only holy things on this earth since Acts 2 are the Holy Bible, the Holy Spirit, and the temple of the Holy Ghost which is the believer s body. Any child in Africa, Asia, Europe, or the Americas could have found that out in less than thirty minutes if a Bible believing Christian had been his guide (Rom. 1:2; 1 Cor. 2:13; 3:17).

Gregory Nazianzen (330-390) says that Rome was loaded with trea­sure and became crowned as the “queen” of cities.32 A huge basilica (building program) was created for the Roman bishop, and down he

sat clothed in purple and scarlet (Rev. 17) with his crown on his head (Rev. 17) and his scepter in his hand (Luke 4:6), and therein began the “Millennial reign” of God’s “will be done on earth as it is in heaven” (see The Sure Word of Prophecy, 1969). Adultery was pun­ished, concubinage was forbidden, women were given some rights, and marriage of near relatives was restricted.33 Later, with the help of Augustine’s book, The City of God, the populace and members of the local congregations were encouraged to believe that Rome was the New Jerusalem, and that the bishops and priests of the Catholic church were the earthly rulers destined to conquer the world for Jesus Christ (Rev. 6:2; Matt. 13:33; see comments in those commentaries) and reign on thrones (Rev. 20:2-4). The advancement of civil liberties and human rights and all phases of humanistic socialism effectively convinced the Bible rejecting apostates of the times that the kingdom was coming, or that having already come, it was rapidly being “spread” as “His truth is marching on,” etc.

Perhaps the most damaging result of Constantine’s decrees of tol­eration was the effect that they had on Catholic theologians and Bible teachers, for until this time nearly every church father (with the excep­tion of the apostates in North Africa—Origen, Clement, and Dionysius) was what we now call “Pre-millennialist.”34 In early times, the Bible doctrine was called “Chiliasm.” Briefly, Chiliasm was a negative view of human nature expressed by the following beliefs in eschatology (the future):

1. Man in his natural state, or even regenerated by the Holy Spirit, is still so evil in his nature (Luke 11:13; Gal. 1:4; Gen. 6:5) that he is unable to do God’s will “on earth as it is in heaven” (Matt. 6:10) with ANY amount of time or resources.

2. Therefore, the thousand year reign of perfect peace, spoken of in both Testaments (Isa. 11:1-12; Joel 2; Amos 9:14; Zech. 14:1-10; Matt. 19:28; 25:31; Luke 1:30-33; Rev. 20:1-6), cannot come in upon this earth until the King of this earth, the King of Kings (Rev. 19:16), The Lord Jesus Christ, returns visibly and bodily (Acts 1:11) to set up that kingdom. To do this He will destroy (Dan. 2:44) every form of religious and political government that man has set up on this earth 2^^ 3 8)’ and this will be done brutally and without mercy (Joel

This layout of Biblical doctrine was espoused by Barnabas, Papias, Ustin Martyr, Irenaeus, Tertullian, Lactantius, Commodian, Victorinus, and Methodius; the list of Pre-millennial witnesses, therefore, runs Un ro^en from 120 to 311 A.D. Origen, however, called this major

Bible truth “a Jewish dream.”35 {Delitzsch, when invited to join the Fundamentalists in 1886, called it “crass literalism.”36) Since Origen moved to Caesarea in Palestine (235) it was quite natural that the bishop of the city (Eusebius) would also reject Chiliasm: ditto Augustine, Calvin, and Jerome.^

The main opposing view to Pre-millennialism, obviously, is POST- millennialism. This view accentuates the essential goodness of human nature, even though its strongest advocate in the ancient church (Augustine) professed to believe in the total depravity of man. POST- millennialism is the positive view (Gen. 3:1) of man; so it is the view adopted by all unsaved atheists, communists, liberals, politicians, Bible rejecting church historians, as well as Bible perverting religious leaders.

Now, we have gone to great length in discussing these matters in a work published first in 1969, called The Sure Word of Prophecy, so it will suffice here to note only that all politicians and religious leaders have to hold out some hope for the human race to get and keep its support. Although this hope may vary from New Deals, Guyana Settlements, Wars on Poverty, and New Foundations to Golden Ages, Thousand Year Reichs, and Utopias, it is always the same false hope: i.e., that man can bring in peace on earth before the Lord returns. It is the per­sistent delusion that no matter what God says about man (Jer. 17:5; Rom. 3:15-25; Gen. 8:21), man is able to bring in an ideal society with an ideal government, without the GOVERNOR (Isa. 9:6). And whether this system is called an oligarchy, a monarchy, a reich, a republic, a soviet, a democracy, a Vatican state, or a union, or whether it be social­ist (Jim Jones was a devout Marxist), fascist, communist, democratic, or Catholic, it is the same speckled bird (Jer. 12:9). It is the man-made substitute for the God-ordained cure (Rev. 11:15; Ps. 2:6).

The Augsburg Confession of the Lutheran church38 treated the Bible doctrine of the Second Coming as a Jewish “opinion,” and the forty- first article of the Anglican Articles drawn up by Cranmer (1553) states that the Bible doctrine of Christ’s earthly reign is a “fable of Jewish dotage.” Augustine had a much more pious way of rejecting the truth, he said simply that the thousand year reign of Christ (Rev. 20:1-6) began at Pentecost so that Christ is now reigning. The Church of Christ (Campbellites) teach the heresy just like that.39 This teaching, calle POST-millennialism, took a bad beating during World War I (191 1918). With one and all looking for the sudden appearance of ‘ peace on earth, good will to men,” the Germans came through Belgium (1914) like a wildcat going through a paper bag. When the dust sett over ten million men had been killed and twenty million wounde , a J

the nations were saddled with a monetary debt ($18,805,919,420) that they haven’t paid back yet, as of 1980.

Christ’s “Millennial reign’’ (if it began at Pentecost) seemed to have a few “bugs’’ in it, if you will pardon the irreverent treatment of the subject. On once occasion, a “Christian’’ was remonstrating with a Bible believer about these kingdom matters and the Christian informed the believer that the devil had already been chained for a thousand years; that is, since the term “a thousand years” didn’t really mean a literal thousand years (see Rev. 20:1-5 and comments in that commentary) that the thousand years began in Acts 1, and the devil had actually been chained for a period of over 1,900 years. To this the believer commented, “Well, he sho do have a long chain, don’t he?” One does not have to be a Greek grammarian to appreciate the theological problem.

Since many of the “brethren” who were Post-millennial had no post left to lean on after World War I—and not even a toothpick to lean on after World War II—they decided that any defection from the truth was better than accepting the truth, so they went back to an old Calvin- istic position: they subscribed to A-millennialism. A-millennialism, in a nutshell, means that Jesus Christ is not about to set up a literal reign on this earth at Jerusalem for one thousand years, now or later, whether you believe in depravity or not. To authenticate the Calvinistic half­measure, the A-millennialists decided that the first resurrection of Revelation 20:5 would have to be a spiritual resurrection, for if they let it stand as a literal bodily resurrection (Rev. 20:5), this would sepa­rate two physical resurrections by a literal period of a thousand years. To pervert this plain Bible truth, the A-millennialists pretended that the “first resurrection” of Revelation 20:5 was the spiritual resurrection of Ephesians 2:1-4. This would place the resurrection in the PAST for the Christians who were reading Revelation 20. And this is exactly how J.G. Machen and Benjamin Warfield endorsed the perversion as “sound doctrine” (2 Tim. 2:18), unwittingly putting themselves into the shoes °f genuine heretics who were turned over to Satan (1 Tim. 1:20) by Paul for the destruction of the flesh (1 Cor. 5:5). Eighty percent of the men who translated the ASV of 1901 were in those shoes when they *ranslated Philip Schaff, a Post-millennialist who swore that he „ ^eved IN and hoped FOR “one holy Catholic apostolic church...one

and one shepherd,”40 was the head of that committee. Any Roman Eg’olic from Catherine de'Medici and Bloody Mary to Califano (HEW) Schj»fO,Pe (John Paul II) would subscribe to that papal creed.

s creed is the creed of all popes: there has not been one Pre- enn‘al pope in the history of the Catholic church. They all “hope

for” and ‘‘believe in” the religious unity of the entire world under Roman Catholic domination BEFORE the Second Advent of Jesus Christ.

That is the official (nihil obstat) theological belief as stated by Cath­olic theologians in the twentieth century.41 In reality this “unity” had already been prophesied in Revelation 13:1-6 more than two hundred years before there were any “Catholics,” and it will be unity under Satan, as the “one shepherd” (Zech. 11:15, 16).

When the mass of pagan idolaters, all believing in “mankind” and “man is the measure of all things,” came into the local churches, espe­cially those churches in Rome (313-340 A.D.), they brought with them the accumulated trash from four thousand years of pagan idolatry. These “added ingredients” are kneaded into one lump of “apostolic” leaven (Matt. 13:33) that is already fermenting, and now the orthodox “Cath­olic” of the fourth and fifth centuries is faced with:

1. A deified Mother who gave birth to Deity: Semiramis deified as Rhea; Vesta under the name of Venus; Hestia the “queen of heaven” as Sacca; Europa who is called Minerva; Venus who is called Lakshmi; the Elie woman who is called the Lorelei; and, above all, THE MOTHER OF HARLOTS (Rev. 17), called “Mary, the Queen of Heaven” (Jer. 44:19).

2. The Saturnalia was called Ule day, Meni, Mane, or Mani. In came the mistletoe with the boar’s head and the Christmas goose. “Lady Day” shows up with the birthday of Baal on the 25th of December.

3. “Easter” from Astarte and Ishtar, around Bel Day (May 1st, Beltaine); Hindu, Babylonian, and Japanese eggs show up at sacred fes­tivals; dyed and colored eggs from the festivals in China; Venus (Astarte) hatching out from an egg, etc.43

4. The sign of the cross, the rosary, relic worship, idol proces­sions, lamps, and wax candles, prayers for the dead,44 and above all the supreme “PONTIFF,”45 ruler of heaven, earth, and hell—God man­ifest in the flesh on this earth—sitting as absolute sovereign above all jurisdictions and powers, with power to kill,46 uproot, tear down, and destroy, and with power to use armed force to eradicate Bible believ­ing “dissidents.”47

What had begun as a “little flock” (Luke 12:32) of sheep (John 10:1-28) had now become a zoo, and although the “Pontiff had not | yet fully magnified himself to the extent of the things listed under number four above, the lenses were getting lined up to magnify in that direc tion. The “chief shepherd,” the Roman bishop, was rapidly assuryl” I the contours of a Fascist dictator, and we are not surprised to find t es

ravening wolves in sheep’s clothing, declaring later that “every human creature under the rigid necessity of saving his soul must be subject to the Roman Pontiff.' ’48 Modern Catholics have “cooled” this incred­ible blasphemy to the following soup:

1. All unsaved men have God for their Father and Christ for their brother.49

2. But outside of the church, not one is joined to Christ, hut there are “anonymous” Christians who are really “outside” the church; they just never joined the church.50

3. But only through water baptism can one join Christ, and only the Catholic church can mediate Bible truth about water baptism to any­one.51

4. But Mark 16:16 (the “damned”) is not a reference to people who don’t believe on Christ; it is a reference to people who think they ought to join the Catholic church and then DON’T.52

The rabid psychosis of religious megalomaniacs like Pope Boniface often erupts into such blasphemous gibberish as “The Vicar of Jesus Christ is placed in the middle between God and man, on this side of God but beyond man, less than God but greater than man: who judges all but is JUDGED BY NO ONE.”53 And "All Christians therefore

should look upon the pope as God Himself.”54 These same deranged fanatics in America state55 that since the Roman Catholic church is the only true church, she “must demand the right of freedom for herself ALONE,” and no one has a real right to accept any religion save the Catholic church, or to practice any form of divine worship, save that “commanded or sanctioned by the Catholic church.”56 Having taken such a “hard-line” stance against everyone, it is not surprising that when the Soviets ran Cardinal Mindszenty out of Hungary (1949), they set up their own secret police agents as bishops, cardinals, priests, and monastery heads in Hungary.57 One reaps what one sows.

When Mussolini signed his Fascist concordant with the pope (1929), I the concession Musso made was that “whosoever publicly slanders the Catholic religion of the STATE shall be punished with imprisonment rone year”58 (The term “slander” in this case means, say for exam- P e, the entire content of Foxe ’s Book of Martyrs, the entire content 0 at‘can Imperialism in the Twentieth Century, or the entire content 0 the works of Paul Blanshard and Ian Paisley.)

jLfe These delusions of megalomania assumed their present proportion r the Bishop of Rome took the imperial seat, left vacant by ^Onstantine in 330 A.D., and the Catholics have been suffering from

I paranoid hallucination ever since. The reader will take note that

the quotations given above are from the twentieth century: Rome never changes.

Augustine’s funny book, The City of God, states the case clearly for every apostate from Origen to A.T. Robertson. This work took twelve years to write (413-426), and it probably contains more non­Christian, anti-scriptural theology than any work written in that century by a professing Christian. Of this work, Schaff says “it was the most powerful, profound, and fertile production in refutation of heathenism and vindication of Christianity” in the ancient church.59 It was the “noblest work.. .which the GENIUS OF MAN had as yet contributed. ”M This “noble work” states that the thousand year reign of Christ is fig­urative and not literal (chapter 9), exactly as it is stated by modern Cath­olic theologians;61 that Christians swallow Christ’s literal body at the “eucharist” (chapter 20); that the Apocrypha (Esdras, Tobit, Judith) is inspired;62 that a man is saved from the second death (Rev. 20:14) by martyrdom;63 that Adam’s soul died, not his spirit; that the Septuagint, with the Apocrypha, is inspired;64 that the references to the resurrec­tion and restoration of Israel in Hosea 6:2 were fulfilled in 33 A.D.;65

that the resurrected saints who sit in judgment in Revelation 20 are Cath­olic priests and bishops now judging the heathen;66 that Malachi 4 is a reference to the last judgment instead of the Second Advent;67 that Romans 8:29 refers to a present spiritual growth in grace, not a final state at the resurrection;68 and that unsprinkled babies go to hell if they are not “elect” babies.69 Further, the Second Coming of Christ occurs one piece of Christ at a time every Sunday morning, in Catholic churches, until the whole body shows up.70

This is the pagan caricature of the Holy Bible which Augustine gave to mankind and the Catholic church: Augustine is one of their great “doctors.” This is the “fertile, profound, noble genius” ofa man who passed off for fifteen centuries as a Bible believing Christian. He was no more a Bible believing Christian than Hort or Brunner. He believed a number of things taken out of the Bible and threw the rest of the Book in the trash can—every time a verse in it crossed his own philosophical speculations and political ambitions. How do members of the Cut (Schaff, Newman, Bob Jones III, Robert Sumner, Hort, et al.) justify such conduct? Simple: they plead ignorance for the defendant or e se “latitude of opinion” on nonessentials. Every time a Cult member , caught red-handed in sin, he is justified by his fellow Cultists in twentieth century, who say “in those days they didn’t have the ig we now have.” And while they are saying this, they themselves harassing every real Bible believer within five hundred miles by imp

ing doubts in his mind about the absolute authority of the very light that “they didn’t have.”71 They had it; they just turned it out. The mod­em light dimmers bear witness as to whose “children” they are (Matt. 23:30-31). The characteristic of the modern Alexandrian Cult member is not that he HAS ‘‘advanced light.” The characteristic truth of the modem Cultists is that he rejects the light he has and pretends that when God gave it (1611), the men He used didn’t have any light (or not as much light as HE has now) because he had destroyed the light God turned on. That is, he is Augustinian.

When Augustine comes on the scene (354430), the ground has been well-plowed and tilled for him by the ornate Council of Nicaea. This council presumably met to discuss matters of Trinitarian doctrine, but before it met, the leader and caller of the council (Constantine) had been involved in much more practical matters than those of “heterusios,” “homoiousios,” “anomoios,” and “katoousian.”72 You see, by 325 A.D., the main issue in the body of Christ had nothing to do with “substances” and “essences.” The sore point was water baptism (see previous chapter). Constantine’s Easter bunnies and Christmas trees had only made those matters worse. (In 1978 when Jerry Falwell went to confer with The Sword of the Lord brethren, he was shocked to find out that far from “separation” being the big issue—as Faith Magazine and the “Sword’’ would have you to believe—the issue was the author­ity of the King James Bible. It upset Jerry so badly that he went home and inserted comments into his national broadcasts against those who believed the AV to be the word of God.73) When the World Congress of Fundamentalism meets, it goes through cute, little “militant maneuvers” (1970-1980), trying to convince the body of Christ that it is “boldly dealing with THE issues.”74 The ISSUES are not separa­tion or “Neo-Evangelicalism.”’ To tell you the truth, those have never been the issues in America or Europe in four hundred years, nor has the issue since 1600 been “the inspired originals.” Councils don’t ever . * with the real issues. So, in 325 A.D., when Constantine sat down ,n his glorious robes of state to mediate between two groups of dead Orthodox “Fundamentalists,” the real issues were swept under the rug.

I 1- The final and absolute authority for Christian faith and practice. _ 3" What that authority said about Chiliasm (the Second Coming °* Christ.).

I 3. What the final authority said about WATER BAPTISM.”

Or this reason, you will find no statement on items two or three Fu^ d- Cree<^ °f &°b J°nes University from 1929 to 1980, although the n amenta! ist Creed of J. Frank Norris (First Baptist Church, Ft.

Worth, Texas) has a statement in it on BOTH articles.16 There is evi­dently a wide gap right in the middle of the Fundamentalists themselves. There are two kinds of “Fundamentalists.” The first statement in the creed at Bob Jones University refers to a “final authority” that no stu­dent or faculty member of that school has ever seen or read.

Nothing like ducking the issue, is there?

In 314 A.D., the Catholics agreed to allow the sun worshipper Constantine to act as a “go between” between the Catholics and the Donatists.77 At this point, Constantine’s “tolerance” suddenly evapo­rated (it had been going on nicely for one year: 313-314). The trouble was the issue of authority. Constantine found his authority questioned by these people (Donatists) who refused to baptize infants and who held that baptismal regeneration was a doctrine of the devil.78 Constantine could have “kept his cool,” only the Donatists immediately brought up the first and main problem that has been the first and main problem on this earth since Genesis 1:1. Who is in charge? (See The Sure Word of Prophecy, pp. 1-4.) Constantine did the only thing that a good Chris­tian emperor could dp under such circumstances: he began killing Donatists.79

Now, what was an emperor doing presiding over a meeting be­tween local churches? Had the HEW moved in? What business do ordained pastors and elders have accusing each other (1 Cor. 6:1-6) in court, especially in the court of a sun-worshipping pagan politician? Constantine put some of the Donatists to death. He didn’t touch the hair on any “Catholic.” Following “the greatest mortal man who ever lived” (Eusebius’ Life of Constantine, see above), Optaus, the Bishop of Mela at Numidia (Council of 411), wrote a book against them, and then in 377 A.D. the Emperor Gratian deprived the Donatists of all of their churches, prohibiting their assemblies in public and private.80 In 411, at a Council in Carthage, 286 Catholics triumphed over 279 Donatists who were defeated primarily because of Augustine’s influ­ence at court81 and the “fog of verbiage” in his writings (City of God, etc.)—which made him appear as an eloquent intellectual; only the writ­ings of Westcott and Hort (1884) could match Augustine when it came to sophisticated smokescreens. We don’t have to guess why the Donatists lost out if we remember Mr. Lord’s comment on Augustine s in u ence (see chapter 6, note 80). The death sentence was passed on a^ Donatists by Honorius and Theodosius (emperors) if they were cau® rebaptizing any “Catholics.”82 That is, active persecution against peo^ pie who would not accept infant baptism or Catholics baptism with Constantine and continued throughout and after the Counc

By the time Caesar (Constantine) came swishing into the Council of Nicaea in purple and scarlet, adorned with gold and diamonds,83 he had already consorted with his purple and scarlet clad wife (Rev. 17:4), and his hands were already dripping with the blood (Rev. 17:6) of Bible believing Christians. “Hail, Caesar! We, who are about to die, salute thee!”

Nicaea marks the beginning of the Pergamos period. The two main protagonists of that fiasco were Arius and Athanasius. Arius of Alex­andria (256-336), once orthodox, was forced into the Jehovah’s Wit­ness position of the New American Standard Version (John 1:18). Athanasius, also of Alexandria (296-372), raised under Origen, took the ‘‘orthodox position” recommended by John Calvin and the Westminster Confession. Calvin had Servetus (1511-1553) burned at the stake for not subscribing to this Alexandrian position. Observe that Alexandria produced both opponents: both engaged in nonessential matters which would be thrashed out while the council was avoiding the real issues. Members of the Alexandrian Cult in 1980 behave exactly as they did then. The final authority for them is the combined consen­sus of the majority of ‘‘orthodox” scholars: where those findings contradict the AV text, the AV text is abandoned.

CHAPTER EIGHT

The First World Congress of Fundamentalism

“Now the end of the commandment is charity out of a pure heart, and of a good conscience, and of faith unfeigned: From which some having swerved have turned aside unto vain jangling;” 1 Timothy 1:5-6

Now, one would think that when Christians sit down at a table to argue out matters such as the Biblical doctrine of the Trinity—one of the greatest mysteries of the Bible—before a pagan sun worshipper, that they would “take heed to their lips” and “look well to their going,” especially with African bishops present (from Egypt) who thought that Mary was a member of the Trinity.1 However, when these plenipoten­tiaries (big wheels) sat down they became ensnared in the most vaporous and theoretical abstractions anyone ever toyed with since Socrates committed suicide. Without settling one major issue then current (the matter of absolute authority, the place of water baptism in salvation, the sprinkling of infants, the independency of the local church, the immi­nent return of Christ), these half-baked, dead-orthodox theologians sat down to fight out Origen’s philosophical propositions which had origi­nated and were fostered in the school of Alexandria.2 Granted that there *ere some mighty and noble Christians present,3 the entire course of e meetlng, the agenda, and the manner in which it was carried out would be worthy of a Democratic convention discussing upralapsarianism and infralapsarianism. As one would say in the ^K^ular, “the whole scene was the pits.”

“*gs 0^ Apost^es Creed,” which took a major place in the proceed- ph- ■ J*25 A.D., had a dubious background. The earliest creed was "Cathr>i fr°m Marceilus and was in Greek: it omitted the magic word

,c> so it was not adopted.4 The canons of the Council of Nicaea

set up principles in hierarchical organization which are anti-Christian and found nowhere in the scriptures.3 Besides the creed, Gelasius says that nine corollaries were attached, the last one being a dogmatic state­ment on Pre-millennarianism.6 This is denied by Myers, who writes for the Catholic Encyclopedia.1 Naturally it would be, since no Catholic pope, priest, nun, bishop, or archbishop was ever Pre-millennial. Mod­em nihil obstat literature of the Catholic church states that there will be no rapture, no restoration of Israel, no Millennium, and no Judgment Seat of Christ.8 Until the Council of Nicaea, Eusebius himself was a Pre-millennialist, and he even included part of the Gospel Imperative in his “creed.”7 Furthermore, Justin, Papias, Irenaeus, Methodius, Polycarp, Ignatius, Commodian, and Hippolytus were all Pre- millennialists.10 The Council of Nicaea finished off the Pre-millennial truths of the Second Coming of Christ: the corollary was not adopted, and the way was paved for the most distorted and grotesque non-Christian “history” of the first millennium: Augustine’s City of God.

From Augustine (354-430) onward, the Roman Catholic church comes into full view. The first person to misapply Matthew 16 to Rome was the African Cyprian, and this idea was developed in North Africa11—not Syria. Believing that the Roman church was founded on Peter and was destined to bring in “peace on earth to men of good will” (Pope John XXIII’s “Encyclical”), the potency was taken out of the Old Testament by claiming for the Catholic hierarchy the literal prom­ises that God made to the Jews. The Catholic political system was called “The New Israel,” and the stage was set for materialism, syncretism, commingling with the heathen, war, murders, atrocities, and every other pernicious form of the papacy (in the name of “faith” and “the faith”) known today. Warfield states that Augustine was in a “true sense the founder of Roman Catholicism.”12 He was an African.

Carefully avoiding the issue of supreme authority—which was the basic issue at the Triple Alliance (1882-1890), the National Convention (1792-1795), the United Nations (1945-1980), the Hall at Versailles (June 1919), the League of Nations (1919-1933), the National Assem­bly (1789-1791), the Peace of Westphalia (1648), the Hanseatic League (1250-1450), the Second Internationale (1914), the Adamic earth (Gen J 2), and the pre-Adamic earth (Gen. 1:1; Isa. 14:13), the American M ical Association (1960-1980), the Magna Charta (1215), the Holy Roman Empire (800-1806), the Third Reich (1933-1945), the Hague Contej ences (1899-1907), the Schmalkaldic League (1531), the Congress <*| Vienna (1814), the Quadruple Alliance (1818), the National EducatKM Association (1950-1980), the British Parliament (1630-1980),

houses of Congress (1776-1980), the Minutemen, the Weathermen, and the Communist party—the bishops at Nicaea set about to determine whether a Bible believing Christian endorsed ousia, or phusis, with unum in numero, or ens unum in multis. On the other hand, it may have been more scriptural to believe in homoousion rather than monoousion (or toutoousion or heteroousion), but the main point was that hypostatses and triousian were like “proprietas personalis,” which would be an economic trinity or an imminent trinity. That is, if the “consubstanti- ality” of the essence was ‘‘unum in specie,” the whole thing might have been settled with E Pluribus Unum. And if it were settled, what then? If you believed everything the council decided on, you would go to hell like a bullet: the new birth is not conditioned on subscribing to a creed; it is conditioned on receiving a living Saviour (John 1:12-13).

So, while the zealous hairsplitters of Constantine’s assembly played puss-in-the-corner for the benefit of their congregations, which were now stuffed full of Christmas worshipping pagans, the world went on to hell as usual, and the local churches went ‘‘down the tube” into an

Imperial State Church that swallowed them up like jelly beans.

Of the ‘‘creed” which finally issued forth from this misguided interplay of confused minds (the Athanasian Creed), Philip Schaff says

‘‘it was unsurpassed as a masterpiece of logical clearness, rigor, and

precision. ” If there could have been some way to explain the inexhaust­ible depths of a mystery of faith into which the angels desire to look, “this liturgical, theological confession achieves the task.”13 That is, first Philip misapplied a clear verse in his own Bible (1 Peter 1:12), and then he proclaimed that not even the Bible itself was as clear in presenting the truth as the man-made creed; therefore it was superior to the Bible.14 Thus, a man-made, philosophical explanation of the Trinity, drummed up at a church state council, became the supreme authority in all matters of ‘‘faith and practice,” and it was eventually to be enforced with FIRE and SWORD against any Bible believer who differed with it.15 Let not the reader think for a moment that we have

overstated anything. The end product of this Roman-ecumenical-*‘one Mfrherd bit stated that a man could not even be saved from hell unless ^R*held to the Catholic faith. ”16 Any man who doesn’t keep the decrees e c°uncils ‘‘whole and undefiled” will perish in hell. You cannot HL heaven unless you accept the doctrine of the Trinity, as set up ^P-onstantine’s council.17 For this reason, John Calvin (1509-1564)

Christian burned at the stake.18 According to the Athanasian counrj~Atllanasius was a champion of “Catholic orthodoxy” at the

—a sinner is saved by good WORKS.19 Schaff takes the burden

for such a remarkable piece of anti-scriptural blundering off of Athanasius’s shoulders and tells us that the origin of the Athanasian Creed was “veiled in mysterious darkness” and that it was “not so much the work of any one person as a production of the SPIRIT OF THE CHURCH. ”20 Exactly: it was the production of a Bible rejecting whore (Rev. 17:1-8). And if one goes back to the Nicene Creed of 325 A.D. and places it alongside the Nicaeno-Constantinopolitan Creed of 381, he will not fare any better than sailing along with Athanasius. The Creed of 325 was so short (less than a quarter of a page of modern print) it didn’t have time to go into refinements. However, in less than twenty years after it was published, it was revised at Antioch (341 A.D.) with this interesting addenda: “...they are condemned by the Holy CATHOLIC and APOSTOLIC church.”21 Quickly (381 A.D.) this was expanded to “...in only one holy CATHOLIC and apostolic church... acknowledging ONE BAPTISM for the remission of sins."22

And there, enthroned in robes of righteousness, sit three of the worst doctrinal errors that ever appeared in a prominent place.

1. All the apostles had been dead for over two hundred years, and not one apostle who ever lived believed in a church state, nor would he have if he had been living at the time that Rome professed to be “apostolic.” The apostles had signs for the Jews (2 Cor. 12:12; Mark 16:17; 1 Cor. 1:22) and were members of a local church separated from the state. To call a religious prostitute “APOSTOLIC” was blasphemy.

2. The “one baptism,” wrested from the context of Ephesians 4:5, could not have been a reference to water under any circumstance; and if it had been, then everyone in Acts 4-28 went to hell because no one there was baptized according to the Jewish formula given at Pentecost (Acts 2:8).

3. Ignatius’s slip of the lip (“Catholic,” see chapter 4, note 40) had at last “arrived” and found its place in the sun by its application to a body of professing Christians, when the word itself was of heathen, philosophical origin and could not be found in one copy of any Greek New Testament manuscript or any ancient New Testament translation taken from any set of Greek New Testament manuscripts.

It is plain to the most prejudiced mind (Catholic) that WATER bap- tism was such a terrific issue before, during, and after the Counci o Nicaea that a perversion of its Biblical nature had to be include i “orthodox creeds” to enforce what a Christian was supposed to be'ieV®, Exactly as we find it today in modern “World Ecumenical ^°unC1Acgj or “World Councils of Fundamentalism,” the burning issues are

tn handle: they don’t come up on the agenda.

In the days of the Nicene fathers, there were three red-hot issues that were keeping the whole empire in an uproar. The first of these, as we noted, was adult water baptism: the doctrinal position of the Donatists and the Montanists was a testimony to the fact that “Catholic orthodoxy” on this matter was now bordering on heresy. The second of these was discipline and purity in the local church: the defection of the Novations and Montanists was proof that “church splits” were rarely over matters of the “Trinity.” The third issue was the Second Coming of Jesus Christ: the Montanists and the theological position of the early church fathers (100-300 A.D.) was proof that “Catholic orthodoxy” in “spreading the kingdom” must have had a few wrinkles in it that needed ironing out.

Nothing was ironed out at Nicaea. The emperor pretended that the divisive element in the church was the variety of beliefs that people held about the Deity of Christ, exactly as the modern apostate in Amer­ica pretends that the trouble in the local churches is due to arguments about separation or Neo-Evangelicalism or Modernism (1900-1980). You will not find any local assembly of shouting, Bible believing Baptists on the North American continent who were ever in danger of any compromise offered by Neo-Evangelicalism or Neo-Orthodoxy. Some twentieth century Sylvester (the “Bishop of Rome,” 325 A.D.) or some Eusebius (Bishop of Caesarea, 325 A.D.) is working for PTL (pulling the legs).

Quite naturally the groundwork for the Nicene controversies was laid in Alexandria, Egypt, by our old friend Origen.23 As far back as 230 A.D. he had made remarks about the Lord Jesus being “begot­ten before Genesis 1:1.24 This easily led to the next philosophical speculation: “WHEN before Genesis 1:1?” After the Council of Nicaea, it was recognized by many that Origen was really a heretic, and so the Catholic church of that day wrote him off their list: but he was not excom­municated because of his heresy about pastors (calling them “priests”): n°'^at heresy was orthodox Catholicism. He was not rejected because ts belief in baptismal regeneration: that was orthodox Catholicism.

U ® Was not blackballed because of his belief that Genesis 3 was not no Catholic has to believe that Genesis 3 is literal.25 He was ■^ousted for his belief in salvation by works, nor yet for his belief p e Bible must be critically revised to bring it in line with Socratic out ofath°niC thinking. No, the reason why Origen was finally booted to iine e Catholic Scholar’s Union was because his theology failed want toUP w’th ihe Trinitarian statements begotten at Nicaea. If you V see how far he really differed with them, you might compare

Origen’s Creed (230 A.D.)26 with the official Nicene Creed as printed by the Epistle of Eusebius of Caesarea to his diocese, which is given by Athanasius at the close of his Epistle to the Nicaenean Synod.21

Both Creeds state that Jesus Christ was begotten before Genesis 1:1.

This Jehovah’s Witness reading (supposedly Athanasian, not “Arian”) will be found in the NASV, promoted by Bob Jones Univer­sity (John 1:18) and ninety percent of its graduates between I960 and 1980.

Origen had stumbled at the stumbling stone: he thought that “all of God’s decrees had to be eternal ” (see Calvin: 1509-1564), so Psalm 2:7 was made a reference to pre-Genesis times. The words “THIS DAY” never bothered Calvin any more than they bothered Origen. But anyone can see at a glance that once a theologian applies the word “begotten”—a word dealing with physical birth—to eternity, he becomes enmeshed in a philosophical dialectic that would drive Hegel up a wall. Constantine needed conflicting authorities (Arius and Athanasius) among the bishops to keep control over them. What Constantine needed was an official religious body of authorities under him who wanted to enforce their belief; then, if he sided with their reli­gious beliefs, he could enforce his political beliefs: i.e., ME first, last, and always. It was as simple as that. Connie-poo saw, in the abstract theological disputes of Origen’s school—still promoted and idolized by the Bishop of Caesarea (Eusebius)28—a piece of fertile ground for set­ting up a religious hierarchy under a political dictatorship (see Sure Word of Prophecy, pp. 192-193). After all, the main issue was never any­thing but authority to start with. There never has been any other issue in six thousand years of history.

Following the debacle at Nicaea (324 A.D.), many of Origen’s teachings were soundly condemned by Jerome and others: in 544 A.D., fifteen of his propositions were declared to be “heretical.”29 Of the sixth century controversy over Origen and his teachings (see the works by Epiphanius, Palladius, Theodoret, Photius, Hueius, Walch, Neander, Hefele, et al.) and the subsequent dropping of his “stock,” Schatt has this to say, “The condemnation of Origen was a death blow to theo­logical SCIENCE” (1 Tim. 6:20).30 Because of his great “pioneering mind” (Prov. 18:1-2) the most learned and able divine of the church had his teachings perverted by “blind and slavish followers” and other narrow-minded, ignorant people who didn’t appreciate the “great departed.”31 Schaff is more than ready to blame the ignorance of the Catholic church in the Dark Ages for their rejection of Origen s Pla­tonic teaching, but he doesn’t open his mouth about their rejection o

the word of God. In Schaff's mind Origen’s theology is more impor­tant to church history than the Bible. (Philip Schaff is careful never to use scripture when judging any man’s character or teaching at this time.) Schaff, for example, is keenly upset at the narrow-mindedness and bigotry of Bishop Epiphanius of Salamis (403), whom he calls "coarse” and "violent,” for trying to destroy the influence of a man "so long departed” (Origen).32

All members (Robertson, Machen, Davis, Hort, Warfield, Rice, et al.) of the Alexandrian Cult (1840-1980) have a horror of someone breaking up the apostolic chain of events that links them to the sacred past, for this would cut them off from being associated with Christian scholarship, and then they could not continue with their devilment, with­out interruption, in the age in which they live. “Slandering the sacred memory of the dead”33 is the charge that all members of the Alexandrian Cult use to the fullest extent in order to justify their sins and sanctify their traditional lying and perverting of the words of God (Matt. 23:24, 30). When Schaff, for example, tells us that Augustine was a theological genius with a deep, bold, and soaring mind,34 "looking DOWN com- mandingly through succeeding centuries,” he is making no reference to anyone in church history who believed the Bible. Augustine could no more find the truth in the word of God on baptism, the ordinances, the local church, the Second Coming, the restoration of Israel, assur­ance of salvation, or soul winning than he could find manna on top of the Sphinx.

The Council of Nicaea ended; it had been a great sideshow. It was the academy award winning play of the summer theater.

Nicaea (meaning “victory”) was in Bithynia about twenty miles from Nicomedia. Here the bishops (each with two elders and three servants) had been assembled. About 318 showed up,35 which is about one sixth of the bishops teaching at that time in the Roman Empire. That is, less than sixteen percent of the church leaders decided what a Bible believing Christian was to believe. In their minds’ eyes they undoubtedly fancied themselves to be walking in the shoes of the apos­tles and elders who met in Acts 15. This is apparent by the addenda on the creed calling their assembly a representative assembly for the oly ‘APOSTOLIC church.” From the fourteenth of June till the twenty-fifth of August these gentlemen did nothing but kill time argu­ing about something that Calvin and Augustine could no more figure out than Judge Rutherford or Pastor Russell.

When "the head of the church” showed up (June 14), he came as a heavenly messenger of God, covered with gold and gems, a

glorious presence full of beauty and majesty [see Ezek. 28], When he reached the golden throne prepared for him, he stopped and sat not down till the bishops gave him THE SIGN.”36

Now, isn’t that a remarkable grand entrance? Who could have con­fused the debut of a Roman politician into a religious convention with the entrance of Paul and Barnabas (Acts 15:2) into an APOSTOLIC assembly (Acts 15:30)?

“Wrapped in royal purple [Rev. 17:4] with a golden fillet on his head...his flushed face and downcast eyes were reflected back in the gems on his vesture, the SWORD of nations and the SHEPHERD’S CROOK |Zech. 11:17] lay at his side.”37 Was this the good shepherd who “laid down his life for the sheep”?

Being a first rate Liberal politician, Connie spoke with a “gentle voice”38 and gave out with one of the greatest bull-shooting, boot-licking pitches that a con man ever tapped a “mark” wit. Connie-poo said (among other things), “I must thank God...He has shown me this high­est assembly... to see you all gathered here in harmony and one mind."39 (After this he banished some of the brethren and issued an edict to kill anyone who didn’t go by the majority rulings of the council.)40 But on went the toastmaster: “May no malicious enemy rob us of this happi­ness, and after the tyranny of the enemy of Christ [referring to a rebel army officer who had tried to kick him off the throne] is conquered by the redeemer...” When Constantine finally closed this political fiasco, he gave a great banquet on his birthday and loaded all those attending with imperial gifts.41 “The wicked demon who....”42 Connie was setting the pace for Pope Leo (440-461), Pope Gregory (590-604), Pope Urban (1088-1099), Pope Innocent (1161-1216), and Pope John Paul II (1978- ); that is, while you are discussing religious topics, you insert

the fact that so-and-so is a wicked demon because he tried to get YOU I off the throne. It therefore follows that any king, prince, or Christian who doesn’t bow down to the pope (after he gets the throne, which he does) is a “wicked demon, etc.”

Connie winds up his pious fraud with, "Discord in the church O consider more fearful and painful than any other war. Delay not, there fore, my friends, delay not, servants of God; put away all causes QJW strife and loose all knots of discord by the laws of PEACE. 43 Soun s almost like a Charismatic convention or a Vatican Council, doesn 1t Do you know what follows this saintly hypocrisy? MURDER. The ca c ... is in the loaded words, “PUT AWAY ALL CAUSES. In trans a^Ui it means ‘ ‘kill anyone that doesn't go along with it. ” The standard int^.y of setting up a war or a dictatorship has always been, and always *

be, by “good words and fair speeches deceive the hearts of the sim­ple” (Rom. 16:18). Since simple folk desire peace and unity, they are prone to think positively about such matters (Gen. 3:1). Therefore, no dictator, politician, pope, or religious huckster in this age, or any age, can speak NEGATIVELY of the future, not eVen where he is designing to carry out genocide. Constantine is setting up Bible believers for the kill (Moravians, Arians, Paulicians, Montanists, Donatists, etc.) so that the final authority for the Christian will no longer be the Bible: it will be a conclave of bishops, sitting humbly at the feet of a golden throne on which sits almighty Caesar Augustus: the Emperor of the Romans.

The Council of Nicaea in 325 which initiates the Pergamos church period (Rev. 2:12) marks the end of New Testament Biblical Christi­anity as found in the New Testament, at least from the predominance and effectiveness of that type of Christianity. From here on any assembly taking Biblical paths will have to withstand an Imperial Church State in order to maintain the purity and integrity of its congregation. The fractured splinter groups that explode out from the Mediterranean area in the next century show how “orthodox” Catholics had become, and

God’s judgment on this apostate church in that area (400-600 A.D.) by the barbarian tribes are the best comment we have in history on what the Holy Spirit really thought of councils who were afraid to even discuss the “causes of Christian disunity” (see above) in front of a man who had Christian bishops so cowed they could not even bring up matters of final authority in his presence.

While these bickering theologians (representing less than one sixth of the preaching and teaching bishops) were establishing “orthodoxy,” their local churches were accepting and believing on such things as Eas­ter eggs, wedding rings, religious festivals, candle lighting, robed choirs, prayers for the dead, kissing pieces of wood and clothing, sprinkling holy water in their rooms, pretending they were drinking literal blood, and counting on the city water system to get them to heaven. Every one of these pagan superstitions came about from rejecting the author­ity of the Bible and replacing it with some other authority. The three competing authorities for the word of God which produced this ghastly ®ess are listed in the word of God. They are:

■ 1- Science (1 Tim. 6:20).

I 2- Tradition (Col. 2:8).

I R PhUosoPhy (Col. 2:8).

fori. eJect>on of these passages by Cyprian, Origen, Eusebius, Papias, prod301*8’ Augustine, Clement, Constantine, Justin Martyr, and Arius paced the Nicene and post-Nicene situation which eventuated into

an official church state “bible” from Alexandria, Egypt (Jerome’s Latin Vulgate: 382-420), an official Baalite priesthood under a state church, a reigning humanoid, superior to mortal man,44 who claimed to have earned the title that Jesus Christ gave to God the Father (John 17:11) and who claimed the use of armed forces to exterminate Bible believ­ing local assemblies.

“A little leaven leaveneth the whole lump” (Gal. 5:9; Matt. 13:33).

From Nicaea on, Bloody Mother Whore (Rev. 17:1-8) is in clear view, and although she had no official “pope” until Gregory the Great, all of the accruements and appendages are present when Constantine dismisses the “victory” by the council, with no statement by the coun­cil on how to be saved, with no statement by the council on the nature or duty of the local church, with no statement from the council on the future of the world system, and above all, with no statement on WHAT or WHO decides any of those questions, or any other question, the Council of Nicaea adjourns with the matter of final authority not only unsettled but undiscussed. From henceforth (Constantinople, 381; Antioch, 341) final authority is vested in the councils (see Acts 4:15; 5:27; 6:12; 22:30; 23:20), and so, to this day, the Roman Catholic church places the creeds of these councils on an equal level with inspired scripture.45 The church, then, goes further and insists that inspired, authoritative statements are still coming through the Roman Catholic church since revelation is progressive and growing after the New Testament.46 The motive for doing this is obvious: with two conflict­ing authorities, the Catholic church itself will play God as the final authority. This is where all Satanic Christianity ends and begins (Gen. 3:1). The two authorities for Christian education since 1960 are the AV and the ASV (1901); the three authorities since 1960 are the AV, ASV, and NASV; the four authorities are the AV, ASV, NASV, and NIV. Since all Catholics believe in progressive revelation that is equal to the Bible, all modern apostate Fundamentalists believe that revelation has progressed since 1611 (AV) outside of the AV, and therefore 36,000 corrections of the God-given text are as authoritative as that text: they claim what any Catholic claims for his traditions: that they are the ecll of the Holy Bible. The traditions of Westcott and Hort were repeat by Harry Ironside and W.B. Riley without even checking the stote ments. The traditions of Gregory and Nestle were repeated by and Machen without even referring to the verses being discusse , the propaganda of Kenyon and Tischendorf is still preserved in the w ings of Robert Sumner and Ronald Walker.47 without them even °

„ „nrr,o fmm or what they were dealing I

Birds of a feather flock together.

The Alexandrian text of Rome, conjured up for Constantine by Eusebius,48 is preserved in the RV, ASV, NASV, RSV, NRSV, IV, N1V, and every other modern bastard translation (New World, Living Bible, Montgomery, Phillips, Weymouth, Moffatt, New English, Goodspeed, etc.) so that Christian scholars can substitute for the Catholic church as “god.”

Birds of a feather nest together (Matt. 13:32).

CHAPTER NINE

The Great Witch Hunt

“For there must be also heresies among you, that they which are approved may be made manifest among you.”

1 Corinthians 11:19

“Heresy” is a Bible word (AV), and it is first found in connection with Bible believing Christians (Acts 24:14). The idea behind “her­esy” is that someone who professes to believe the Bible is using the Bible to prove or teach something that is not so (1 Cor. 11:19): for example, teaching that 2 Timothy 3:16 (“inspiration”) refers to the original autographs. Heresy differs from infidelity in that infidelity has mainly to do with unbelief in the Bible as one unit. There is, however, really no fine line between the two terms, for the term “infidel” was applied by scores of popes to Bible believing Christians who didn’t believe in sprinkling babies, while the term “heretic” was applied to people like Marcion (d. 160) and Celsus (d. 180), who didn’t believe anything in the Bible that disagreed with pagan philosophy. Everyone at heart is somewhat of an “infidel” in that unbelief is found among Bible believing Christians who refuse to believe Romans 6:6-7 and con­sequently have a terrible time with sin (Rom. 6:11, 14). Unbelief was found in Christians like Machen, Warfield, and Robertson, who threw out five hundred verses of the Old Testament as being literally true OlScause Origen and Augustine threw them out. “Good men” are often a rotten example for each other.

Unbelief” is the damning sin of the human race, according to sus Christ (John 16:9), and degrees of unbelief vary from believing ■ly°d (Deists) while rejecting the entire Bible, to believing in the entire a f e’ ^ut not believing the Bible that anyone can read (Bob Jones, III;

an; McKee; Porter; Martin; Wemp; Yaeger; Anderson; Rice; be- er; et al.). Therefore, when anyone speaks of “heretics,” the term °mes relative and quite subjective. If every Christian was a heretic

who rejected the restoration of Israel (Rom. 11:25-33) or the Millennial reign of Christ (Luke 1:30-34), then A.T. Robertson, Machen, RD. Wilson, Spurgeon, Talmage, Warfield, Kuyper (as well as Calvin, Berkhof, Mauro, Dabney, Gill, Hodge, and Ladd) would be in the same company with Hymenaeus and Philetus (2 Tim. 2:17).

In this history, “heretical teaching” is a teaching derived by either adding to or taking from (see any edition of the ASV, NASV, or NIV) a verse in the Bible or by severing a verse in the Bible from its context. We presume that the Bible is always right and the “godly” Christian is always wrong whenever he disagrees with it (see the prefaces to any of the Bible Believer’s Commentary series). Our proof that he disagrees with it (while professing to believe it) can be proved in court by a very simple application of grade school logic: if he either adds to the verse or takes from a verse (see any edition of the RV, /1SK, NASV, or NIV) or takes a verse out of the context in which it appears, it is because he doesn’t like it as it stands. A fourth stratagem which is nearly as effective is to “spiritualize” or allegorize (see chapter 5, notes 54-57) a passage so that it has no effect on the reader (Mark 7:2-13). These four “dodges” are the bag and baggage of any infidel or heretic. When­ever they disagree among themselves, or conflict with Bible believing Christians on any point, one of these four methods will always be used to teach something that is not so. A few brief samples will suffice:

1. In order to prove that Acts 2:38 is the “plan of salvation” for Gentiles, one must ignore the audience listening to the discourse (vv. 5, 12, 22, 36), the amount of revealed truth at the time of the discourse (only Genesis to Malachi had been written), the question asked by the crowd (Acts 2:37) before the “plan” was given, and the subsequent revelation (Gal. 2:16; Acts 15:1-20; 10:44-48) which completely nul­lifies Acts 2:38 as a “plan of salvation” for getting anyone anywhere except into a Lake of Fire.

2. In order to prove that Ephesians 4:5 and Romans 6:1-3 refer

to water baptism, a Catholic or Campbellite simply adds one word to both verses, which is found in neither book; as the cookbook says, you add water. ” There is no water in Romans 6 or Ephesians 4 or Galatians

3. J

3. In order to prove that a black-robed, Baalite priesthood of blac magic practitioners is the “infallible pillar and ground of truth (1 3:15), you spiritualize the “gates of hell’’ (see the /iSFor Atew

in Matt. 16:18) and pretend that “gates” are really “powers.

you pretend that the words “my church” mean “Roman church,” and then you pretend that one rock (Petros) is another

(Petra). Fairy stories for the kiddies are not limited to the children’s library.

4. In order to teach evolution as an exact science (knowledge), you change the word “science” to “knowledge” (New ASV, 1 Tim. 6:20). Then you pretend that “in the beginning” (Gen. 1:1) meant “When God began to create” (Living Bible, Kenneth Taylor), and then you remove “after his kind” (Gen. 1:11), and finally you pretend that the word “day” (Gen. 1:5) in Genesis really means “an indefinite period.” Pretense is a great expedient when it comes to writing your own “bible.”

5. In order to prove the AV (1611) is not the infallible word of God, John R. Rice; Robert Sumner; Wilbur Smith; and Bob Jones, III, add

the words “the original autographs” to 2 Timothy 3:16, although they do not appear in any Greek manuscripts from any ‘ “family” of manu­scripts. Then they pretend that the word “scripture” (context: 2 Tim. 3:15) is a reference to “verbal, plenary inspired originals” or “inspired men” (that is the latest gaff in the act), when it doesn’t mean anything of the kind. Consequently, when Sumner, Rice, Jones, Smith, Warfield, Hymers, and Machen quote 2 Timothy 3:16, they never quote 2 Timo­thy 3:15.

Now, this should suffice to show the reader what our conception of a “heretic” is. When a Christian will add to the Book (Prov. 30:6) or take from it (Rev. 22:19) or pervert it (Jer. 23:36) or refuse to believe it (2 Kings 7:2; John 5:44), at that point he is a heretic. This is not to say that his life constitutes the life of an infidel or a heretic. Chris­tians are guilty of unbelief and heresy at different times for different reasons. But the important thing to note is that no Bible believer would think of persecuting a Christian “heretic” if he found one. Peter, James, John, and Paul don’t waste any time in trying to kill heretics or take them to court or even in getting them arrested. This Biblical fact can­not be emphasized too much, for it is the verdict of history that those who are the most interested in ferreting out Novatians, Hussites, Manichaeans, Nestorians, Ruckmanites, Arnoldists, Darbyites, ^OTrisites, and Petrobrusians (see chapter 6, notes 78-79) are inter- in arresting them, jailing them, torturing them, or killing them. _ must never forget that there is not a case in church history where n ' C Relieving Christian was ever caught actively persecuting a JEW.

Catholics (Hitler, Heydrich, Himmler, Bormann, Eichmann, hav H°ess, Eicke, Diels, Koch, the popes, Loyola, Torquemada) “Gree^en ^nown to persecute Jews, and so have “Protestants” and PubHc , ^rt^°^ox ” Bible believers are something else. To give the T 1 e impression that Bible believing Christians were behind the

TV Holocaust (1978) is a monstrous perversion of the truth. The concentration camp system in Germany (1933-1945) and the concen­tration camp system in Russia (1921-1985) were neither suggested nor set up by anyone who believed the Bible in the High commands or Low commands. Hitler and Himmler were Roman Catholics,1 and Stalin was a candidate for the Eastern Catholic (Russian Orthodox) ministry.

When a Bible believer encounters a “heretic,” his orders are clear (Titus 1:13). His weapons against heretics are not carnal; they are spir­itual (2 Cor. 10: 4; Heb. 4:12). When you find a “Christian” using a real sword2 to suppress “heretics,” you are dealing with a Roman offspring of a religious prostitute (Rev. 17:5). Roman harlots (Rev. 17:5) are not to be confused with Bible believing Christians, not even in “Leb­anon” (Associated Press, 1960-1978). Roman popes sporting two swords before them in their pompous processions and their claims to the power of destroying nations with weapons3 are never to be confused with Bible believers. A bloody murderer is a bloody murderer, whether you call him “Holy Father” or not, and here we are not hurling epithets about for “effect.” The terminology chosen is intended to be an accurate, objective description in dictionary terminology of the nature and char­acter of most of the popes. We do not say “bloody murderer” to impress anyone with emotional feelings: “bloody murderer” (see chapters 13, 14) is a calm, dispassionate, objective description of a bloody murderer. When a man gives one set of his servants4 orders to suppress every religion but Roman Catholicism in one nation (say Spain, Colombia, Argentina, and Italy) and another set of instructions to his servants to “play it cool” in another nation (America and England) and pretend, at least temporarily, that Catholics stand for “human rights” to the extent that “no one has a right to even harass anyone” because of their “reli­gion,”5—while at the same time refusing to arbitrate while a nation is exterminating Jews (Hitler signed a concordat with the Vatican) and Protestants (North Ireland 1960-1978)—we know what to think of his “holiness” and his religion, and we know what to call him (1 Sam. 20:30).

“Holy Father” is hardly the proper appellation to be used in addressing a two-faced, religious hypocrite. , .

Since all cardinals, priests, bishops, and archbishops are in s jection to the pope and must obey him to the last detail when 1

orders—under pain of committing a mortal sin if they don t6—-!* be exceedingly simple for any pope to stop a twenty year war in r^bja in twenty-four hours or to stop the killing of Protestants in » o (1950-1955) in half that time or to allow street preaching in °

Madrid in a quarter of that time. According to history, what do we hear from the popes about these kinds of matters? What do we hear from these noble descendants of Constantine the Great? Why, that’s easy: all we hear is “Peace, love, and UNITY’’ (Dan. 11:21, 24). It is no accident that the popes still occupy the throne that Constantine left vacant when he moved eastward: Connie always was a “peacemaker. ’’

During the life of Augustine (354-430), the barbarian invasions began. They terminated nearly two hundred years of bickering and spec­ulating about what was orthodox and what wasn’t. The vast list of “heretics” drawn up by the Catholic church by the time of Augustine’s death was an appalling thing to behold: Carpocrates, Nestorians, Apollinarians, Appeles, Gnostics, Eutychians, Monarchians, Monothe­lites, Sabellians, Manichaeans, Paulicians, Novatians, Pelagians, Donatists, Monophysites, and so forth. However, the grand word adopted by Catholics for a genuine heretic, after Nicaea, was simply “Arian.”7 If any enemy of the Catholic church showed up (saved or lost), he was called an “Arian.” Since the barbarian tribes were loot­ing churches and killing clergymen, naturally they had to be “Arians,”8 or to put it another way, if anyone was an “Arian,” he was a burning, looting, stealing killer. “Catholics,” of course, wouldn’t think of doing such things!9

In modem times (during the Washington-Vatican Axis: 1945-1960), since Communists were taking church property and imprisoning revolutionaries like Cardinal Mindszenty (Feb. 3, 1949), then anything “anti-Catholic” (say, Bible-believing local assemblies, for example) was “COMMUNIST.” The foundation creed of all good “Catholics” from Nicaea (325 A.D.) to the Second Vatican Council (1765) is that if you are anti-Catholic, you are a God-defying, God-hating, Christ- rejecting “heretic.” That is the true “creed” of the Roman Catholic fascist state.10

11 However, one will observe that Rome’s profession, being what it >s, is usually about as reliable as her practice. While professing to be e great enemy of “Arianism,” Rome produced the first genuine Arian translation of the Bible we have in the modern era (the RV, the ASV,

the NASV): all of these came from the Jesuit Rheims text of 1582. i R true Arian translation shows its theological fangs in Luke 2:33; fej^°thy 3:16; and Acts 4:26. One must never forget that Arius in th Wh° rePresented the “heretics” at Nicaea, certainly believed Uja e,ty °f Christ as much as any Jehovah’s Witness: he just believed Pl 2\SUS Christ was a “lesser” deity {New World Translation, John

)• Any Arian Bible will have the Deity of Christ somewhere in

it (John 1:1; 20:28), but it will also take the Deity of Christ out of it (Matt. 12:6; 1 Tim. 3:16, Rom. 9:5, Luke 2:33; 23:42, see any ASV or NASVor NIV) in order to make him a “lesser” deity (see Phil. 2:1-11 and comments in that commentary).

In spite of the great “victory for orthodoxy” at Nicaea, the “Cath­olic” church adopted Arius’s views, practically, after Constantine’s death; Constantine’s sons went completely over in that direction." The most Arian outfit on this earth outside of the Jehovah’s Witnesses—who use the Vatican manuscript for their New World Translation—is the Roman Catholic communion, which has managed to reduce the Lord of glory to a piece of bread and a bottle of hooch that is locked up in a box in a building. Again, we overstate nothing: the “tabernacle” in a Catholic church is said to contain the Lord Jesus Christ.12 How this is to be believed in the face of Acts 7:49 is a little mysterious, but in the pagan “mystery religions” no priest is handicapped if he has to lie about his “mysteries.” They are an added attraction; most people like mystery stories (see chapter 5, note 14).

A'etius and Eudoxius were two “heretics” who believed that Christ was of another substance than God the Father. Eunomius was a man who believed that Christ was of a “dissimilar” substance than the Father. Eusebius (as anyone could guess) stood theologically right between Athanasius and Arius at the Council of Nicaea, to demonstrate his most outstanding talent of all—compromise. Eusebius taught that Christ was made of a similar substance as the Father, but his followers divided off into those who thought that the substance was LIKE the Father as to being (Asterius and Eudoxius), while others believed it was similar as to being (Acacius). Sabellius (d. 260) taught a progressive revela­tion of the Trinity: this came to be called Sabellianism. Artemon, Cerinthus, Paul ofSamosata, and Photinus were supposed to have denied Christ’s Deity altogether, while Hermogenes, Noetus, Praxeas, Sabellius, and Victorinus only denied his “personality.” Those who denied Christ’s true humanity were Apelles, Cerdon, Basilides, Colorbastes, Neracleson, Marcus, Marcion, Valentius, Saturninus, Secundus, and many gnostics. Those who denied His essential Deity® were said to be Carpocrates, Acacius, Eunomius, and many gnostics. Felix and Elipandus thought that Jesus was adopted by God at >s baptism and then deserted by God at His crucifixion (see any heretica translation of Luke 23:42: RV, ASV, NASV, RSV, NRSV, NIV). Chris, was two distinct persons, according to the Nestorians, if we are to I the “Catholics,” and the Agenoetae denied an intellect to Christ s hu ■ nature, if we are to believe “the Catholics.” Believing the Cat io ‘

in all matters listed above would be like believing whatever Charlie Darwin said about the Origin of the Species (1859).

One can see with a sideways glance that the first two issues which the Catholics tried to settle (and which they deemed to be the crucial ones to be settled) concerned the Deity of Christ and the two natures of Christ. Having settled these issues to their own satisfaction, they began to ferret out every Christian who didn’t accept their conciliar and theo­logical definitions of them. Looking over their agenda ledger again, with peripheral vision, one cannot help but be struck with the singular fact that two subjects were taken out of a Book to argue about, while not one word was said by anyone about the BOOK from which these two subjects were extracted. It is a little like re-examining, carefully, the death of John Kennedy (Nov. 1963) without mentioning Dallas. Did all of the Catholics up to this time (430-500) believe the Bible was the word of God? Did ANY of them believe it? Then why did they have two Bibles that contradicted each other in more than five thousand places in the New Testament? If the Deity of Christ was the big, hot issue for Christians and it was settled “victoriously” at Nicaea, how in the name of Hort did Vaticanus and Sinaiticus (330 A.D.) become accepted AFTER the Council of Nicaea (Jerome, 420) by Bob Jones, John R. Rice, Wilbur Smith, Philip Schaff, Westcott, Hort, Nestle, Aland, Metz­ger, Laird, Harris, Theissen, MacRae, Wuest, and Afman as “Bible manuscripts”? They both attack the Deity of Jesus Christ.'3

With the orthodox Greek text (Textus Receptus) appearing in full form following Nicaea—the Byzantine text of the Greek speaking church in the east14 which was flatly rejected by the Roman church in the west13—who that is orthodox today would go to Rome to find “Athanasian orthodoxy” where it dealt with the Deity of Christ? If the creeds of Nicaea, Constantinople, Antioch, and Carthage were such great victories for orthodoxy, how is it that at Falwell’s school in Lynchburg and at Pensacola Christian College in Pensacola, Florida (1980), we find the Arian, heretical text recommended that came from Origen in North Africa up to Rome?'6 Doesn’t one feel here that some Christian scholar’s sense of history is a little boggled, if not downright perverted? “What fellowship hath righteousness with unrighteous- nes»?” (2 Cor. 6:14)

Now, it is at this very time (330-340) that Westcott and Hort gjjBpectured that the orthodox text exalting Jesus Christ (1 Tim. 3:16;

" 5;7-8) was artificially manufactured at Antioch.17 This ridicu- eory is known as the “Lucian recension.”18 It is built around

Uspicious and awkward conjecture that at this very time (during

the life of Augustine, following the Council of Nicaea) a presbyter named Lucian, who had some acquaintance with Latin translations of the Old Testament,19 suddenly brought Vaticanus and Sinaiticus (with associ­ated papyrus) with him to Antioch (or Constantinople), and then by “conflating Vaticanus and Sinaiticus with Western manuscripts” (D in particular),20 Lucian manufactured a “Textus Receptus’” that added 536 words in the Gospels to Vaticanus and 839 to Sinaiticus, while sub­tracting 1,048 words from both of them. He then transposed or altered 1,098 words from one (B) and 2,299 from the other (R), thereby producing a corrupt text which dropped out of circulation for twelve hundred years, and when it reappeared (see chapters 17, 18), it brought Europe out of the Dark Ages.

In the meantime, according to Westcott and Hort and all of those who took them seriously, the pure text of the Bible became established by Jerome in the Vulgate for 1,080 years, and this pure text accompanied the Dark Ages. Along with this fantastic “excursion into cloudland” (to quote Dean Burgon, 1883), Westcott and Hort required the faculty members at Bob Jones (and Harvard, Colgate, Tennessee Temple, Yale, Westminster, San Francisco Theological Seminary, Wheaton, Columbia, Biola, Princeton, and Berkeley) to believe that two Greek manuscripts, which differ with each other in three thousand places in the Gospels alone, “fell out of style” as soon as they were written (330-340 A.D.) and didn’t appear anywhere except in Jerome’s Vulgate (New Testa- . ment) until the Laodicean period of church history (1880-1990); and when they finally received their place of honor under the sun (due to the artfulness of Westcott, Hort, Tischendorf, and Nestle), two world wars broke out, England and America went bankrupt, the Vatican con­verted to Communism, and all national revivals in the United States ceased.

This is what Sumner, Rice, Jones, and Hutson call “conservative scholarship” (1950-1980). We had a name for it in the Army, but I could not repeat it.

It is apparent, then, that the word “heretic” covers a vast spectrum. An orthodox believer who calls priests “father” because they wear long “robes” and pray for a deceased husband to get him out of purgatoiy■ J (Matt. 23:14) might call a Bible believing Christian a “heretic an Bible Christianity “heresy” (Acts 24:14). That is, the Bible s own pointing of the term is a reference to Orthodox Pharisees trying to PreVj.jg people from finding Christ. (Naturally, Philip Schaff never ‘^^.s scripture have any bearing on his use of terms in matters of c urc tory: nor does Newman, Neander, or Latourette.) The word e

(1 Cor. 11:19) is a reference to false teaching by Christians in the local church (1 Cor. 11:19). So, we will use the term throughout this church history in the scriptural sense: i.e., a “heretic” is a Bible believer who distorts, perverts, misappropriates, or misapplies the words of God to teach something that is not compatible with, nor in agreement with, the words of God.

A heretic would change the English text of Hebrews 6 and Hebrews 10 to prove eternal security. A heretic would alter the English text of Colossians 2:21-23 to prove that Protestant asceticism or Protestant mon­asteries were scriptural. A heretic would alter Colossians 2:17 to prove that the Law (Exodus-Deuteronomy) will never come into effect again. A heretic would spiritualize Ezekiel 40-48 to get rid of some of the details of the Millennial reign of Christ. A heretic would alter the English text of 1 Thessalonians 2:16 to get rid of the restoration of Israel. A heretic would alter the English text of Revelation 22:14 (AV 1611) to make it teach tribulation salvation without works. A heretic would insist that all the saints were “in Christ” before Genesis 1:1. A heretic would take Acts 8:37 out of the Bible because he felt that “it didn’t seem like the rest of the Bible.” A heretic would remove the blood of Christ from

Colossians 1:14 on the grounds that since you could still find some blood in Ephesians 1:7, there wasn’t any sense in “overdoing” it. A heretic would teach the body of Christ began with Paul, when Paul had rela­tives “in Christ” before he was saved (Rom. 16:7) and persecuted the “church which is his body” (1 Cor. 12:13; 10:32; Gal. 1:13) before he was saved. A heretic would make a Jewish SIGN (Exod. 20:10; Neh. 9:14) binding on a Christian (Rom. 13:9) on the grounds that the Jewish signs, under the law (Exod. 1-20), were not done away with at Cal­vary (Matt. 5:17) for the child of God in this age (1 John 3:4).

The biggest heretic of the lot would be an apostate Fundamentalist telling you that since the English text of 1611 doesn’t match letter for letter the English text of 1980 (AV), that the items listed above are not serious. Every item listed above is a perversion of ANY edition of the AV from 1611 till now.

Stephen was accused of heresy (Acts 6:11). Paul was mobbed for wrejy (Acts 21:28). The councils (Acts 6:12; 23:1) were the authority ,n both of the cases cited.

From the New Testament (Matt. 26:59; Mark 13:9) it would appear re*’8’ous council, by scriptural definition, is an ecumenical (Acts for {^at^er'n8 °f heretics who unite and attain a spirit of “one accord” °r the purpose of wiping out THE TRUTH (Acts 5:40). They have Peace, love, and UNITY.” Truth is an afterthought, if a thought at all.

From our study of church history thus far, we have already identi­fied a number of false teachings that are being taught, and we have the names of the men who taught them. However, to label all of the church “fathers” as “false prophets” (the Bogomiles did this),21 and thereby unjustly classify them with unconverted sinners, is going too far. We must recognize that there are two natures in every Christian: an old nature and a new one. The old nature in an educated Christian is con­stantly tempted to usurp the authority of the Bible when it commands certain practices and to usurp the authority of the Holy Spirit in teaching those commandments. Saved people can certainly teach false doctrine. Further, we must remember that the unholy Mother Whore of 600-1500 A.D. was at perfect liberty to dissect the writings of the church fathers at any time and to remove statements from their contexts, forge false documents,22 take statements literally that were figurative,23 and on scores of occasions to simply misquote the “father.”24 Students of Roman Catholic mythology are quite aware of their lengthy history of forgery, falsification of fact, and fraud (The Donation of Constantine, The Pseudo-Isidorian Decretals, The Council of Orange decrees, the Council of Milvis decrees, Gratian’s citations of Ambrose, the Antwerp edition of Gregory the Great’s works, the Paris edition of a quotation by Cyprian of Carthage, The Bordeaux New Testament 1686, and so forth).25 Too much of a strain on the intellect is required to believe that a church dedicated to maintaining its own authority by any means (fair or foul)26 is capable of honestly handling a Book whose inspired words expose the Satanic nature of that church (Rev. 17:1-8).

Notwithstanding, we must face the truth that among the writings of the church fathers are found the departures from scripture that even­tually become consolidated into an official body of creedal beliefs: the beliefs of orthodox Roman Catholicism. This means that the first real “heretics” in church history were Catholics who became ROMAN Cath­olics even before the Council of Nicaea. Although Augustine from North Africa is generally recognized as the first real “Roman Catholic and the definer of Roman Catholic doctrine,27 we must never forget that the Roman church was a North African church to start with, for she received her priests, Mariolatry, infant baptism, purgatorial teaching, black magic, and her “orthodoxy” from Alexandria in Egypt. The ortho­dox champion at Nicaea (Athanasius) was the bishop of Alexan na. I

By way of this route the Alexandrian Cult took over the leaders ip of the “catholic” church. With African ideas about asceticism ( chapter 11, notes 3-10) incorporated into “the faith,” African trus black magic, and African ideas about Bible manuscripts (see notes

the Roman church of post-Constantine times was, to all practical purposes, the First African Church of Rome. Heretics can include Cath­olic and Orthodox, as well as Gnostic and Heterodox. An African Catholic church will eventually have to have an African “pope,” but since neither popes nor African Catholics (Ps. 16:4; Matt. 23:15) have anything to do with New Testament Christianity, there is not much point in referring to either of them as “scriptural” realities. While the Catholics were raging about “heretics” out in the pasture, they let the following beasts through the bam door:

1. Tychonius’s Key to the Scriptures, written by a Donatist,28 was adopted by Augustine, but Augustine was in favor of killing Donatists because they were “heretics.”29

2. Augustine figured on a Post-millennial Second Coming of Christ in the year 1000 A.D., and none of his Catholic friends raised an eye­brow about his “date setting.”30

3. The first resurrection was spiritual only.31

4. The Roman church was the fulfillment of Isaiah 35.32

5. Some sins are mortal and others are “venial.”33

6. Infant baptism—regeneration by sprinkling—was a New Tes­tament doctrine.34

7. Susanna was a real person, and therefore she should be included in the book of Daniel.35

8. It is not lawful to baptize36 anyone unless a bishop is present.37

9. Virginity was a condition of salvation (Hiercas of Leontopolis, in Egypt).38

10. One could reject all of the Gospels except Matthew (Cerinthus).39

11. Origen’s fifth column from the Hexapla (which he wrote him­self) was accepted as the B.C. “Septuagint.”40

12. Marriage was prohibited (Encratites and Satuminus).41 Observe that both of these men, as well as Marcion, are included in the list of

heretics,” according to Catholic and Reformed historians. How does one explain clerical celibacy adopted by priests and bishops as scrip­tural when the men who taught it were considered to be anti-scriptural heretics,” deserving DEATH?42

3. Efforts were made to incorporate images into the churches and e lord’s Supper into an African sacrifice.43

' Opponents of the decrees of church councils are to be cursed.44 “co An infant becomes a Christian and “joins Christ” through a sacranient. ”43

can beCre’ ^en’ *S Wltnessed a trend or principle in church history which applied throughout: church leaders and theologians can absorb

and condone practical heresy and unscriptural dogmas through the churches and schools while they are fighting heresies in councils and “standing for the faith” in “congresses. ” Here the Pauline Obsession (see introduction, notes 4-6) comes into play. When the written work or any man matches Paul’s writings in quantity or subject matter, he takes for granted that he himself is like Paul, for he pictures Paul only as a polemicist or an apologist. While the theologian himself is spend­ing his time fighting “false teaching,” the main business of preaching the Bible and winning souls is neglected. The results? Practical heresy which leads to doctrinal heresy. The progress is interesting to observe:

1. Orthodox Catholics continually complained about the heretical asceticism found in the Gnostic and Manichaean sects, yet Origen was a violent ascetic (he castrated himself), and he was accepted as a guiding light by the champions of orthodoxy until sixty years after the Council of Nicaea.46

2. Origen’s main teachings were accepted until the time of Jerome (340-420). In the times of Justinian (483-565), he was pronounced a heretic and all of his writings were condemned. However, his teaching on Chiliasm (A-millennial) was retained by all Presbyterians and Reform­ers as “orthodox.”47

3. Novatus, arraigned on charges of murdering an unborn child, developed a heresy (Novatianism), yet his followers appear as Bible believing CATHARI five hundred years later—-the only really ortho­dox group left inside the Catholic church in the Dark Ages.48

4. Tychonius (see above), branded as a schismatic under the label of Donatist, had his teachings endorsed by Augustine while that worthy gentleman was cursing Donatists at the Council of Carthage.49

5. The radical Montanists, ostracized by all “catholic” parties, opposed the episcopal hierarchy and championed the “priesthood of every believer. ”50 Constantine issued a decree that they were to be killed I on sight.51 Was Constantine an “orthodox” Christian?

Now, this insoluble schismatic melee becomes more snarled in pro* j portion to its examination. According to Schafif, “we seek in vain among j them” for the evangelical doctrines of the exclusive authority scripture, justification by faith alone, and the universal priesth ® 1 the laity.52 Note that Philip purposely overlooks the MontanistsWK believers like Jovinian and Vigilantius, exactly as Jerome over them; or, more properly, having trampled them down into e orne_ Jerome made it impossible for Philip Schaff to find them. Jovinian times Joviniah) was such a “heretic” that it took two councl? vjnjan Him nut of business (Rome, 390 A.D., and Milan, 395 A.D.)- I

taught regeneration by the Holy Spirit: not water. He also taught eter­nal security and that all baptized believers constituted the priesthood. He denied the perpetual virginity of Mary and said that “monkery” was nonsense.53 Vigilantius (sometimes Vigelantus or Vigilantus), around 395 A.D., was rebuking the worshippers of martyrs and relics; he cas­tigated monasteries, vows of celibacy,54 and vows of poverty. Of the Roman Catholic “way of orthodoxy,” he said, “To defend religion by bloodshed, torture, and crime is not to defend it but to pollute and profane it.”55 Jerome considered Vigilantius and Jovinian to be two of the deadliest enemies the Catholic faith ever had. He considered them to be more heretical than Origen. Aetius (355 A.D.) was of the same mind as Vigilantius and Jovinian, and Helvidius was another “here­tic.” Helvidius (380) went around denying the perpetual virginity of Mary56 (although the ASV and the New ASV went to some length to preserve that Catholic doctrine in their dissection of Matt. 1: 25). Aerius assailed nunnery and prayers for the dead, and he insisted that only an ordained elder was a bishop.57

When the Council of Nicaea had accomplished its dirty work, it had an alibi to get rid of two groups of Bible believers. The first of these was a group of second and third century Puritans called Novations, who were too Trinitarian for the council—that is, they made too great a distinction between the persons in the Godhead. The second of these groups was the Paulianists (whose later adherents were called Paulicians), who were guilty of being “semi-Arian’’—that is, they were halfway between Servetus (1511-1533) and John Calvin (1509-1564). They were also guilty of another terrible heresy: these dissenters bap­tized all who joined their assemblies, and they baptized by immersion according to the formula found in Matthew 28:19-20, not Acts 2:38.58 Among these dissidents (“heretics” by Catholic standards) were the Armenians (350 A.D.) with whom Aerius (see above) was connected. Whereas these Puritan groups had begun defection only by finding fault with the moral lives of the Roman bishops and elders (Novatus), they d, with the passage of time, come to find fault with Catholic adult •^ptism (Donatists) and then Catholic infant baptism (Manichaeans) and wh°le godless, depraved, hellish, Catholic mess: the vation'P.0^ ^ar^’ veneration of relics, celibacy as a means of sal-

n, Eucharists” that were sacrifices, baptismal regeneration, beads, H«~s’ Christmas trees, images, candles, prayers for the dead, pur- “uni1?’ rest 8arhage. The only ones who kept the

severalCaith once delivered to the saints”—delivered hmes by Satan—were those who went along with Rome and

stayed in imperial favor with a church state setup; the rest of them went back to the Bible and consequently back to the chopping block, the whip, the dagger, the stone quarry, and into exile. That is to say, right back where they were before Constantine faked his conversion and hitched the church (Pergamos—much marriage) up to a pagan sun-god in the “holy sacrament” of marriage (Rev. 2:12). I

Now, this brings the student of history to a face-off with another HB

great truth, which he must grasp and then cling to for the remainder < of his studies. This truth is that a real Christian witness or a real Bible I

believer is more apt to be found on a street comer or in a jail than at a “synod” or a “convention.” The real Bible believing people through- out church history, up until now, were always more likely to be found I

in coliseums (the center of the coliseum, you understand: on the “ground ■■■

floor”) or torture chambers than in council rooms and imperial “palaces” (Acts 24; 26; 2 Tim. 4): he was in chains both times. Most I

soul winning, Bible believing Christians are too busy serving God to HHf

ever get caught up by science and philosophy and plunged into theo- logical heresies. Their field is PRACTICAL theology, not systematic I

or dogmatic theology (Shedd. Chafer, Berkhof, Brunner, Boettner, BHI

Tillich, Warfield, Whale, Williams, Ramm, Kerr, Lawson, Anselm, Thiessen, Harnack, Hodge, Neve, Abelard, Stevens, et al.). I

As we have noted, from 68 A.D. until 313 A.D., the ten great anti- ■■■

Christian persecutions had ravaged the Mediterranean shores. This should be kept in mind when any attempt is made to find real New Testament local churches and real “apostolic witnesses" following the ■Vi

destruction of Jerusalem (70 A.D.). These persecutions lay in the realm '

of real threats to the home, family, and the life of the child of God. They were not merely dialectic sophistries presented by quick-witted theological opponents such as the Nicene breed. The persecutions formed a gruesome setting of “opportunity" for the Christian to put his theol- j

ogy into play, so to speak, to see if it was as infallible and as unimpeached as it sounded to the ear.

Historians have noted how the mark of the witnesses in the Pre

Nicene period was the peculiar zeal for martyrdom, in keeping w ■■■

the spirit of the times. The fact is that the expectation of the ‘mrn J |

return of Christ dwindled after the edicts of Constantine (313 •

in no way proves that the Pre-Nicene fathers were deluded in J ■w negative “world view of their tunes. They proved to be fajry J correct by what actually took place following Augustine s tabulou^ to tale about the “City of God." Augustine's City oj God had cea pHlB

......................... ” rnanv years before Augustine wrote.

A.D. it had become “the king’s chapel’’ (Amos 7:13). Furthermore, we cannot dismiss the Chiliastic belief of the Pre-Nicene Christians,59 for it inspired the greatest bravery in the face of actual persecution, and it was the driving and sustaining Bible truth for those who were actually witnessing during the persecutions, not sitting around arguing about hoosian, ad hooousia, and homo-homo-homey.

From 70 A.D. to 440 A.D. (Pope Leo I), many a Bible believer had “kept the faith once delivered to the saints” by the writers of the New Testament. There has always been and always will be a “remnant according to grace” while the leavening process (Evangelism, Educa­tion, Culture, Apostasy) is taking place.

The Gospel was propagated in these days chiefly by living, preaching, and personal dealing. The rapid expansion of Christianity in those first two centuries was due to four causes: zeal, pure morals, compact local church organization, and expectancy of the Second Com­ing of Christ. DePressence says that many Christians without any special calling “watch for opportunities...they find their way into cities...into the armies...they call the people together and harangue them with FANATICAL GESTURES. ”60 Observe how unbecoming this description is compared with the stately, glittering sociability of the Bible teachers at the “Council of Nicaea.”

The Christian of 70-325 A.D. found a mission field at his front door. He witnessed (Acts 1). Captive soldiers carried the gospel to King Shapur of Persia; consequently there was a Persian bishop present at Nicaea.61 A bishop near Amasea in Pontus, called “Asterius,” preached sermons which Broadus says could be preached today.62 Fifty sermons are ascribed to a man named Macarius: he was an abbot in a convent in Egypt. His sermons were highly esteemed by the Pietists of the six­teenth century.63 Ulfilas, the “Apostle to the Goths,” made the first translation of the Textus Receptus into a barbarian tongue64 and thereby became the first author in the Teutonic language. Since Ulfilas’s trans­ition was substantially the Syrian text of the Antiochan Church (King ontes 1611, AV), he was branded immediately as an “Arian” by the ®™°hcs, who then proceeded to claim that all of the barbarians who ■Mated,the city of Rome were “Arians.” (Proof that Ulfilas was an Ne nan Was the fact that he had one ASV and NASV reading in his estament at 1 Tim. 3:16, which naturally came from manuscripts aU o^ri^ ^at Origen corrupted: see chapter 4, notes 65, 66). Calling and’ e ^ar^ar*an tribes by the title of “Arian” is quite remarkable "'ho^alfh amus'ng' lmag>ne 100,000 to 500,000 half-naked horsemen

| eheved in the Virgin Birth, the crucifixion, the bodily resur­

rection, the Second Coming, and the Deity of Christ, but didn’t quite grasp the “truth” that the word “begotten” (Ps. 2:7) could refer to eternity, called “Arian.” Surely Rome could have welcomed them as “militant” Christians.

Preaching occurred at every place where Christians gathered, and it was not at all confined to Sunday services. When services were held, the preacher usually sat and the congregation stood. The sermons were fifteen minutes long in most cases, according to Dargan, and never longer than an hour.66 In spite of the councils, theological debates, strife, sedi­tion, and “catholic” heresies, the Bible believers maintained a powerful Christian witness for nearly three hundred years. The martyrs preserved the treasure of evangelical doctrines without knowing themselves all that it contained. They esteemed the Holy Bible more highly than their own lives. Where the apologists brought their opponents to the issue of correct philosophical and theological interpretations, the witnesses brought their opponents face to face with the issue of personal account­ability to God for their sins.67 If “apologists” (someone writing a treatise in defense of Christianity) felt compelled to define “Christology,” the witnesses were compelled to prove that the Lord Jesus Christ was living and returning to judge sinners (Acts 17:31).

The cross-examination of a certain Phileas before Culcian, during

the reign of Diocletian, is an example of a powerful New Testament,

apostolic witness.68 The passion of Theodotus69 demonstrates the prac­

tical application of a living theology far better than volumes of Nicene hot air on Christological subjects. There is certainly something in the knowledge of God (“theology”) of Sanctus, Blandina, and others that should have a place in determining who is “orthodox” and who is a “heretic.” Though unrecognized by historians for their academic attain­ments, the street preachers of 68-313 A.D. were theologians: they had to be. The personal worker who led Justin Martyr to Christ had his number even before that Campbellite got saved. He said to Justin, Yw are a sophist, but have never tried to act. ”70 One can imagine how this must have stung the young intellectual who was about to become a ca -j

olic” theologian and teach baptismal regeneration.

Personal witnessing was a dangerous business; DePressence te us that idol making was the largest industry in the Roman Empire a the most lucrative. Workmen who became converted had to just like a Christian would have to give up his job today it ^er working in a distillery when he got saved. The absence of a wO was noticed immediately. A real Christian was marked by his spe ivhirh lacked the constant and colloquial references to the go s.

was also marked by his refusal to participate in heathen worship. In every persecution against the truth, “we discover the hands of the PRIEST”71 exactly as any Bible believer should have expected if he had believed the New Testament accounts (Acts 14:13; Mark 15:31).

The acts of Tarchus, Progus, and Andronicus show an unaltered witness from that of Simon Peter.72 Alban, the first English martyr, converted the executioner who whipped him at the stake.73 Accompa­nied by fire, rack, scourges, pincers, clubs, screws, ropes, pulleys, and boiling oil, the New Testament local churches kept right on witnessing and witnessing for Christ until Constantine saw that his only hope of controlling his pagan subjects was to split the churches over a theological argument that had nothing to do with the Gospel or the conversion of souls and then to absorb the “winners” of this dispute into paganism, by professing to believe what they believed (Ezra 4:2). A heretic, from Nicaea on, was in most cases a Bible-believing Christian who would not be absorbed.

Constantine used the Satanic nomenclature74 for these believers—a

SECT (Acts 28:22). After saying that heresy was “altogether impossible, or at any rate most difficult to define,”'15 Augustine decided that those who taught against infant baptism were heretics and should be killed. It is a good thing for Augustine and his Catholic “brethren” that the Novatians and Donatists had more Christian grace than they. Schaff, covering up for his own fellow heretics, tells us that if Augustine had just seen, ahead of his time, the crusades against the Albigenses and the horrors of the Spanish Inquisition (see chapters 13, 14), he would have retracted his dangerous opinions about cursing heretics.76 We doubt that. A man who would consign non-elect babies to hell and limit the election of sinners to babies sprinkled in the Roman Catholic church has a much stronger stomach than Philip imagines.77

®ut now it is time to look at some real heresies. For a change, instead of imagining that “heresy” consists of not lining up with what a Catholic council thought about the Trinity, let us examine “the real McCoy”;

t is, the heresies that were accepted by orthodox and heterodox Cath- lc^ teachings that clearly distort and pervert the Book from which e hristian professed to have gotten his beliefs.

*s a l’st °f “popes,” which is still printed in every Year Book bein manac *n 1980, just as though it were a list of real people. It with a “Linus” who was supposed to have followed Simon Peter, folio 6 'S f°l'owe<l by someone named Cletus; then Clemens, who is called •* ^varistus, Alexander I, and Sixtus; then some character Telesphorus” shows up. This Disneyland succession of “vicars”

goes by title of “pope.” In Schaff s Church History78 the roll call runs through twenty-five more names before good old Sylvester sits down on the throne of Rome, replacing Connie the Great.

After running through Jaffe, Wattenbach, Artung, Lipsius, Hort, Duchesne, Harnack, and Waitz, Schaff tells us that the oldest links in this chain of Roman “bishops” are veiled in “impenetrable darkness.”79 (It is kind of like reading a modern biology textbook on “the origin of life of this planet.”) We could have guessed the situation without being told. Going from Peter to Sylvester is like going from Paul to Rasputin. Since Peter was an apostle and not a pastor of a local church (“bishop,” 1 Tim. 3:1-6), the early church fathers never reckon Peter among the bishops of any church—let alone Rome. Peter was an “elder” (1 Peter 5:1-4), but spent his life as a traveling evangelist.

Where then does this non-Biblical, anti-Christian line of names come from? Well, the names “Linus” and “Clement” have been extracted from 2 Timothy 4:21 and Philippians 4:3 by some anonymous play­boy. Overlooking the fact that Linus and Clement were the friends of the apostle Paul, who went to Rome (not the apostle Peter, who went to Babylon, 1 Peter 5:13), the two names are inserted as coyly as a Valentine dropped into a mailbox. The next few names after Linus and Clement are invented by Irenaeus (130-202) and are recorded in his work “Against Heresies.”80 This fabricated apostolic line was supposed to be a list of real “popes” down to his time (177 A.D.). Irenaeus is zealous to tell us that by this make-believe “line, the ecclesiastical tra­dition from the apostles” and “the preaching of the truth have come down to US.”81 If Colossians 2:8 is laid alongside this remarkable rumor, one is constrained to ask, “Who is US?” Everything about the “preaching of the truth” that Irenaeus needed to know and everything about apostolic tradition that he needed to know (2 Thess. 3:6) was one the table in front of him in a Book which he himself quoted more than 1,800 times. Irenaeus’s extra-canonical, extracurricular specula-'.; tions, outside of the light God had given him (Ps. 119:105), had evidently bogged him down in “impenetrable darkness.” It must have been a mud hole in a swamp. Lange carries the Roman line of “papas from Linus A.D.) down to Alexander (supposedly 109-119 A.D.J- The historians Lipsius and Hamack follow the lists given by Hegesippu and Eusebius. Several Bible facts are militant against any Christia believing any of the foolishness listed above:

1. There are no popes in the New Testament.

2. There are no apostolic signs after the apostles are dea

3. There are no apostolic successors to James the apost e

4. Only those converted under the ministry of an apostle have the “signs” (2 Cor. 12:12; Mark 16:17), and they can pass none of these signs along to their converts (Acts 8:19-24).

5. Peter was never in Rome because it was virgin territory for the Gospel when Paul went there in 62 A.D. (Rom. 15:20-21).

6. Paul wrote to the Romans, not Peter.

7. Peter’s bones have been found in Jerusalem, not Rome.*1

8. The idea of an “apostolic succession” from Jerusalem to Rome, to a believing reader of Matthew 27; John 19; Acts 12; 2 Timothy 4; and Revelation 17, is just too comical for words.

Some faithless church historians have agreed in collusion to pass on a vicious fable with such force and persistence that to this day there are over ninety million people who think that a “pope” is the Vicar of Jesus Christ on this earth. A pope is no more a “Vicar of Jesus Christ” than Adolph Hitler or Ho Chi Minh.

Strangely enough, the heretic hunters seem to have a terrible time finding obvious cases of disagreement between Catholic teaching and scriptural teaching, while they have no trouble finding all sorts of anti- Catholic “heretics” who disagree on matters so obtuse and philosophical that the devil himself would have a hard time figuring out what was orthodox and what wasn’t. To the modern, apostate Fundamentalist, for example, a “heretic” is a Bible believer who believes that the Bible by which he was saved is the final, infallible authority of God Almighty. In some quarters (1970-1980) this heretic is called “a Ruckmanite.” To prove that this is a dangerous heresy, a system has been constructed by apostate Fundamentalists which would absolutely defy the wildest imagination of the most reckless and undisciplined mind. The system teaches that “only the originals were inspired” (although there isn’t one verse in either Testament that says that), that attacks on the Virgin Birth (Luke 2:33) and the Deity of Christ (1 Tim. 3:16) are to be over­looked if either fundamental is found somewhere else in the scriptures, at attacks on salvation by grace (Acts 8:37; Luke 23:42) have nothing do with sound or false doctrine but are matters of “choice of readings” °r preferences”),83 and that since you can find the “fundamentals ar somew^ere *n Alexandrian manuscripts, that these forgeries

• ’ even when they alter the God-given text in eight thousand

36 000° New Testament. On the basis of this absurd “scholarship,” n- ’ . c^anges were made in the NIV and the NASV from the Autho-

text of the Protestant Reformation.

church burning” was a favorite pastime of the Roman Catholic Or a thousand years, and to this day she officially believes (in

spite of the propaganda put out by CBS, NBC, ABC, the Associated Press, and the United News Service) that all Bible believing Baptists are heretics. Furthermore, she confesses that they are damned84 and deserve to be killed by the one “true” church that Jesus “founded.”85 The same pope (any pope between 1900-1990) who spouts off about “absolute tolerance” for all religions in America and England is the same rascal who backs up absolute intolerance of every religion but Catholicism in Spain, Ireland, and South America.85 The cardinals and archbishops in America are taught to pretend that they are for “separa­tion of church and state” while their fellow-members and kinfolk in

Ireland and Spain are taught that no church has a right to exist in any state but the Roman Catholic church.87 Catholic priests and bishops are for “religious liberty” like Jewish rabbis are for blood pudding and pork chops.

Heretic hunting passed over to the church state religions of the Ref­ormation (Anglican, Reformed, Lutheran, etc.) so that eventually anyone who didn’t believe in infant baptism was a “heretic.”89 Thus, those who clearly and plainly and openly violated the New Testament teaching —where the passages were plain—passed off as orthodox Christians, while those who differed on obscure Trinitarian formulas (Novatians, Manichaeans, Arians, Donatists, Sabellians, etc.) were labeled “here­

tics.” None of the following “heretics” accepted INFANT BAPTISM: Waldenses,90 Albigenses, Paterines, Vaudois, Huguenots, Piphles, Bap­tists, Anabaptists, Donatists, Bogomiles, Bulgarians, Petrobrusians,91

Pelagians, Henricians, Tisserands, or Paulicians.

Did the local New Testament church practice INFANT BAPTISM?

This orientation should clear the ground for any honest man who still believes in the authority of the New Testament. If a church his­tory, for example, was written by a man who was tied to a communion that practiced infant baptism (say Fisher, Drummond, LaGarde, Dollin­ger, Neander, Schaff, et al.), how objective do you suppose he would be in presenting his material? How could he deal with the doctrinal truth, objectively or neutrally, when his position was false to start with? How could he state the truth without openly admitting that he was a Bible rejecting heretic HIMSELF where the New Testament crossed his reli­

gion”?92

This one matter alone will account for much of the muddled non sense that one reads in such histories as Philip Schaff s. Infant baptism, as a means of regeneration, is behind so much false reporting and a interpretation in church history that the matter had better be dealt wit ooenly. Although the Campbellites (1800-1940) who followed Alexanae

Campbell (1788-1866) back to Rome would not immerse infants, still they insisted upon saying that John 3:5; Romans 6:1-4; and Ephesians 4:1-6 were references to water baptism: the word “water” occurs nowhere in Ephesians or Romans. Since Schaff, the church historian, was an evolutionary theologian (Post-millennial), his attitude toward much of the corruption that came into the church from 200-400 A.D. is “back in those times, so forth and so on,” or “for the age in which they lived no one could expect such and such,” or “in those early days men did not have the advantage of, etc. ” It would seem that ignorance is a real “friend in time of need” when it comes to rejection of Biblical truth (Rom. 11:25), despite the specific Biblical warnings to guard against it (1 Peter 1:14; 3:5, 8; 1 Thess. 4:13).

Now, a Bible believer can understand how things not covered or mentioned specifically in the New Testament could be confusing to a Christian in any period; church buildings, for example, are mentioned nowhere in the New Testament, neither are they forbidden. There are no Sunday schools in the New Testament, and (to be thorough about the matters) there are no schools of any kind mentioned but one school, conducted by an unsaved, heathen philosopher (see Acts 19:9 and com­ments in that commentary). Adjustments had to be made even in the first century (Acts 6:1-6) to meet unique situations arising that were not specifically covered in the scriptures written up till that time (Acts 15:19). From this we may gather that there is certainly nothing wrong with Sunday school buses, PA systems, Training Unions, missionary conferences, or a thousand other things not mentioned directly in the scriptures. However, in this present chapter we are not concerning our­selves with a study of such items. We all know God is a “Trinity,” although the word is not found anywhere in the scripture; we all know that the “Advent” is Pre-millennial, although neither word is found in the scriptures, and we all know that the saints will be “raptured” out of this world, although that word occurs nowhere in either Testament. But here we are dealing with the deliberate perversion of common, basic, fundamental truths that any Christian could find immediately if he were guided or instructed by anyone (2 Tim. 2:2) who believed the scrip- fcres to be the word of God. Granted that a teacher of the Bible in the -t three centuries of church history might have had trouble with e rews 6; 10; or Zechariah 1; or the Song of Solomon (God knows _^gh of them have trouble today!), it is impossible to understand why oOj W*1° lh*nk they are smart enough to dissect the Trinity (Council wouidaCa^ an^ PaSS e<^’cts on Professing Christians, anathematizing them, E? fe'nk that drawings of an electric chair or a hangman’s noose

were the signs of a Divine blessing. The “cross” was the Roman instru­ment for capital punishment, and according to God, it signified a “CURSE” (Gal. 3:13). Nor could there be any mistaking of that fact by any Christian who read the passages (Gal. 3:13; Deut. 21:23) in either Testament, as to what a “tree” signified. Life from a dead tree is the “branch” of pagan religions; it is connected with olive wreaths, olive branches, mistletoe, Yule logs, and the “Hollywood” of the heathen, who couldn’t possibly sell a wooden cross to a believer who knew that life came from his own, personal Saviour, who was mur­dered (Stephen calls it “murder,” Acts 7:52) on a “tree.”

Tertullian (160-220), Cyprian (195-258), and the “Apostolic Constitutions’’ (third century)93 all mention “the sign of the cross” as part of baptismal rites, inscriptions on tombs, engravings on helmets, coins, seals, scepters, crowns, and above all, its use against demon pos­session. A Christian is supposed to be able to exorcise demons (Acts 19:13) by using the sign of a CURSE (Gal. 3:13). Viewers of Rosemary’s Baby and The Exorcist should appreciate the droll humor. Paul and Jesus Christ cast out devils every time they turned around (Mark 1:25; 5:13, Acts 13:10; 16:18), and neither of them had any more use for a piece of wood, shaped like anything, than they had for a popcorn popper. How did the first Christian who made the “sign of the cross” escape the charge of HERESY? If he “crossed himself,” he put himself under anathema, without a council touching him (Gal. 3:13)!

The Charismatic “fish” pops up out of nowhere with the only expla­nation being that some German rationalists (Schultze and Merz)95 thought it was an allegorical representation of Christ’s flesh.96 An “acrostic” is found in the Sibylline Books,91 to make you think that a fish repre­sented Christ; Tertullian capitalized the letters in the “fish” and calls Jesus Christ “our FISH.”97 Schaff lightly sluffs the matter off with the note that it was a “pious fancy” which might “best be traced to Alexandria.”98 It is mentioned by Origen and Clement, our “qualified scholars” of chapter five.

Now, if Clement and Origen could read the Bible (and we presume they could since Origen quoted it over 17,900 times), how could they have failed to notice that the “great fish’’ (Jonah 1:17) which symbol­ized Christ’s death, burial (Matt. 12:40), and resurrection—not Christ Himself—was a SEA MONSTER (Job 41:1-32) who is identified with SATAN (Isa. 27:1; Rev. 12:9)? Who are these “reverent Biblicists” who have no trouble in recognizing that fishes are types of lost sinners (Matt. 4:19) and then go right ahead and pretend that a fish is an alle gorical representation of Jesus Christ? Who are these egotistical upstarts

in our own century who undertake to alter the Old Latin Bible in Alex­andria" and the Old Syrian Bibles in Caesarea100 (“correcting” the Bible in more than 5,800 places) and then can’t find out what the same Book says about the things they are discussing? Do they ever consult it for information or for edification, or just for critical analysis and amusement? Do these “recognized scholars” (any century) have enough eyesight to see that the fifth cherub (in the Book they were correcting) represented the serpentine or aquatic class of animals (Ezek. 1; 10; Rev. 4:7), and that he is missing from his place “over the throne” (Isa. 14:12; Ezek. 28:14) so that the four remaining cherubim represent only land and air animals? “Fishes” are out of the question; how do you make a fish a type of Jesus Christ when the Lord doesn’t even allow a representative of that family to appear before His throne? What “qualified scholar” would think of such a stupid thing?

Origen taught that the “darkness” of 2 Peter 2:17 was spiritual ignorance. Is that teaching a heresy? Augustine says that praying for dead saints is the uniform practice of the church: what church? Irenaeus and Justin Martyr taught the final annihilation of the wicked, exactly as Pastor Russell and Judge Rutherford taught it. Was that due to igno­rance, or willful rejection of the revealed truths of God? In view of Revelation 22:15; Daniel 12:2; and Matthew 25:41, are we really to believe that Justin, Origen, Augustine, and Irenaeus were that stupid? In 431 A.D. it was decided that orthodox Catholics were to call Mary “The Mother of God, ’’and anyone who would not use that expression (in this case Nestorius: Council of Ephesus) was a heretic. Since no saint in either Testament would think of referring to her by that name, and no one in the book of Acts ever asked her for the time of day, and Christ Himself had only referred to her as “woman” (John 2:4), what was the point in even considering using the title? Could it be that the apostate Catholics of the fourth and fifth centuries had more light on Mary s nature than the apostles who prayed with her (Acts 1:14)? Can a plea of primitive ignorance get the “fathers” through every time?

If Mary was “the bridge from God to man, the scepter of ortho­doxy, the dwelling place of the Holy Trinity, the Holy Temple of Christ, e root of Jesse, the Scepter of David, the Rod of Aaron, and even Salvation of the Heathen,”101 how is it that not one orthodox Bible A *®ving Christian anywhere during the entire “Acts period” (33-62 • •) ever asked her for anything, ever spoke to her in public, ever

& 1 her advice, ever remembered the birthday of her Son, or ever ta./1 ment'oned her name when preaching ANY Biblical doctrine? If

rae,zi Syrus (379 A.D.) prayed to Mary, followed by Gregory

Nazianzen (389 A.D.), upon what grounds did they do it? No one in the New Testament did it. Who were they following? Certainly not Peter, James, John, Matthew, Mark, Luke, Paul, Silas, Barnabas, or anyone like them.

Did any of the church fathers know that all of their pagan forbearers had female deities called “the queen of heaven”? If they didn’t, couldn’t they have found out by reading Jeremiah 44:18 and guessed it? Again let us ask ourselves: who are these Greek scholars (they all spoke and wrote in Greek) who do not hesitate to correct God Almighty anytime

they object to what He says, and at the same time plead “ignorance” for assimilating heresy? If they did not plead ignorance (100-400 A.D.) when put on the griddle by the Paulicians, Donatists, Bulgarians, and Novatians, who are these low-down hypocrites in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries who are pleading ignorance for them now? Could it be that the modern Conservatives who defend them now are just as careless and as incoherent in Bible study? The church fathers quote the New Testament 36,289 times. Who, then, in the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries is going to plead ignorance for them, except a CROOKED LAWYER? If Augustine was in favor of damning here­tics,102 he should have demonstrated his convictions by a simple case of suicide—a beautiful example for other heretics to follow. Certainly there was nothing Biblical about Augustine’s views on baptism, his plan of salvation, his political views, his views on prophecy, his treatment of the brethren, or his views on the local church. If every “heretic” had been flushed and killed instead of just those who disagreed with the followers of Constantine, then Justin Martyr, Irenaeus, Origen, Clement of Alexandria, Clement of Rome, Ephraem Syrus, Cyprian, and Eusebius would have hung by their necks. A “Christian” who believes in the Deity of Christ and calls Mary “the Queen of Heaven in the same breath is like the zoologist who crossed a crocodile with an abalone in the hopes of getting an abadile: instead he got a croco- baloney. Imagine a Christian boldly and bravely announcing that he believes in one or more “essences” in one or more “substances, consubstantial with (or without) hypostasis, while he is depending on sprinkling by a “godfather” to get rid of his sins! Imagine that.

There are “heretics” and then there are heretics.

CHAPTER TEN

The Lights Go Out

“I must work the works of him that sent me, while it is day: the night cometh, when no man can work.” John 9:4

The period of history that begins around 500 A.D. and extends to the Reformation (approximately 1500 A.D.) could properly be called “the Dark Ages.” On the authority of the infallible words of God (AV 1611), the day-year system of the “seven-sevens” (Lev. 23; 25; Exod. 21; 2 Peter 3; etc.), this period represents a nighttime bracket of 9 p.m. until 3 a.m. Bible-rejecting historians (ninety percent of all the histor­ians), including members of the Alexandrian Cult (Schaff, Latourette, LaGarde, Neve, Dollinger, Neander, et al.), have searched out a num­ber of ways to get around this scriptural division. The most modern way is by calling part of the period, or all of it, “the Middle Ages.” What secular educators fail to see when they do this is their unwilling and unconscious assent to Biblical Christianity, for according to the “seven sevens system” set up in the King James Bible, there are five hundred years before the Middle Ages and five hundred years after the middle. By calling 500-1500 A.D. the “Middle Ages,” the stupid fed­eral educators have dated the Second Coming of Christ at 2000 A.D., for as surely as a line was drawn for the beginning (at the year 500), , middle ’ ’ can only have five hundred years after it; otherwise it is not the “middle.” So God continues to make “foolish the wisdom of this world” (1 Cor. 1:20).

The Pergamos period of history begins with the Council of Nicaea ends somewhere around 500 A.D. From Augustine’s time up'to for k D ’ Per*°d marks the use of the word “Pope” or “Papa”

e western bishops; then in 500 A.D. the word came to mean the °^Ofnc, who by 590 A.D. was recognized by many as a “Uni- Bishop.“i Augustine (354-430), of course, marks and defines e Roman Catholic. He has all of the earmarks: the spirit of bigotry

and persecution, the spirit of spiritual blindness and ignorance, the spirit of piety and self-righteousness, the sacramental and ritualistic spirit, and above all the fake humility of a Bible perverting philosopher. He would have made an excellent “pope.”2

The outstanding characters of this period of history (325-500 A.D.) are Chrysostom (345-407), representing the Antiochan school—following the Byzantine text of the King James Bible—and his Roman counter­part, the Catholic Jerome (340-420), who produced the New Testament text of the ASV and NIV fifteen hundred years before they were published in America. Jerome’s New Testament, which became the official “bible” of the Roman Catholic church (and still is), is the match-meet for the Westcott and Hort Greek text of 1582 (the Jesuit Rheims Bible of chap­ter 4, note 92). With the official acceptance by the leaders of the church of Jerome’s Latin Vulgate, from the Alexandrian Cult manuscripts,3 the lights around the Mediterranean go out, the lights in Europe begin to turn on, and every time they turn on there appears on the scene some “Catholic” who is commissioned to turn them off again. The Dark Ages, from a scriptural standpoint, are the results of an official church state adopting a devil’s Bible. For a counterpart in history, one may study the history of England since 1884, when that same Bible was adopted, or the history of America since 1901, when that Bible was adopted. The “writing of divorcement” given to the woman in Matthew 19:7, in every Greek text, says Pi^Xiov dTtooTdoiov (biblion apostasiou)—an apostate Bible. A nation gets its walking papers when it steps out on God.

The councils called during this period were supposedly called to settle the Apollinarian question (Constantinople, 381), the Nestorian question (Ephesus, 431), the Eutychian controversy (Chalcedon, 451), and the Monophysite controversy (Constantinople, 553); the truth of the matter is the councils were called to give more power to councils so that church councils could become the final authority in all matters of faith and practice for “catholics.” The Council of Sardica (343) was called exclusively for western bishops, so that this council could decide ■ that the Roman bishop (in the western half of the empire) should be given the precedence over the eastern bishops (those in Antioch, Smyrna, etc.). Could it have decided anything but that? By then (343) the Roman . bishop was well on his way to the place of military dictator. As ear Y as 154-168 A.D. the Bishop of Rome (Anicetus) had tried to get the ■ Syrian churches in Asia Minor to alter the date of the observance M Easter,4 as Constantine had tried to get the Novatians to do.5 j

was undoubtedly encouraged by the fact that he had access to ■ 2 Clement (apocryphal books added to the New Testament in

Sinaiticus manuscript), and since “Clement”—whoever in blazes that was—had earlier undertaken to instruct a Pauline church (Corinth) set up in the east (Greece), so it logically followed that Anicetus could “go and do likewise” and thereby join the ranks of the “apostles” (Pauline Obsession).

Stephen I (253-257) had tried to straighten out the brethren down in North Africa, as he considered Rome to have jurisdiction over every­thing within eight hundred miles. Cyprian (195-258) shut Stevie up even though he had to overdo the office of the local bishop6 to get his point across; Cyprian’s point was that every bishop was so exalted and so supreme that no other bishop (be he ever so exalted and supreme) could dictate to him.7 And when Cyprian was a boy, Victor I (190-202) had threatened to excommunicate the Syrian and eastern churches for cele­brating Easter on the Bible date (the 14th of Nisan) instead of on Sun­day every year. (If one observed the Biblical date, “Easter” would change days from year to year and would not fall annually on Sunday.) This ancient row was a bone of contention between the Bible believing Celtic Christians of ancient Britain, who followed Antioch of Syria, and the Catholic “missionary” Augustine, who followed Rome (see chapter 12).

By the end of the fourth century these warring bishops had divided off into five geographical areas, and the leaders of these ecclesiastical centers became known as the five “patriarchs.” They “fed the flock” (supposedly) in Rome, Constantinople, Jerusalem, Antioch, and Alex­andria: quite naturally Alexandria, Antioch, and Jerusalem all leaned toward Constantinople, which was nearer “home base” than Rome, so the Roman bishops had to shift for themselves. This they were well able to do for two reasons: the first and most obvious reason was that Constantine had to all practical purposes given them a throne, and although Constantine’s sons reigned on (and more about that later), the Bishop of Rome was a religious ruler of Italy, France, Spain, Switzer­land, Carthage, Sardinia, Sicily, and what is now western Austria and southern Germany, as well as parts of England. Secondly, Origen and Clement had caused a deadly schism in the east that would never be ealed: the difference in matters of belief and interpretation between e Alexandrian Cult, who followed Origen and Eusebius, and later ugustine and Jerome, and the Bible believing Christians who would accept philosophy, science, and tradition on an equal footing with nfrPtUre‘ unifying factor, then, which eventually put the Bishop no °me into the place of a world ruler of heaven, hell, and earth8 was the invasions of the barbarians, although this happened; nor was

it the invasion of the Turks in the east, although this happened. It was the fact that the Alexandrian Cult was able to pollute both branches of the church, and that the popes, from the first one that sat on the throne (Leo I, 440-461, according to some; Gregory, 590-604, according to others) to the last one who surrendered to the Russian Soviet (1970- 1978), were all in agreement with the Alexandrian Cult: none of them preferred the Bible over philosophy, science, and tradition. The Cult is marked by dual authorities, where the third authority plays “god.”’ The dual authority for a Roman member of the Cult would be CHURCH TRADITION, composed of councils, fiats of the popes, and the “church fathers”—interpreted by GOD, the third authority. In this case “god” means the pope of the Church.10 The final authority for a Conservative or Evangelical Christian in 1980 who is a member of the Cult11 is the AV and the New ASV,'2 or the ASV and the NIV, or the AV and the

NIVand the RVand the NASV, interpreted by GOD. In this case, “god” means the “recognized Christian scholars. ”13

To return to Rome, Constantine passed on to his “due reward” (whatever that was) on May 22, 337 A.D., and his “works followed him” (Rev. 14:13), whatever may have been involved in that. His sons, Constantine II, Constans, and Constantius (Connie seems to have been

hung up on one name: his own) began immediately to butcher various other relatives in the family and finally wound up killing each other. Constantine II was slain by Constans in 340, who in turn was murdered by Magnentius, 350. Constantius became sole emperor in 353 A.D. Constantius was a fanatical “Arian” who liked to be called “Bishop

of Bishops” (archbishop), which was nothing out of the way since his father had been so highly exalted that he had presided over every bishop in the church (Nicaea, 325 A.D.). The next apostate into the ring was called an “apostate”—“Julian the Apostate”: he was a nephew of

Constantine.

Since the great “victory” of Nicaea had thoroughly established “Catholic orthodoxy,” Constantius rejected it, and Julian went a step further, after being trained by Eusebius and being baptized an ordained,14 he immersed himself in heathen philosophy, picked up a of the sorceries and superstitions he could from pagan religions (3000- B.C.), and was initiated into the “Eleusian Mysteries,” believing in dreams, visions, oracles, and black and white magic.15 Like his pag forefathers, he worshipped the sun-god (Helios) and sacrificed to up^ ter. To pass his real religion off as a “Christian religion,” Julian to sponsor a reformation among the heathen priests to make them • like Catholic clergymen. So the priests of Apollo, Zeus, Jupiter, e

were to believe in and practice separation: they should give alms, live chaste lives, have no long hair, have no rock records, wear simple cloth­ing, and stay away from theaters and taverns.16 They were to dress like Catholic “priests” and bishops and practice Catholic rites of excommunication, absolution, restoration, and a mumbo jumbo of “sacraments” all accompanied by music from a well arranged choir (see Alexandria: chapter 5, notes 14-16).

Adopting Constantine’s Satanic method, Julian decided to lower Christianity another rung down the ladder by getting the bishops embroiled in theological disputes.17 This proved to be a blessing for the local assemblies who really believed the Bible because Julian, as any Roman ruler, was only gunning for the big quail: the “recognized scholars” who were “qualified” to dispute. Consequently, most of the “dissenters” were left to propagate the gospel without the terrors of the former imperial persecutions (see chapter 4).

When Julian died, Jovinian took over (363-364). After one year of professing to believe in the Athanasian orthodoxy of Catholicism (Nicaea, 325), he died. Valentinian I took over and reigned until 375 A.D. He rejected Nicene “orthodoxy.” The next ruler was Gratian, his son (375-383). Gratian sidled up to Ambrose, the Bishop of Milan (Augustine’s old buddy), and then had a merry time taking the rights and liberties away from every local assembly that didn’t knuckle down to the Catholic church.18 His brother, Valentinian II (383-392), replaced him but followed in his steps. Theodosius the Great reigned from 392 to 395 A.D. Theodosius professed “fundamentalism” (Nicene Cathol­icism) and firmly anchored the Catholic church to the Roman State, giving it all the rights and privileges of a state religion, including armed officers to kill Bible believing “dissenters.”19 Hence, historians refer to Theodosius as “the Great.”20 After his death, his four sons (Arcadius, Honorius, Theodosius II, and Valentinian III) inherited a fractured empire which had again broken into two parts due to the controversies between Bible believing dissenters in the east and Roman Catholics in the west; this time the Roman Empire never recovered, at least not the '^tperial form of it. The Lord God had evidently had enough killings, urnings, lootings, stabbings, and imprisonments of Christians by atholics” who had settled down into the world system of sun wor- •Ppers. He decided to wipe Rome out.

n 378 A.D. the Roman Emperor Valens lost his life in a battle nanople) with the Visigoths, who had crossed the Balkans after being Cen^se*^ westward by the Huns, who were invading Europe from west- ra Asia. On the death of Theodosius (see above), Alaric and the

Visigoths plundered the countryside to the walls of Constantinople and then invaded Greece, penetrating as far as Sparta. By 401 A.D. (Jerome at this time was 61 years old, and Augustine was 47 years old), the Visigoths were threatening northern Italy. Alaric marched on Rome in 408 but did not capture it until 410 A.D. (at this time Jerome was 70 years old and Augustine was 56 years old). Alaric died (410), and Ataulf, the Visigoth, took command of his armies and marched into southern France (Gaul) and settled there. The Kingdom of the Goths (419) from this area became half of what is now modern France.

While these events were taking place, the Vandals (called “Arians” by all the historians—assuming that all of them were Christians who differed with Nicene Catholicism!),21 Alans, and Suevi invaded Gaul and went on into Spain. The Franks were pressing into northern France. As the Germanic conquests advanced, they drove the Celts westward into England, Ireland, and France. The Vandals tore through Spain into Africa (425 A.D.) and then sacked Rome in 455 A.D. At this time Leo I had been a “pope” for fifteen years. There had been another terrible invasion of France in 451 by the Huns under Attila (reigned 435^453), who came clear through Italy in 452 to sack Rome but was bought off at the last minute by Pope Leo I (440-461).

This sudden deliverance from the heretical “Arian” on the part of the Bishop of Rome raised his stock so high that, henceforth, he was called the ''king of Rome,” and he refers to Rome, henceforth, as the “QUEEN of the Universe.” The pagan Catholic historians call Leo I modestly “the pope of SALVATION.”22 In view of this sudden elevation of a Bible denying apostate, who was in favor of killing anti­Catholic subjects,23 what could have taken place when St. Leo met Attila the Hun?

Well, it was said by some that Attila had the pants scared off him when he saw a figure robed in white, like a priest, standing behind Leo with a drawn sword—a likely story. Again, several psychotic Catho­lics said that St. Peter or St. Paul showed up in the nick of time (depend­ing upon which one of them founded the Roman church, unless both of them did). At any rate, Leo I shelled out: he payed “protection money” to get rid of Attila, and he had plenty with him, for when he went to the Mincio River to meet Attila he had crosses of gold, g°l monstrances,24 royal banners, and probably enough cash to finance a Mafia. But the encounter is of tremendous theological import, for it shows that although Pope Leo I did not believe in killing HUNS (even if they were Arian), he did believe in killing “heretics.’ 25 Evident y the deciding factor in determining which “Arians” to kill was the stz ■

of the armies they led. Killing heretics is “orthodox” if you outnum­ber them (see chapter 14, note 111). “Heretics,” in Leo’s case, as in the case of all subsequent popes, meant anyone who accepted the Bible against tradition (see previous chapter). For example, Leo, along with Ambrose, believed implicitly that Christians should get Peter and Paul to pray for them although both apostles had been dead for more than three hundred years.26

But aside from believing in these godless and depraved vestiges of pagan religions, Pope Leo had more important matters to attend to than buying off Huns or killing people who didn’t pray to Peter or Paul. Like any political incumbent, his main job was how to stay in office after he got there; self-preservation has always been the first law of life (Job 2:4) for the unconverted. You could always buy off Huns, but you had a hard time buying off your fellow patriarch in the east near Syria, where the New Testament manuscripts were written. Leo’s main concern was interfaith competition from the Patriarch of Constantinople.

The fourth ecumenical Council of Chalcedon was held in 451 A.D., and at this council (twenty-one years after the death of Augustine) the Bishop of Constantinople was elevated to such a place of power and prominence that he nearly threatened the Roman bishop’s influence.27 Leo’s papal legates at Chalcedon vigorously protested to this “unscrip- tural motion,” but they got nowhere. This would make Constantinople a “new Rome” with a patriarch just a “smidgen” (southern colloquial term, 1900-1980) under the Roman bishop in dignity and authority. Still, Leo I had a definite advantage, for the imperial court of the Byzantine emperors was in Constantinople, where it would not put too much pres­sure on the holy papa in the west. The patriarchs of Constantinople were always under imperial pressure, for the emperor lived in their “home town.”

Finally, a synod was held in Ephesus in August of 449 A.D. which attempted to depose “Leo the Great.”28 Leo quite naturally called it * Robber Synod” and suggested that everyone in the east come to ‘n l^e west’ where they could be more “objective” and “neu- *n ^eir political movements.29 They finally met (but not in Italy) e east *n Chalcedon, and they decided among other things that the Peter was speaking by remote control through Leo,30 and also glfc anyone who disagreed with Leo I was CURSED. Not content with state of things, they took three more shots of cocaine (or heroin: Chris' 1 < r^nS are divided!) and decided (as good “Bible believing I lans ^at a man was a blasphemer of Christ if he refused to

call Mary “the Mother of God.” To update these matters, we read from a tract placed in the city hall of Pensacola in 1978, stating that anyone who claims that God is their Father but does not claim Mary as their mother is an UNSAVED SINNER on his way to hell. These are the people who like to quote Matthew 7:1 when you witness to them about the new birth.

At Chalcedon, Leo had objected bitterly to the twenty-eighth canon, which dealt with the ecclesiastical elevation of the Bishop of Constan­tinople; however, Leo didn’t object to one thing that was said about the “mother of God” or Peter (deceased over three hundred years) “speaking through him.” There are “heretics,” and again there are heretics.

One of the great theological dead ends of this period was what his­torians called the Pelagian heresy. As other “heresies,” it became the occasion for much argument, writing, debate, and conciliar action, which were all designed and manipulated to avoid the issue: absolute author­ity. As the church continued to degenerate into a mass of carnally minded, worldly, sprinkled apostates, the issue of religious authority became more and more important as it was obvious that religious anarchy or political “mobarchy” were “in the offing.” In 502 A.D., when Bishop Ennodius of Pavia stated that the pope can be judged by God alone,32 he pretty well stated what good “Catholics” are supposed to believe about final authority.

Pelagius (about 400) was a British monk who espoused the old Celtic brand of Syrian Christianity33 and used the old Latin of the Waldenses and Albigenses (that is, the Textus Receptus of the King James Bible).3* He chose the Antiochan school of theology (Acts 11:26) rather than the Alexandrian; so, naturally he got off to “a bad start” with his con­temporary, Aurelius Augustine, baby-sprinkling persecutor of the Donatists. Jerome, also being a member of the Alexandrian Cult in good standing, easily sided with Augustine in the “Pelagian Controversy.

A Spanish Catholic named Paul Orbsius was the first to stand up and declare that the writings of Pelagius were heretical. When Orosius said that a council at Carthage (Augustine’s anathemas placed on the Donatists) had condemned Pelagius’s writings and that Augustine had written against his errors, Pelagius said, “What matters Augustine to me?”35 (Pelagius was no respecter of persons—not even a North Afri can Catholic). He was then sharply rebuked, being told that since the whole North African church had been SAVED from the errors oft 4 Donatists" (the Donatists believed in separation of church and stat J they rejected infant baptism and refused baptismal regeneration) I

Augustine,36 that Pelagius should be excommunicated. He was exon­erated, however, by a council in Palestine (in the east) under Eulogius, the Bishop of Caesarea. Immediately, two North African synods (Carthage and Mela) condemned Pelagius’s “errors” and appealed to Rome for help. First of all, Pope Innocent (402-417) commended them for their wisdom in appealing to him as the final, absolute authority in all matters of faith and practice,37 and then he agreed with their com­plaint (2 Sam. 15:4). Consequently, the North African council of the Alexandrian Cult assembled and declared that any Christian who said that infant baptism could not take away “original sin” was damned, and any Christian who said that Adam would have died naturally if he had not taken of the tree of life was damned.38

Further, if a Bible believer says that babies can get into the king­dom of heaven without water baptism (i.e., Catholic sprinkling), he is damned. This time the Cult got an emperor to back up their “ortho­doxy.” Honorius published an edict against “Pelagians.” Pelagius’s followers were stuffed into a bracket with the “Nestorians,” who had refused to call Mary “the Mother of God.”39 Like the Norrisites of the 1930’s and 1940's and the Ruckmanites of the 1970’s and 1980’s, they were pronounced “anathema.”

Now, what damnable heresy do you suppose Pelagius had been teaching?

Well, to be perfectly honest about it, the main objection to Pelagius’s teaching was not his theological system that dealt with original sin, free will, or the “form of freedom,” or the “first stage of freedom.” Nor was it the “plenum or perpetual tabula rasa of freedom,” nor the three elements in the idea of good (power, will, and act), nor was it to be found in his views on “justitia per naturam" or “justitia sublege” or justitia gratiae.” Now, when a “hit dog” yells, the rock is never that hard to locate (Rom. 2:1-3). Pelagius’s arguments, as discussed in Schaff’s history,40 do not impress us. Schaff was predestinated before the foundation of the world to justify Augustine before he began to write by virtue of the fact that both of those five-point baby-sprinklers believed *n a holy catholic church”41 and were counting on their water bap-

to give them the new birth: exactly as Popes Leo and Honorius

• No, the infuriating thing about Pelagius’s teaching was apparent: / ere is no original sin inherited from Adam, then sprinkling babies

°f nothing. Pelagius was a threat to any church state system t k ’3a'3'es to coerce Christians into submission and that wanted ■_ cep their membership roll stacked (see chapter 14, notes 137, 173).

gustme s anti-Pelagian system was as full of holes as a rotten cam­ouflage net.42

In the year of 529 A.D. the Catholics at the Synod of Orange adopted a semi-Augustinian system (after killing Pelagians for nearly fifty years). The semi-Augustinian doctrine taught that the soul of man was injured in Genesis 3 (of which the scriptures say nothing) and that free will can only be restored by sprinkling in the Roman Catholic church,43 of which doctrine the scriptures are as silent as Yankee Stadium at 3 a.m. Nevertheless, Pope Boniface II confirmed these matters in 530 A.D.

Thus regeneration of infants by sprinkling became an official Cath­olic doctrine (orthodoxy) for the “Church of Christ,” with the back­ing of the Greek emperors and Roman bishops. This blatant, God defying denial of the New Testament plan of salvation (John 1:12-13; Rom. 10:9-10; 4:1-6; 5:1-10) was designed to create an unregenerated church membership where Satan and his own sons (John 8:44; Eph. 2:1-3) could control the lives and destinies of every Bible believing Christian in Europe, since they were commanded by their scriptures to “obey the powers” of the state (Rom. 13:1-6).

Summing it up, one may say that the most damnable heresy, that had more to do with the bloody massacres of the Dark Ages than any other heresy, was the heresy accepted as orthodox Bible doctrine by Jerome, Augustine, and the popes. Alongside regeneration by immer­sion (or sprinkling), the Arian heresy, the Nestorian heresy, the Eutychian heresy, the Donatist heresy, the Pelagian heresy, the Sabellian

heresy, the Montanist heresy, the Manichaean heresy, and the Novatian heresy appear as inspired scripture. Regeneration of infants by sprin­kling can produce nothing in the end but an unregenerate church full of whitewashed, religious hypocrites. With the establishment of this Catholic “fundamental of the faith” (Boniface II, 530-532), the last light in the Mediterranean area goes out, and the local assemblies who believe the Bible become hunted animals. By 590 A.D. we enter the Thyatira church period (Rev. 2:18). It continues until the century that

saw the Crusades (1090 A.D.).

While we have been giving our attention to the matters of witches and witch hunters in the first four centuries, and also the political gyra" tions of the “catholics” (synodical legislation and ecumenical councils), we have temporarily lost track of the Bible believing witnesses w a considered the imminent return of Christ and the gospel imperative be of more importance than hairsplitting discussions about philosop y and theology. When we last observed our practical theologians, ey were going through “tribulation” in the Smyrna period (Rev. 2. JI of church history, and they were coming up to the third heaven in their own blood (Rev. 12:11). Wherever their backslidden bret i

took a step away from the Bible, they parted company with them (Rom. 16:17) The continual dissenting from the state church after Nicaea was exactly like the continual dissenting before Nicaea, except it was accel­erated. It became now Puritans and Protestants who protested against the abandonment of the New Testament by Roman Catholics.

The Montanists had left (among other reasons) because they objected to the Gnostic rationalism that was creeping into the writings of the “Church Fathers.” They also resented the moral laxity of the Catho­lics of their day. As a Bible believer would suspect, the Montanists came from Asia Minor in the east (where John wrote to the seven churches and where Paul evangelized on three missionary trips from Antioch). The Montanists were also called Priscillianists and Cataphrygians. The most anti-Catholic doctrine they taught—which revolted all the ortho­dox bishops—was the teaching that there was no special “priesthood” (1 Peter 2:9), but that every believer was a priest. This “heresy” directly contradicted the teaching of the faculty members of the most unusual university in Africa (see chapter 5). Montanists were Pre-millennial; that doctrine also rubbed the faculty members raw. Whatever their oppo­nents may have said about them to convince students of history that they were terrible heretics can easily be overlooked if one studies the rest of church history (500-1900 A.D.); every dissenting group of peo­ple from 100-1980 A.D. who believed the Bible (and did not knuckle down to the ecclesiastical powers of their day) were called “heretics,” for, after all, that is the New Testament designation for a real believer (Acts 24:14).

When the Novatians hauled out of “mother church.” following their leader Novatian, they did so because of the laxity of church disci­pline under Cornelius, Callistus, and Zephrynus; many of them then united with the Montanists.44 Neither of these groups were ever forgiven by the “catholics,” who then decided if you could not hang Montanists and Novatians for desiring moral purity and discipline, at least you could hang them tor being “unorthodox” in their conceptions of the Trinity, ince the Catholics themselves practically put Mary into the Trinity and left Christ hanging on the cross (chapter 9, note 93), it was a pure case ot a skunk accusing an opossum of having bad breath.

The Donatists had evacuated because they insisted that if a Chris- g"*' as Put on the spot by a Roman emperor or any of his goon squads. . e hristian was to remain “faithful unto death,” and at no time was n tO reveal where he had hidden his Bible,45 nor was he to tell any _*han where any other Christian had hidden a Bible. These scriptural "W’V’ctions are pictured by Schaff as “a fanatical contempt of death.”46

which made them "rush to the martyr’s crown.” Exactly how this con­clusion is drawn, the historian does not say. He may have had in mind some isolated utterances like those of Ignatius,47 but if he does, he doesn’t list them. However, the facts are stubborn things, so history itself now rises up against its chronicler (Mr. Schaff) and proves that his low esti­mation of the Donatists was slander disguised as a ‘‘qualified opinion.” The surest proof that Schaff, and historians like him, don’t know what they are talking about is that when the Imperial persecutions were over— and consequently the need for martyrdom brought to a standstill—per­secution against the Donatists by Catholics went right on until they were exterminated, at least from the Diocese of North Africa, controlled by our good, old, baby-sprinkling buddy Augustine.48

You see, the real root of the Donatist trouble was not any such small thing as refusal to receive ‘‘traitors” or ‘‘cowards” back into the assembly: no, the roots were much deeper than that. The root was that Augustine and Origen conceived of ‘‘the church” as an organized institution into which pagans should be brought so that they could ‘‘learn how to become a Christian,” or at least learn how to live like one (so they could pass off as one). The Donatists thought that the ‘‘church” was a society of regenerated people who lived separated lives.49 That is, the Donatists took the New Testament view (Acts 1-13), contrary to the Alexandrian Cult. They taught that by tolerating those who were openly sinful (1 Cor. 5-6), the church would lose her holy character and calling and cease to be a New Testament church (Gal. 5:9). In plainer words, they took Paul’s view of the church as recorded in the New Tes­tament (1 Cor. 5-6). Augustine and Origen took the view of Constantine: that the most important thing about the New Testament church was not a regenerated membership, nor yet holiness in conduct;50 the main thing was UNION and POWER. To be specific: the personal character of the individual Christian was a secondary consideration with Augustine and Constantine; the main thing would be the validity and authority of the ecclesiastical functions of the hierarchy.51 Augustine and Constantine, in these matters, represented Satan.

Satan’s “interpretation” of Matthew 13:36 is that the “field” is the BODY OF CHRIST (see any exposition by any Post-millennial expos­itor), notwithstanding the definition given by the Head of that body that the “field” is “THE WORLD” (Matt 13:38). But since all Catholics thought that the “leaven” of Matthew 13:33 was the gospel (when it was defined as false doctrine: Gal. 5:9; Matt. 16:12), and since all Ca olics thought that the “woman” of Matthew 13:33 was the “churc (when she was a professional prostitute: Rev. 17), it is not surprising

at this point (313^50) to find the great Bible rejecting heretic Augustine about to authorize the killing of his brothers and sisters in Christ52 on the grounds that he thought the “net” in Matthew 13:47 was the “body of Christ.” Yet by some strange twist of hypocrisy, Augustine would allow the “net” to pull in unsaved pagans, while it was not allowed to gather in any Donatists! Matthew 13 seems to have affected Catho­lics like a dose of strychnine, but such are the ways of the scholars who followed the Alexandrian Cult’s method of “allegorical interpretation.” Platonic allegory is not the way to interpret Matthew 13. The Cult had installed into the First African Church of Rome the teaching that dual authorities are to be used in interpretation; on this occasion, Augustine will “play God.” Nowhere in the Bible does Augustine manifest his ignorance and infidelity more than when he attempts, as the drunken man of Proverbs 26:9, to set a parable on its feet (Prov. 26:7). If we are to take our Lord at His word, in the context of Matthew 13:1-13, we would have to assume that Augustine was an unsaved Pharisee. He could no more handle the parables of Matthew 13 (neither could John Calvin) than he could handle a two-headed cobra.

No Bible believer could have tolerated what took place in the realm of “Bible study” between the time of the first “father” (Papias or Ignatius) until the death of Jerome. One group left the “fathers” because they knew that Easter did not fall on Sunday every year.53 Another group left them because they knew that Origen’s Alexandrian manuscripts (Vaticanus and Sinaiticus) were no more “bibles” than Homer’s Odyssey.54 Another group knew, as well as they knew their own names, that Mary was no more the “mother of God” than the mother of Paul.55 Others knew from reading their old Latin Bibles that a state church hold­ing councils to kill Christians was no more “Christian” than Nero’s stag parties. As one light went out after another, the real Christians moved out of the Mediterranean to “shine in a dark place,” or they stood their ground and were butchered. Thousands of them knew per­fectly well that no infant was ever sprinkled or baptized in the Bible. Many of them read St. Augustine off as soon as he opened his big, lying mouth.56 Little boot licking politicians like Eusebius, with crafty plun- i_rers like Pope Leo, had no more spiritual effect for good on the lives 0 thousands of Christians than Constantine’s wine bottles.

. -^hen Jerome finally came out with his Alexandrian Bible (420 • •)—an Old Testament that included Tobit, Bel and the Dragon, and a New Testament fashioned after the Cult—thousands ristians in northern Italy and southwestern France57 turned up their n°ses at it like it was a rotten egg.

After Nicaea, most of these Bible believing people were called “Arians” or “Manichaeans,” unless the name of their leader could be found; in which case they were named after him. The final consoli­dation of the imperial church state (500 A.D.) under an apostate bishop is interpreted by Philip Schaff as meaning that there was a “complete victory of Christianity, transforming the enemy into a friend and ally.”58 If the modern pope were to take over the United Nations and establish a world bank and one world government, Philip Schaff (1819-1893) would write in exactly the same manner today: ignorance is bliss.

Now, what had those dissenters been doing while their Catholic brethren were scrounging around through every manure pile and garbage can in town in an effort to shut down their churches and confiscate their Bibles? Well, they were spreading the good news (Mark 10:29). The urgency of the hour must have impressed them. They saw light after light going out along the Mediterranean, and they knew the Lord had not come yet nor was He “reigning,” in spite of such ridiculous pro­ductions as Augustine’s City of God. They undoubtedly resolved that if the big chandeliers in the dining room and the living room blacked out, they would keep a porch light (or back hall light) on so that fleeing sinners wouldn’t break their necks in the dark, stumbling on Roman Catholic “orthodoxy.”

The first extensions of Biblical Christianity, you will remember, go back to Acts 2, where Jews from every nation under heaven had assembled for a Jewish feast. At that time, with only an incomplete revelation regarding the atoning work of Christ (see Acts 8:38 and com­ments in that commentary), the good news was preached to Jews and Jewish proselytes that Christ had been buried, had risen from the dead, and was coming again to sit on David’s throne (see Acts 2:34-35 and comments in that commentary). Without a doubt, these converted Jews took that news back with them to every major point in the Roman Empire before the conversion of Paul (Acts 9).

The next thing that happened was an Ethiopian eunuch got saved (see Acts 8:35 and comments in that commentary). Without a doubt, he took the good news into the heart of Africa (Ethiopia) before Origen and Papias were born. Not only this, but the eunuch took something more with him: he took the gospel of the grace of God—salvation of the individual through the finished blood atonement of a Saviour (see Acts 8 and comments in that commentary). !

The gospel then went to the Gentiles, in Acts 10, but not until after God had called out a man who would preach it to the “ends of the cart (Acts 9:5-12). Paul doesn’t stop till he hits Rome and Spain (Rom-1

15:24), and he may have even gone on to England. Long before super­stitious philosophers like Justin Martyr were talking about regenera­tion by water baptism, hundreds of thousands of Christians knew that a sinner was saved by grace through faith, without a drop of water. This was commonly known throughout the Roman Empire in any local church that had access to any of Paul’s epistles, or copies of any of his epistles, or witnesses to his preached messages, or any writings, or sermons from anyone he trained (2 Tim. 2:2). To suppose that God intended for the body of Christ to be in the dark about the nature of New Testament assemblies, the Second Coming of Christ, water bap­tism, and regeneration, until people like Origen and Irenaeus show up, is the most monstrous kind of nonsense. How did the church fathers quote the Bible 36,289 times if they never READ it? Who are these church historians who keep trying to justify the imperious rejection of the New Testament revelations by the “church fathers” on the grounds that they couldn’t read the Old or New Testament as we know them? They all read them. They just didn’t believe the Bible where their own self-chosen dual authorities (science, philosophy, and tradition) con­flicted with it. They were exactly like any modem Conservative scholar today.

By 90 A.D., nearly every unbelieving Jew in the dispersion who lived through the debacle of 70 A.D. (Titus) knew that Christians believed in the Deity and Virgin Birth of Jesus Christ; they knew what Christ was reported to have said in Matthew 24 and Luke 21. To think that Judean Jews, who had been witnessed to by the twelve apostles for more than thirty-five years, didn’t remember any of it is as fantastic as the nonsense we have just mentioned. Nothing was “done in a cor­ner” (Acts 26:26), and the attempts of the church historians to pretend that the shades of night suddenly dropped in 90 A.D. and cut off all knowledge of the New Testament so that the “fathers” had to sort of start over” by “enlightening the church" is cockeyed fantasy; it is more than that: it is criminal fraud. Such a church historian is just one more Cult member, between 500-1980 A.D., trying to cover up for the sins of his fellow Cult members committed between 90 and 600 A.D.

Since Antioch of Syria (Acts 11:26) was home base for New Tes­tament Christianity (Acts 13:1-4) and the missionary center of the early c urch (Acts 16:1-6), it should surprise no one to find thousands of E ,e Relieving Christians in Syria and Mesopotamia before the com- P etion of the New Testament.59 Since the apostle to the Jews, Simon - er, preached in this area (Babylon, 1 Peter 5:13), no Bible believer Ou d think for a minute that Rome or Alexandria would have had any

head-start on “orthodoxy” when it came to Bible believing Christian­ity. Syria had the scriptures in her own language before Origen was bom in Alexandria,60 and her scriptural texts do not “jive” with Origen, who came along later. There were twenty bishops from Syria at the Council of Nicaea.61

Gregory Thaumaturgus (210-270), called the “worker of wonders,” was made bishop of Pontus in Asia in 240. It is said that when he became their pastor, there were seventeen Christians found in the city, and when he died there were not more than seventeen in the city who had not professed faith in Christ.62 Although this is certainly not the “whole truth,” it indicates a swarming population of people who at least pro­fessed conversion. To say that they had never heard the truth and were still in darkness would also be falsifying the facts. According to Hamack, Duchesne, LeClerc, and Eusebius, there were Christians in Alexan­dria following the conversion of Apollos (Acts 18:26). The appearance of Clement and Origen shows at least that the devil was interested in perverting something in Egypt that was going against his designs. Africa became the first main base of Latin Christianity long before Nicaea, and long before this the effect of the old Latin Bible and the evange­lism of those who used it was so great that Greek was abandoned in North Africa and then abandoned in Rome itself and replaced with Latin.63 Harnack estimates the local church at Rome to have a roll of 30,000 members by 250 A.D. Christianity in northern Italy, which always was more Biblical and pure than that of Rome, entered by way of the Po Valley from Dalmatia in the east; that is, from Antioch of Syria and Asia Minor, where the Receptus manuscripts for the King James Bible came from. There never was any pure (or Biblical) Chris­tianity in Alexandria or Rome after the time of Cyprian (258 A.D.).

Syrian merchants carried the gospel into Gaul and the Rhine val­ley. The Greek communities in southern Gaul were originally from Ionia. Latourette conjectures that the Christians in the Rhone valley received their gospel from Ephesus. Irenaeus, in Lyons (southern France), was supposed to have been a student of Polycarp in Smyrna.64 Churches sprang up in Lyons, Toulouse, Vienne, Trier, Rheims, Metz, Bourges, Cologne, Paris, Mainz, and Bordeaux before the Council of Nicaea. Three bishops from Britain attended the Council of Arles (314). H we give them the odds that we found at Nicaea (chapter 8, note 35), there were eighteen bishops in England before Constantine got on the throne, this would be more than 271 years before any Catholic missionary ex er saw England (see chapter 12).

The greatest center of New Testament, Biblical Christianity, as we

----------------------------- — A lovanrlria HCOCC the city

Edessa was predominately “Christian” at the time of Nicaea. Mission­aries from there (mainly the despised and hated Nestorians and Arme­nians) even carried the gospel into Persia, Central Asia, and eventually into China.66 Christianity had penetrated Armenia by the end of the second century.67 So far and wide had the gospel been preached that when the unsaved pagan philosopher (Pantaenus), who founded the school at Alexandria, went from Alexandria to India (180 A.D.), he found people there who had a “Hebrew version of Matthew’s gospel.” This was one of the sources for the famous “Aramaic-Q Document” hassle that Papias and others talked about interminably.

While the churches were swelling with pagan members in Rome, Alexandria, Constantinople, and Carthage due to the policies of Augustine and Constantine, certain basic truths of the New Testament got an even wider circulation, regardless of the spiritual condition of those who heard them. It is truly remarkable, when one considers it, that the Goths up on the northwest side of the Black Sea had their own Bible in their own language (350 A.D.) before Augustine was pronounc- ng a curse on the Donatists; and while Jerome was getting his Alexandrian Cult Vulgate printed on the Holy Virgin Press at Rome (400 A.D.), a missionary in England (Patricius) was getting adults saved right and left and baptizing them.69 So many of the Germanic warriors were professing faith in Christ that Latourette is driven to confess that the word “Christian” is not the same word as the word “Catholic.”

Latourette says70 that the Burgundians (southeast France) became “CHRISTIANS” when the Visigoths invaded their country: before this they had been “Catholics.” (I only heard this remarkable confession one time in my life: it was from a Spanish-American lady in a tene­ment district near Pomona, California, in 1976. She confessed, “No, I am not a Christian; 1 am a CATHOLIC." Sometimes peons in tene­ments have a better grasp of Biblical theology than the Associated Press or the Vatican Councils.)

When Clovis (466-511 A.D.), the Frankish ruler, professed faith m Christ (Dec. 25,496), many of his troops followed suit. He undoubt- y heard the gospel from hundreds of Christians who were in Gaul (France).

The Lord had said “to the ends of the earth,” and to the ends of ®earth the gospel went. The barbarian invasions of Gaul and north ^^only served to reproduce thousands of anti-Catholic Christians who later antl ^°man *n every way; many of them settled in those parts and and anat^ernatized as “Albigenses” and Waldenses or Cathari

■ auhcians.”72 Persecution from Catholics also drove the Donatists,

Novatians, Montanists, Messalines, and Paterines along the shores of the Mediterranean out of Africa, and through Spain into France, and out of Asia Minor up into Switzerland and the Balkans via the Danube; eventually thousands of them cropped up in Silesia, Bohemia, and Moravia (Germany).73 Maintaining purity of practice and baptism of adult believers only, these “Baptist” groups understood throughout their lifetimes that no “kingdom was coming,” as prophesied in the extrav­agant fiction written by Augustine. Augustine had already committed himself to heathenism. He took the position of Constantine: don’t destroy pagan temples; convert them into papal temples.74 Constantine was still classed among the gods by his own Senate long after the “Edict of Milan,”75 and his senators continued sacrificing on “the altar of vic­tory” long after Constantine’s “conversion.”

The “Holy Catholic church” had not only misread the nature of her constitution, but also her commission. Following the blind stupid­ity of Origen and Clement, which they had pilfered from Plato, she assumed that “the kingdom was a cornin’,” and if you couldn’t “bring in the kingdom” by killing Bible believers, you could at least bribe heathen army commanders to do it if “push came to shove.” That is, if you “can’t lick ’em, join ’em.” The unholy queen city of Revelation 17 became a whore who sold her favors to the world in return for favors from that world (Rev. 18:3). We are to presume that she had read her commission as follows: “Go, be mistress of the world” (in spite of John 17:9); “Love the world and minister to the world” (in spite of John 17:16 and 1 John 2:15); “Give them anything they ask for if they consent to come under your domination” (in spite of Rom. 3:8); and “then you will not only be Queen of the World but Queen of the Uni­verse,76 for all will believe what you believe! Peace on earth will come, with the one fold, under one shepherd, and you will get credit for doing what only Jesus Christ might have done and was unable to do” (John 18:36).

At any rate, that is how the Catholic church carried out her com­mission, whether she had read it that way or not.

On the other hand, the Bible believing witnesses and the local assemblies spread out to the ends of the earth in their efforts to convert sinners to Jesus Christ and tell them of His Second Coming (there are more verses on the Second Coming in the Bible than on the Lord s Sup per, water baptism, church membership, and Mary combined). Bi e believers were concerned with the salvation of the individual souls oj men through the regenerating power of the Holy Spirit, operating grace through faith. Catholics were interested in the unity and po^e

of an ecclesiastical hierarchy by political maneuvering and anathema­tizing opponents. Believers knew that nothing short of a restored image by supernatural grace would suffice for salvation (Col. 3:10), but that would do the trick and do it permanently (Rom. 8:2).78 Catholics believed that even repentance, confession, contrition, penance, baptism, the sac­raments, membership, and confirmation still came short, and that no man could know if he was one of the “elect” until he was DEAD. Bible believers then, as now, believed in the autonomy of the local assembly without interference from the state; Catholics believed then, as now, that every local church should be under the dominion and complete con­trol of a state, dictated to by a church: a church state which guaranteed that no church but a Catholic church could survive.79 Bible believers carried with them a Greek Receptus or a Latin Receptus or a Syrian Receptus,80 while Catholics referred occasionally to “the originals,” which they had never seen, and to Jerome’s Latin New Testament, com­piled originally by Clement of Alexandria and Origen. Bible believers would baptize no one but adults, and only then on a profession of faith; Catholics would sprinkle babies after killing their mothers.81

Catholics and Christians are not the same flock.

These glaring inversions of attitude, faith, belief, and practice mean that they don’t belong in the same flock: wolves don’t belong in a fold with sheep.

The duty of every Roman Catholic from 325 onward was to put out every light as quickly as God turned it on, and the duty of every Christian was to keep turning lights on faster than they could be turned off. In view of what happened between 500 and 1000 A.D., Augustine’s prophetic views (The City of God)*2 became the funniest piece of pulp literature to gather dust on the bookshelf since Plato’s Republic.

“The City of God” retained bells, beads, candles, rosaries, Eas­ter bunnies, Christmas trees, bingo cards, prayers for the dead, beer companies, reverence for relics, fish signs, cross signs, black robes, sacrifices to Venus and Jupiter, and books on black magic. When an Arian” became a “Catholic,” he simply professed to believe in the Nicene Creed (where Arius had opposed Athanasius), and then he unwit­tingly became obligated to kill every Christian that wasn’t “Catholic.”83 inversion from Arianism to Catholicism meant conversion from plun­ks Catholic villages ’' and Catholic churches for yourself to taking ^P/he sword and shield for a Bible rejecting, Catholic “pope” and

*n8 his killing for him, plus plundering “Christian” churches and Mages. In this fashion Pope Simplicius (468-483), Pope Felix •’■492), Pope Gelasius (492-496), Pope Anastasius II (496-498), and

Pope Symmachus (498-514) managed to survive all of the barbarian invasions: they used the Germanic tribes against each other. All they had to do was tell a Germanic leader who had been converted to “Cathol­icism” that the tribe threatening Rome was “Arian.”84

The Council of Nicaea (325 A.D.) had at last begun to pay off: in hard cash.

Individual Christians in the Thyatira period are still preaching the truth, but one can see by examining their sermons (St. Pat, Chrysostom, Columba, et al.) that the darkness is gathering. Although Patricius (St. Pat: 389-465) never goes to Rome and never recognizes the pope, and although he baptized adult believers only, one still senses a lack of New Testament doctrine in his few surviving works.85 Chrysostom waxes hot and cold between fervent, evangelistic, New Testament preaching86 and sacramental nonsense.87 Jerome has enough sense to get his Old Testament text from the Masoretic text of the Hebrews in their lan­guage (the Receptus of the King James Bible), but not enough sense to get a Greek Receptus of the New Testament from Antioch of Syria, nor enough power to keep Pope Damasus from jamming the apocryphal books back into the Old Testament just like Eusebius had originally had them when he mailed his corrupt bibles to old Connie.88 Crossing from Pergamos into Thyatira is like going from a swamp into a roller derby; the action in one is no more Biblical than the mud in the other, but there is a change of pace.

In the Thyatira period, the truth of God makes an “end-run” around Rome,89 going up through the Balkans from Asia Minor into Germany, on the right flank, and on the left flank going around Spain to Ireland and coming back through England to Germany (Friesland: Belgium and Holland).90 God will send nothing through Rome but corruption; abso­lutely nothing. The pure truths of the Bible preserved in Italy are pre­served in north Italy,91 but not even these truths come northward through Rome; they come westward from Asia Minor and Antioch.92 The truths of the word of God that are found in Gaul (France) in the Dark Ages do not come from anywhere near Rome; they come westward from the Piedmont Valley, the Po Valley, and the Italian Alps.93 Furthermore, the scriptural truths that crop up in Bohemia centuries later, under John Huss, do not come northward from Italy; they come northwest from the Bogomiles and Paulicians in the Balkans.94 What pure Christianity North Ireland has today, it certainly never got from Rome.95 It got lts Biblical Christianity from the Old Latin manuscripts that originated in Syria and from the son of a married deacon96 who was less Roman in his “Catholicism” than Ridley and Latimer (burned at the stake un er

Mar,,

The fireflies that twinkled all over Europe as the Dark Ages descended upon her were never animated at the fires of Roman Cathol­icism. Roman Catholicism lights fires for burning Christians97 or for celebrating the burning of Christians.98 The lesser lights that lit up Europe for the next thousand years (ten centuries!) were energized before the pages of the Book that God wrote—the Holy Bible. The Book had an old Latin version for believers, an old Syrian version for believers, a Koine Greek version for believers, and an old Gothic version for believ­ers.99 Thus, its contents were available for anyone who could read throughout the entire empire. Those fortunate enough to obtain copies of the Book copied it by hand, reverently and prayerfully, and preserved it by the grace of God (Ps. 12:6-7) till it became such a potent force that it split Unholy Mother church right down to the seat of her bloody jeans (see chapters 14, 15).

Unholy Mother church, for the next thousand years, was completely occupied with the problem of unity and power, exactly as she received her commission from Augustine and Constantine. This was essential in order to prove that she was the one true church “which Jesus founded” in Matthew 16:18. Since she had adopted this text (taken out of the context)100 for her “flight plan,” she was forced to fly by instruments. From then on, her own perpetuation had to be her first consideration (Job 2:4), for if the “gates of hell” ever overcame her, then that would be proof she was NOT the church ‘ ‘that Jesus founded. '' Thus, if self­preservation ever became a conflicting duty with soul winning, Bible doctrines, Christian tolerance, belief in the truth, practice of the truth, or preservation of the truth, then those items would have to go out the window:101 “NO MAN CAN SERVE TWO MASTERS” (Matt. 6:24). Dual authorities which conflict lead to apostasy.

So, the big lights in the Mediterranean area went out, and for the next thousand years the Bride of Frankenstein which Constantine, Origen, Jerome, and Augustine had created occupied her time with power Politics; her only religious hobby was putting out every bit of light that

into the world (John 1:1-6; 3:19-20). She became the Bride of *Uan while maintaining enough profession of faith (and retaining enough saved members) to pass off as the Bride of Christ; a remarkable accom­plishment if one considers it (2 Cor. 11:1-3).

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Lesser Lights in the Twilight

“Ye are the light of the world. A city that is set on a hill cannot be hid.” Matthew 5:14

Passive Christians (like Melanchthon, Ockenga, Arlin Horton, Bill Gothard, J. Vernon McGee, Daniel Poling, Cornelius Stam, J.R. Mott, et al.) in the local assemblies were faced with a real problem when Constantine opened the doors of the church Sunday morning in 314 A.D. for the heathen to join “by letter,” by profession of faith, or by water sprinkling. The influx of these unsaved sinners, who brought their rock records (Hymns to Diana, in those days), their television sets (metal and wood tabernacles with statues in them), and their morals (fornica­tion with “vestal virgins” after a donation to help the “building fund”) with them, caused deep grief and sorrow to the more refined segments of the local church, who longed to serve Christ acceptably but didn’t have the courage to stand for what the Bible said about separation and doctrines (2 Cor. 6:16-17; Mark 4:17). The more timid and retiring members of the local churches from 313-590 A.D. saw their predica­ment very realistically. How were they to live for God and please the Lord Jesus (1 John 2:15) when they had been forced by imperial decree to fellowship and keep company with half-naked savages who used tntages and idols as “aids to worship” and called every preaching service a sacrifice,” since they had been sacrificing to their gods for two thou-

years? The more godly members of local assemblies in the empire (anywhere: Rome, Alexandria, Jerusalem, Antioch, Constantinople, esarea, Lyons) were forced to face a Biblical issue (2 Cor. 6:17) H v d'd not have the stomach to face.

ou see, if they insisted on strict church discipline within the Cath- On1C church, they would be branded as “NOVATIANS.”1 If they insisted jj- , re8enerated church membership only, the Catholic priests and °Ps had a word for that: "DONATISTS.”2 If they pointed out to

their bishops that their assemblies were degenerating and making it impossible for the “kingdom to spread,” this would be negative think­ing, denying Post-millennial “truth.” Consequently, they would have to bear the heretical label of “MONTANISTS.”3

You understand, not only did “the Greeks have a word for it,” but the Catholics had a word to shut up anyone who believed the Bible instead of THEM.

There was no way these tender souls could remain loyal to the supreme authority—the word of God—without being called a “here­tic.” If they insisted that the Roman bishop was not the head of the church or that the church had no business playing political ring-around- the-rosy with Constantine, they would be called “PATERINES” or “MESSALINES”;4 and since everyone from Nestorians to Eutychians (by 500 A.D.) were under some kind of official ban, subject to death or exile by Holy Mother church, the Christians who wanted to serve God but didn’t have enough guts to cross “Holy Mother church” had to think of some way “out”: that is, halfway out.

Church historians refer to the expedient they adopted as MONASTICISM.

This asylum enabled any compromiser who feared God enough to want to live holy (while fearing the Catholic bishops enough to obey them) to serve two masters: the bishop and THE Bishop (1 Peter 2:25). It was a clever stratagem to submit docilely to the conciliar decrees, thereby avoiding the ban placed on heretics while at the same time pleas­ing God by “coming out from among them and becoming separate” (2 Cor. 6:17). Going far beyond the modern barbed wire, patrolled dormitory and underground wiring of the modern Christian college or university, these separatists believed in “tertiary separation.” They not only refused fellowship with the Neo-orthodox or Neo-Evangelicals of their day, but they also refused fellowship with Bible believing Chris­

tians who were preaching the gospel.

In keeping with the signs of the times, monasticism begins around the time of Augustine and Jerome: it begins where all compromising and leavened forms of Christianity begin: North Africa, near school.6 Heathen monasticism, of course, is nothing new; it is foun in the Veda (1200 B.C.), Buddhism (600 B.C.), and other religions. Ascetic practices are the heart and soul of Hinduism and Buddhism, along with “inner meditation.” The Greeks, who showed up many y later, had their monastic societies (Pythagoreans). Spiritual me ita 1 and mutilation, or humiliation of the flesh, were as much a tpnchines at Alexandria as purgatory, transmigration o s

and no bodily resurrection. The Essenes in Palestine and the Therapeutae in Egypt were monastic orders of Judaism. The word “monasticism” obviously means “alone” (mono, monoplane, monologue, monopoly, etc.). It assumed a number of forms, but it eventually resulted in the building of convents, nunneries, and monasteries (“homes for monasters,” as someone has said) where the neophyte could be cut off completely from all intercourse with the outside world for a number of days, months, or even years. Meditation, worship, and prayer were to be carried on in these places, along with various forms of self­mortification and penance. The Trappist monastery in Madison, Georgia (1970), is an excellent example of the original institution. Famous mon­asteries were founded in Monte Cassino (529), Cluny (910), Citeaux (1098), Thebaid (348), Mt. Sinai, and Marseilles (432).

The four “fathers” who lent the greatest support to monasticism were Athanasius (Alexandria and Africa), Jerome (of Rome), Chryso­stom (of Constantinople), and Augustine of Hippo (Carthage, Africa). The most fertile ground for propagating the institution was Africa’s most unusual university, were Oriental meditation, Gnostic spirituality, Bible perversion, professing Christianity, and Greek philosophy were all infused into one ball of leaven and taught by an apostate (Origen) who believed that the more asceticism one practiced, the more spiritual he was: to prove this doctrinal conviction, Origen castrated himself, under the pretense of following Matthew 5:29-30.

The first real ascetic “monk” was Paul of Thebes, in upper Egypt (Africa), and the second one “Saint” Anthony of Egypt (Africa). But far more radical in his desired, and more consistent in his efforts to obtain separation and isolation, was Simeon Stylites, the father of the ‘pillar saints,” of whom we shall say more. Simeon was from Antioch of Syria. Pachomius, an ex-soldier, established a corporate monastery for hermits at Tae Tabennisi on the Nile (Africa).'1 The church “father” who brought monasticism to Cappadocia in Asia Minor (Basil of Cappadocia) had to make a careful study of North African monasticism before adapting it to the congregations in Asia Minor.8 In keeping with uman nature, Basil (when he had set up his own monastic retreat at Ontus) spent most of his time compiling an anthology of his favorite

au Or~Adamantius Origen of Africa’s most unusual university.9

The man who introduced monasticism to the west was Athanasius, e champion of Alexandrian “orthodoxy” (Nicaea, 325 A.D.). He was a North African.

ng onasticism obviously implied celibacy—the perpetual virginity Very male in the outfit unless he had married before he went into

the monastery (referred to by some irreverent historians as “a home for unwed fathers”). By 325 it was a generally accepted rule that a clergyman could not marry after ordination if he was single when he was ordained.10 The scriptural authority for this Neo-Platonic virgin­ity was the same set of verses used to prove that Mary was the Mother of God and that babies should be sprinkled. That is to say, it couldn’t be found anywhere in any Christian scriptures known to God or man.

The most striking thing about monasticism is that is was found nowhere in the New Testament. Having access to the church fathers, who quoted the New Testament more than 32,000 times,11 and having officially stated that the New Testament canon is the twenty-seven books of the King James Bible, the Catholic church suddenly decided that it was better to build a non-scriptural institution where the tenderfoots could hide out than to wash their own dirty linen in public, repent, and clean up the pagan pigsty they had made of the New Testament local church (see chapter 1). Since the monastic life obviously had its good points, it could be preferred above obeying the scripture: after all, every­thing about the tree in Genesis 3:6 was “GOOD.” Why obey God when you can do something “good” for someone (1 Sam. 15:21)? However, since the Bible declares that obedience is better than “sacrifice” (Ps. 51:16-17; 1 Sam 15:22), the Catholic church “fathers” missed the whole point and purpose of both Testaments. The “sacrifice of the Eucha­rist” given to sprinkled heathen became the center of worship, while retirement from the direct commission and commandments of God (Acts 1:8; Matt. 28:19-20; 2 Cor. 5:20) became “good” because some good came from it (Rom. 3:8).

With this Jesuit type of logic in operation (see Hugh Hefner, Joe Fletcher, hedonism, epicureanism, etc.), the inevitable was bound to happen; sooner or later some monk in a “monastery” would produce a “Bible” for Bible rejecting Christians.

The man who got rid of the old Latin Receptus (at a time when Latin was becoming the universal language) and replaced it with Origen s Alexandrian New Testament12 was a “monk.” His name was Sophronius Eusebius Hieronymus (Jerome). Jerome (340-420) received his educa­tion from an unsaved pagan (Donatus), his baptism from Rome, his manuscripts from Origen and Eusebius, and his ideas about salvation**! from tradition. His ideas about Mary and monasticism were as unscnpj tural as any heresy invented by Cyprian, Augustine, Clement, Onge®* or Constantine the Great. Jerome’s concept of obeying God an . scriptures had nothing to do with cleaning up the local assem i (Novatianism) or demanding a regenerate membership (Donatism

anticipating the return of the Lord Jesus (Montanism). His notion was that monasticism was a noble institution because Christ and His apostles were poor, because Mary spent more time contemplating than serving tables, and because the Jewish church in the early part of the book of of the Acts was communistic.13

Schaff, the cheerleader for the Oxford Movement in England (nine­teenth century) and the Return to Rome Movement in America14 (twen­tieth century), states it very mildly when he says, “Monasticism, in any case, is not the NORMAL form of Christian piety.”15 You bet your booties it is not “normal.” No, as a matter of fact, it is an impious fraud warned against in Colossians 2:20-23 (which quite naturally has been changed in the NASV recommended at Bob Jones University). However, since it is possible to always find pious people and “godly” people connected with a fraud,16 or going along with a fraud, or sup­porting a fraud, or promoting a fraud, wittingly or unwittingly,17 Monas­ticism could be justified on the grounds that at least it was not a “heresy” like Montanism, Eutychianism, Pelagianism, Sabellianism, Manichae- anism, or the Pauline Epistles!

Since monasticism “promoted the downfall of heathenism and the victory of Christianity in the Roman Empire and among the barbari­ans,” it was a fraud with a “means to a higher end.” Schaff says that it stood as “a warning against worldliness, frivolity, and immorality in the great cities,” and it was a mighty “call to repentance and con­version.”18 Now, the reader will see immediately that Schaffs estimation and evaluation of the institution is remarkable if Schaff was any kind of Bible believer. If the phrase “BIBLE PREACHING” had been inserted everywhere that Schaff had written “monasticism,” the sen­tences would still read the same way, except it would be Bible preaching (1 Thess. 2:13; Isa. 50:10-11) accomplishing the work that God said it was supposed to accomplish—not “Monasticism.” Philip Schaff, one of the greatest Roman apostates of the nineteenth century, subconsciously realizes the terrible error he has made in his reporting; so, he runs quickly back to Matthew 13:33 for a proof text: he may as well have run from a serpent back to a Kodiak bear. The text he picks is the bedrock foun­tion text for every Bible rejecting apostate in the history of the church J ®tt. 13:33). Schaff says (without blinking) that monasticism justifies g_f—even though God condemned it (Col. 2:20-23)—because it was - p5*f the "leaven of Christianity”19 which was to convert the world nstianity. Origen and Augustine both used the same parable the •^7 Way; a lame drunkard, according to the Holy Spirit (Prov.

Some of the monks wore heavy, iron collars; some dragged about heavy chains fastened to their testicles. Others kept their fists shut till the fingernails grew through the palms of their hands. Some stood on one leg for a week; some looked over their shoulders till their neck muscles froze and they couldn’t straighten their heads around; others laid on spikes; some suspended themselves by hooks over hot fires; others fastened themselves to a trunk of a tree from five to thirty years.20 As some wit observed following Adolph Hitler’s Brauhaus Putsch speech (Nov. 1923), “All that was missing was the psychiatrist.’*21 The monks thus set before the world an appalling and hideous example of Bible Christianity even worse than the gross caricature that if found pictured in Augustine’s City of God. Since they all had rejected the Bible to start with and followed Origen’s African school, they arrived at the predes­tinated terminus: Baal worship. Baal worshippers mutilated themselves (1 Kings 18:28) when worshipping the Queen of Heaven (Jer. 44:17), at noon on Sunday (1 Kings 18:27), with the “fathers’’ (Judg. 18:19).

“Paul the Simple” said three hundred prayers a day (it is not recorded that he ever PRAYED). Isidore of Alexandria ate no meat.

Ptolemy spent three years alone in an unwatered desert drinking dew—eventually he lost his mind.22 Macrinus once lay six months naked in a desert, being eaten on by gnats the entire time. A certain Batthaeus had worms crawling out of his teeth, and Simeon the Stylite had unwashed abscesses on him full of worms. Akepsismas of Cyprus lived sixty years in one cell. When he got out, he looked so wild and shaggy that he was stoned by a shepherd who took him to be a wolf.23 (A pure case of a sheep in wolfs clothing!) Nilus demanded of his monks the complete suppression of their sense of blood relationship to anyone; that is, the commandments of Luke 14:26 and Matthew 10:37 are car­ried out by demanding loyalty to a Catholic institution instead of the Lord Jesus Christ Himself. St. Anthony forsook his younger sister for good. Hilary of Poitiers said that he would rather have God kill his daughter than allow her to get married.24 “A monk,” said Pachomius, “should especially shun women and bishops, for neither will let him have peace.”25 This was an admirable proverb if it did come front Pachomius, for it put light on the real problem, which we have a*re defined: if the Christian sought to please God, he would have to o ey the scripture; but if he obeyed the scripture, his bishop would r him as a heretic (notes 1-3). So the “monk” (or monkey) had toj^H out of the local church and get away from under the ordain, (bishop) who pastored that church. Once “out of the church a „ „ the world, he was exposed to “the world, the flesh, and the e

where sex reared its ugly head. There was only one thing to do: invent a “halfway house” (Oberammergau, Germany) where he could be spir­itual without being scriptural. Monasteries with compulsory chapel atten­dance, dormitories, barbed wire fences, monitored halls and classrooms, and no contact with women filled the bill.

Quite naturally, human nature being what it is, the monasteries were filled not only with weak-kneed Christians who couldn’t “face the music,” but they were also filled with unsaved ascetics who were trying to work their way to heaven by self-crucifixion (Col. 2:20-23). This turned some monasteries into a sadistic nightmare many times, and the run-ins the monks had with the flesh26 were as bad as they would have had on “the outside,” and in many cases worse. A normal man with a normal set of glands and a normal metabolism is hardly going to be satisfied with a room, a mat, a stool, a table, a candle, and a picture of the Virgin Mary (Trappist monastery, Madison, Georgia). As some­one had said, “A monk is often clothed in the garbage of a monkey.”

In direct violation of the New Testament epistles, written to the Gentile churches (Col. 2:20-23), Pachomius took his marching orders from an ANGEL (Gal. 1:8) and set up a cloister for “nuns.” He then spent fifteen years sleeping on a stone—sitting straight up.21 Fifty mon­asteries arose following Pachomius’s “godly, Christian example”; nat­urally they all were built in Africa. Ephraem propagated monasteries in Mesopotamia, Eustathius in Armenia, and Basil in Pontus and Cappadocia. The compromisers had found a way out of their predica­ment; they could pass off as “godly” Christians while rejecting the New Testament: if put on the spot they could alter the Authorized text (Col. 2:20-23) and read it as Panosian, Custer, and Neal (Bob Jones University) read it in the NewASV. Sometimes “scholarship” is a great aid to sinners who are looking for an alibi to live like the devil. Their godliness” was based on secondary separation coupled with self-denial and self-mortification, and once this reputation was established, they could convince multitudes of Bible believers that you could still be godly while correcting and rejecting the words of God. Secondary HMation and “high academic standards” would atone for rejection ™1 e and their refusal to obey it.

Hf. e fanatical monastic societies in the east were called Eustathians Historians associate the Messalines and Euchites with them; olic’<’°nSeqUentty every Bible believer in the east who was not a “Cath- | j^.Was accused of being a fanatic.28

(340-397aSt*C*Sm *n Gaul (France) was planted by Martin of Tours

W )> with monasteries being erected in southern Gaul under John

Cassian (432) and Honoratius (426) the Bishop of Arles. Benedict (480-550) of Nursia founded the Benedictine Order of monks after con­verting a temple to Apollos (Italy) into the Mount Cassino Abbey (529 A.D.). Benedict, as Origen, believed in salvation by works; mainly self­mortification, self-denial, and self-crucifixion.29 The “abbot” was the name given to the leader of the monasteries which Benedict set up. The abbot was the representative of God and Christ: the “monks” were not. Here again was a bald faced denial of the word of God (1 Cor. 4:6, 2 Cor. 3:17, Phil. 2:3-8) by men who claimed to have faith in the “church fathers.” The church “fathers” read and quoted the New Testament more than 32,000 times. Certainly a hundred verses in the New Testament dealt with the equality of all born-again believers in Christ (1 Cor. 12, Eph. 3, Gal. 2, Rom. 12, etc.).

Clothing in a Benedictine monastery was quite naturally African, that is, it was a black cowl; from whence came the term “Black Fri­ars.”30 Adolph Hitler was trained as a child in a Benedictine monastery school.^ Benedict’s “rule” stated that the monks should avoid all contact with the world as dangerous to the soul. “All contact” meant no buying, selling, bargaining, talking, or listening to anyone outside the convent property. This was another direct violation of New Testament orders (Matt. 28:19-20; Acts 1:8; 20:20) given by the One whom Benedict assumed he was serving. To best approximate the source and nature of this movement we will sample the lives of two of its greatest practi­tioners: St. Anthony and St. Simeon. These “lesser lights” made a certain contribution to semi-church history as the sun sank down over the horizon (see previous chapter); and along with Chrysostom, St. Pat, and Jerome, these men show the nature of the transition from the Pergamos period of church history (325-500 A.D.) to the Thyatiran period (500-1000 A.D.).

St. Anthony (251-356 A.D.)

This gentleman, bom about 251 in Coma, North Africa, at one time said that “the Holy Scriptures give us instruction enough” for any rule of conduct.32 In 270 he picked a pre-crucifixion verse aimed at Jews under the law (Matt. 19:21) and coupled it with the Jewish Sermon on the Mount (given under the Law before the resurrection; Matt. 6. ) and used them for an alibi to go and live in a sepulcher; from !*Kn^e ! he went to spend twenty years in a ruined castle.33 Unlike a good a olic, he would not take wine at any time, not even in the “Eucharist^^ i He ate once a day: bread and salt and an occasional date. Only on^ > did he leave his solitude, and that was the year 311, when he appea

in Alexandria, Egypt. He showed himself foj the last time again in Alex­andria to bear witness for Athanasius against Arianism.35

There is no record in his lifetime of 105 years of his telling anyone how to be bom again or what salvation was, in the New Testament sense. Unlike his early feelings about the Bible (see above), he later confessed that his “Book” was not the Bible but “the whole creation.”36 We should not be too hard on Anthony for, after all, the Roman Catholic editor of the Catholic Digest in 1978 (December) couldn’t tell anyone in the twentieth century how to be born again, either. When Kenneth Ryan answers the question about how to get to heaven by the new birth, he answers that sprinkling in the Roman Catholic church IS the new birth and fulfills John 3:1-5— although neither sprinkling, immersion, nor bap­tism occur within twelve verses of the passage in either direction. Why pick on old Tony back in 350 A.D.? His Catholic successors were just as dumb and just as anti-scriptural as he was sixteen centuries after Anthony died.

Anthony, however, spoke of salvation in general terms, and he did not fail to give God the glory for earthly power and wisdom. He did not fail to state that Christ was “the king,” and that a man should be a Christian. He died at the age of 105.37

Of Anthony we may say that in spite of his eccentricities, his lack of understanding of many New Testament doctrines, and his voluntary isolation from the world (to which he was sent as a witness) that at least he was simple, refreshing, dedicated, and not in the least inclined to persecute anyone for their beliefs. He stands as a good example of an uneducated, primitive witness to the basic, general truths of the Bible: God is the Creator,38 Christ is the Saviour, prayer is the way to find both, and Christ should be served. Here St. Anthony’s Bible knowl­edge ends. He is a prayer warrior and a “lover of Christ.” He would fit into a New Testament local assembly as well as Peter the Hermit would fit into a Congress of Fundamentalism.

Simeon Stylites (390-459 A.D.)

B Simeon the Stylite founded the royal order of flagpole sitters, or

■ jar saints. His first pillar he built himself: it was about ten feet high ^>th a platform on the top of it. He lived on it for about four years.39

ar was about twenty-two feet high, and the third one feet high. His last pillar on which he perched (for twenty —. Jt forty feet high with a platform on the top that was

syJL ree feet *n d‘ameter-4° The gradually rising height of these phallic

■ s was supposed to represent Simeon’s gradual “perfection” and

,,e second pill ab<>ut thirty-five years) Was ako.

his growth in grace as he approached the heavens (Gen. 11:1-4; Isa. 14:13). He slept standing up or sitting, and he could bow his head to where it nearly touched his feet. One spectator counted 1,244 of these “genuflections” in one day.41 Exposed to drenching rains, frost, sun­burn, and snowstorms, old Simeon tried to get rid of his sins my moan­ing, howling, crying, and prayer: he never got assurance of salvation till he was dead. Nonetheless, Simeon preached twice a day on good works and was credited with healing the sick, settling theological con­troversies, and performing miracles from the top of his perch.42 Although multitudes came to see the freak at the sideshow, he would not allow women to come within a wall which was built around the base of the pillar. He died at 69; his dead body was discovered by some brave soul who climbed the pole to see how things were going. The corpse of Simeon was covered with lice, vermin, ulcers, and salty dirt. Simeon, being economical, was a great believer in energy conservation: he only took a shower when it showered.

Jerome (340-420 A.D.)

The greatest member of the Alexandrian Cult in his day was Jerome, who was commissioned by Pope Damasus (382) to revise the Old Latin Bibles being used by the Bible believing assemblies.43 The idea was to give Rome a STANDARD Bible by which she could prove that the Latin Receptus was from “late manuscripts” and showed many “care­less copyist errors.”44

Jerome is one of the great doctored-up “Doctors” of the Roman Catholic church; they canonized him. Jerome partook of the monastic life, highly recommended it to others, and in his entire lifetime was not caught once working for a living (Acts 18:13). He seemed destined from the start to an automatic subsistence provided for by the church or the monasteries, or rich women with whom he consorted.45 He called a nun named Paula “the Mother-in-Law of God.”46 Paula kissed a stone in Jerusalem that was supposed to have been the one the angel rolled away from Christ’s tomb; she disfigured her face to humble herself, tormented her body, and wept for hours at a time to atone for her “sins of laughing.”47 (We are to presume, according to Jerome, that if God had a “mother-in-law” she would have carried on in this fashion, or j something like it.) For several years Jerome wandered around doing his work as a translator in Rome, Alexandria, Palestine, Bethlehem, etc., and wound up in his latter years presiding over a monastery I

Jerome’s high point for “kicks” was being permitted to use t e library at Caesarea, where he found the works of Pamphilus a ■

Origen50 (see chapter 5) neatly preserved by the late bishop—Eusebius.51 He spent all the money he had in his mad desire to purchase the works of Origen.52 Since Jerome himself was a self-styled philosopher,53 he took to Origen like a duck takes to water. After assimilating Origen’s critical approach to the scriptures, Jerome began the work of translating during his second residence at Rome (328-385) at the suggestion of “Pope” Damasus. At the first, he intended only a revision of the Old Latin (the Textus Receptus in Latin called ‘ ‘the Itala ”) but like his fellow Cult members, Westcott and Hort, he wound up abandoning the Received text of the Old Latin in about three thousand places and substituted for it instead the Alexandrian text of Eusebius and Origen54 (as preserved today in the RV, ASV, NIV, and NASV). When Westcott and Hort began their subversive work for the popes55 (1870-1884), they professed that they and their committee would “make as few changes as possible” in the Received text: they made 5,788 in the New Testament and over twenty thousand in the Old Testament.56

After twenty years of perverting the New Testament—as a “good, godly” scholar desiring to recover the “original text” and “put it in words that,” etc.—Jerome finished his work (405 A.D.). Of this text, Philip Schaff (the pro-Catholic head of the ASV 1901 committee) says: “For ten centuries it preserved in western Europe a text of holy scrip­ture far purer than that which was current in the Byzantine church.”57 What Philip Schaff is trying to tell you (with the approval of Warfield; Machen; A.T. Robertson; and Bob Jones, IB—who had his faculty mem­bers do the dirty work for him in print) is that although Byzantium is in Asia Minor, near to Antioch of Syria (Acts 11:26; 13:1-3), and although the Greek New Testament was written in the language of Byz­antine Greek in that area, and although the so-called Byzantine family of manuscripts (called “family” by Griesbach, Lachmann, Hort, and others) is from Syria (Acts 11:26), and the originals were written in that language (Greek) from that area, that a Roman monk’s revised Latin text from Alexandria, Egypt, is a “far purer text. ” That is exactly how Westcott and Hort put it in 1884 before the RV committee in England when they appointed Philip Schaff58 to reproduce the same text in

erica in 1901 (ASV).59 "Purer, ’’like the city water system is purer than spring water.

; later severely criticized Origen’s theology, Jerome fol- and Origen when it came to spiritualizing and allego-

“le scriptures: the Shunammite of 2 Kings 4 wasn’t a person, the ‘ever virgin wisdom of God.” The argument between Peter ' U didn’t really take place (Gal. 2), it was just a playlet to instruct

Although he Jowed Eusebius

Antiochan Christians;60 and quite naturally Matthew 24 was all fulfilled three hundred years before Jerome was born—according to Jerome. Jerome, as Origen, Eusebius, and Augustine, was a religious evolu­tionist; he believed the Catholic church was the Kingdom of God predestinated to conquer the world by infant baptism.61 Jerome taught that Simon Peter washed away the “stain of his married life” when he was martyred; that is, Peter’s marriage was “living in sin” because Jerome sensed immediately that if the popes came by “apostolic suc­cession’’ from Simon Peter that that Galilean fisherman could not have been married—at least not legitimately. He couldn’t afford to have had a wife: which he DID (Matt. 8:14; 1 Cor. 9:5).

Jerome’s Old Testament in the Vulgate is much better than his New Testament, for the obvious reason that he ignored Augustine’s advice to translate the Old Testament from Sinaiticus and Vaticanus (which he had).62 Since Sinaiticus and Vaticanus contained both Testaments, they were (and still are) referred to as “the Septuagint.”63 Jerome instead went back to the Hebrew manuscripts and Bibles. Being a great admirer of Eusebius and Origen,64 however, he could not resist translating the Greek apocryphal books and the Hebrew apocryphal books contained in the Alexandrian canon65 set up by Clement, Philo, and Origen.66 Consequently, although he did not believe that Bel and the Dragon, Tobit, Judith, and others were inspired,67 he did translate them; and Pope Damasus (knowing that proof texts could be gotten out of these books for praying for the dead and drinking liquor) stuck them into the body of the Old Testament canonical books as part of the inspired words of God.6*

This leavened Bible amalgamated perfectly into the leaven of Augustine and Philip Schaff, who both claimed that the “leaven” of Matthew 13:33 was the gospel and that Christianity would eventually “leaven the whole earth” with pure doctrine and pure practice. Jerome s Vulgate was a perfect Bible for Catholics, as it made remission of sins and redemption of sins the same (see the NASVCol. 1:14, recommended by Custer, Neal, and Panosian at Bob Jones University), which they are NOT. It was a perfect Bible for Catholics, for it upheld the perpetual virginity of Mary (see the NASV, recommended by Bob Jones Univer­sity and Pensacola Christian College) in Matthew 1:25, which the Latt Receptus did NOT. It was a perfect Bible for ERA exponents, for 11 allowed women to be ordained as ministers (see the Amplified New 1 tament, published by the Lockman Foundation) in Romans 16:1 H wa a perfect Catholic Bible for anti-Chiliasts, for it omitted the ending o I Matthew 6:13 (see the NASV), justified and promoted by Bob Jone

III) so that the Jews could not get credit for “bringing in the Kingdom.” Above all, it was ideally suited for Catholic priests because it alleviated them of damaging charges brought against their titles and purgatorial prayers by the scriptures (Matt. 23:14, see ASVor NASV). On the other hand, it was also a fine “bible” for Arians and Ebionites because Christ could never be in more than one place at a time (see the readings for John 3:13 in any Bible recommended by any Christian faculty member of any “Fundamental” school); and the Docetists and Adoptionists could put up with it because the “Lord” left “Jesus” at the crucifixion (Luke 23:42, /15K and NASV and NIV). Furthermore, it was handmade for Post-millennialists and A-millennialists because the literal kingdoms of this world (Rev. 11:15)—plural, not singular—would never be His; so no peace on earth was coming in the future from Christ’s return—only “peace of mind” to Socratic philosophers whose summum bonum was “good will” (see any Bible recommended by any faculty member of any so-called Fundamental or Conservative college, seminary, or uni­versity on Luke 2:14). And finally, it was a perfect Bible for any demon possessed Christian educator who wanted to fool his students into think­ing that it was a “good translation,” for Jerome retained enough of the Receptus’s readings on the “main doctrines” so that anyone could find “the fundamentals of the faith” somewhere in it.

To sum it up: the Vulgate was the perfect synthesized, lanolized, homogenized, leavened, watered-down, mongrelized, Standard, Inter­national, polluted, emasculated, American Standard, Authorized Catholic Version, published in 1901 as the ASV, in 1884 as the RV, in 1960 as the NASV, and in 1978 as the NIV. Jerome’s Greek New Testament

(for his Latin) is published today by Hort, Aland, Metzger, Nestle, Souter, and others and is said by Panosian (history teacher at Bob Jones University) to be so accurate that in it—plus any others you want to add to it, depending upon how you feel when you get up in the morn­

ing we can be assured we have “every word of the word of God.”69 .Jerome’s “eclectic” New Testament text is the ideal text for higher hristian education (1980), as it allows all qualified opinions and “schol- ar y preferences” of the “recognized authorities” to cancel each other out and thus maintain the authority and power of the INSTITUTION.70 UnitY and power were the first considerations of the post-Nicene ,c church, they needed a Bible that would accomplish this purpose. had>b1e £aVe l^ern ’^ea' book- I* was not tbe God-given book that ti fCn God-breathed” or God-inspired: it was not even a transla- Philo’ B°ok- In the New Testament it was Origen, Clement, and acc ’ Ievived to enforce the authority of education at the expense of Bible as the final authority for the church.

With the acceptance of Jerome’s New ASV by the “church,” the Dark Ages begin.

John Chrysostom (347-407 A.D.)

Chrysostom, the “Golden-mouthed,” was the greatest preacher and expositor of the Syrian-Byzantine Greek church, which was the custo­dian of the Greek Receptus of the King James 1611 Bible. He was born at the birthplace of Gentile New Testament Christianity (Antioch), and he was converted and baptized there (Acts 11:26). He spent six years in study and prayer under the guidance of Abbot Diodorus (394) and Theodore of Mopsuestia, the father of Nestorian theology.71 He was chosen to be the patriarch of Constantinople in 397 A.D. (At this time Augustine was fifty-three years old, and Jerome was sixty-seven years old.)

Chrysostom was banished for preaching against the sins of the rulers of his day: the religious ruler being Theophilus of Alexandria (North Africa) and the worldly, political ruler being the Empress Eudoxia. John was sent out of the country under an armed guard and died in exile near the Black Sea in 407 A.D. Tradition states that he died on his knees in prayer.72

Although Chrysostom opposed the Arians and Novatians, he would neither persecute them nor engage with them in angry controversy; how­ever, he violently opposed the arbitrary allegorizing methods of Origen’s Alexandrian school.13 Unlike his “catholic” counterparts (Jerome and Augustine), he did not consider Nestorianism to be a heresy. He was a Bible literalist most of the time, although he had his faults when it came to correct interpretation. He had assimilated, as did everyone else, Origen’s heresy that an ordained elder was a “priest.”74 However, Chrysostom’s “priest” was no monk or sacramental dispenser. Chry­sostom’s “priest” was to be a Bible believing preacher actively engaged in applying practical theology.75 And although Chrysostom was not smart enough to see that Simon Peter never went further west than Joppa, he did have enough sense to note that Ignatius of Antioch (not “Linus of Rome) took up the “government of the church” after Peter, and that Peter had preached in Antioch before he preached in Rome.76 Even . though Chrysostom, in some places, had assented to African black magic in regard to the Lord’s Supper,77 he still had the boldness to state that it was the performance of a “memorial of the sacrifice at Calvary.

However, Chrysostom went along with the “spirit of the times in regard to the worship of the saints and some of their relics. ■

Chrysostom was an example of the best Bible believing PrcaC

'J c--i "♦ time at least the best of the well-kno*H

Christian “celebrities” of church history. He was a much better preacher than any of the Roman Catholic leaders (Augustine and Jerome included). He was much more Biblical in his expositions than any of the Roman Catholic scholars (Origen, Jerome, and Clement included), and he was much more balanced and sane in his approach to spiritual devotions than any of the monks, nuns, anchorites, or flagpole sitters of his day. His life, like the lives of Savonarola and Erasmus, manifested that pecu­liar half-in, half-out position assumed by men like Billy Graham and Harold Ockenga in this century. It was a dedicated and prayerful evan­gelistic approach without completely abandoning the word of God, coupled with a moderate, disciplined control of impulses when declaring ALL the counsel of God. There was a “damper” present in the venti­lating system in order to maintain “peace with the apostate brethren.” However, when push comes to shove (as it will every time, sooner or later), a Bible believing preacher has to preach against sin. Chrysostom preached against it, and he was Biblical enough to know that God was no respecter of persons (Acts 10:34; Rom. 2:11). So Chrysostom told the Empress where to head in. He laid it on the line, and they picked up the line, tied his hands with it, and hung him on it.

Patricius (389-465 A.D.)

About seven years before the Thyatira church period started (Rev. 2:18), a man died in Ireland and was buried in a grave which is now the churchyard of a Protestant cathedral (Downpatrick, Ireland). The tombstone says simply, “Patrie.” Church historians refer to him as “the Apostle to Ireland.”

Saint Pat was the son of a deacon and the grandson of a priest.80 He was born in Scotland near a village called Bannavem Taberniae, which is now called Dumbarton; it is situated at the joining of the Clyde and Leven rivers.81 Patrick’s father was Calpurnius, a magistrate and a minister to the British church, which at this time (380-400) had nothing but the Old Latin Receptus of the King James Bible (which, inciden­tally, contains 1 John 5:7, 8 and the supposed “invented” Erasmian Passage in Revelation 22). This explains why the Celtic church of Britain

years followed the Byzantine order of Ignatius, Polycarp, and p^ysostom instead of the Roman order of Papias, Cyprian, Clement, BP rigen.82 Since these early Bible believing Celts and Picts did not

UP w’th Jerome or the Roman Catholic church, the Roman writers °stantly accuse them of being “pestilent heretics.”83

ters' ^at S *etters (The Confession, consisting of twenty-five chap- i e better to Corocticus, consisting of ten chapters; and a Hymn

written in ancient Irish), he is clear on some facts: he is not an Irishman; he never mentions Rome or any pope in connection with anything Bib­lical or Christian; and he was not born on March 17. Furthermore, Patricius was not canonized (made into a saint) until four centuries after his death, and he never even visited Dublin.84 Patrick recognized only the scriptures as the final authority in matters of faith and practice*5 and never appealed to a bishop, council, pope, or king for any religious advice regarding any spiritual issue. Unlike Origen, Clement, Augustine, and Eusebius, he evidently discounted philosophy, science, and gnos­ticism as being worthless.

He was carried away from Scotland to Belfast, Ireland, when he was sixteen years old by a band of marauding Picts (or Celts), and after six years he escaped and returned to England, where he was again in captivity as a slave for a while. Upon receiving a commission (in a vision) to evangelize Ireland, he returned and labored there for about fifty-three years. Legend surrounds St. Pat’s work from start to finish, but the documents containing these fabrications were not gathered or published as facts until St. Pat was Romanized by the Catholic church in the eighth or eleventh century.

Patrick himself speaks of having baptized thousands of grown men.85 He is credited for having started over three hundred local assemblies (seven hundred, according to some of his more extravagant backers). It is interesting to notice that after Patrick’s death (during the sixth and seventh centuries) that Ireland came to be called the “island of saints.” St. Pat evidently was more than an anti-Roman, Bible believing “cath­olic”; he was a missionary-minded evangelist. All of the monasteries set up following his ministry were missionary institutions (located at Armagh, Bancho, Clonar, Clonmacnois, Derry, and Glendolough); they were organized to train missionaries in companies of twelve to thirteen to convert sinners in Scotland, north Britain, France, Germany, Swit­zerland, and north Italy.87 The thousands of converts who listened to these evangelists were terrible misfits in the coming Holy Roman Empire, for there is no evidence that any Celtic church before 600 A.D. worshipped saints or adored Mary or believed in the Lord’s Supper as a “transubstantiation” in a sacrifice.88 Furthermore, the sacred boo which these monastic institutions were engaged in preserving was no i Jerome's New ASV; it was a Bible from the Old Latin which came ou of the Mediterranean area. This God-given, God-honored, G preserved Bible had survived Diocletian’s burnings, Origen s perver^ sions, Jerome’s revisions, and Pope Leo’s anathemas.89 In sP'te : “eodlv” Conservatives and “reverent Biblicists,” the word of G I ...u„ read.

And here begins the Thyatira church period. With the ascension of Symmachus to the papal throne (498-514), with the hoofbeats of the barbarian horsemen shaking the ground all over Europe, with Clovis hustling for the popes, and “Holy Mother church” trying to do every­thing in her power to Romanize Germans (instead of converting sinners), the Bible believers and the New Testament local churches were reduced to the minimum amount of efficiency for over a thousand years; only God knows all of their names, their work, their labors, and their sufferings.

Following the cycle of Paganism (300 B.C.-33 A.D.) came Evan­gelism (33-90 A.D.), followed by Teaching (90-200 A.D.), followed by Culture (200-325 A.D.), followed by Apostasy (325-500 A.D.). By 590 the great Ecumenical movement, or synthesis, had joined church and state, thus uniting believers with unbelievers; this is followed by PAGANISM (590-1500). Biblical evangelism was reduced to sporadic and disconnected efforts of individual Christians to win people to Christ; Bible teaching fell to the lot of individual street preaching “heretics”; and the administration and propagation of the New Testament local assemblies (in a New Testament fashion) became the unthankful and often hideous task of local pastors who were branded as heretics the first time they refused to pray for the dead. The records that deal with Dark Age Biblical Christianity will forever be the chronicles of an under­ground movement, if they are true. Occasionally we shall spot a witness that is nearly apostolic in stature, but in an environment controlled by the Bride of Satan such outstanding figures are going to be hard to find; when the “Bride” finds them, she burns them at the stake.

Although historians vary in their time brackets for this period of chronology, most end the Dark Ages around 1450-1480, while others insert the Renaissance as a separate age from the Dark Ages (1200-1400): we will take the Thyatira period to be 500-1000 A.D. and the Sardis period to be 1000-1500 A.D.

The sun has set. The workmen are in from the fields. Many people PreParing to go to sleep (Matt. 13:25); others are taking advantage ° the darkness to express their “life-styles’” (Rom. 1:29-32) because love darkness rather than light (1 Thess. 5:1-8), and no one can rar. At this time, with the exception of a clouded moon and stars, all the light is artificial light (Matt. 4:14-16); and since aPpro°rePresents th® Bride of Christ (Song of Sol. 6:10), we may an e 1^ stu<ly °f next period of church history as a man watching ual sta^ °^l^e moon by the world. Starlight is all that is left. Individ- I must light our path through Thyatira. The “faith” (Matt. 13:31)

planted in the world (Matt. 13:38) produced a tree (Matt 13:32) that nested demons (Matt. 13:32; Rev. 18:2-5). When the world comes between a Christian and his “Sun” (Mai. 4:2; Ps. 19:4-5), there is a blackout. The correct term for it in church history is ‘‘the DARK Ages.” It was brought about by questioning God’s words (Gen. 3:10—the Alexandrian “antilegomena”), setting up a competing author­ity against God’s words (Gen. 3:2-4: Alexandrian philosophy, science, and tradition), and then rejecting God’s words (Gen. 3:3-5)

Jerome’s Vulgate (called the ASV, RV, NASV, NIV, RSV, and NRSV) signals the blackout. It is an apostate Bible for an apostate church whose membership has followed the leadership of Bible-rejecting apostates for three hundred years.

CHAPTER TWELVE

Thy Kingdom Come, Thy Will Be Done

“Now make us a king to judge us like all the nations....And the Lord said unto Samuel, Hearken unto the voice of the people in all that they say unto thee: for they have not rejected thee, but they have rejected me, that I should not reign over them.” 1 Samuel 8:5, 7

We all recognize that there are good things accomplished in a can­cer ward; conversions take place in penitentiaries; attacks on the Bible can stimulate people to study; torture can give Christians an opportu­nity to glorify God; you can find all of the “fundamentals of the faith” in the new “bibles’; murder has its positive aspects: it strengthens the police force, sharpens the detective's mind, often causes an inheritance to pass on to others who may use it better, etc. That is, the most pessi­mistic and negative observers of history know that some “good” can take place while an appalling amount of destruction is going on. (“This an ill wind that, etc.”) Our purpose, however, in tracing the history of the New Testament local assemblies is to judge the “good” done by the Bible definitions of “good, ’ ’ not the humanistic standards adopted by free thinkers, logical positivists, philosophers, and church historians. In picking up the golden threads of “goodness” and “progress” and tracing them through the network of the Dark Ages, we will, there­fore, never attach them to the loom of those two famous pagan gods peace” and “prosperity” (Deut. 23:6). Furthermore, we will have ittle to say of unity, since Biblical unity (John 17:21) is a reference to* spiritual organism (1 Cor. 12:12) that has always been united in

st (1 Cor. 12, Eph. 3), with the only further unity desired being ® unity of Bible believing people (Acts 4:32; 1 Thess. 2:13) who agree

at G°d said (1 Cor. 1:10). The political unity of an ecclesiastical was never in the mind of God when speaking of “unity”

■ er 5:1-5; Gal. 6:1). No Christian was ever promised prosperity

above food and clothing (1 Tim. 6:8), and his peace was an inner peace (John 14:27, Phil. 4:7) and only outward on sporadic occasions (1 Tim. 2:1-2; 1 Peter 2:19; James 2:6).

In looking back over the road that led into the blackness of black- cowled hoods, black-robed friars, the Black Death (1300’s A.D.), and the blackness of the Dark Ages, we find a number of cheerful items from the standpoint of humanism, socialism, and culture:

1. The barbarian invasions caused a greater unity of Catholics and more compactness in church organization, thus guaranteeing the pres­ervation of three or four Bible truths.

2. The barbarian invasions exposed thousands of pagans to the gospel preaching of “heretics,” resulting in some real conversions right in the midst of thousands of Romanizing conversions.

3. The barbarian invasions forced the gospel to go east to west, according to the Divine plan (Acts 16:1-8).

4. The monastic life gave some spiritual souls an opportunity to read and study some version of the Bible.

5. Alliances of professing Christians with the pagan tribes (Clovis, Pepin, Martel, Charlemagne, et al.) enabled some of the gentler aspects of humanism to permeate European culture.

6. A feudal system arose where certain aspects of chivalry and honor were glamorized due to the influence of the Catholics through their teachings on Mary the Mother and their emphasis on good works for getting out of purgatory.

Now, this spice in all of the garbage is sufficient to convince a “pos­itive thinker” that “the eternal purpose of God, working all things together for good,” was still gradually, by “mysterious ways and means,” operating in history to bring about the day when “man’s inhu­manity to man, and like that there, and etc.”' Positive thinkers (saved or lost) have always been very irrational when it comes to learning the lessons of history.2 Rejecting the Biblical revelation of the nature of man (Matt. 7:11), the inner operations of the minds of men (Gen. 6:5), ’ the world system, the moral character of the men in it, and the men who believe in it (Gal. 1:4), plus the motives and intentions of “accept­able conduct” (Jer. 17:9), a positive thinker has no more chance o learning anything from history—church history or otherwise—than the leaders of the United Nations or the Roman Catholic church. Strange y enough, some of the greatest positive thinkers among the Christians (Schaff and Augustine, for example) professed to believe in the totOU depravity of man. How they reconciled this Christian “conviction their interpretation of Christian history3 is simply mind boggling-

can only conclude that they were stupid enough to believe that the regen­erated nature that babies received when they were sprinkled would even­tually outnumber* the unsprinkled babies that were still “in original sin,’’ and thereby guarantee (eventually) “Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done in earth, as it is in heaven’’ (Matt. 6:10). That both men thought this (as well as Machen, Ted Kennedy, Fulton Sheen, Warfield, and others) is apparent by the fact that the ending of the Jewish prayer in Matthew 6 has been deleted (RV, ASV, NASV, NIV, and RSV) in Origen’s Alexandrian text. This subtle mutilation disconnects the “king­dom, and the power, and the glory” (Matt. 6:13) from any association with Israel, who had God for a Father as a corporate UNIT (see Exod. 12:51 and comments in that commentary). “The kingdom, and the power, and the glory” were Rome’s when Constantine manipulated the churches into line with paganism; therefore a Roman bishop (called a “pope” after five hundred years) would not hesitate to claim that “the kingdom, and the power, and the glory” belonged to HIM.5 (For the “good of the church,” of course. Hypocrites always have good motives, John 11:50.6 Jim Jones—Guyana Massacre, 1978—believed in and taught civil liberties, equal rights, gay liberation, social equality, and racial equality—just like some of you.)

Church history, then, in reality is not a study of the Roman hierar­chy. If a historian were Biblical in his approach to history—that is, if he interpreted the solid facts of history in the light of the superior reve­lations given by the God of history—he would have to call the history of Roman Catholicism, “anti-church history. ” By the same token, the Reformers would fall sometimes under the heading of “semi-church history. ” The Reformers would kill the Donatists of their day (the Anabaptists) as quickly as Theodosius or Augustine would in the fifth century. Genuine church history must deal with a body of born again, Bible believing people in the body of Jesus Christ who meet as baptized ■dults in a local assembly (see chapter 2). We shall keep this in mind when attempting to document the history of the “church” through the first halt of the Dark Ages.

Christianization ” is the word used by Schaff and other histori- to describe the Romanizing of the Germanic peoples. “Evangelizing *s n°t at all the proper term for describing what the Roman did to Europe between 500 and 1000 A.D. The Catholic writers ves admit that in spite of “Christianization,” the Germanic tribes after hC r ^ea^s’ ’^ols, gods, oaks, and various superstitions centuries the^pi ecorn*n? '°yal “Catholics.”7 However, Christians traveling in

■ *lippine lslandS, Mexico, and South America today (1980) are

not the least bit shocked by such an observation: it is the standard testi­mony of the centuries where ANY population becomes "Catholic. ” The Catholic writers express a sort of childish “shock” (or a hypocritical pretense) when they observe the ineffectiveness of their “one true church” and “sacraments” on “the heathen.”8 It seems never to occur to them that if a heathen Romanized is a heathen, he is only “twofold more the child of hell” (Matt. 23:15) than the heathen who “converted” him.

We have mentioned St. Patricius. The missionaries that he trained

undoubtedly went out into Scotland and Britain, and of these mission­aries Columba (or Columbkille, born about 521 A.D.) was the most

effective.9 Columba founded a monastery off the coast of Scotland on a fog-bound island called Iona (the Hebrides Islands). From here Columba evangelized Scotland and sent teams of missionaries (twelve or thirteen to a group) down across southern England and over the chan­nel into Normandy, Friesland (Belgium), Germany, and Denmark. Although Columba, as St. Pat, absorbed a few Catholic ways of looking at things, he and his converts are marked with that peculiar anti-Catholic stigma that first showed up around 168 A.D. That is, Columba and his missionaries (and their converts) observed the day of Easter according to the Byzantine reckoning of Antioch in Syria;'0 they would not observe it on the annual Easter Sunday bunny-egg hunt (chapter 10, note 4).

The ninth successor of Columba (Adamnan, 700) tried to line up the Pict and Celtic Christians with the Roman Catholic practice on Easter, but his church members refused to follow him. After his death (704), every missionary monk doing evangelistic work was expelled by royal command (715) if he didn’t put out the colored bunny eggs at the right time: the issue was the date of Easter. By 715 A.D. the stranglehold of the Catholic church was so terrible that they could label a man a heretic for not observing a holy day (Col. 2:16). There is no indication that any Catholic cardinal, pope, priest, bishop, or nun in the history of the church ever read Colossians 2:16 or took it seriously if he did, nor did one of them ever look up Romans 14:5. The history of Catholi­cism is therefore ANTI-church history, for Roman Catholicism is AN

Biblical Christianity.

There were three outstanding differences between early British Irish Christianity and the later Christianity which was enforced b) Papists with fire and sword. One: no transubstantiation or prayers a* dead saints.11 Two: no vows of celibacy or adoration of Mary- the bishops were only pastors; they had charge of no parishes or and they claimed no “apostolic succession.”12 St. Pat and Co u

* ’-- nnnd “catholics.”

The first introduction of Christianity into Britain is as obscure as the list of popes given by the Catholic church (chapter 9, notes 77-79). Some think that Paul himself introduced the Britons to the gospel; others say that it was Peter or James or Philip. Norman legends have con­nected Joseph of Arimathea with the first evangelistic efforts.13 However, Biblical Christianity in some form was certainly established in England before the year 200 A.D.14 Tertullian (208) speaks of converts who were converted without any Roman getting within a hundred miles of them.15 As we have noted, there were three British bishops at the Council of Arles (314). Of the anti-Augustinian Britisher who gave Augustine such a hard time (Pelagius), Schaff says he was “a notable heretic.”16 In the same paragraph the pro-Augustinian Catholic, Philip Schaff, men­tions the fact that ‘‘Constantine, the first Christian emperor,” was also from Britain.17 If the cardinals had installed Philip Schaff as a pope in 1890, they couldn’t have made a wiser choice.

Now, the dictatorial control exercised over foreign powers by the Roman popes was always carried on in a sort of HEW, District Court Judge fashion (1940-1980). That is to say, safe and snug at Rome, pro­tected by “converted” armies of barbarians, the popes would allot certain distant countries to their friends and favorites, and then goon squads were sent out with the promised backing of ARMED FORCE if the inhabitants didn’t get “converted.” (See the race-mixing mess that went on in the federal school system between 1964 and 1980, or FDR’s gen­erous donations of Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia to Stalin at private conferences held five hundred miles from those territories).

When the news got to Pope Gregory I (540-604) in Rome that Ire­land, Scotland, and England were being overrun with Bible believing preachers who were baptizing adult converts, he realized what any District Court Judge (1964-1980) would realize: “that oppressed minor­ities had to be liberated from this harassment so they could have equal lights." Consequently, he sent out a scout to see if there was any child abuse or “child neglect” going on in merry England. The tenderfoot’s pame was Augustine, a Benedictine abbot (see notes 33-36) who believed *n salvation by works. Naturally he took a Roman Catholic Bible with him and some Roman Catholic commentaries that originated in Alex-

Egypt. *8 The way had been prepared; the English king (Ethelbert) married a French Roman Catholic from Paris (Bertha) who had made plans to get rid of Bible believers in England. She had JgpWt a Roman Catholic bishop with her from France when she got ■gi “• Augustine entered a field that was plowed and harrowed he threw in the first handful of counterfeit seed (Matt. 13:31)— by Philip Schaff and Augustine “the true Christian faith.”

Ethelbert, in democratic innocence, gave Augustine permission to pass out tracts and witness to the people,20 never suspecting for a moment that the godless outfit he was dealing with believed in imprisoning Chris­tians who passed out tracts and burning them at the stake for witnessing to people.21 Ethelbert allowed the Benedictine monk to reside at Canter­bury, and from henceforth the demoniac plenipotentiaries of Catholi­cism looked to the Archbishop of Canterbury as the greatest Christian in England. Jesus Christ Himself never attained such an exalted position (1 Peter 2:25): Jesus was only a Bishop.

Augustine and his monks won “converts” by their “radiant Chris­tian testimony,” their lack of preaching on hell and judgment, and their tactful diplomacy. Their sheepish lives covered their fangs.22 Ethelbert got baptized (or sprinkled), and as soon as Pope Gregory got word from his fifth column, he had Augustine ordained as an archbishop. In an impressive ceremony at Arles, France (not England), the pope graciously gave the entire English nation to a Benedictine monk (chapter 15, note 26). At Christmastime (597) Augustine sprinkled about ten thousand Englishmen who came out for a clear-cut stand against the Biblical Chris­tianity of St. Pat and Columba—which had been anti-Catholic (see notes 80-87). In 601 A.D. Pope Gregory ordered King Ethelbert to do

what Augustine told him to do and to follow his instructions as all good kings should.23 To make this advice more impressive, he sent a few relics of the apostles and martyrs to England along with some sacred vessels and, above all, some good copies of Jerome’s New ASV (the Latin Vulgate) with some transcripts of Vaticanus and Sinaiticus. (“The leaven of the gospel,” Matt. 13:33, had to permeate England like any­

where else.)

In 602, Augustine, with the backing of the pope, the King of England, and the armies of the Franks under Clovis’ four sons, had a friendly “detente” with the British bishops who still insisted on teach- ing anti-Roman Catholic doctrines; i.e., Biblical doctrines. Quite naturally the issues that came up in the meeting were issues that the Council of Nicaea had refused to discuss: final authority and infant bap­

tism. At Sussex these issues were faced. Augustine was quite frank (since he could afford to be); the final authority was a bishop of bishops over five hundred miles away, and infant sprinkling should replace baptism of believing adults.24 Knowing more about Bible doctrine than an^ Roman Catholic archbishop could possibly know (the Britons had ee trained by Piranus, 325-430; Servanus, 450-543; Drostan, 471 $

and Finbar, 490-578; before Augustine was ordained.),25 the r^eV refused to yield. Augustine then pulled off a little A. A. Allen, ■

Ike, David Dunn, Oral Roberts, etc., stunt and “healed a blind man so he could see,26 but it misfired. The Britons still refused to accept a “pope” as the final authority. At a second conference Augustine saw that he was up against it, so he did the only thing that a really “godly, spiritual’’ Catholic archbishop would do: he threatened to call for God’s vengeance against the Christians in Britain by the Saxon armies if the Britons would not give up New Testament Christianity and trade it in for a Roman mess of pottage.27 His efforts at blackmail failed, and the British read him off for what he really was: a gangster. However, when the Saxons finally did invade England ten years later, all members of the Catholic church were taught to look upon it as the divine judgment of God falling on a heathen people who had refused to submit to “God” and obey His vice-regents (whatever that is) on earth. When Augustine was buried in the cathedral of Canterbury, some deluded Catholic put the following graffiti on his stone: “Here rests the LORD Augustine who...reduced King Ethelbert and his NATION from the worship of IDOLS to the faith of Christ.”28

Often a degeneration into apostasy is mistaken for “conversion.” Often a degenerate is called “lord” by idolators who worry about "Bibliolatry.

Often a lapse into false doctrine is mistaken for “the faith of Christ. ” There is no tombstone in Europe bearing a bigger lie than the one lying on Augustine’s grave.

The four principle English “sees” (a non-Biblical term for “wards”) became Canterbury, London, Rochester, and York. Philip Schaff, running true to form, gives the credit to Rome’s “nominal Chris­tianity” for the unity of the English nation and the “BEST elements in her civilization.”29 This implies that Bible believing preachers, Bible believing teachers, evangelistic missionaries, and the new birth are not to be connected with England’s spiritual legacy or her spiritual indebt- ■ness. (Latourette’s church history is also devoid of understanding when touching the basic New Testament truths of preaching, teaching, con- ersion, soul-winning, witnessing, evangelism, and local church Planting.30)

11 In discussing the conversion of the Arian Goths to Roman Cathol- *Sm’ Schaff believes with the simplicity of a child that since the B'h?1311'0 ^ot^s on|y “accidentally believed” the teachings of their ,? e (Ulfilas’s Gothic Bible, 350 A.D.) that they quickly became teach’ °X (R°man Catholic) when they became acquainted with the foa *? R°me-31 When these Arian tribes (the Vandals in particular)

e through Africa, the Donatists found them to be more tolerant

of Biblical Christianity than the “Catholic” brethren in Rome.32 The Vandals destroyed the playground of Augustine, Clement, Origen, and Philo, but this time Schaff, the historian, does not consider it to be “the divine judgment of God” falling on rebels—as he did when he commented on the Saxon invasion of England—no, this time it was a “tragedy” because it desolated the “scene of the immortal labors of St. Augustine” (see chapter 6, notes 79-89).33 Let us hope so.

The Salian Franks were Romanized under the leadership of Clovis (Chlodwig), the grandson of Merovig, from whence we obtain the name for the “Merovingian” dynasty of rulers. Clovis (466-511) was bap­tized by immersion on Christmas day (496 A.D.) by Remigius, the Bishop of Rheims, and three thousand of Clovis’s troops followed him. The fruits of their Catholicism were quite manifest in the next fourteen years: bloody biographies, outrageous cruelties, incredible perversity, assassinations, horrible massacres, gross superstitions, outbreaks of fury, fratricidal executions, polygamy, and perjury.34 One might say they had become good Romans; they certainly had not become Bible believing Christians by the wildest stretch of the most liberal imagination. The Catholic antidote for these aborted “new births” that produced “strange children” (see Hosea 5:7 and comments in that commentary) was sim­ple: pacify them with sweetness and holiness by the use of relics, candles, incense, holy water, beads, pieces of the cross, and skulls of the saints. It is a common joke in Europe that there were enough pieces of the cross in Germany, England, Italy, France, and Spain by 1200 to make a ranch-style house,35 and there were two or three bodies and heads of Peter at Poitiers, Rome, Triers, Geneva, and John Lateran.36 It was another standing joke (in the Middle Ages) that since one skull of John the Baptist was smaller than another one, that the small one must have been John when he was a young boy. Which, after all, is just as credible as the inscription on Augustine’s tombstone (note 28).

There were German congregations of Christians in the upper and lower Rhine as far back as the time of Irenaeus (120-192 A.D.), and if these congregations had access to any Bible, of course it was the Old Latin of the Albigenses and Waldenses: Jerome had not yet been born. The Christian history of Germany will parallel the history of any nation in Europe from 100 to 1000 A.D. Four stages are distinguishable, whic • will match: Evangelism (Discovery), Teaching (Colonization), Culture (Civilization), and Apostasy (Deterioration). In the first stage the ^cotc37 Irish missionaries (or Byzantine missionaries) evangelized a P°PU^<^’JO in the next stage they began to learn the word of God and teae Jyp others; in the third stage up shows a bureaucrat from the HEW or

(Russian secret police)—in Germany’s case Boniface—to “consolidate” the work of others and bring it into line with the “cultural standards” of the “qualified officials” in the federal hierarchy at Rome; and finally the forcible conversion by armed military forces of every “noncooper­ative person” who might be a “counter-revolutionary” and not obey the Roman Catholic dictatorship thus set up. Apostasy is the logical out­come of such a cycle.

There were two bishops at the Council of Arles (314 A.D.) from the Rhineland. Notice that the Donatist controversy over baptism attracted bishops outside the Mediterranean area (chapter 7, notes 27, 77). It was the hottest doctrinal issue in the empire before Nicaea (chapter 7), which shows that a Christian witness had gotten into Germany long before Constantine passed any “decrees” of toleration for anyone. As in the case of England, Germany had been evangelized by anti-Catholic, Bible believing missionaries long before the papal “nuncio,” Boniface (718), showed up to “consolidate” the work. Severinus was going up and down the Danube into Bavaria and Asia Minor in the fifth century.38 The Irish and Scottish missionaries from Iona had penetrated to south Germany and eastern Switzerland years before Boniface was bom.38 The Holy Spirit thus indicates that the “way of truth and righteousness” for Europe is around Rome eastward from Antioch and Constantinople, and around Rome westward from Iona and England: never through ROME (see chapter 10, notes 59,90-96). Willibrord (658-739) was raised in an Irish convent, and he came into Belgium and Holland (Friesland) in 690 A.D. He became the first bishop (not ARCHbishop) of Utrecht. An Irishman named Clemens, who preached in Franconia, and a Gaul named Adelbert (Edelbert), who labored in the Rhine area, were both “bad news” for Boniface when he arrived in Germany under the auspices of “Holy Mother church.” According to Boniface, Adelbert was a second Simon Magnus (Acts 8) and an immoral imposter. Since such a character was obviously a “heretic,” he was excommunicated as a heretic (along with Clemens), imprisoned, and then killed.40 Clemens disappeared from the scene.

By now the student of church history should have enough facts at his disposal to intelligently evaluate what a Catholic calls a “heretic.” The charges brought against Clemens and Adelbert by the synods (Soissons, 744; and Rome, 745) were stated by Pope Zacharias (741-752—who incidentally turned out to be a woman according to the Roman Catholics who tried John Huss41), who proceeded to excom­municate both men without a hearing; neither man was present, nor was he allowed representation (Acts 25:16). Pagan Rome (Acts 25:11) was often more “Christian” in its dealings with dissenters.

The charges brought by the Roman papa (in this case, “MAMA,” see above) were that these two “impostors” (tried by a female posing as a male!) were performing miracles, claiming equal rank with the apostles, leading women astray, and boasting about possessing more valuable relics than Rome.42 Would anyone who knew the moral stan­dards, the political dealings, the ethics, and the Jesuit principles of the Vicars of Christ (let alone Vicaresses of Christ!) be inclined to believe half of that? No, the real trouble was as simple as the trouble that Augustine had with Pelagius (chapter 10, notes 32-43). The trouble was that Adelbert and Clemens opposed clerical celibacy (Roman Catholic) and the acceptance of tradition over the Bible (Roman Catholic). They also taught that Christ literally descended into hell (Acts 2:27, 31). Bible believing Christianity (Eph. 4:8-12) has always been a “heresy.”

When Boniface (Winfred) tried to evangelize the Frieslanders near Utrecht in 715 without success, he went back to England, and then made a pilgrimage to Rome (718) to see if he could get some political and military help in “converting the heathen.” Pope Gregory II, there, gave him a commission to Romanize the Bible believing Goths (Arians) in Central Europe. Naturally Boniface was received very coolly in Thuringia and Bavaria since they had already been evangelized by the ' anti-Catholic missionaries of Columba.43 Realizing that he would have to have a government army behind him before he could “preach the gospel” (i.e., get Germans to swear submission to Rome), he returned from Thuringia in 722 A.D. in the wake of Charles Martel’s army.44 , He then founded a convent and returned to Rome. Having learned that a missionary trip is much more “effective” and “spiritually powerful” L»with an army to back up his “church,” Boniface then attached himself to the court of Charles Martel.43 By what Schaff calls a “master stroke i of MISSIONARY policy,” he cut down the sacred oak of the Thunder God at Geismar with his own hands, in the presence of a vast assembly, __and built a church there for Peter—the apostle to the JEWS. Of course, Boniface did not perform this “master stroke of policy” until he had papal military backing: cutting down a German sacred oak in front of a bunch of Germans without and army to back you up (see above) would hardly be good missionary policy, let alone “master” policy.

From here on, the official church of England (which was solidly Roman Catholic) sent to Boniface nuns, monks, and several good copies of Jerome’s New ASV (or NIV, as it could also be called). Boniface founded monasteries in Erfurt, Fritzlar, Ohrdruf, Bischofsheim, and Homburg (now Hamburg). Naturally, Boniface went up through the ranks (see Augustine’s climb, notes 21-22) and attained a degree of holi­

ness higher than Jesus Christ; he became an ARCHbishop (1 Peter 2:25). In 743 A.D. he was installed as the Archbishop of Mainz after founding parishes in Salzburg, Fresing, Passau, and Ratisbon, plus sees in Wurzburg, Buragburg, Erfurt, and Eichstadt.

Boniface completely eliminated his two Bible believing opponents (Adelbert and Clemens) at the Council of Soissons (744); after this, he set up a monastery at Fulda (the “Monte Cassino” of Germany).46 He was killed by armed pagans (“he that killeth with the sword must be killed with the sword,’’ Rev. 13:10) and so gained the reputation of a Christian martyr for “the cause of Christ” while his Bible believing opponents obtained the reputation of heretics who deserved to die.

Catholics in England chose Pope Gregory, Boniface, and Augustine as “patron saints” for the English Catholics, and in 1875 Pope Pius IX directed all Catholics in Germany and England to pray to St. Boniface that both countries would soon become 100% Roman Catholic.47 Can­onizing popular or important men from different countries (St. Pat, for example) became a powerful and effective means of keeping a group of different nations under one Roman dictatorship.48

Boniface plays a great part in anti-church history for giving to the Germans his Catholic “plan of salvation,” which ran as follows:

1. You renounce the devil and his works because if you do ANY of them—lying, hatred, theft, malice—you shall not “inherit the King­dom of HEAVEN.”49

2. You are to believe in the Trinity according to Nicaea (325 A.D.), or at least profess to believe it that way.

3. Keep the Sabbath and go to church, sponsor babies when they get sprinkled, and give alms because alms get rid of sins.50

4. Abstain from all that is lewd or impure around Christmastime, and don’t even have marital relations with your own wife at this holy season.51

If ten percent of Boniface’s “converts” became Christians, it was an extra-canonical miracle of God with the Holy Spirit operating entirely outside of “authorized channels.” Boniface’s teachings, above, have nothing to do with church history or the history of the Christian church.

ey are the creedal statements of Cain and the Judaizers. No man who ..read Romans through Philemon would believe that they were Chris-

doctrines any more than Adelbert or Clemens believed them.

Columba’s missionary training center at Iona had sent missionaries

. to Scandinavia as well as Germany. In 690 A.D. the Danes came ntact with Christianity in Luersted, Holland, and the first missionary visited them was Willibrord. He had been expelled from Friesland

around 691 A.D., and he came to Denmark in 700 A.D. to form a con­gregation and to teach young men the Bible. King Harold Klak (826) called for evangelists and missionaries. Willibrord was followed by Ans- gar (800-865), who worked with King Harold till 829, and then he visited Sweden, where he stayed until 831 A.D. After a stormy ministry amidst raids, burnings, sackings, and papal politics, Ansgar settled in Bremen, Germany, where he won the King of Denmark (Horich) to the Catho­lic faith.

The first efforts of Ewald and Suidbert among the Saxons, after the Bible preaching of the missionaries from Iona, were unsuccessful. The Saxons of central Germany (Hanover, Oldenburg, Westphalia, and Brunswick) were forest dwellers. Fiercely independent and splendid fighters, they had whipped the Romans so badly at Teutoburg in 9 A.D. that Rome had never gotten over it. The Saxons kept the Franks beyond the Weser River with their backs to the Rhine, and it took Charles Martel, Pepin, and Charlemagne to even get into their territory. The Saxons hated the foreign yoke of the Franks, or for that matter, anyone. They had no more use for a Roman church or a Roman pope than for a Polish pig or a Parisian poodle. When Charlemagne (Karl der Grosse) took over the Frankish armies, he went to bat for the pope by attempting to unite the German tribes into the pan-Germanic state envisioned later by Hitler and others. Believing, as all popes do, that sinners become “Christians” when they are sprinkled or dipped in water (see chapter 11, notes 36-39), Charlemagne took the only logical course of action that anyone would take who sincerely believed in such outrageous non­sense: he enforced water baptism at sword point—if you don’t get sprin­kled, you get executed.

With this noble, “Christian” motive for “keeping the faith once delivered to the saints,” many Germans got “baptized.”32 As we have noted earlier (see notes 3-7), the only hope for spreading a kingdom like the one pictured in Augustine’s City of God would be to produce more “wets” than “dries.”

The Saxons had some convictions, too. As soon as the “Christians (that’s what Schaff and Latourette call them)33 massacred four thousan captives at Verdun, the Saxons promptly burned down a dozen churches and killed the priests. It took eighty-three years (722-805) to Chris tianize” them. At this time (792 A.D.), ten thousand Saxon taini ies were driven from their homes by Roman Catholics and scattered thrt’u^\ out the provinces.34 “God’s truth was marching on; glory- ^° * hallelujah,” etc., by “spreading the kingdom.” The war of Charlernag^J against the Saxons was the first church-approved massacre for the ex

sion of the church; it set the pace for a dozen more later. Unity and power were the church’s first considerations in any set of options (see chapter 10, notes 25-30); so, as we have said, if it came to a choice between UNITY and POWER versus truth and righteousness, the latter items would have to go down the tube; they went.55

Seven hundred years after Charlemagne “converted” the Saxons to Roman Catholicism, a Bible believing Saxon monk reconverted them to primitive German Christianity. The Germans have long memories.56

This now introduces Charlemagne, the great prototype of all Roman Catholic dictators (Talleyrand, Franco, Hitler, Kennedy, Castro, Batista, Allende, Pope Leo, Lenin, Mussolini, Pope Boniface, Metternich, Napo­leon, et al.). Charlemagne, as Napoleon, Pope Urban, Pope Gregory the Great, and King Henry VIII, belongs to the realm of anti-church history. Charlie had no marks of Biblical Christianity on him, and he certainly couldn’t have joined a New Testament local church even with the aid of the Justice Department (see Jimmy Carter’s fiasco at Plains,

Georgia, in 1976, regarding some unwanted members who “joined” by obtaining federal aid in the form of ARMED GUARDS).

The literature on Charlemagne is the works of Einhard, Durant, Migne, Jaffe, Walch, Dipplot, Ellendorf, Bahr, Waitz, Dollinger, Gaston, Rettberg, Stacke, and others.

Charlemagne’s greatest life ambition (768-814) was to bring in the kingdom. He could think of no greater purpose in life than to overthrow the prophecies of the Bible (Rev. 11-13; 19) and to set up a Christian theocracy (see Calvin, chapter 16) on earth without Jesus Christ being present.51 He was the Constantine of the eighth century, though often wrongly called “the Moses of the Middle Ages.” If he was the coun­terpart of Moses, then Bloody Mary was the counterpart of Ruth.

In his lifetime, Charles conducted more than fifty military campaigns {none of them ordered by God, as those found in Exodus and Numbers), fighting against Lombards, Aquitanians, Thuringians, Bavarians, Avars, anes, Slavs, Saracens, Greeks, and Saxons (none against Amalekites, ® Us,tes. Amorites, Moabites, or Ammonites, as in Exodus and Num- rs)- This was done in an attempt to unite all of the Teutonic and Latin ^°P es in Europe into a United Nations under himself and a Roman

° lc P°pe. (It had nothing to do with conquering Hamites before a *he Prom>sed Land: Exodus to Joshua). To call Charlemagne tionUnterPart Moses is to talk like a moron. Charlemagne’s ambi- (“p0WaS t0 accomplish what Satan will accomplish in Revelation 13. histoSH1Ve taking” will never yield the truth in dealing with these

,ca facts, for the Bible has already set itself up as the final and

supreme authority in these “kingdom” matters more than seven hun­dred years before Charlemagne was born.)

Charlie was nearly seven feet tall, with a “commanding and yet winning presence.”58 He was fond of hunting and swimming, and during his meals he had Augustine’s City of God read to him instead of the book of Revelation.59 (Charlie was always a positive thinker: he would not stoop to thinking that the outcome of art, music, science, philosophy, tradition, culture, and literature was the Great Tribulation under Satan- Rev. 13! How could you be a political or religious leader and believe THAT?) He delighted in culture, was familiar with Latin, and highly esteemed his own tongue: German. He founded schools and was a firm believer in “Christianity.” Charlie was a devout and regular worship­per at church, going morning and evening to mass. He endowed churches, built the cathedral at Aix-la-Chapelle, and filled the Roman bank account at St. Peters with gold, silver, and precious stones, sending “countless gifts” to the popes. (A market speculator may guess where all of these riches came from: Charlie certainly wasn’t on salary laying bricks.) Among his more outstanding private enterprises was limiting his concubines to only four after the death of his fifth wife.60 He also took measures to correct every Old Latin version in Europe61 that didn’t line up with Jerome’s NASV. None of the popes opened their yaps about Charlemagne’s four dismissals of wives that he didn’t like.62 When a field commander has as large an army at his disposal as Charlemagne had, ''convictions about divorce” become highly flexible and some­times are simply swept under the rug until someone like Henry VIII comes along. The popes evidently were not only often liars and ego­tists, but cowards as well (see note 67).

Hemy Hallam says that “a strong sympathy for intellectual excel­lence” was the leading characteristic of Charlemagne. “He stands alone like a beacon upon a waste, or a rock on a broad ocean. His scepter was the bow of Ulysses,” etc.63 The Bible believer must understand that such eulogies have nothing to do with beacon lights pointing to the Bible or to Biblical truths; nor is the “rock in the ocean” (see above) the bold stand of any Christian witness for the authority of the Bib e. Church historians do not write within a Biblical context. G.P.R- James says that “no man perhaps that ever lived...was ever more trusted an loved by his people, more esteemed in his lifetime, or more regre at his death.”64 James had evidently not met any Saxons; “his pe°P ® in the above is not a reference to Saxons, Bavarians, Pau Donatists, Novatians, Manichaeans, Arians, or any Bible believing tilled oeople who wouldn’t accept Catholic ba V

tism. James also must have never read Eusebius on the Death of Constantine (see chapter 7, notes 12-19), or if he had, he must have sluffed the bishop off as excess baggage.

The greatest event in Charlie’s life, however, was not his temporary conquest of the Saxons nor his founding of schools and monasteries. By far the greatest event was the Academy Award performance at the Super Bowl on Christmas Day of 800 A.D.

In these days, the Super Bowl was called “St. Peters” at Rome, and the Academy Award was a golden crown. For several years (774-799) Charlie had been running interference for the ball carriers at Rome, whose ministry was putting out lights in Europe. In 774 A.D., for example, when Pope Hadrian was having trouble with Bible believ­ing Christians among the Lombards in north Italy, Charlie crossed the Alps and bailed him out. Again in 781 A.D. Charlie visited Rome with his son Pepin, whom on that occasion was anointed by the pope as “King of Italy.”65 A third visit, in 796 A.D., allowed Pope Hadrian to give Charlie a little gift for his birthday: the keys to the sepulcher of St. Peter—which was really in Jerusalem, in Palestine.66 A few years later

when a terrible riot broke out in Rome, the pope (Leo) was assaulted and almost killed (799 A.D.). Instead of praying and trusting God like Peter, James, and Paul ("apostolic succession,” remember?) the pope did the only thing that a “vicar of Christ” could do; he ran over to Paderborn in Westphalia (Germany) and asked Karl if he would activate the Wehrmacht and help him out.67 Karl did.

Now, this was the background for the great Merry Christmas (Freuliche Weinachten!) in Charlie’s life in 800 A.D. “Karl Der Grosse” was kneeling in prayer before the altar at St. Peters when suddenly who should appear (not “a miniature sleigh and eight tiny reindeer”!) behind him but Leo (the “lion” of the incident above), who runs in and places a golden crown (Rev. 5:10) on Charlie’s head (2 Cor. 4:4). At this, the* local church” (the First African Church of Rome) hollers three times: "Charles Augustus, crowned by GOD!’’M Since the term Augustus” had been thrown in, Charlemagne on his return to France Passed a law compelling every European leader under his dominion to uke an oath of loyalty to HIM (ditto Hitler, 1939) as “CAESAR.”69 v , e Roman Empire was back in business. No title could possibly Btow.. n more aPPropriate for a sprinkled barbarian who had just been in t»u a North African Catholic. The Roman Empire was back to dist'11655 exCePl *h*s l‘me would be called a ‘ 'Holy’ ’ Roman Empire to thirdgU*Sh fr°m tbe Unholy' ’ Empire of Nero and Diocletian (first centuries). Obviously, all good “Christians” were to believe

that the thing that made it holy was the fact that two sprinkled Bible rejectors were “HOLY” while Nero, Diocletian, et al., were not.

The Kingdom had come.

Augustine must have been an inspired divine. At last “God’s will” could be “done on earth as it was in heaven.”

But like most of the schemes of these positive dreamers, where some “dreamer has dreamed the impossible dream, or schemed the impossible scheme,” there was the proverbial fly in the ointment (Eccl. 10:1). The man who had crowned Charlemagne was only a mortal sin­ner, but by his act (see above) he had been recognized by the church (after a few rehearsals and pre-game instructions) as “GOD”70 (Acts 10:26). “Crowned by GOD” could only have meant one thing to a Roman bishop who was in the act of crowning one of his kneeling sub­jects. From this point on, the state (Kingdom of Heaven) and the church (Kingdom of God) were to work conjointly to “bring in the kingdom,” but at the inception of this blessed merger, the church was obviously the winner, for the head of the Roman church (in this case, the pope) had just been accepted as GOD1' while the reigning emperor of the state was only Caesar. Caesar, under God (Matt. 22:20), as head of

a political kingdom (Kingdom of Heaven) was obviously under subjection to the Kingdom of God: that is, “Rbmischer Papa uber alles!”

Observe the marvelous forward progress: under Constantine, although the pope was able to get armed help to kill anti-Catholics, he (the pope) was only a bishop of bishops or a ruler in ROME; under Charlemagne, he obtains military power over every anti-Catholic in EUROPE and is promoted from archbishop to GOD.

Under this divine arrangement, future popes, as “top dog,” have the right not only to select which king can reign over which kingdom, but they also have the right to interdict or excommunicate any king they don’t like. In other words (Merry Christmas, Happy New Year), 800 A.D. marks the installation of a Roman Catholic pope as the supreme political ruler of the nations of Europe, with the obvious intention of becoming the supreme political ruler over every man, woman, and child bom in both hemispheres.72 It also marks out the identification of the greatest type of Antichrist on this earth (2 Thess. 2:1-9), according to the definitive statements of the New Testament (Rev. 13:1-10). Having apprehended the title of God the Father for himself (John 17:1U, Roman pontiff now accepts the adoration of his subjects as Go Father (Dan. 11: 37) and claims the power to install rulers.7’ From ® forth, any ruler who will obey the Roman dictator and keep his su J ”—Roman Catholicism will be a GOOD ruler, while any

who allows rebellion against Roman doctrine, Roman teaching, Roman laws, Roman sacraments, Roman priests, Roman officials, or Roman councils will have to be a BAD ruler: good and bad are no longer deter­mined by the Bible. Rome, by 800 A.D., has replaced the Bible standards of “good and evil” with her own. You are “good” if you support Rome; you are bad if you don t.

Henry VIII was not bad because of his divorces (see Charlemagne, above); he was bad because he wouldn’t kneel at St. Peters to get crowned by a pope. Hitler was not bad because he did away with six million Jews; he was bad because he allowed Balder Von Sirach to lead German youth (1936-1945) into a party where allegiance to the Father- land was more important than allegiance to a foreign state—the Vatican state. Hobbes stated it exactly when he said that the “pope” is the “ghost of the deceased Roman Empire, sitting crowned upon the grave thereof.”74 (See The Sure Word of Prophecy, p. 32.)

However, until Charlemagne died, the Roman popes could not enforce everything they had planned. Charlie still held the royal flush because he was still an active commander of an army. He presided at the Council of Frankfurt in 794 instead of the pope, and he continued to appoint his own bishops and abbots without the pope’s consent. If Pope Leo had croaked during Charlie’s lifetime, he would undoubtedly have filled the vacant papal throne with one of his own bishops.75 Fur­thermore, Charlemagne did not wait for any Roman papa to crown the next ruler of France; after being married five times he crowned his own son (Louis the Pious) as king at Aix-la-Chapelle in 812 A.D. Later the imperial dignity of this crown removed from France to Germany, which became politically separated after Charlemagne’s death. Karl himself was a Teuton and, while alive, represented both nations.

With the usurpation of the power of God by a cowardly bishop and the acceptance of the title “Caesar” by a man who believed in killing Christians (800 A.D.), Philip Schaff notes only that the papacy was * wholesome check” and the empire was a “wholesome check,” with toth ‘securing order and unity,” both “nourishing the great idea of a commonwealth of nations...a BROTHERHOOD OF MANKIND”76 and “a communion of SAINTS.” In Schaff s sick thinking the Holy l^ttan Empire was a “law to lead people to the gospel” (misquoting ^■•23-24 when he made the application).

owever, we shall refer to the establishment of this empire as the dQS thjat*‘°n Unho,y Mother Whore” in future chapters, and we will jOhn th *n w't^1 die sweet spirit and charitableness shown by

■E e beloved apostle (Rev. 17:1-6) when he wrote under the inspi­

ration of the Holy Ghost. Likening the papacy and the Empire to the Old Testament law (which is holy, just, good, and spiritual: Rom. 7:12, 14) is like comparing the ASV of 1901 with Joseph (see preface of the New ASV, 1960). By such logic the RSV must be a type of Paul, and Das Kapital must be a type of Jesus Christ.

Backtracking for a moment, we pick up the Frankish reigns. Clovis died in 511 A.D. His four sons divided up the possessions, and in 588 Lothair secured the whole kingdom; at his death (561)? his sons split it up. Dagobert (628-638) was the weakest king in the Merovingian line, and after him came more figureheads until the time of Charles Martel (688-741). Martel won the Battle of Tours in 732 A.D. and con­quered the Frisians, Neustrians, Thuringians, Bavarians, and Alemanni, though he could not handle the Saxons. Pepin the Short (714-768) ruled after Charles Martel. He captured a few Lombard cities for the pope and brought the keys to those cities to Rome and placed them on St. Peter’s tomb—which really was in Jerusalem in Palestine (note 66). Charlemagne reigned over the Holy Roman Empire from 800 to 814 and was succeeded by Louis the Pious, who boot-licked the pope most of his life. Later Louis’s three sons took over: Lothair, Louis, and Charles the Bald. Lothair got the title of “Emperor” at his father’s death. All three brothers fought each other until the Treaty of Verdun in 843 A.D. From this treaty came the following allotments:

1. Louis the German received Germany.

2. Charles the Bald got France.

3. The Rhineland between them went to Lothair, who also got Italy.

This family, called the “Carolingian” dynasty, disappears from history in 987 A.D. after the election of Hugh Capet as “Holy Roman Emperor,” following the reign of Otto the Great (936-973 A.D.). 1

The various causes which lead to the disintegration of the empire under Charlemagne’s successors were the invasion of the Vikings from the north, the invasion of the Hungarians from the east, and the invasion of the Saracens from the south. These events, and those associated with them, cannot help but remind the serious student of history of an old, familiar friend (or enemy) whom he has met before. What man who believed the Bible and studied church history could fail to see the events of 400-500 A.D. (see chapters 10-11) repeating themselves?

The eternal cycle of church history is as fixed as the laws of t er modynamics; the only thing that could follow culture was APOST > and the only thing that could have followed the apostasy in the founii of an “empire” was PAGANISM. Charlemagne's culture cou a no other terminus than the pillaging of Rouen (841), the sac mg

Nantes (843), and the capture of Paris (845) by plundering barbarians from the north. This time they were the Northmen, who came to plunder monasteries and murder bishops, enslave monks and, in general, exe­cute the judgment of God on an ungodly and unholy, Bible rejecting church that insisted upon usurping the place of the Lord Jesus Christ in bringing peace on earth (chapter 10, note 76), and now the place of God the Father in ordaining the “powers that be” (Rom. 13:1-4). Schaff, Dollinger, Durant, Neander, LaGarde, Huizinga, Fisher, Newman, and Walker can no more see the connections in these Biblical matters than the links in a chain of DNA molecules.

The Thyatiran period of church history (500-1000 A.D.) exhibits the greatest departure from “the faith once delivered to the saints” of any period in church history. The conduct and creed of the entire official church (Roman Catholic) by this time is of such a nature that one only marvels that the Black Death was delayed by God until 1300 A.D. (see Deut. 32:23-27).

Dominican and Minorities in Rome gave witness to the fact that a woman had once been a pope, and her bust, along with those of other popes, was found in Sienna (see note 41). She was called John VIII by some after Catholic historians began to deny her existence, and this so screwed up the list of “apostolic succession” where it touched the term “John” that John XX had to call himself John XXI,77 and John

XXIV (1960) had to call himself John XXJI1 (who lived in 1410). Clem­ent VII (840 years after the death of the popess) called her “Zacherias. ”78 During a procession from the Vatican to the Lateran, an untimely birth revealed that there was more than one person under the “papal robes.”79 Pope Joan (or Zachariah, or Zecherias, or John VIII, or Tiny Tim, or whatever it was) became the only mother, dressed like a father, to become a mother while she was a “Holy FATHER.” (A notation for the Guinness Book of Records if you ever saw it!) Mosheim attests to all of this, although the French Catholic historian David Blondel naturally ascribes it to mythology, along with Schaff.80

Pseudo-Jsidorian Decretals—three pious forgeries, as Sinaiticus firs ^at’canus—were written to enforce Unholy Mother’s desires. The ^Kbook is in three parts, the first part containing “canons”81 and spurious decretals from the spurious Clement who forged the Epis- dement found in the Sinaiticus manuscript.82 The second part lns a f°rged document called The Donation of Constantine with ferent^aCtS canons’ and tl,e third part contains decretals from dif- Popes.” About thirty-five of them are forgeries.

CharlieeSe ^ecreta's advocate a papal theocracy exactly as Leo and H PUt't across in 800 A.D. Thev state that the reonlar memhershin

of the churches is made up of carnal sinners to be called “laity,” while the pastors are “priests” who are spiritual—according to the Alexandrian teaching of Origen and the Gnostics. The final and absolute authority in all matters of faith and practice is to be the Roman Catholic pope.83 The decrees further allege that when Constantine was baptized by Sylvester in 324—he was not baptized in 324, and he was not baptized by an orthodox bishop—that Constantine gave him the Lateran palace and all of the imperial Roman insignia, together with Rome and all the territory of Italy.84

These forgeries were written in France, and they were quoted as New Testament truths at the Paris Council of 829, the French Synod at Chiersy in 857, and by Hincmar of Rheims in 859 A.D.

All of these “shenanigans,” as we have said, belong properly to anti-church history. They should be handled in the briefest way possible, as not one of them has anything to do with the history or progress of the New Testament church. They have to do with the violent spread of an ecclesiastical hierarchy by fraud and bloodshed. To file such oper­ations under “church history” is to create chaos out of confusion.

A series of popes in the Thyatira age bridge the gap between Pope Leo and Otto III (died 1002). Since none of them were Bible believers, and since all of them were members of the Alexandrian Cult, and since none of them were soul winners or faithful witnesses for the Lord Jesus Christ, the less said about them, the better.

1. Nicolas I (858-867) took sides against the patriarch of Constan­tinople (Photius) at the Council of Rome (863), whereupon Photius excommunicated the pope. This permanently alienated the Greek Cath­olic churches from the Roman Catholic churches. Nicolas, however, succeeded in humiliating an archbishop in Rheims who was a friend of Charles the Bald by reinstating an enemy of his (the Bishop of Soissons) after he had been jailed. In this controversy, Nicolas estab­lished the heresy that no king has a right to try a Catholic bishop (chapter 15, notes 12-16).

2. Hadrian (867-882). .

3. John VIII (872-882). Both of these egotists claimed the right to be able to set up kings and depose them. However, John did ma e one decent gesture in his time which almost caused him to be ana matized: he took sides with a group of evangelistic, Bible be dissenters around Constantinople called “Bulgarians (chapter

78; chapter 4, note 73) and said that God had created other lanfe,u for worship besides Greek, Hebrew, and Latin. That is, he a"°We otjier a man could translate a Bible (or preach out of a Bible) in som

tongue. If the Bulgarians had been preaching in his diocese in the west, undoubtedly Johnny would not have been so liberal. But since they were evangelizing in the east (see Photius versus Nicolas), it would be to John’s advantage to encourage dissenters and schismatics in another man’s territory (see any of the works by district and federal judges in America between 1960-1980). You see, the “popes” have not only been known to be liars and cowards, but trouble-making politicians as well.

Following Charlemagne’s blind lead into Alexandrian culture instead of the Bible, the apostasy took the political kingdoms back into paganism, but it also took the popes with it. Three professional hustlers (Theodora and her two daughters, Marozia and Theodora) began to fill the papal “throne” with a variety of paramours and bastards.85 Sergius III “soiled the chair of Peter with every vice.”86 The lover of Theodora (John X) was the “Vicar of Christ” and “Prince of the Apostles” from 914-928; a woman had him cast into prison, where he was smothered to death, while she put three of her own sons on the chair as “successors to blessed Simon Peter” (Leo VI, Stephen VII, and John XI), the last one being a bastard son, twenty-one years of age.

4. John XII (955-963), as “Holy Father,” disgraced the tiara for eight years by being one of the most immoral popes who ever lived. He committed homicide and adultery, lived with his father’s mistress, drank toasts to the devil, and turned the Vatican into a brothel, while

praying to Jupiter and Venus.87

Otto the Great (936-973) restored the Carolingian empire so that the Germans would have the imperial crown of Rome thereafter. There follows Popes Leo VIII, Benedict V, John XIII, Benedict VI, Benedict VII, Boniface VII, John XIV, Otto III (Gregory V—the first pope of German blood), followed by John XVI and Sylvester II.

From the standpoint of church history—not anti-church history or semi-church history—we may say that their lives, works, teachings, conduct, and ministries had no more spiritual effect for good (in the Testament sense) than the worst heathen who ever drowned their tes in the Nile. To write about such religious charlatans as a serious church history, in view of the New Testament definitions of e *S m°St s^arne^u* hypocrisy.

■L. ese men are the men who approved of (and authorized) the killing EL ogomiles, the Paulicians, the Arians, the Bulgarians, the Pater-

> and every other Bible believing group contemporaneous with them, in the 6 sPea^< more of their political dealings with the patriarch ^chismT)1 (Constantinople) when we study matters relating to the Great

’ U45 A.D.) between the Greek Orthodox communion—which

humbly professes to be the only church that Jesus Christ founded~mA the Roman Catholic communion, which (equally as humble) professes exactly the same thing.

But now, it is time to give our attention to matters of more impor­tance than “Caesars” crowned by “God” trying to “bring in the king­dom.” Since the Kingdom of God is not “meat and drink” (Rom. 14:17) and has nothing to do in this age with anything that can be seen or handled (1 Cor. 2:4-14), we will have to look for our real “kingdom builders” in some other locality than a million dollar cathedral built by extorting “Peter’s pence” from serfs.88 Scriptural kingdom builders in Thyatira will not be sending gifts to kings or trying to fix the date of Easter; nor will they be found sprinkling babies and praying to Boniface. Since the new birth is required to enter “the kingdom of God” (John 3:3)—not “the kingdom of heaven,” as misquoted by historians—and since this is the work of the Holy Spirit (John 3:5-9) after convicting the sinner of the sin of unbelief (John 16:9), the “king­dom builders” in the church age will have to be engaged in preaching the living words of the living God (John 17:17), which are able to give the new birth (1 Peter 1:23) and save the souls of those who hear them (James 1:21) and believe them (John 5:24). “Belief’ and “unbelief” in the Bible contexts given above are never connected with “belief’ or “unbelief’ in a church hierarchy, a church organization, the traditions of ANY church, or the claims of any church. If any “good,” there­fore, is done in the Dark Ages, it will be done by that One who works all things together for good (Rom. 8:28) through his own ordained “means of dispensing grace” (1 Peter 2:2): HIS WORDS (Prov. 8:6-10). His words never connect the “means of grace” with “sacraments’ or anything like sacraments.

Charlemagne, Martel, Pepin, Clovis, and their playmates (Leo, John, Gregory, and Otto) are interesting from the standpoint ot recre­ational diversions and power politics, but they certainly have nothing to do with church history. Thyatira cannot be translated as papal politics.” No, if anyone is going to locate any “lights that shine in a dark place” (and the tenth and eleventh centuries are denominated asl the darkest of the Dark Ages by Schaff89), he is not going to find them among the candles on the altar at St. Peter’s, nor in the candelabra a Canterbury, nor will he find them dressed up in Halloween costume | parading around as “clergymen.” Light in the Dark Ages, as ma I age, must be carried by a light-bearer; and apart from that wore w i is the “light of the world” (Ps. 119:105), there is no light (Prov. on history whether you are reviewing it, experiencing it, writing

prophesying it. Spengler, Darwin, Wells, Gibbon, Dollinger, Durant, Harnack, Churchill, Huxley, and Schaff are examples of historians who read and write in the dark. Their “kingdom” never comes (no matter what political or economic or social “hope” they hold to) because in the first place they don’t know what it is; in the second place they don’t know who founded it; in the third place they don’t know how it is going to come in; in the fourth place they wouldn’t know the subjects of it if they met them; and in the fifth place they wouldn’t recognize the King who rules over it if they met Him in broad daylight. Ignorance is bliss (John 17:17).

The people who preach and teach the word of God in this period (500-1000) are never called “Catholics” or Roman Catholics or Greek Orthodox; they are called Paulicians, Bulgarians, Paterines, Burgun­dians, Bogomiles, Armenians, Cathari, and other names. Whatever their theological deficiencies were and however short they may have come in mastering all of the doctrines of the New Testament, there are two things that none of them would do: they would not sprinkle babies, and they would not baptize an adult until he professed to have experienced the new birth. They rightly could be called “Baptists,” for it is the Baptists (now as then) who have always had these two peculiar beliefs about water baptism. As a matter of fact, every attempt by historians to prove they were not Baptists runs head on into a solid wall of evidence90 that cannot be broken through. If the term “Baptist” means a Bible believer who will not baptize babies and will not baptize adults till they are saved, then the most famous group of evangelical dissenters in the Dark Ages—the WALDENSES—were Baptists, for that is exactly what they believed and practiced.91

The Paulicians from the start were identified as a heretical sect by all good Catholics. To place the “ban” on them, they were associated with the famous heretics, “the Manichaeans,” founded by Manes (or Mani), a Persian, who was supposed to have started this “cult” in Persia

270 A.D. The main objection to the teaching of Manes was that had a more accurate exposition of Genesis 1:2 than the Gnostics (or a olics like Origen and Clement), and he recognized that there was . nic force in the world opposing all “kingdom spreaders. ” In the- in°‘7i *S rn*srePresented by Catholic historians as a Gnostic believing ^^ansm.’ All Catholic popes, archbishops, priests, monks, nuns, On t.. s’ and presidents reject the idea that Satan will bring in a kingdom As in tV3^ ^ev’ If y°u believe this, you are a “dualist.” "Para 1 C,a,Se Montanus, Mani was accused of professing to be the

ete (the Holy Ghost) promised by Christ in John 14-16. A care­

fill examination of his work shows that he professed nothing of the kind. However, Catholic historians believe that the Holy Ghost speaks only through their church; and therefore, if anyone but a member of the Cath­olic hierarchy professed to have any Biblical revelation (1 Cor. 12), he was “professing to be the Holy Ghost.” (For confirmation of this, see chapter 7, notes 41, 49, 50, and 52). Mani professed only that the Paraclete was IN him and spoke through him (Matt. 10:20). One might say that Mani’s attitude toward the Old Testament was definitely that of an infidel, but only if he believed the writings of Mani’s enemies. As in the case of the Montanists, Paulicians, Paterines, Bogomiles, Cathari, Novatians, and Donatists, the information on what the Manichaeans “believed” is supplied by Bible rejecting baby-sprinklers who resented everything that any Christian believed where it crossed their own traditions. The disputations with Mani, for example, are writ­ten in Latin (although the disputations were originally in Syriac)92 by an unknown author, while the material about the Manichaeans themselves were all written by an Egyptian from North Africa who idolized Origen’s school of philosophy at Alexandria. His name was Alexander, Bishop of Lycopolis, and even all of his information about Mani was second hand.93

The historian Beausobre thinks “Alexander” was nothing but a pagan philosopher; Tillemont thinks the same thing.94 A reader of the work called Of the Manichaeans would draw the same conclusion; this “oral tenuous” report would rival The Letter ofAristeas (the supposed evidence for a B.C. “Septuagint”) for the gas bag of the millennium.

The Disputation with Manes looks like the report of a Campbellite elder on a debate between himself and an Episcopalian.95 Manes was put to death (hung) in 275 A.D. for his speculative opinions about the nature of good and evil and his philosophical opinions about pre-Adarmc history. Nonetheless, he and his followers all professed that both Tes­taments were inspired, that Christ came from a Virgin, that He was God manifest in the likeness of human flesh, and that He died and was buried and rose again.96 Manes’s opponent (an unidentified Archela 1 us”) puts Galatians 1:9 on Mani on the grounds that Mani doesn t have a proper theological grasp of the nature of evil and good in to matter. Since this philosophical argument—the basis for all o I philosophical speculations of the Gnostics (300 B C.-300 A.D.)-- nothing to do with Galatians 1:9, we may presume that Arcq^^.,s was somewhat of a Gnostic heretic himself. The real objection to a teaching by the “orthodox” was much less complicated. You see»^"-| followers in the fourth and fifth centuries were notorious for

fiin of Catholic credulity and the anti-Biblical practices of “Catholics.”97 So, since the Paulicians were also “anti-Catholic,” they were (for pur­poses of plunder and murder) associated with this group (Manichaeans).

Philip Schaff aligns them with “radical, heretical sects.”98

The two books that associated the Paulicians with the Manichaeans were written by Photius" and Siculus (about 868 A.D.). According to their enemies (Photius and Siculus), the Paulicians received their name from two heretics in Samosata. Undoubtedly this is incorrect; obviously they were called “Paulicians” for the emphasis they laid on the Pauline epistles in opposition to the Roman Catholics, whose emphasis was never on the Pauline epistles (Matt. 16:16-18; John 20:23; Heb. 6:1-7; James 2:24). That is, they were Bible believing Christians who had a much better grasp of the New Testament than Origen, Cyprian, Clement, Papias, Eusebius, Jerome, or Augustine. The founder of this group (which Schaff calls a “sect”) was stoned to death in 684 A.D. on orders of the Greek Emperor Constantine Pogonauts (688-685). As a Bible believer, one could easily guess the location from whence this “sect” came: the Paulicians originated in Syria (Antioch, Acts 11:26) and spread throughout Asia Minor (see chapter 10, notes 4, 5, 8, 59, 93, 94). Theodora (a good, orthodox, Nicene Catholic) put a hundred thousand Paulicians to death by the sword, the hangman’s noose, and the flames.100 Congregations of Paulicians left Constantinople and aligned themselves politically with the Saracens (though not religiously). On the Arab fron­tier, the more militant among them joined the Moslems in attacks on Byzantine territory, which by this time (867 A.D.) was controlled by idol worshipping apostates (see chapter 13, notes 46-47): i.e., Greek Catholics.

Philip Schaff (following the Catholic party line) tells us that these radical heretics” taught “dualism,” a contempt for matter, that the Virgin Mary was not the “Mother of God” (chapter 11, note 71), that they preached Judaism rather than Christianity, and that they regarded | Mnon Peter as a false prophet.101 More cautious souls and more careful lnvestigators than Philip Schaff (Prov. 14:15) sense the “pig in the *T. e’ ^e Catholics had insisted on building their church on Satan "h\1On Peter’ Matt. 16:23); therefore, if anyone said anything against H^^ed Simon Peter,” the “Prince of Apostles” (as Christ did—Matt. Should mUSt be rePorte<J as rejecting everything Peter wrote; this I®- class>fy Paulicians as “heretics” on two counts: becaus C^'l'ng head of the Catholic church a false prophet (Satan) (see eh'* ° Cath°**c church was “The Prince of Apostles”

p Pter 10, notes 29-31), the “successor to Simon Peter."

2. Rejecting part of the Bible.

The attacks on the Paulicians are typical of fifteen centuries of slan­der against Bible believing Christians (see chapter 13-14).

However, as in the case of Pelagius (chapter 10, notes 34-41), no one will have to get involved in the lengthy discussions about the matter of “nature” or “dualism” to see what the real problem was. The real problem was that the Paulicians rejected the Catholic priesthood, the Catholic sacraments, the worship of relics and crosses, and they thought the “one baptism” of Ephesians 4:5 was the Holy Spirit putting the believer into Christ: they were the Stamites and Bullingerites of their day. At their worst, they were at least five times as scriptural as any bishop or archbishop in the ruling church. Under severe persecution they moved into Bulgaria and the Balkan mountains102 and from thence to north Italy and Yugoslavia to produce Christians called Waldenses and Albigenses, of whom we shall speak later.

Neither were the “Manichaeans” completely eradicated in spite of the “Christianity” of Rome; they continued to teach and preach the Bible secretly in northern Italy, the home of the Paterines and Waldenses, and in southern France, the home of the Vaudois and Albigenses.103 The Paulicians were supposed to have originated with the conversion of a certain man named Constantine, who was a Manichaean at that time (560 A.D.). Some soul winning evangelist gave him a copy of New Testament manuscripts which contained the gospels and the epistles of Paul; naturally they were of the Syrian Byzantine family of manu­scripts (see chapter 3) instead of the Alexandrian family used by Jerome. It is instructive to note that only sixty years before this, the Philoxenian (Syriac) version of the New Testament was reproduced in this area by the Bishop of Hierapolis, whereupon he was denounced by the Emperor Justin (483-565) as a “Manichaean” and was banished to Thrace, where Greek Orthodox Catholics murdered him.104 Among other things, the Bishop of Hierapolis had committed an unpardonable blunder in his Syriac translation: he had translated “baptizo” as “amad,” which, in the Syriac Peshitto, means “TO IMMERSE. ”

The historical truth of Paulician teaching was that the Paulicians, from the time of Constantine (not “Connie the Great”) on, openyj condemned the philosophical speculations of the Manichaeans | complained of the injustice of having their Bible believing people asso ciated with Manes’s entire teaching.105 And, quite contrary to Scha ° opinion that the Paulicians baptized no one in water (the obvious n^j vative slander from a Catholic who was counting on water to save Robinson says106 that they baptized in water by immersion an

have mercy on the “heretic” who believes this!) baptized only adults who professed faith in Jesus Christ.107 Another name applied to them by the apostate Catholics of their day was ' ‘Acephali ’ ’ (headless), which was the Catholic way of mocking them for not recognizing Peter and his “vicars” as the visible “HEAD” of the church. Unlike the Bible rejecting popes, they believed what the apostle Paul said about the “HEAD of the church” (Eph. 1:22; Col. 1:18). If this conflicted with Peter (Matt. 16:16-18), they had “robbed Peter to pay Paul.” Hence, their Catholic adversaries accused them of saying that 1 Peter and 2 Peter were not inspired: a likely story.

The Paulicians in Italy were called Paterini or Cathari; in France they were called Bulgarians, Publicans, and Albigenses (see chapter 10, notes 72, 89-95).

Milan and Turin in north Italy (where all the Lombards were) had continual trouble with these “dissenters” and “schismatics,” for the Novatians (the fourth century Cathari) had migrated there from other parts following the Council of Nicaea. Northern Italy gave them the names of Paterines and Fratracelli (as the Paulicians), and they arose

in great strength during the pontificate of Stephen II (725-757). They all taught that a man was saved by grace through faith before baptism, that the Law of Moses was not New Testament doctrine for New Tes­tament practices, that a church was only a local assembly, and that the baptism of infants was HERESY.108 In short, they were anti-Catholic BAPTISTS of the most vicious kind. Their writings would have to be classified as “hate literature” by all of the “news media.”

Atto, the Bishop of Vercillia, complained of these people109 in 946 A.D. At that time they were very numerous and conspicuous in Milan, where they flourished for nearly two hundred years. These “Paterines” considered the Ante-Nicene and Post-Nicene fathers to be “the cor- nipters of Christianity.”110 They called the cross an “abomination of esolation,” and they said that it was the mark of the beast.111 They had their greatest religious liberty during the reign of the Gothic tribes

Lombards, who were classified by the Catholics as “Arians.”112 I hJ Were nOt dePrived of their property until Charlemagne and Clovis e ped the pope out of his “problems with heretics” by attacking both G«ths and Lombards.

I u European center, then, for Bible believing Christianity makes WestPSlde d°wn crescent, with the right tip in Moravia and Silesia (the left Gzechoslovakia and south border of Poland) and the

surveP °n t*1e West *3an'c t^ie Rh’ne River in southern France. Map rs will see immediately that the area is heavily wooded and moun­

tainous: it is the mountaineers that give Rome such a hard time. (Freiheit im Walde!) Bible believing Christianity lies north of Rome and south of Munich (in Germany) and Lyons (in France).113 Northern Italy, lying next to southern France and southern Germany (Austria), was “infested” (that would be the Catholic term for it) with Burgundians who came from Germany to settle in Vienne and Lyons,114 Novatians who came from Italy and Africa, Donatists who came from Africa, Paulicians and Bogomiles who came from Asia Minor, and finally Albigenses who came from their residence in Albi, a city about forty-two miles north­east of Toulouse, France.

In addition to this, Bible believers in northern Spain (the Pyrenees Mountains) showed up who later were identified with the Waldenses. Many of the believers who left Spain and crossed the Pyrenees were called “Vaudois” when they settled in southern France.115 The apostate Catholics (500-1000 A.D.) invented as many names for each group of Christians as they could, but all of them were related. For example, the ancient “Euchites” we mentioned earlier (chapter 6) begin to pop up all over Europe by such names as “Bogards” (a Dutch term), “Beguines,” “Picards” (a term from Germany and Bohemia), and “Beghards” (a Rhineland term); but all of these terms mean basically “a person of prayer” or “persons of prayer.”116 The Paterines in north Italy were from Bulgaria: that is, they are the ‘ ‘Bulgarians ’ ’ of the fourth and fifth centuries (chapter 9, note 91).

Going back to the time of Nicolas I (“the greatest pope since Gregory the Great”117), we remember that he had trouble with a nation­alistic bishop in Rheims, France, called Hincmar. Ostensibly the trouble was with a rival bishop (the Bishop of Soissons) who was confined to the “slammer” for “insufficient reasons.”118 However, when Nicolas went to bat for his incarcerated bishop, he certainly had more in mind than “sufficient” or “insufficient” reasons for arrest. The real trouble.. was that the jailbird’s adversary in that area was Hincmar; Hincmar was not a “good” Catholic: he had renounced infant baptism119 an thus could almost be called an “Albigensian.” Mosheim, the churc I historian, says that “no point is more strongly maintained than this, that the term Albigenses, in its more confined sense, was used to denote those heretics who inclined toward the Manichaean system and w o were originally and otherwise known by the denomination of Catharis , Publicans, Paulicians, and BULGARIANS. This appears evident | many incontestable authorities.”120 Of the Paulicians, Archbishop says, “These worthy clergymen affirmed that there was no virtue capa of sanctifying the soul in the Eucharist or in baptism. 1

Another name plastered on these groups of Bible believing Chris­tians—who actually composed a unified body of Bible believers—was Valdenses. Peter of Lyons (south France) adopted their teaching and was called “Valdus” after that time.122 Their followers in Lyons, France, were sometimes called “Lionists,” and Reiner Sacco and Theodore Belvedre both admit that their orthodoxy goes back to the remotest time, perhaps even back to the apostolic age.123 Beza links Lyons with Biblical Christianity when he notes that the Waldenses were the relics of the pure, primitive Christian churches; some of them were called “The Poor Men of Lyons.”

We shall have occasion to speak of these groups of Baptists (or Puritans) later in much more detail: the Waldenses, Cathari, and Albi­genses in particular. It will suffice for now to review the basic truths that Biblical revelation gives us in regard to these groups and the light that the Bible sheds upon how and why they were persecuted and misrepresented.

1. Any group of Christians connected with any local assembly that rejected infant baptism was a target of the Roman Catholic church for annihilation. Mass murder in the Philadelphia period of church history was carried out (see chapters 15-16) because of this doctrinal issue.

2. Any group of Christians connected with any local assembly that would not baptize an adult until he professed faith in Christ was another target, for this was a public renunciation of the effectiveness (efficacy) of infant baptism in the Roman church.

3. Any local assembly after 325 A.D. that would not subscribe openly to the decrees and canons of the church councils was subject to STATE action.

4. By 500 A.D. any local assembly or pastor who refused to sprin­kle babies was subject to DEATH (Theodosius, 413). This became an official law for the entire empire under Charlemagne in 789 A.D.

5. By 800 A.D. any local assembly or pastor who refused to submit auth°rity of the Roman pope or archbishop in ALL matters of

31 and practice was in danger of armed attacks by military forces

r the Holy Roman Emperor” (in this case, “Charlie the Great”).

• By 1000 A.D. every Bible believing Christian in Europe was ■^®ger of imprisonment, banishment, or death if he was caught one religious'"^ s s’de against the Catholic bishop’s side in any church’’ 8*Ve *mPression that the “one, holy, apostolic, mother

“gates” XX^ a rock “before the powers of hell,” etc., (by altering

; ° hell to “powers”—see the NASV) and that all her enemies

were just splinter groups scattered about by heretical schisms, the Bible rejecting Papists and Reformers (particularly the literary men) invented names for Bible believing Anabaptists: Puritans, Bogomiles, Lionists, Vaudois, Paulicians, Manichaeans, Priscillians, Sabellians, Arians, Novatians, Donatists, Burgundians, Bulgarians, Albigenses, Waldenses, Paterines, and Cathari, and eventually Bible believers were called Quak­ers, Anabaptists, Puritans, Pietists, Baptists, Dispensationalists, and Fundamentalists. That is, real Bible believers are always split up into smaller groups by the historians so that no one will think that a really orthodox “Christian” would believe the Bible was the word of God and was the final authority in all matters of faith and practice. The attack then, as now, was on the absolute authority of the BOOK (Gen. 3:1).124

During the next intermission we shall examine the lives and the times of these Dark Ages witnesses, giving some attention to the rise of one of the world’s greatest religions—Muhammadanism—and the trouble that it caused among the idolatrous Catholics, Also, we will examine the continual progress of the apostasy within the Catholic and Greek churches as both of them continued to incorporate and tolerate pagan practices within their own communions on the theory that New Testament Christianity was not fully developed when the New Testa­ment was completed and needed to “progress” and “grow” into a New Testament rejecting body of religious politicians.

Since unity under a dictator will always quicken the pace of things (Hitler, for example: 1933-1945) because of the efficiency that is attained in such a system (Roosevelt, for example: 1933-1945), the unification of Europe under a dictator (the pope) produced the fascist arm of Chris­tianity: Roman Catholicism. This explains why all western dictators come from Catholic backgrounds (Hitler, Mussolini, Lenin, Kennedy, Napoleon, Stalin, Franco, Castro, DeGaulle, Batista, et al.). With the regimentation of liturgy and laity under an iron fist which controlled the churches, the tempo was speeded up: the tempo of Bible rejecting apostasy. With a unified church to work in, a unified papal hierarchy to work through, and a unified military organization to carry out his will, Satan had no trouble injecting into the professing church of Jesus Christ enough leaven (Matt. 13:33) to float a loaf of bread. Since e God of the Bible is the God of history, we need not suppose that e Almighty observed all of this corruption without responding. I

His response, after sending the Vikings to ravage most of the pean shores, was to raise up a demon-possessed epileptic125 (Rom' meJj for the purposes of teaching the Greek and Roman Catholics that so times the heathen are more Biblical than those who profess to e

guardians of the scripture.”126 Mohammedans don’t use statues as an “aid to worship,” and they don’t drink intoxicating liquor. The demo­niac, German fanatic that God raised up (Rom. 9:17)—don’t fuss about the language just because you have denied the scripture—between 1923-1945, to carry out Jeremiah 52 and Deuteronomy 32, lived and died in Germany in good standing127 with the church that professed to be ‘‘the guardian of the scriptures.”

ENGLAND

SAXONY

MORMAND'

LORRAINE

BRITTANY

SWABIA

BAVARIA

FRANCE

LYONS

VERCELLI

VIENNE

VALENCE

TURIN

PAVIA

ALBI

TOULOUSE

ARLES

BEZIERS

.RAVENNA

REGGIO

ARAGON

LAUSSANNE

COMO

Milan

PAVIA RONCAGLIA

BURGUNDY FERRARA

PIACENZA PARMA •

THE CONCENTRATIONS OF ANTI-CATHOLIC “CATHARI” IN NORTHERN ITALY AND SOUTHERN FRANCE (1000-1400) I

FRANCONIA

BRITTANV

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Meanwhile, Back at the Ranch

“If thou seest the oppression of the poor, and violent per­verting of judgment and justice in a province, marvel not at the matter: for he that is higher than the highest regardeth; and there be higher than they.” Ecclesiastes 5:8

When all of the Roman Catholic practices and beliefs from 200 to 1000 A.D. are amassed into one lump of leaven, it produces a for­midable loaf; and many of them were in operation a century before receiving official approval. Remembering that the infallible rule for settling all Biblical matters in the Roman church is “how can we keep power and unity?" (chapter 10, notes 50-51), one can see how any anti-Biblical thing could be adopted, or even promoted, as long as it did not cause disunity or impotence in the political and hierarchical struc­ture of “Holy Mother church.” For this reason, barbarian converts were allowed not only to keep certain pagan practices (notes 6, 33, 52) but were encouraged to adopt additional pagan practices which they hitherto knew nothing about (note the ludicrous inscription on the tomb of the Archbishop of Canterbury; chapter 12, note 28).

By 312 A.D. prayers for the dead and making the “sign of the cross were officially ruled by the leaders to be orthodox practices for good Catholics. By 320 A.D. candles came into use in the services;

375 veneration for angels and saints; and by 394 the mass became ? celebration” (the word means “to rejoice”) of the death of Christ instead of a memorial (1 Cor. 11:26). By 431 A.D. worship of Mary

considered to be New Testament Biblical Christianity (Council of f P esus^’ ar,d by 596 the “hoods” (Catholic clergy) were dressing dif- or^p *^e P60115 (Catholic laity). The title of “Universal Bishop” Chri °Pe WaS ®*ven to P°Pes after 611 A.D., and as early as 709 onCeSulanS Were suPPosed to kiss his feet. The crosses and images that

■j' ° been used as an “aid to worship” (contemporary Catholic

propaganda) became objects of worship by 788 A.D., and by 850 the priests were mixing salt with water to perform various acts of North African black magic. Bells were baptized in 956 A.D., and by 1000 Catholics were fasting on Friday and observing “Lent.” The mass became an obligatory (go to mass or lose your head) “sacrifice” by 1000 A.D.1

The number of anti-scriptural names, titles, items, rites, and objects that enter into the Christianity of the harlot church are simply incom­prehensible. To give the reader some idea of the anti-church history involved when one is discussing Roman Catholicism and the anti-Biblical nature of her “Christianity,” we present a brief list of Roman Catholic terms used by the “true faith.” They are supposed to be the logical (and spiritual) development of the New Testament church by the Holy Ghost: clergy, laity, pope, pontiff, Vicar of God, cardinal, prelate, abbot, superior, nuncio, legate, dean, canon, cleric, licentiate, rector, holy orders, mendicant, curia, curator, archdeacon, confessor, stole, cincture, red hat, pectoral cross, acolyte, nun, monk, friar, zucchetto, tonsure, habit, purificator, host, maniple, surplice, amice, soutane, rochet, flabellum,- censer, viaticum, ciborium, canon law, bull, requiem mass, novena, offertory, rubric, introit, litany, etc., etc.

This is about one-half of the list.

Catholic forgeries are so plentiful in the first ten centuries of Rome’s defection from the truth that they couldn’t be listed. In the second cen­tury, Catholics were already forging the names of Clement, Dionysius, Linus, and Barnabas onto documents. In the third century they forged the names of Cyprian, Zephrynus, Hippolytus, Fabian, Origen, and Marcellinus on documents,2 and in the fifth century the names of Sylvester, Athanasius, Constantine, Chrysostom, Eusebius, Damascus, Liberius, Hilary, Augustine, and Jerome.3 The standard Catholic practice was to attach the name of a well-known man (especially a “devout and “godly” man) to a false teaching so that the “saint’s” endorsement of a lie proved it was the truth (see, for example, the correspondence by John R. Rice or Bob Jones, III, on the AV, 1970-1980).4 Many other forgeries are found listed in the Catholic Encyclopedia.

The appalling intrigues and immorality of these “princes o ® church” who came from the “Prince of the Apostles” became so we^ known and so despised in the eyes of intelligent people in ^urO^ pagans and Catholics as well as Christians—that by the tenth cci the average scholar in Europe didn’t care who was pope or '■'* professed to believe. As Luther said later, due to the influence anverage tices of the Catholic church counterfeiting Christianity, the a 1

Pope Paul I (757-767) wrote to Pepin the Short (chapter 12), “Rejoice, most happy prince. By the power of your arms your spiritual MOTHER, the Catholic church, has triumphed over HER enemies.”6 “Enemies” of the church (see chapter 9) were any Bible believing Chris­tians, as well as any church burning, monastery looting “Vandals.” After the destruction of the Frankish dynasties by Charles the Fat (884-887), the neighboring princes placed on the pontifical throne men favorable to their own personal interest and ambitions.7 Stephen VI (896-897) dug up the dead body of one of his political opponents (Formosus), propped the corpse up in a chair, and conducted a mock trial, condemning Formosus as a “heretic.” Then he cut off some fin­gers from the corpse and threw it into the Tiber River.8 He reaped what he sowed: Stephen VI was strangled in prison (897). A little later Leo V (903) was forcibly booted out of St. Peter’s chair and died in prison.9 When Sergius III hopped into the high chair (Peter’s throne is supposed to be exalted above every throne on earth), he took pity on two “Vicars of Christ” who were languishing in the clink and had them both put to death.10 John XIII (965-972) hanged his enemies," and all that the Catholic writers can say about the “Holy Father” of 1003-1009 (John XVIII) was that he was a disgrace to the chair of Peter; “he was a youthful libertine, living a dissolute life.”12

In addition to being plagued by these carnal, hypocritical scala­wags who professed “apostolic succession” as the representatives of God on this earth,13 devout Catholics were also plagued by having to learn the names of over a thousand saints who had been “canonized”

since the first century. These saints neatly replaced the former gods oi Rome and Greece which were found in their “mystery religions” (chapter 7, note 23).14 Following the practice of the pagan Romans who killed Christians in the Coliseum (chapter 4), the Roman Catholics of 500-1000 A.D. got them a saint for the hearth, a saint for the bath-

a sa*nt for the camel, a saint for healing, a saint for the dog, for traveling, a saint for poverty, etc., till their houses, filled ** gods,” looked like a joss shelf in a Hindu temple. “Patron saints” et^ame as popular or more popular than Jove, Zeus, Jupiter, Diana, C p e Exod. 20:3 and comments in that commentary.)

,ut since none of this was detrimental to UNITY and POWER, F- If h h ’ 3 matter fact)> no P°Pe would take an open stand against allie h d°ne m’ght have endangered his head with his military tan F ' K barbarians, who had as many gods (Zeus, Saturn, Thor, Wo- No pJ1C a’ EHe Woman, etc.) as Carter had liver pills (1930-1945).

F” said anything publicly about Charlemagne's four marriages

any more than any pope (1940-1945) dared peep about the concentra­tion camps in Germany and Poland operated by ten loyal sons of “Holy Mother church” (Eicke, Kramer, Palitzsch, Hoess, Stangl, Koch, Hitler, Himmler, Heydrich, and Diels).15 Silence is consent. Where the first consideration is political expediency (see Nixon, 1973; or Carter, 1978), standards of truth and righteousness are not to be examined too closely.

In the twentieth century, when Bob Jones University wishes to main­tain the POWER and UNITY of its own institution, it teaches publicly (in print) that there is no issue of right or wrong involved in the Greek texts of the Bible used by translators.16 No examination is made of these texts touching the truth or righteousness: Bob Jones University lumps the Greek texts of Westcott and Hort, Aland, Metzger, Erasmus, Beza, Tischendorf, Weiss, Stephanus, Lachmann, Griesbach, and Elzevir into the same group, although this is not RIGHT, nor is it SO.'1

In Jesuit theology the end can always justify the means17 because the church, by virtue of its Biblical perversion (its interpretation of Matt. 16:16-18), had to persevere by force or give up her claim: she could not persevere by faith or prayer or the word of God. Therefore, Unholy Mother Whore had to make UNITY and POWER the first major con­sideration in approaching or dealing with any and every religious, social, political, or spiritual issue that arose.

Two issues arose immediately; both were connected with the issue of issues among any groups of people of any degree of learning, in any culture on any continent, in any period of the world’s history: WHAT IS THE FINAL AUTHORITY?

The issue was now raised by Moslems and Saracens who had accepted the Koran as the final authority in all matters of faith and prac­tice. They had followed the leadership of a Jew hating Arabian who had married a nine year old girl when he was fifty-three years old. His last utterances were, “Lord, destroy the JEWS and the Christians....^ Gabriel come close to me....”19 He received his “call'’ from Gabriel, whom Schaff in his ignorance calls an “Archangel,"20 when he went to Mt. Hira to commit suicide. J

Mohammed (570-632 A.D.) had regular visits from angels (2 Cor 11:10-14); often he growled like a camel, foamed at the mouth, I streamed with perspiration during his frequent epileptic fits.-1 He Pr I pared and dictated the Koran, which became the most powerfu riv | of the Bible in the eastern hemisphere. Obviously the Koran lac s j major features necessary for any inspired book to have:

1. It carefully avoids making any prophecies on anything —.♦ found in the Old Testament. That is. the writer, thoug

ing himself “the prophet” and “no prophet but him” (see the Shehada: ‘‘and Mohammed is his prophet.”), was unable to predict one single word concerning one single historical event beyond his time not men­tioned in Daniel, Isaiah, and the Old Testament prophets. He was a sort of Jeanne Dixon without her boa constrictor. Mohammed majored in “angels of light” (2 Cor. 11:14): as a prophet he was a consummate

flop.

2. The Koran had only one writer, completing his work in less than thirty years, whereas the Bible had over twenty-four writers writing two thousand years apart and writing on three continents. Collusion between the various writers of the Bible would be impossible; collusion between Mohammed and himself would certainly be a possibility, one will have to admit.

3. There is no absolute assurance of salvation for anyone in the Koran unless they get killed in battle while slaughtering Jews or Christians.22

4. According to the Koran, no one needs the sacrifice of Christ for atonement of sins; there is no redemption in Christ’s blood; and as a matter of Koran doctrine, Christ didn’t even die on the cross (Koran, Sura 4); he was raptured with his Roman Catholic mother (“The Assumption of Mary”).

Salvation for Mohammedans (as for all Catholics) is by works: fast­ing, praying, and alms giving. Polygamy and slavery are both condoned in the Moslem religion. Nevertheless, Moslems are “the children of God” according to every Roman Catholic pope in the twentieth century who believes (as Masons do) in the “Fatherhood of God and the Brother­hood of Man. ” The trick in 1980 is how to get a Bible believing Christian to keep company with such “brethren” (John 1:12). This is exactly the trouble the popes had in the Dark Ages when it came to “getting along with the barbarians and Vikings and the unsaved membership their pagan local assemblies. Unity was far more important to them an Biblical truths or sound doctrine.23

Mohammed is buried in Mecca (Al Kaaba), which contains the Ara- lan Blarney stone of south Ireland. In this case it is a black stone called th el-Assouad” (the heavenly stone), something like “the image

e 1 down from Jupiter” (see Acts 19:35 and comments in that com- It is kissed perpetually, as the Blarney stone, by pilgrims, wore aS P*'gr*ms hissed the black St. Peter at Rome24 until its foot "the Luther, a Bible literalist in these matters, called Mohammed med w'1StllOrn °f Satan,” but when asked about whether Moham-

pOpe w°rse than the pope, Luther gave the Biblical answer: the [ * worSe (Matt. 24:5; 2 Thess. 2:4; John 17:11).

After Mohammed’s death (632 A.D.) his religion was established by bloodshed. Not to be outdone by the popes, he had raised an army of 114,000 Mussulmen who also fought under Abu Bakr, his successor. They destroyed the Empire of the Sassanids, and in fifteen years they took Syria, Palestine, Crete, Cyprus, Rhodes, Armenia, and Egypt. They were nearly indomitable because every swordsman in the army had been deceived by the devil into thinking that if he was “killed in action’’ he would get an immediate passport into a wine garden and would be supplied with several dozen ravishing belly dancers who were virgins.25 This produced what might best be described as “high morale’’ among the troops. They destroyed Carthage in 697 A.D. and the Berbers in North Africa were “converted’’ to Muhammadanism. Three Cal­iphates were set up: Baghdad, Cairo, and Cordova (Spain). The Moslems had passed from Africa into Spain, conquering the Visigoths who had settled there. Tarik landed near Gibraltar and found that the Jews there

were ready to aid them in invading Spain, as the Jews by then had been persecuted by Roman Catholics for over five hundred years. The Mos­lems nearly conquered all of Spain but were defeated at the decisive Battle of Tours (732) by Charles Martel, the pope’s errand boy (see chapter 10, note 84).

The Moslems attacked Sicily and Italy and then attacked Rome (846 A.D.). They were expelled permanently in 915 but went back to rule over all of the pope’s “holy” cities, relics, and associations (Antioch, Jerusalem, Jaffa, Tyre, Sidon, etc.), and then they enticed the papa to “come and get them” if he dared. Pope Urban II dared. To satisfy his own ego (and misdirect the anti-papal forces at work in his day), Pope Urban II started a war that cost the lives of 500,000 of Europe’s finest young men. We call this war “the Crusades,” from the Latin crux (crus), or “cross” (see chapter 7, notes 1-4). That is, under the*, sign of the CURSE, “the curse that was causeless” (Prov. 26:2) came, and the “good” that came from it was used by church historians as proof that “all things work together for good.” But all of this lies! in the realm of anti-church history, so there is no point in quoting t e church’s constitution (see chapter 3) to prove a point. There is no I Testament church involved in any of these things. They are nothing u the malevolent outworkings of history under the “god of this vvor . (2 Cor. 4:4), who owns the kingdoms of this world (Luke 4;^ un J the permissive will of God (Matt. 28:18), who will allow this sysl©M to run downhill (2 Tim. 4:1-6) until Satan takes his seat as Got 1 nate” (2 Thess. 2:1-13) at Rome and controls the United Nations M there. This is ANTI-church history.

The second contender for Roman authority, besides Mohammed, was the Patriarch of Constantinople. For a long time he and the apostate bishop of Rome had been “jockeying for position’’ and trying to check­mate each other. Since both churches had returned to a wholesale pagan­ism by 800 A.D., the contest was more of a political contest to see who could dominate the most people, rather than a spiritual contest to see who was Biblical: neither group was Biblical, and both groups were persecuting believers who were. Of course, the eastern church had to be more Biblical than Rome by virtue of its location (near Antioch of Syria, chapter 2), its superior Bible manuscripts (chapter 3), its better preachers (see Chrysostom, chapter 11), and its lack of political power (chapter 12, notes 84-85), compared with the political power of the Roman Bishop. Rome and Constantinople did agree on the following

things:

1. It was all right to worship images (787)—thinly disguised by hypocrites in both churches as “aids to worship” and “reverence to the people represented by the images,” etc.

2. Two final conflicting authorities: the Bible and tradition.

3. The worship of dead saints and pictures of dead saints—thinly disguised by hypocrites in both congregations as “venerating,” etc.

4. Salvation by faith and works.

5. Baptismal regeneration and priestly absolution by divine authority.

That is, by 800 A.D. Greek Catholics and Roman Catholics were first rate pagan idolaters by all the standards laid down in the New Tes­tament: any New Testament.

However, they disagree about some other things:

1 • The doctrine of transubstantiation (turning hootch and bread into Christ’s body and “unbloody” blood) was not as explicit in the east (800) as it was in the west, nor was the doctrine of purgatory.

& 2. The Greeks allowed free distribution and translation of the Bible: no Roman ever did.

3. No Greek Orthodox would accept the universal infallibility and au ority of any Bishop of Rome: the Patriarchs of Rome, Constanti- • P e’. Antioch, Alexandria, and Jerusalem were all of equal authority *n their own eyes.

' • In the Greek “Eucharist” the church members got to drink a ltlUor- In Rome the priest saved all the “shinny” for himself, fabl r 0 eaSt no onc t>elieved that Mary was conceived sinless (the the Immaculate Conception).

and the^***00 tO differed ah°ut the dates for keeping Easter,

K Urch at Constantinople was so constantly exposed to real Bible

believing “schismatics” that she never could get as far off base as Rome. As we have noted, the truth of the gospel goes up and around Rome through Bulgaria and the Balkans: it does not touch Rome at any point (see chapter 10, note 89) before, during, or after the Dark Ages.

The first serious rupture between the two apostate churches occurred when Photius and Nicolas collided. Nicolas, you will remember, was the papa who could not put up with Hincmar’s views on infant sprinkling (chapter 12, note 119). When Nicolas, the Bishop of Rome, tried to unseat Photius, the Patriarch of Constantinople, he took on a wildcat (Roman Synod, 863). Photius told him (Encyclical Letter) that the whole western church under Rome and under Nicolas was heretical. Thus the Greek Patriarch “stole the fire” from the “heretics” in his own area:

the Euchites, Bulgarians, Paulicians, and others, who had been calling Roman Catholics heretics for a long time.

Although Photius was imprisoned (867 A.D.) by the pro-Catholic political authorities in his area, he got out (877) and immediately con­vened a council in November, 879, which lasted until March, 880 (the Eighth Ecumenical Council). In this council he established that the Roman pope was a heretic and should be anathematized for inserting the word '‘filoque ” into the Nicene Creed.26 Believing that “one good turn deserves another,” Pope John VHI of Rome solemnly cursed Photius in return; it was a sort of sadistic application of the Golden Rule (Matt. 7:12).

There followed a long series of divorce-and-marriage intrigues, diverse dethronings of emperors and popes (see chapters 13-14), and anathemas hurled about like confetti (with about the same effect), but the history is too long and cumbersome to relate. Since it belongs to the realm of anti-church history (see Durant’s work), it is wise to skip it. Nicolas, Mysticus, Pope Sergius, Michael Cerularius, Pope Leo IX, Pope Innocent III, Michael Palaeologus, Bonaventura, John VII, Dionysius of Sardis, and various councils (Ferrara, 1439; Lyons, 1274, etc.) are involved, but the end result of involvement was quite clear, the bottom dropped out. If there had ever been any hope of reconciling the two apostate communions before 1054 A.D., that year finished their

chances.

When the Crusaders finally sailed through Constantinople (or any , where in Asia Minor, for that matter), they came as sprinkled ^este?1^ representing a sinless “Queen of Heaven” (Mary) and an infal i “pope.” The Greek church in Constantinople and Asia Minor. W I had looked to them for help from the Moslems, tolerated them on^ as unwanted despots from a foreign government. The Greek churc

the Roman church remained “at loggerheads” with each other for nine centuries, and then when Rome failed after World War II to reinstate the Catholic Hapsburg dynasty to the old Austria-Hungarian Empire, she gave up the situation in the Balkans and eastern Europe where the Greek Orthodox church had held sway. Adopting the Communist approach, the cardinals in Rome installed two red popes (Giuseppe Roncalli and Giovanni Montini27) and began to work with Soviet Russia in an attempt to seat the pope on the rostrum of the United Nations Assembly. The church that the Communists would tolerate would be a Polish, or Rumanian, or Bulgarian church (Wurmbrand and Popov were from Rumania and Bulgaria) that would allow Soviet agents to enter its communion as priests and bishops. This was accomplished be­tween 1960-1980 with little or no trouble. Rome has always been willing to go along with anything if she could retain her UNITY and POWER (see chapter 10, note 51). Consequently, Pope Paul VI fell at the feet of the Greek Metropolitan (Meliton of Chalcedon) in January, 1977, in the Sistine Chapel at Rome and got the Greek Orthodox leader to recognize him as a SAINT.28 Both men were under the domination of the Communist Party.

With ecclesiastical fights going on between the east and the west, the Saracens running all over the southwest and southeast, and the Vikings running all over the northwest, about the only safe place in the “Holy Roman Empire” between 500-1000 A.D. would have been Spitsbergen or Madagascar.

Excommunication was practiced: this meant exclusion from taking the “sacraments.”29 Bishops could excommunicate anyone except a pope, and only a pope could excommunicate a bishop: actually the pope was sinless and could not be excommunicated by ANYONE (at least, that was “canon law”). Popes were evidently liable to imprisonment and strangulation by fellow popes (see note 9), at least one or two of them. Excommunication in those days was a fearful thing, for since all Catholics believed in their dread superstition that water baptism (baby agfmkling) and the continual partaking of the Eucharist were essential Of getting to heaven, their souls would be literally damned to hell if y were “excommunicated” permanently. Such are the beliefs of

(head °f the HEW in America in 1979) and the Kennedy family

)• Popes were quite liberal with their damns when they felt like Of nin£ somebody. Benedict (1012-1024) put some damns on robbers 28-3? naSter*es ^at wou'd make the Deuteronomic anathemas (Deut. s°uls d °- more t^lan g°°d adv*ce: "accursed in their bodies,

» e ivered to torture.. .let them be damned with the damned.. .let

them be accursed...let them be accursed with those who lie damned in hell...let them be accursed in the daytime and in the nighttime,” which is followed by a curse on what they eat, what they wear, what they drink, and what they do, awake or asleep.30 It would seem that popes are characterized by mouths that are full of “cursing and bitterness’’ (Rom. 3:14), and although today they dare not hurl anath­emas about (say, 1920-1980 A.D.), they resort to “good words and fair speeches” (Rom. 16:18). The anathema given above is a greater excommunication than simply getting run off of the church grounds. The Council of Nicaea (325 A.D.) anathematized the Arians, while the Council of Trent (1564) pronounced over 124 curses on every Baptist, Methodist, Presbyterian, Lutheran, and Episcopalian in both hemi­spheres, plus every living Buddhist, Mohammedan, and Hindu.

The INTERDICT was a political lever used to pry a king off a throne if he didn’t submit to the Roman Pontiff in political or economic matters. It was carried out by the local priests, who were (and still are) subversive agents who have sworn allegiance to a foreign government, no matter what nation they may have infiltrated.

The interdict was a chain-of-command thing, where all the priests in a given area (sometimes only a village, at other times a large city, and in some cases a nation) closed the cathedral doors and cut off the sacraments from everyone—thereby temporarily damning all the people in that area because the sacraments (in every nihil obstat Catholic cate­chism) are said to be the “means of grace” and are essential to the salvation of the soul.31 Only baptism and extreme unction could be per­formed under an interdict (and some authors say that extreme unction was denied), while the mass and the rites of marriage and burial were withheld. All Catholics had a deadly fear of not being buried in a “Cath­olic” graveyard. This gave the local populace a half-completed salvation; that is, a washing away of original sin but no “mass” to take care of daily and weekly sins. To soften the blow, a death bed repentance was allowed which might, or might not, work if the priest could get to you in time (extreme unction). “Quick Henry, the flit!”

Hincmar of Laon, France, put an interdict on his diocese in 86. but the old adult baptizer Hincmar of Rheims (chapter 12, note 1 )»l who gave Nicolas so much trouble (chapter 12, note 118) remov I and said that it was “not Christian.” Gregory VII laid the inteidict O| the whole nation of Scotland in 1180 A.D. because the Scots had a papal nuncio (a bishop) out of the country and told him to go ^oie his papers somewhere else.32 Innocent III put an interdict on the nation of France (1211) because King Philip was living with a con

(see chapter 12, note 5)—at least that is how the old pious hypocrite (Innocent) put it.

When one finds popes terribly upset about marriage, abortions, and divorce, it is usually because someone has married or divorced the wrong person, politically: a wrong marriage or divorce (or an abortion) can cause a decrease in church membership or weaken the church’s power (power and unity, remember?) in that area. When it comes down to actual moral convictions about matters of sex, nothing could be more absurd than a bachelor pope whose first concern is maintaining a majority of votes in a country for his political ambitions. Catholic priests don’t have to pay debts, according to Pope Urban IV,” they can alibi steal­ing,34 and they can commit adultery on occasion, according to Popes Sergius III, John X, John XI, John XII, John XVII, and John XVIII.35 A priest does not break his vow of chastity by adultery.36 Third and fourth marriages were tolerated in the Catholic church where they had a need for unity or power,37 and fornication could be justified in some instances, if the end justified the means.38

The greatest thing about the interdict from the standpoint of Biblical Christianity was that it forced political rulers (barons and kings) to use their police forces and armies to kill or imprison Bible believing Chris­tians under their jurisdiction. The European ruler was faced with the choice of having his own subjects rebel against him—for they would naturally blame him for the closed church doors and lack of “sacra­ments”—or he could obey the pope and kill anyone the pope told him to kill. Popes very often encouraged rebellion against kings,39 and in some cases encouraged assassinations (“for the glory of God,” of course) to get a ruler out of the way who either would not tax his people for church profit or wouldn’t kill Christians.40

In a church state set-up (see Dan. 2-3) with the church in the position of final authority (see chapter 10, note 51), a noble, baron, king, ambas­sador, prince, or elector could be forced under pain of revolution, assas­sination, or damnation to kill anyone the popes wanted killed. That is,

Roman church by 900 A.D. had become a religious Mafia of Professional killers engaged in staying in office. As we have said before, g^all the history of such a Cosa Nostra “church history” is to stretch -imagination beyond its limits. There is nothing in the history of the

the cardinals, the Vatican, or the papal church that resembles of'book "St^’ we use as a guideline and register instead

sins ifU1 and J°hn VIII were very generous about remitting venial

e culprit died in action fighting for them.41 Penance was taught

to the tune of salvation by works, for there was not absolution of small sins until the penitent had done the required good works; naturally these good works would be determined by the supreme standard for goodness in the church: its own unity and power. Peter Damiani recommended self-whipping (flagellation)42 as a means of paying for one’s sins: so did the prophets of Baal (1 Kings 18).

Peter popularized the idea that you would learn the Psalms better if someone lashed you on the back with a whip one hundred times every time you read a Psalm. A real Sunday school teacher could sport fifteen thousand lashes by the time he had read the book through once.43 Peter always believed in “moderation” (as any good Catholic), so he cautioned against whipping yourself and limited a good day’s “Bible study” to four thousand strokes by someone else: that is, reading forty Psalms. This “evangelistic practice” was adopted by Dominicans and Francis­cans and passed on to the people who believed in “Orthodox Catholi­cism.” Armies of penitents ranged across Germany, Italy, and England in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries stripped to the waist and belting each other, with leather thongs.44

As a substitute for “doing penance” (taking pilgrimages, spinning the rosary, losing at bingo, lighting candles, jacking up the priest’s offer­ing, etc.), filthy lucre entered as a “propitiation.” From this came the practice of buying and selling indulgences with money. At first this, innocently enough, simply meant that if you couldn’t walk to Lourdes on your knees because of lack of time, or if you couldn’t beat yourself to a pulp because of poor physical conditioning, you could buy your way out by putting a little “moola” in the pot. However, this rapidly and rabidly developed into the business that drove Martin Luther to attack Tetzel (1517), for sinners got to the place where they could con­tinue sinning cheerfully as long as they had enough money from liquor sales and bingo tables to pay the piper when he showed up: the “piper was a Catholic monk or priest.

Urban ZZat the Council of Clermont (1095) offered full satisfaction for sins for anyone who would fight in Palestine to regain it from ,e “infidels.” Thus European Crusaders and eastern Saracens collide m battle, both carrying with them the Satanic impression that salvat&IK from hell was conditioned on killing someone who disagreed with leaders—both of whom rejected the Bible. Satan has not lost his o? on this earth one time, and he will not lose it until Revelation and then not completely until Revelation 20:10. .

Pope John XIII, in the meantime, was baptizing bells and ca them JOHN.45 (Heeere’s Johnny!)

Festivals had been set up (1 Peter 4:3)—to depart from the New Testament as far as possible (Prov. 30:6). The festival of “All Saints” was introduced into the west by Pope Boniface IV; this remarkable “Christian” festival was held on May 13 to commemorate the dedication of the Pantheon in Rome, built by Agrippa and dedicated to Jupiter.*6 On May 13 it was “cleansed and restored” and then dedicated to “the ever Virgin Mary.” That is, the feast was transferred from a pagan god to a pagan goddess. Later on the festival was moved up to the first of November. The festival of “All Souls” next showed up as a sort of Sunday supplement to “All Saints.” It took place the day following (Nov. 2) and was supposed to be a help in arousing the living saints to mourning over the departed saints who were still in purgatory. The festival of Michael the Archangel now showed up (Sept. 29), and all three festivals were run into a lineup with Easter, Halloween, Christmas (Col. 2:16), and eventually Mother’s Day, Father’s Day, Shrove Tues­day, Armistice Day, Ash Wednesday, Groundhog Day, Good Friday, Bad Saturday, Chocolate Sunday, Monday, or Always, etc.

Contemporaneously with these festivals the dollies began to show up. The Empresses Irene and Theodora in the east sanctioned the use of images and idols in 787 A.D. (the Seventh Ecumenical Council), and Popes Gregory II, Gregory III, and Hadrian I all stated it was the duty of Christians to use and worship images of Christ, the Virgin, and the saints. You see, “they were of special value to the common people, who could not read the Holy Scriptures,” etc. The reactionaries to this idolatry were the Iconoclasts, who came from the eastern branch of the Catholic church (Asia Minor)—mainly the Greek emperors (Leo III and his sons). The iconoclastic synod of 753 denounced image wor­ship as a relapse into heathen idolatry which the devil had smuggled into the church. But since all dispensations end in apostasy—this is the Thyatira period—image worship finally triumphed in both apostate churches (Roman and Greek). The “icons” were restored to the churches ,n Constantinople in February of 842 A.D. On the day they were ^stored, the church called a “Sunday of Orthodoxy,” which gave offi- sanction to the doctrine of dolly worship; but it went further than for the churches declared that if anyone didn’t have images H^call them “icons” to make the sucker think they are not IMAGES) tob 'd°lS *n h‘s church, he was a HERETIC. The Donatists would not images in their churches.*1

es of Urc’1 history, then, which deals with the major, organized branch- churchrhfeSS*ng Christendom, could often more properly be called anti- W istory, or at least ecclesiastical history. The alibi given for the

machinations and dark intrigues of these times we.have just reviewed is that “zn those days Christians didn’t know the word of God. and with­out the printing press copies were hard to get hold of, so only the monks,” etc. In view of the fact that the Bible had been translated into Ethiopic, Syriac, Latin, Gothic, and possibly Celtic and Persian before Jerome sat down to pervert it, the alibi is rather lame. Furthermore, all of the popes and all of the archbishops professed to know the Bible well enough to state exactly what was “Christian belief” and what was not; and they were willing to kill people in order to back them up.

If Constantine received fifty copies of the scriptures,48 who read them? Who got them when they arrived at Rome? Is one to believe that they were so worthless that nobody copied any of them at least ten times? Couldn’t fifty official copies, safeguarded by a church state, be repro­duced into more than a thousand copies, or a hundred thousand copies? What was the church state doing, burning copies produced by indepen­dent, uneducated Christians,49 when thy wouldn’t even reproduce copies which they themselves thought were authentic? If the Trinity and the two natures of Christ were so well-defined by 500 A.D. that a Christian could be killed for not agreeing with Catholic decrees regarding them, someone must have spent an awful lot of time in the scriptures. How do you determine the two natures of Christ and their operations without reading the entire New Testament through at least seven times? There are people in 1980 who have read it through ten times who still cannot explain those matters clearly.

Now, the perverted interpretations of the arrogant Catholic bishops and archbishops, along with their vicious lives and raging fanaticism against their opponents, shows all too well how they felt about the con­tents of ANY Bible. With them the Bible was an afterthought. Whatever in it could be used to maintain unity and power (Matt. 16:16-18; John 20:23) was certainly held to be “the sacred, verbal, plenary inspired original,” but whatever in it would hurt the unity of the church or weaken its political power was to be overruled and replaced on the basis of any extra-canonical writing of any Father that could be found; where it coul not be found, a blatant forgery would serve just as well. If a young man seeking for the truth would like to know how the hoodlums in Vatican feel about “final authority,” he should read a little hate > erature” which exposes the hatred that these rascals have for

Book. ,,5o

“The pope’s letter is the most weighty authority in the churc (Then it obviously outweighs the Bible if you are a member of a ( a^ofe church.) “Reading the Bible in the language of the people does

harm than good. ”51 Pius IV required bishops to refuse lay persons leave to read even Catholic versions of the scripture unless their confessors or parish priests judged that such reading was likely to prove beneficial.52 “It is not necessary for all Christians to read the Bible.”53 (Why not? Worried they might see something they are not supposed to see?) A priest is a “saviour”; you are to obey him not as a man, but as God.54

In spite of pious little “cover ups” like “ignorance of the Bible is ignorance of Christ” (a quotation by Jerome sometimes found in the prefaces to the Alexandrian Bible published by Rome: American, Douay, Chailoner, Rheims, etc.), there are no great Bible scholars in the Cath­olic church, and there never have been. In the twentieth century, Prot­estant Bible scholars who are pro-Catholic are dead orthodox apostates, and Protestant Bible scholars who are anti-Catholic are Pre-millennial Conservatives. Rome has never produced and kept one proficient Bible scholar in fifteen hundred years of recorded history.

Jerome could be fooled by Origen as quickly as by “God’s mother- in-law” (see chapter 11, note 46). Martin Luther left the church when he began to master the Bible. The only brains that stayed in the Roman church were Jesuit theologians, Jesuit politicians, Jesuit educators, and Jesuit philosophers (DeLugo, Bellarmine, Toleus, Suarez, Lessius, et al.); and not one of them knew enough Bible to teach Daniel, Revelation, Romans, Galatians, or Colossians in ANY language from ANY set of manuscripts. Roman Catholicism, per se, is so NON-Biblical it cannot produce a Biblical scholar. A low estimation of the power and authority of the Bible will never produce a Bible scholar. It may produce an ety­mologist, a philosopher, a grammarian, a theologian, a reviser (or “Biblicist”; twentieth century cliche), or a textual critic; it cannot pro­duce a man who understands, believes, and knows the contents of the word of God (1 Cor. 1-2; Isa. 28-29; Luke 10:21). That is a law that God established, and it operates automatically, regardless of your opinion about it or anyone else’s opinion.

■It is necessary to look for a moment at the contemporary domestic and social scenery around 500-1000 A.D. to get a better understanding _ die conditions under which the Bible believers were called to witness r e Lord. The system was called ‘ 'the feudal system, ’ ’ and it operated somewhat as follows.

Ve feudalism the relationship of the people to their “King” was ^■pistant, and consequently this hindered the development of strong K/. les- Th*s decentralization of political governments was due to Ur|der h any to §uard the lives and property of his subjects g e boisterous conditions of the times, characterized mainly by

raiding horsemen from north, south, east, and west at a moment’s notice. The people, for purposes of survival, became gathered into clusters under barons and “lords,” with the local man-of-war as the leader; this was especially true of the Germanic tribes in Germany proper. These clusters lived in an agrarian economy with peasants called “tenants” renting lands from “lords” or “suzerains.” Fortified towns and houses were everywhere, with the big “lords” or barons running the smaller ones. Any man who was under a lord was called a “vassal,” and he had to swear allegiance to the immediate straw boss of the area. This oath was called “giving fealty. ” (The “fief’ was the name for the portion of land rented out to a vassal for him to work.) In exchange for this oath of fealty, the vassal was guaranteed a forty hour week, time-and-a-half for overtime, social security, and “fringe benefits,” which back in those days meant food, clothing, and protection. This was the basic German system. “Beneficium” was a reference to the fact that donations (tax exempt) were often made to the church, so that by the year 1000 A.D. the Catholic church owned several hundred thousand acres of land in

Europe, all “tax exempt”: like Yankee Stadium and their present hold­ings in the Miller Brewing Company (beer).55 One who held ay?e/might some day become a “lord” by granting a portion of his land to another vassal (sub-infeudation): this vassal of a vassal was called (we could have guessed it) a “sub-vassal. ”(He was a sort of janitor who worked for a sharecropper, or vice versa^X “serf” was his proper designation, and he was a person bound to me land, representing an intermediate position between a freeman and a slave.

Military duty was the most important characteristic of feudalism because everyone’s life, but everyone, was in danger about six days a week from some source or another. Each feudal state had to maintain its own army; each vassal was required to serve in the army for a certain amount of time each year. Against the Biblical instructions given by the Holy Spirit for covering these matters (1 Cor. 9:7), Catholic vassals had to equip themselves and pay their own expenses. In such an army there was no unification of command, and often a draft army wou ■ “resign” if one king wanted to attack another king; or at least the draftee could desert in combat if things weren’t going right. The average vas a would take the hippy way out when these things occurred. He cou I always plead the “Vietnam Amendment” and simply claim that (this vassal’s) was purely defensive; he had only been inducted into m itary service to protect his king or “lord” in case of an attac

Feudal justice was executed by means of what they calle ordeal.” The plaintiff in each case made an accusation, and from

on the man who was accused was considered to be guilty until proven innocent. (This Jesuit method still survives among the faculty members and student bodies at Pensacola Christian College, Bob Jones University, and Falwell’s schools in Lynchburg, in regard to their attitude about the King James Bible. They take for granted that it must have mistakes in it because of the brainwash job done on them by professional liars.56) It was believed by the courts in those days that if the accused came through the “ordeal” uninjured, he was innocent; that is, God was on his side. If he dropped dead, obviously, he was as guilty as hell. Some ordeals were not designed to kill the “respondent”; some were only designed to scald his arms by immersing them in boiling water, or burn his feet off by walking on red hot coals, or wound him in some other way by armed combat. Murder and mayhem was still kept at a minimum for the obvious reason that whenever a “defendant” failed to survive,

he had a friend or relative who could begin to look for an accusation against the plaintiff to give him a dose of his own medicine. Human nature is a remarkable thing.

In social circles the nobles and the clergy lived “high on the hog and low on the chicken,” which is a plain way of saying “luxuriously” (or “faring sumptuously”). Nobles lived in castles and manor houses and spent their time (when they weren’t knocking each other’s brains out) in hunting, feasting, and participating in tournaments. Anyone who has spent any time watching television or the movies doesn’t have to have a detailed account of such matters. The Tales of King Arthur, Camelot, Sir Galahad, Roland, Robin Hood, the Black Knight, Ivanhoe, the Round Table, Prince Valiant, etc., are all vestiges of a culture where “knights were bold in days of old.” On the bottom of the pile were the second estate: the vassals, serfs, fiefs, and slaves. It was the typical Roman Catholic pyramid or Mao Tse-tung pyramid—two classes: a rul- >ng class on top and the rest of humanity on the bottom. This is also the Fascist set-up (1933-1945) and the Communist set-up (1917-1980). oscism, Communism, Catholicism, Socialism, Nazism, and humanism the same system. All totalitarian systems are exactly alike in structure, feudal system was a religious dictatorship57 at Rome which sided l ' the nobies, barons, and kings against humanity (the masses). This s^em st’h >s the Roman Catholic system conducted by the Vatican (Joh’ °nty var*at’on being a few “token gestures” by the popes anio XIII, Paul V, John Paul II) to create a false image of the church: Feb^n1-^656, Pres*ding at the wedding of a “commoner” (John Paul, nation * ’ re^us'n8 to he crowned with the standard tiara at the coro-

t ohn XXIII), and speeches aimed at “the welfare of the poverty-

striken masses" and the “good of the people," etc. All popes since 1960 are pro-Communist in policy and aims. Since both totalitarian sys­tems are the same, any Communist can survive in a Catholic country, as long as he is a “Catholic.”

The status of a farmer in feudalism was degrading. You could expect little national spirit or patriotism from a farmer unless you gave him a religious alibi for fighting; so, the armies drafted for this Crusades (chapter 14, notes 22-23) were raised in this fashion. A worthy motive for killing was invented, and a Christian cause was manufactured out of thin air, convincing the superstitious barons and vassals that it was “God’s will.” In such a social system, torn with petty interests and conflicting authorities, the Catholic dictatorship could keep things pretty well in hand—divide and conquer. As long as strong national monarchs did not rise up, “the Kingdom” could come. By pitting the barons against each other, none of them could get enough power to resist papal author­ity, and by keeping them split up, no king could muster his forces to cast off papal authority. Further, with the weapons of interdiction (note 31) and excommunication in hand, the Fascist dictators at Rome (“blessed apostle Simon Peter,” etc.) could extort all the money they needed to coerce any “lord” into doing their bidding. As a matter of fact, the popes from 600 A.D. up through the reign of the papal pornocracy were so powerful that they dictated to the barons and dukes the times they could fight and the times that were for “cease fires.” These two “rules” for conducting warfare were called ‘‘The Truce of God" and ‘‘The Peace of God. ” (Not to be confused with anything in the Bible about either: Rom. 5:1; Eph. 2:15-16). The “Truce of God” meant that it was time to stop fighting and rest for Easter, Christmas, All Saints Day, Groundhog Day, All Souls Day, Bing Crosby Day, etc. The “Peace of God” meant that certain sections of land were off limits (a “demilitarized zone” is the contemporary expression) for war; fighting there was a “no no.” Quite by accident these sections always seemed to have wealthy clergymen, ornate cathedrals, rich monasteries, and Catholic relics in them. For example, it would have been "against the rules to bomb Mt. Cassino Abbey (1944) even if the German Wehrmacht was using it as an artillery observation post.

Merry England had had enough invasions by 1000 A.D. to appre I ciate a "Truce of God” or a “Peace of God,” even it it came rom the devil. In the fourth century England had been protected by the military army of occupation, but Englanders dropped out ot the Ro | Empire in 410 A.D. when the Emperor Honorius was unabk to se^ help to them due to more pressing needs at home: protection from ojjH

barians and persecution of Bible believing Christians (see chapter 7, note 82). The invaders of England were mainly Angles, Saxons, Jutes, and Frisians; they came from Denmark, Germany, and Belgium. By 600 A.D. about half of the island was occupied by German tribes from the Continent. The Saxons split England up into seven kingdoms (North­umbria, Mercia, East Anglia, Kent, Essex, Sussex, and Wessex). About 859 A.D. the Danes began to invade, and when they did they found allies among the old Celtic peoples whom the Saxons had conquered. For a similar case, see the Germans in Austria and the Sudetenland taking Hitler’s side when he entered Austria and Czechoslovakia: 1938.

The Saxons and the Danes finally made a truce and split up the country until the time of Alfred the Great (Alfred of Wessex), who defeated the Danes soundly in 878 A.D. and ran them back onto the Continent. Ethelred, Edmund, and Edgar the Peaceful followed Alfred. Then came Canute the Dane (called “Great”—-a man, not a Great Dane!), followed by Edward the Confessor and the Norman conqueror, William (1066).

France, as a nation, began about 843 with the Treaty of Verdun (chapter 12, notes 76-80). In 987 A.D. the Carolingian line came to an end when Hugh Capet was chosen as emperor. The duchies of France were Normandy, Burgundy, Brittany, Aquitaine, and Gascony, while the counties were Flanders, Bois, Champagne, Anjou, Toulouse, and Barcelona. The Capetian kings were Hugh (987-996), Robert (996-1031), Henry (1031-1060), and Philip (1060-1108).

Germany had not yet become a nation at the end of the ninth century. Five different peoples inhabited it, and they should be defined by name, history, and institutions: the Alamanni, (or Swabians) between the Vosges Mountains and the Lech River; the Bavarians, living to the each of the Lech; the Franconians, who were the eastern Franks of the Rhineland; the Saxons, in central and northern Germany; and the inhab­itants of Alsace-Lorraine in the Rhineland. The German State was estab­lished by Henry I (the Fowler) in 919 A.D. Otto I (936) was elected to the throne of the Holy Roman Empire (Feb. 2, 962), and from this *me on, for forty years, the popes at Rome were nominated by the rrnan kings. Otto II (973-983) continued his father’s work by seizing Bg*es and Tarentum and bringing Italy under control; however, he

defeated by the Saracens in 982 A.D. and died in 983. Otto II was (1024^*1039^ Ott° Bl’ Henry Duke °f Bavaria (1014), and Conrad II of tk^OW’ this belongs to the realm of secular history, the history

e world system (1 John 2:15-16), operated by Satan (Luke 4:6-7).

When speaking of the “Christianization” of these nations (chapter 10, notes 69-84) and the “conversions” of their kings, we should exercise the utmost caution and never be so indiscreet as Schaff or so bold as Latourette and others in supposing that Biblical Christianity was spread­ing. Biblical Christianity carries in its entourage very few “mighty,” and few that are “noble” (1 Cor. 1:25-29). Most of these emperors were simply rivals of the popes, and they fought with him to the best of their own abilities in order to keep control over their own dominions. The pope, being a worldly ruler exactly like them (except he claimed all of their dominions combined), responded with “more of the same.” It was kind of like Stalin calling Mindszenty a “dictator,” or perhaps Pope Pius XII calling Mussolini a dictator: birds of a feather.

Throughout these hectic times chivalry grew as an institution. We will not go into a long thing about it, as so many have volunteered to write about it (and recently, reenact it) that it is as well-known to western civilization as cowboys and Indians. Sir Galahad’s efforts to find the cup that Christ drank from, Merlin the magician, Sir Lancelot. Tristan and Isolde, Valhalla, Robin Hood, Friar Tuck, William Tell, Sir Gawain, and the Lady of the Lake are as ingrained in English and European cul­ture as Grimm’s fairy tales and Mother Goose rhymes. The culmination of this entire system—that is, the gathering together in one bundle of all that was good, pure, romantic, brave, and noble about Catholic chiv­alry in this age (500-1000)—was the call from the popes to kill Saracens. The Crusades against the “infidels” (Mohammedans), designed to “restore the Holy City to the Holy Church so that the Holy Virgin Mother could glory in the Holy Cross held up by the Holy Father, blah, blah, blah,” was the perfect unifying idea: it was the greatest inspiration that a Bible rejecting Papist ever had for holding an “empire” together. It really put Constantinople’s diplomacy (chapter 8, notes 38-43) off the map.

1. All of the barons and lords and kings would be under HIS orders.,

2. All of the serfs, peasants, and vassals, would jump at the chancel to go on a worldwide excursion to loot and bring home treasures. I

3. All those who did the fighting would have a chance to be a

for the church and gain heaven by works: dying “for the glory of G • |

4. If the Crusaders returned rich, the pope could split the booty.

5. If they captured Jerusalem, he might even move there (2 T e • I 2:1-14), as Constantine had moved west to east, and then he cou g| credit for doing what Christ couldn’t do: he would get credit for tir"^’on in the Millennial reign of Christ (HIMSELF; see Matt. 24. , V the earth.

If ever a politician had a capital idea, Pope Urban II had it.

The Crusades usher in the Sardis period of church history (Rev. 3:1). The “Red Ones” refer to the bloodied bodies of the crusaders stretching out on the land for a thousand miles between Constantinople and Cairo, the bleeding bodies of men, women, and children hacked to pieces by Catholic priests, bishops, and their congregations,58 and the corpses of over five million victims of the Black Death.59 Sardis ushers in a period of history which, if it were given any terminology relative to the church, would be called “Unholy Mother church,” or (more scripturally) “Hellish Mother Whore” (Rev. 17:1-9). Catholics refer many times to such documented, scriptural FACTS as “hate lit­erature.”60

Before entering the portals that take us to Sardis, where the bloodiest murders ever committed in western history up to that time were com­mitted, let us examine the lives of a few outstanding individuals in the Thyatiran period (500-1000 A.D.), laying their lives and works alongside the infallible standard (AV 1611) to see if they are to be found as faithful witnesses to church history or vacillating witnesses to anti-church history.

Gregory “the Great” (540-604)

When a church historian calls a man “great” (see Leo the Great, Charles the Great, Peter the Great, Canute the Great, et al.), it is because of the man’s reputation among worldlings; the term has nothing to do with Biblical Christianity per se. “Great” (see chapter 14, notes 122-128) is the nomenclature for men who are not like Peter, James, John, and Paul. The apostles refer to themselves (1 Peter 5:1-6) as servants and “less than the least of all saints” and “chief’ of sinners (1 Tim. 1:15). They were called “great” by no one before or after their deaths. To counterfeit these “bond-slaves of Jesus Christ,” the popes often made the hypocritical profession of being a “servant of servants,”61 but this will not do at all; a wolf professing to be a sheep (Matt. 7:15) cannot absolve himself from the charge of hypocrisy. Gregory the Great is called the Great” because he was a crafty politician, a great organizer, and an energetic proselytizer for a religious prostitute (Rev. 17:1-6). The ^dern term is “pimp. "His “interest” in England (chapter 12, notes certa>nly had nothing to do with a burden for lost souls or a desire °bey 2 Corinthians 5:20 or Acts 1:8. Gregory, as all popes, was ^_erned with bringing every country in Europe into a totalitarian ■ state, with himself as head of that church, especially any country time that had providentially obtained the correct Bible text (see On p er 11 ’ notes 86-89) and was beginning to oppose Roman traditions aster and infant baptism (chanter 12. notes 17-273

Pat’s work in Ireland and Columba’s work in'Scotland and England had created a sudden, desperate need for a ‘.‘missionary effort” to “con­vert the poor, idolatrous pagans” in England; at least that is how any pious hypocrite like Gregory would shell it out if you asked him for the peanuts. When Boniface received his papal commission to corrupt the primitive Christianity of south Germany and Switzerland (chapter 12, notes 17-29), the first thing he was equipped with (after copies of Jerome’s New ASV) was a pile of bones and relics to be reverenced by the “pagans.” Substituting one set of idols for another is hardly an operation which could be connected with New Testament Biblical evangelism.

Gregory (Rome’s greatest pope62) was born into a rich family of professional politicians (senators) and was a Roman governor before becoming a pope. He became a monk after his father’s death and col­lected enough “tithes” to build six monasteries in Sicily; his widowed mother entered a convent and was canonized by the Catholic church. Gregory became a papal ambassador (“nuncio” in 1980) to Constanti­nople (580) to try to undermine the authority of the eastern patriarchs and bring them into subjection to Rome; he “served” there until 590 A.D. When he became pope, the first thing he did was raise an army to kill Lombards,63 and since he held tradition (Col. 2:8) to be as author­itative as scripture (Mark 7:6-13), he preached purgatory as a Biblical doctrine and taught that pastors (priests) should be unmarried (1 Tim. 4:3). In short, he was a Bible perverting apostate. Gregory was the one who sent Augustine to England (chapter 12, notes 17-29) to Romanize the Bible believing Christians there. The Catholic Encyclopedia says of him that he was “above all, a physician of SOULS” (in or out of purgatory?).64

Philip Schaff, setting his Bible aside before making any comments on Gregory, says that since “goodness” is the highest kind of “great­ness,” that the “church has done right in according the title of ‘Great to him. ”65 Schaff obviously did not consider (nor has he ever considered) that faithfidness to God (Matt. 22:37) and obedience to the word of Go (1 Sam. 15:22) mark the Christians as being “great”—not just being good.” John R. Rice leans heavily toward Schaff in these

Since there is “none that doeth good” (Rom. 3:12), and N IS GOOD, SAVE ONE, THAT IS, GOD” (Luke 18:19), the “gooa men” who promoted Jerome’s New ASVand Rice’s NIVall altered u 18:19 so that it did not read “NONE IS GOOD.” It would seen^veS one of the characteristics of “good men” (or men who fancy to be “good”) is a predilection to alter everything in the Bible t ...:,u ’t KPpm to be able to stand the Bible as v

If “goodness” is greatness in God’s sight, then there has never lived on this earth a great man: the word of God (Rom. 3) is very clear about these matters. Barnabas was only a “good” man by virtue of the Holy Spirit within him (Acts 11:24) that led him (Gal. 5:16) to bring forth the fruits of the Holy Spirit (Gal. 5:22). Hiring armies to kill Lombards does not come under this heading except in the imaginations of church historians. Destroying the Biblical faith of converted pagans who were won to Christ by others is not characteristic of “goodness.” If accosted with these charges, historians like Schaff and Latourette would immediately resort to the old “mentally incapable” bit or the “mentally irresponsible” plea: “Your honor, my client didn’t know what he was doing,” etc. (See the Son of Sam, Charlie Manson, et al.) Gregory would have handled it differently, however; in reference to killing Lombards and calling any professing Christian who didn’t agree with Nicene orthodoxy a “heathen,” Gregory said, “Let us imitate the works of the pious as well as we can. ’ ’ According to Gregory, pious saints kill “the heathen.” Philip Schaff had already agreed that if a man is an Arian he is a heathen,66 and that all of the Lombards were

ARIAN.67 Extrapolating from these basic equations, we can assume that Philip Schaff would have you killed if he thought you were an “Arian. ” Since the Lombards were the independent tribes of north Italy, where most of the Bible preaching and teaching was going on (chapter 10, notes 89-99), we may also assume that Schaff would have attacked them along with Gregory.

When the last Bible believing Christian was run out of Spain into the Pyrenees (Council of Toledo, May 8 589), Gregory “the Great” rejoiced.68 It was quite similar to the great celebration that Pope Adrian I ordered when he received news that Charlemagne (785) had “converted” thousands of Saxons to Christianity. The evidence of this mighty ‘revival” resulting in “thousands of conversions” was the fact that thousands of the Saxons had been sprinkled by Catholic priests. However there was a footnote to Charlie’s telegram that neither he nor the pope talked about too much; the conversions were made with the understand­ing that if any Saxon refused Catholic sprinkling he was to be put to P?0"1-69 A similar celebration with high masses, bells ringing, and com­memoration medals being struck was ordered by Pope Gregory XIII jr*611 over fifty thousand Bible believing Christians in France were mur-

red (St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre).70

The word “great,” when attached to any Roman Catholic, can have nU??,Us implications (see chapter 14, notes 122-128).

hen writing of this vicious killer, the church historians are almost ^■encal in their praise. Bishop Bousset (cited by Montalembert): “This

great Pope...saved Rome and Italy...goverened with as much vigor as humility...gave to the world a PERFECT model....”71 Count Monta- lembert: ‘‘No one would have hesitated to call the greatest of the popes...his virtue, his candor...his innocence...the tenderness of his heart.”72 Gibbon: ‘‘a clear, practical understanding...a kind and mild heart...lenient to the penitent and a warm friend...with a great prudence...and great sagacity...humility to him was the most sublime virtue...a warm patriot...a great character...he shines as a star of the very first magnitude.”73 James Barmby: ‘‘The loftiness of his aims, the earnestness of his purpose, the fervor of his devotion, his personal purity,” etc.74

What these men-following, men-pleasing, men-worshipping human­ists are trying to say is that Gregory was everything you could want in an unsaved politician trying to act like a “Christian.” Of his fidelity to the Bible nothing could be said at all. If the Bible were raised alongside Gregory’s life as a standard, his greatness would pass away as the morn­ing dew. Nothing could be said in regard to his motives, heart attitude, beliefs, practices, sermons, or leadership. But when a church historian writes of this kind of man, he accepts him on the basis of his reputation with his subordinates in the hierarchy or the testimony of those in the hierarchy who wanted to see IT prosper. Biblical truth is out of the question. Humanism and sentimental evaluation of sinners when dealing with sinners was what made Gregory “the Great” (chapter 14, notes 121-139).

Gregory’s theology was based on four church councils, the traditions of the fathers, and the four gospels75—thereby excluding the gospel (1 Cor. 15:1-6), the plan of salvation (Rom. 1:15), and the entire body of doctrinal truth revealed to Rome by the apostle to the Romans (Rom. 15:6-16). In short, Gregory was a Bible warping scamp. He is called, “one of the great doctors and authoritative fathers of the church’ by Philip Schaff. Not any church found in any New Testament. Gregory handled scripture in such an Alexandrian fashion that one would think his middle name was Clement (see chapter 5). He says that Job is Christ, Job’s wife is Job’s carnal nature, the seven sons (Job 1:1-2) are the! apostles and the clergy, and the three daughters of Job are the threel classes of faithfid LAITY. He also says that Job’s friends are heretics* and that the seven thousand sheep (Job 1:3) are “perfect Christians. You couldn't get more screwed up in heresy if you followed Joe Smi angel (Moroni). Gregory is as lost as a goose in a horse race uhen comes to expounding the scriptures. Gregory’s four books “Dialogues” are the chief source of medieval superstitions aboil p gatory.77

If Gregory the Great was “great” according to the Bible, a Christian should get his standards of values readjusted to the Koran or the Analects of Confucius.

Gottschalk (805-868)

This man was a German Benedictine monk and theologian near Mainz, Germany. He was condemned for his teaching and preaching by Hincmar ofRheims (chapter 12, notes 118-119) and Rabanus Maurus, Archbishop of Mainz (848-849). He was imprisoned in a monastery the last twenty years of his life. Gottschalk collided with Rabanus Maurus on the matter of absolute predestination. Gottschalk (as Calvin) taught a double-barreled, absolute predestination of the “non-elect” to hell as well as the elect to heaven. In these matters, Gottschalk followed the North African apostate Augustine all the way.78 Rabanus Maurus pointed out Romans 8:29 and 1 Peter 1:2 to Gottschalk to convince him that both election and predestination were conditioned on foreknowledge (not “unconditional,” as taught by Mauro, Machen, Augustine, Bob Ross,. Kuyper, Dabney, Mill, Hodge, Gilpin, Pink, Shelton, et al.).

Hincmar—the gentleman who wouldn’t baptize babies (chapter 6, notes 57, 93)—is branded by Philip Schaff, the “church historian,” as a proud, intolerant prelate because he treated the “poor monk” (Gottschalk) without mercy.79 That is, Gottschalk was scourged at the Synod of Chiersy (849) and then imprisoned. Schaff commends St. Remigius, the Archbishop of Lyons, for expressing horror at this “unheard of impiety and cruelty. ” Evidently neither Remigius nor Schaff had studied very much church history where it dealt with Calvin: he burned dissidents at the stake (chapter 17), and Augustine approved of killing anyone who opposed infant baptism.80 With Gottschalk’s incar­ceration and Pope Nicolas going to bat for him (chapter 12, note 84), another irrelevant argument became an “issue” to add to the pile of scrap metal issues designed to cover up the real issue: absolute authority. The old arguments about Pelagianism and semi-Pelagianism, Augus- tinianism and semi-Augustinianism arose again to fog up the windshield of every driver in the Dark Ages. The scenery was clear however; it was all too clear—Hincmar wouldn’t baptize babies.

A moderate doctrine of absolute predestination (if you can imagine such a thing) was adopted by Prudentius, Bishop of Troyes; Ratramnus, a monk of Corbie; Servatus Lupus, Abbot of Ferrieres; and Remigius, Archbishop of Lyons. It was confirmed by synods (Valence, 855; and Langres, 859). The doctrine of free will and conditional predestination (Rom. 8:29) was advocated by Archbishop Maurus of Mainz, Arch­

bishop Hincmar of Rheims, and Bishop Pardulus of Laon; it was con­firmed in synods at Chiersy (853) and Savonnieres (859).

The theory set forth by Gottschalk (805-868) simply taught that the unsaved sinners who went to hell were foreordained before the foun­dation of the world to that end and were predestinated before birth to go to the lake of fire.75 With this blasphemous nonsense the doors opened for a first-rate sideshow, and away the theologians went with “gemina and bipartita, ” for two sides of predestination; “pariter and propemodum,” in regard to sins committed by the “non-elect”; “effi­cient and sufficient deaths” of Christ for two different kinds of sinners; God as the ‘ ‘ordinator and acrutor ’ ’ of good thoughts and bad thoughts; and “proedestinatio gemina. ”

Pope Nicolas sided with Gottschalk against Hincmar because Gottschalk would sprinkle babies to get them elected, and Hincmar wouldn't. The outcome of such a theological bull-fest was predestinated to be a wipe-out “before the foundation of the world,” for, after all, no Roman Catholic in Europe ever thought of salvation apart from water. No Roman Catholic associated salvation with election or non-election, with special calling or general calling, or with common or saving grace; every true Roman Catholic had been led by his priests to associate sal­vation with earning his way to heaven by doing the works that the bishops and priests told him to do.82 As usual, the official council (a “synod,” in this case) had nothing to do with anything but the inner, political manipulations of a political machine.

Paschasius Radbertus (800-865)

This Catholic crystallized the theory of black magic called “tran- substantiation. ” He was born near Soissons, France, and brought up by Benedictine nuns. He was an abbot, though never a priest (844-851). Transubstantiation teaches that when a black-robed, Baalite “priest officiates at a Roman Catholic “altar,” he has the power by incantation and prayer to turn a piece of bread into the literal body and blood of Jesus Christ83—although it is UNBLOODY.** The liquor that he then drinks has been “bootlegged” (that is, “homemade”), for he himself turns it into the blood of Christ85—although it is still UNBLOODY.*6} But, of course, in the substances mesmerized are to be found the VERY BODY and VERY BLOOD of Christ—in a bloodless manner.87

Now, to a modern reader this sounds as though Cathb s are either “off their rockers” or someone is misrepresenting their rei.gious posi I tion, but this is only due to modern man’s bigotry and ignorance. Any literature put out by the Knights of Columbus on the mass (see Rome—t e

Great Private Interpreter, 1969) will show that the preceding statements are describing the official doctrine of the Roman Catholic church, and further that anyone who doesn’t believe in this garbled rigmarole is cursed of God.ss These matters are matters of historical fact and have nothing to do with emotional reactions to undesirable literature or some­one’s ideas about what his church may or may not teach. The Catholic mass is an unbloody sacrifice that is supposed to produce out of bread and wine the body and blood of the Lord Jesus Christ—in an UN­BLOODY manner. That is the truth given in every nihil obstat, imprimatured piece of Catholic literature dealing with the subject.89 Catholics must believe that the Sunday morning mass in an Catholic church is IDENTICAL with the Lord’s Supper in the upper room.90 Further, that both of them are identical with the one, effectual, BLOODY sacrifice on Calvary (Heb. 10:8-12), except that two are UNBLOODY and one is BLOODY.

You are to believe this and at the same time believe you are sane. If you do believe it, someone has probably blown out your pilot light. According to Radbertus, there is “nothing else in the Eucharist but the flesh and blood of Christ,” although the “figures of bread and wine remain.”92 That is, you pretend that the figure is real (1 Peter 3:21) while you are pretending that the real is only a figure (see Matt. 15:17). These excursions into the realm of cloud-land with fairies,

spooks, and hobgoblins are not to be considered as inconceivable trips for good Catholics. To attain this fantastic perversion of common sense and Biblical truth, Radbertus extracted John 6:52-54 from its context, then he removed John 6:63 as the key for interpreting it, and then he placed it down into Matthew 26:27 and pretended that it was a reference to a Roman priest “sacrificing” on Sunday morning.93

Radbertus evidently was not wired up on the right circuit.

The chief opponent of Radbertus was Ratramnus (800-868), who restored verse 63 to its context (John 6:54) after Radbertus had removed Ratramnus regarded the mass as a commemorative celebration of Christ s death. Nicolas’s old enemy Hincmar (chapter 6, note 57), who w°uldn t baptize babies, also refused to believe that a Catholic priest bei reproduce Jesus Christ every Sunday morning long enough to Kpten (see Augustine’s madness in regard to this: chapter 6, note

A pupi] of Fulbert of Chartres named Berenger (1000-1088) finally dent^ h to a showdown. Berenger (or Berengar) was a Bible stu- Urai.w^° had the courage to criticize the authority of Rome. Quite nat- a ra^ e came to the conclusion that Radbertus was as cockeyed as F rooster. Berenger began to teach his pupils in Germany and

France that Radbertus didn’t know what he was talking about.94 He was sent two letters of warning from an archbishop in 1046, where he was condemned, in absentee, without a hearing. (The pope had decided to back up another heresy since he saw its utility in maintaining UNITY and POWER.) Berenger did appear before a Lateran council later (1059) under Nicolas II, who insisted that when a Catholic eats a piece of bread blessed by a “priest,” he is swallowing Christ’s literal body.95

When he returned to France, Berenger went right on denying the truthfulness of any such gross and vulgar thing (Lev. 17:10; Gen. 9:4; Acts 15:29), and he attacked the blasphemies of Popes Leo IX and Nicolas II. Consequently, the pope raised up such an army of ecclesi­astical heretics against him that Berenger was almost killed at the Synod of Poitiers (1075). Hildebrand (Pope Gregory VII) tried to protect him but chickened out when he saw that Berenger had so many priests and bishops who disagreed with him.96 The upshot of all this was that the blasphemous doctrine of Radbertus was finally accepted by all Roman Catholics as Christian doctrine, and for five hundred years after this the deceived popes and their stooges were killing Christians who dis­agreed with them about it. Berenger’s followers numbered around three million by that time.97

The Council of Trent (1546) reaffirmed Radbertus’s African voo- dooism by saying that any man on earth who doesn’t believe that the whole substance of bread is turned into the substance of the body of Christ and the whole substance of wine into the substance of the BLOOD is cursed. Of course, for centuries there was a little horseplay with the terms (as there had to be with the “bloody” and “unbloody” bit), for the “laity” were given the body without the blood, according to the definitions established by Trent. However, this was no problem to any irrational man who had already “flipped his lid” and discarded the Bible for black magic; the priest simply told the laity, “If you get bread (Christ’s body), the blood has to come in it because blood is usually in a body.”98 Any old port in a storm.

Now, this is not a caricature of the position, although the dirty heretics responsible for the blasphemous doctrine may insist that it is- Thomas Aquinas (“the prince of the Scholastic divines’ ") gives us the so-called “Christian” explanation for the phenomena of stantiation. It is “FAITH, the law of sight transcending, to things not understood. ” Or to put it over the plate wa

itual alibi (Heb. 11:1-2) has been given for denying the won oj and the Biblical faith that comes from hearing that word (Rom-• trUth

*-- „i;u; nrivp.n for this deliberate perversion of Bib e I

il igh:aspir-

is “FAITH.” You are to have “faith” to believe that God is a liar (John 6:63) and faith to believe that a Roman Catholic fable IS the word of God (Mark 7:13).

With the acceptance of this unholy and obscene teaching came a thousand problems: what to do if someone poisons the liquor (which they did); what should you do if you step on a piece of the ‘ 'host ’ ’ (which happened); and what to do if a rat gets a hold of a piece of Jesus Christ (the ‘host”) and runs off into a hole before you can catch him.100 One major problem was what to do if Jesus Christ (the host) stuck to your false teeth. The solution to this is found in the twentieth century Catholic literature (1906, 1910) by an American “bishop” in New York.101 You take Jesus Christ out of your plates with a knife or your finger, put “Him” into water, and then drink “Him.”102 Christians who know

the Lord Jesus Christ as their Saviour and the Lord of the universe could hardly be expected to trade their own God in for a ‘‘god’ that you could scrape around with a knife and drink. Your “god” would have to be your BELLY (Rom. 16:18; Phil. 3:19) before you could do that. The logical outcome of this coarse and obscene, pagan ritual was the teaching that if a priest regurgitated “the host,” he must pick up the vomit if able.103 But the implications of this “dangerous delusion” (Articles of the Church of England, Article No. 31) go far beyond this, for if the Christian “receives the Lord Jesus” every Sunday to swallow Him again, what happens to “the Lord” during the week?

To this day Ted Kennedy and Califano (HEW, 1979) practice and believe in this hideous banality, palmed off on “Christians” as the high point of Christian worship. The bloodiest murders in England under Bloody Mary (chapter 17) were executed because of the refusal of Bible believing Christians to subscribe to the spiritual madness of Radbertus and Lanfranc (his most zealous supporter), who was the Archbishop of Canterbury (see chapter 12, notes 21-22) from 1070-1089.

Gregory “the Great” believed in cannibalism in the fashion given above (Gen. 9:4; Lev. 17:12, 14; Acts 15:29) as religiously as any Cohen Baal” (priest of Baal, Judges 18) who ever did penance (1 Kings ®) for the “queen of heaven’’ (Jer. 44).104 There is nothing new about Pagans offering up drink offerings of blood (Ps. 16:4). Any Jew in

F'St s time knew this and knew that His words in John 6 could not He^0'1 Uterally tf*6 w’^est stroke of chance (John 6:63) unless

'yas blaspheming outrightly. Catholic priests and bishops never could ■r’e **teral passages (Matt. 15:16) rightly divided from the spiritual K“Sages (Matt. 16:12). No unsaved man could (1 Cor. 2:14).

John of Damascus (675-749)

John was the last of the Post-Nicene Fathers. He was noted for defending pagan idolatry by recommending the use of images as “aids to worship. ”105 He is called the “father of scholasticism. ”106 According to Johnny, the Virgin Mary appeared to him on several occasions.107 For his writings in favor of image worship and idolatry, he was enthu­siastically lauded by the Second Council of Nicaea (787 A.D.).108 John, as Clement and Origen, vehemently applied the teachings of Porphyry (an atheist) and Aristotle (an evolutionary socialist) to Christian doctrines. After he refused to heed the Divine warnings aimed right smack at him (Col. 2:8 and 1 Tim. 6:20), he presumed to write “an accurate summary' of the Orthodox faith.”109 It is an Aristotelian extravaganza about as scriptural as the poems of St. Thomas Aquinas. John of Damascus believed in the perpetual virginity of Mary (which if true means she sinned against God and disobeyed her husband, 1 Cor. 7:5); John also believed that 1 and 2 Clement belonged to the New Testament, and that the two witnesses in Revelation 11 were Enoch and Elijah (see Rev. 11:3 and comments in that commentary). John does not mention how a sinner gets saved in any of his writings, nor does he state what blood atonement has to do with completed salvation. We are to assume he was a Christian, like we are to assume that Nestle, Westcott, and Hort were Christians.

Baeda (the Venerable Bede) (673-735)

The Bede was born in England near the Scottish border; at the age of seven he was placed in a monastery set up by one of St. Patrick’s missionaries. In such an environment he had access to Old Latin manu­scripts (chapter 11, notes 87-89) that did not match Jerome’s New ASV (Latin Vulgate), and he was also exposed somewhat to a non-Roman, anti-papal Catholicism, a Celtic Christianity, which by this time was almost gone because of the deadly work of Augustine of Canterbury (chapter 12, notes 17-29), the pope’s undercover agent. The Bede had the disadvantage of being taught by a man (Benedict Biscop) who was a rabid Papist110 and who had visited Rome five times to bring bac a junk-yard full of pictures and relics. The Bede applied his whole time^ in the monastery studying Latin, Greek, and Hebrew and the scrip | tures.111 He declined to be an abbot, although at thirty he was ordain I as a “priest.” The Venerable Bede wrote in part or in whole | Pentateuch, Samuel, Kings, Ezra, Nehemiah, Proverbs,4 "'es*aSj^J Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, the general epistles, and Revelation. 1 most outstanding thing about the Bede’s work was his constant corr

of Jerome’s corrupt Latin manuscripts (chapter 12, notes 17-29) while he was commenting on the Latin Bible. The Bede seems to have had “the original,” according to Philip Schaff,112 and Jerome’s Latin Bible was evidently not “up to snuff’ in the Bede’s eyes. The Uncial Codex E (Laudianus) from the sixth century contains an almost complete Greek- Latin text for Acts, and naturally it matches the King James text (see Acts 8:37; 9:5; 20:28 in the New ASV of Bob Jones or the NIV of Wheaton). The Bede’s most famous work was his Ecclesiastical History, which consists of five books telling the history of England down to 731 A.D.

Leo the Great (440-461)

Leo was the real marker of the papacy which later culminated in such characters (see above) as Gregory the Great. Leo I magnified his office (Rom. 11:13) by misapplying Romans 15:16. His chief aim, as Constantine’s, was to sustain the unity of the church and bring glory and power (and shekels) to the church instead of to God or the Bible. Leo laid great stress upon the primacy of Peter (which he claimed) and insisted that Peter’s apostolic power (which he claimed) had been passed on to the Roman bishops and Roman popes only (which he professed to be). From a Biblical standpoint, one might say he was an egocentric madman. Readers of church history are familiar with three verses of scripture which Catholics pervert out of their contexts (see Rome—the Great Private Interpreter, 1969) to obtain this teaching (Matt. 16:16-18; John 20:23; Luke 22:38). The Bible which Leo perverted shows that more than twelve apostles received power to “retain and remit” (John 20:23; Luke 24:38). that Paul had the power also (2 Cor. 2:10), though he was not even in the room (Acts 13:38), and that Peter was no more in Rome than he was in Mexico City.113

Leo I was in favor of exterminating the “Priscillianists,” who were the Montanists of his day.114 Leo humbly presented himself as the spir­itual leader of the entire world whom all people were to honor, recog- ®ize, and obey.115 That is, he was a Bible rejecting, Fascist dictator."6

Methodius (815-885) and Constantius (827-869)

Methodiusand Constantius (Cyril) were two pains in the neck for , ecclesiastical demagogues of their day in both churches (Roman Cath- c and Greek Orthodox). Methodius was bom in Greece (Thessalonica) ^educated in Constantinople reading and studying a King James Greek from the Byzantine family of manuscripts.117 He and his his nonhCr began their mission work among the Tartars (845) on the

east shore of the Black Sea and later went to the Bulgarians.

At the invitation of Duke Ratislaw, they were sent to the Moravians. After years of successful evangelism they made the mistake of going to Rome to effect an agreement with Pope Adrian II relative to their work.118 Pope Adrian II was thus alerted (exactly as Gregory I had been: see chapter 12) to the fact that a Biblical type of Christianity (i.e. “Arianism” in Catholic terminology) was being established in the Balkans. He immediately went behind Constantius and Methodius when their backs were turned and made preparations to sent the papal Mafia in; this was to insure that if anyone got saved in the Balkans, Moravia, or bordering areas, that they would become baby sprinkling sacramen- talists who worshipped a pope, not Bible believing Christians who wor­shipped God.119 After the death of Ratislaw, Methodius was summoned to Rome and honored by the pope, who announced that at last he “recognized the independency of the Slavic church.” Whereupon it as immediately overrun with a mass of Roman monks and bishops and consequently returned to paganism.120 Accompanying this apostasy, the Slavic language (into which Methodius and Cyril had translated the Receptus) was replaced with the Latin of Rome.121 This was mainly for the purpose of ridding the Slavic people of the Slavic Bible, which Cyril and Methodius had brought from the Byzantine (Syrian) family of manuscripts.122 To do their translating work, Cyril had to invent an alphabet before translating; most of the work by this Bible believing, evangelistic translator was plowed under by the popes in less than one hundred years after his death,123 but it erupted violently in the next cen­tury, and centuries following, under the Bulgarians, Waldenses, Picards (and later the Hussites), and other “heretical” groups.

After Methodius and Cyril had preached (Evangelism) and taught the Bible (Education), the Papists came in with their Culture,124 and with them the eventual Apostasy; the cycle cannot be broken. Evangelism (a man), Education (a movement), Culture (a machine), Apostasy (a monument).

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Hellish Mother Church

“And call no man your father upon the earth...Ye serpents, ye generation of vipers, how can ye escape the damnation of hell?” Matthew 23:9, 33

The turn of the first millennium (1000 A.D.) marks the end of the

Thyatiran period of church history; we have examined its nature and its “progress.” By the time of Gregory the Great (540-604) the period is well underway, and by the time of Henry III (1046) the transition has been made from Thyatira to the Sardis period (Rev. 3:1). The Sardis period ends with the Reformation in 1500 A.D.; and although secular historians may run “extra” time periods in, such as the Renaissance and Scholasticism, we will continue to deal with the Biblical time bracket

for church history since it is the Book that informed the world there ever was a church to start with and since it is the only Book in the uni­verse that professes to know the history of how history began (Gen. 1) and how history will end up (Rev. 22). Why trade in a Lincoln Con­tinental for a dune buggy?

In this period of church history the Roman Catholic church is in full bloom. She attains the very height of her power and authority and does not fail under these circumstances to exercise them to the fullest;

so we may take this period to be an A-l example of what true Roman Catholicism is (“by their fruits ye shall know them”). By the year 1400 A.D. this demoniac Harlot, whose debaucheries stained Europe with blood and filth (Rev. 17:1-6), had assimilated so many non-Christian non-Biblical teachings that to refer to her as the “Christian church” °r even as “a Christian church” would be an insult to the Holy Spirit.

y 1400 A.D. this hybrid monstrosity (Matt. 13) had become a nesting P^e for demons (Matt. 13:32) and was forbidding the “laity” from L. 8 “cup,” forbidding laymen to read the Bible in any language, lng a “wafer,” selling indulgences,1 twiddling beads on rosaries,

confessing sins to “priests,” and torturing Jews and Bible believers who wouldn’t go to mass or sprinkle their babies.2 To call such a mongrel mass of godless teaching and practice "orthodox doctrine” is too much for one day, or one century for that matter. Church history cannot be called upon to deal with such matters, at least not a history of the Chris­tian church. The Sardis period deals mainly with the affairs of a religious prostitute who sold God and the Bible out to obtain power and unity in the world system in direct violation of the orders given to the church in 2 Corinthians 6:14-17; Hebrews 13:10-14; John 17:9, 14; and 1 John 2:15-16. “Holy” mother church had become Unholy Mother Whore (Rev. 17:1-9), and her “vicars” and “princes”—who thought they came from “the prince of the apostles”—were no more apostolic in their beliefs, conduct, theology, aims, goals, motives, and plans than Baibars or Attila the Hun. The bungling egomaniac at Rome who claimed to “feed the sheep” (Luke 22:32; John 21:16) stated that the separation of church and state was absurd,3 that he should be obeyed like God Himself,4 that he held the place of God Almighty on this earth,3 that he was the “most Holy Lord,”6 and that he himself was subject to no authority7 because he was the absolute and final authority for every human being on this earth8 when it came to faith or practice. He and his supporters taught that it was a crime to disobey a “pope” in ANY matter, and if you did you should be burned at the stake.9

If this were not enough psychotic megalomania, the depraved Roman bishops taught that their priests were not subject to the laws of the land in which they lived (Rom. 13:1-4),10 but Bible believing “laymen” had to be subject to these laws plus the ecclesiastical laws of the Roman church no matter where they lived.

The creed of Pope Pius IV (1559-1565) made a Catholic swear with his hands on an Alexandrian Cult Bible that the “mass” was a propi­tiatory sacrifice (1 John 2:1-2) for the living and the dead, that souls in purgatory were helped by the “suffrages of the faithful,” that due honor and veneration should be given to images of the “Mother of God, and that if any sinner did not believe those things (as just stated) he had to go to hell. (“I...do at this present freely profess and sincerely hold this true Catholic faith without which NO ONE CAN BE SA VED. )

The irrational bigotry found in such a creed and justified in the name of “faith”—whereas the subscriber is actually condemned in the name of * ‘credulity ’ ’—is a certain guarantee of a crop of atheists. Catholicis breeds atheism (Russia, China, Cuba, France, Germany, etc.) tieC^n an unsaved intellectual (Communism from its inception has T' 3Ys a news media-student movement) will take for granted immediate y

the Roman Catholic church is an accurate representation of Biblical Chris­tianity: it is, inthe way that King Kong represents General William Booth.

This hellish church was held together by Augustine’s infant baptism and Radbertus’s theory (see chapter 13), which we have noted. The central point of worship and communion for all Catholics (at any time since 600 A.D.) had been the unbloody sacrifice of a piece of bread and a cup of wine called “Jesus Christ,” or to be exact, called “My Lord and my God” (Catholic Missal). Without this the Roman Catholic thinks that he is cut off from salvation, or at least will have to call for a priest on his deathbed and get the last rites of “extreme unction” to slip him in under the door. For fifteen hundred years the Catholic “priests” performed this cannibalistic rite of black magic in direct con­tradiction to the word of God in both Testaments (see Matt. 26:26 and comments in that commentary).

1. In the Bible, the Lord Jesus spoke in a language his disciples understood; the Catholics spoke in tongues until their church began to fall apart in Europe around 1950-1960 A.D.12

2. Our Lord spoke in a loud, distinct voice so that all of the disciples heard Him. The priests have been muttering (Isa. 8:19) with their backs turned to the “disciples” for over fifteen centuries.

3. Jesus said that this cup, “is my blood of the new testament” (Matt. 26:27-28), but every Baalite who corrected Him misquoted it as “this is the chalice of my blood of the New and eternal Testament mystery of the faith.” There are seven mysteries given to the body of Christ in the New Testament (see chapter 1), and not one of them is connected with the Lord’s Supper directly or indirectly.

4. Jesus broke the bread AFTER hesmJ“this is my body,” while the Baalites pronounce the words before they break the bread: obviously to convince the superstitious natives that the mumbo jumbo (“hocus- pocus”) they say does something to the bread.

| 5. The Lord Jesus placed the broken bread into the hands of the disciples, but the Baalites for fifteen centuries were sticking a wafer mto the MOUTHS of the parishioners.

I 6. The Lord Jesus “elevated” nothing at the Lord’s Supper.

7- TheLordJesusdidn’tsayonewordaboutthebreadorthe“wine” gcw wine—grape juice) being offered to God as a sacrifice, but the aa ites profess to be offering in the mass the body of Christ as a “sacrifice or ^e S*ns Quick and the dead.”

Ke h L°rc* Jesus said, “This do in remembrance of ME;” but ed charlatan says, “Solemnizing and communicating in the first

Ce the remembrance of the GLORIOUS MARY, ever Virgin.”

If the two operations are the same—which all Baal ites have to believe under pain of anathema13—then obviously you would have to be as crooked as a dog’s hind leg to see even a similarity: this crooked perverseness Thomas Aquinas called “faith.”14 (What else would you expect from a rascal who supported the Inquisition?) This was “the faith which was once delivered unto the saints” (Jude 3) according to ‘ ‘holy mother church, ’ ’ the church that dominated the Sardis period of church history.

The representatives of these psychotic madmen during the dictatorship of Pope Innocent IV (1245) sent out an embassy of Dominican monks to Cathay (China). This embassy was headed up by one Nicolas Anselm,15 who, after a long journey, arrived in Central Asia (1247) and delivered

an infallible fiat of the “Holy Father’ ’ at Rome to a leader of the Mongolian army. The great Khan got wind of it and called for the monks. He listened to their message and then sent them back to the Holy Papa, accompanied by two Tartar envoys. The exchanges between these rival rulers was so preposterous you wouldn’t have believed it. The stupid Catholic monks had delivered a letter from Innocent IV asking the Khan to come and bow down to the pope in Italy and acknowledge him as the ruler of the whole world, including Cathay; the Khan graciously returned the favor and told the pope to hit the dirt since he (the Khan) was the ruler of the world.16 (No doubt both of them sincerely believed they were‘ ‘accord­ing to their measure of faith.”)

Undaunted at contacting a fellow dictator, Pope Innocent dispatched a second embassy of two Franciscans with the full powers ‘ ‘of the keys” to make the lord of Tartary a vassal of the wine-drinking Italian. One of them went into the Mongol Empire by way of Bohemia, and the other went through Poland. They entered Mongolia in time to witness the enthronement of a new Khan. At this time the “orthodox Catholics (Franciscans) were horrified to find that Bible believing evangelists had already beaten them to the punch (see Pope Adrian, chapter 13, note 13; and Pope Gregory, chapter 12, notes 22-32), for they found Russian and Hungarian priests there with court officials who were Christians—but they weren’t CATHOLICS.17 When the Khan and his court got the latest message from “the Vicar of Christ” about his claims of being a Universa Bishop, the room was filled with roars of laughter (very irreverent a irreligious, I suppose, if you looked at it from the standpoint of a PaP*®'

The popes didn’t quit. In May of 1253 King Louis IX of sent out another mission (headed up by William D. Rubruquis). spoke to the Khan, who appeared very interested in the extravagant n^ sense put out by the popes. When Willie had finished,t’ ^time him why he was intrigued, for he had been considering for a ong

In the next fifty years the popes sent out Marco Polo and his family (1371), five monks (1278), and a mission led by a Franciscan (1289). When this Franciscan (John of Monte Corvino) found Bible believing people in south China (Peking, 1292) and got some of them to help him proselytize Christians into a Roman communion, the pope saw the time was ripe (as Adrian and Gregory had seen it: see above) to put out some lights (chapter 10, notes 3-4), so Pope Clement V made Johnny the Catholic archbishop of Peking.19 Naturally the political conquest of China was in the pope’s mind—“evangelizing the untold millions of lost souls” or “sending workers into the harvest fields” never were factors (and never have been factors) in papal religious politics.

But the Chinese, a Shemitic people, were far more intelligent in spotting a spiritual fakir than the Europeans who had been “conned” by Japhetic “evangelizers” (Gen. 9:26). In 1346 the papal legates in Cathay dropped slap out of sight, and when Pope Urban V (1370) sent eighty priests and an archbishop to see what had happened to “holy mother church” in the Far East, they were swallowed up and never reported back. These religious politicians simply vanished into thin air, and Peking had no more dealing with Christians until Bible believing missionaries entered the land with a King James Bible in their hands.20 Likewise, when the Japanese discerned the true nature of the Vatican state and its political designs—always disguised as an “apostolic CHURCH “—their monks and priests were banned by the government.21 According to Shem, what appeared to be a flock of sheep led by a shepherd was actually a pack of dogs led by a wolf.

The only lights (Biblical lights) that continued to shine in a dark place in the Sardis period were the Biblical offspring and spiritual descen­dants of the Novatians, Priscillians, Paulicians, Paterines, Messalines, Euchites, Nestorians, Sabellians, and Manichaeans. In the Sardis period they came to be known as Vaudois, Brethren, Bogomiles, Albigenses, Waldenses, Henricians, Bulgarians, Petrobrusians, Berengerians, Amold- >sts, and Cathari. Although they vary sometimes in their closeness or distance from the Catholic creedal statements (and they also vary in their attitudes towards some finer points of theology), they all had five things in common:

■ L They professed to believe that the Bible alone was the final author- tty in all issues when any issue came up.

f 2. They would not sprinkle or baptize babies.

■^ 3' They did not believe the state had any business dictating to a a church in matters of religious belief or practices.

I 4- They would not pray to the saints or pray for the dead.

5. They rejected the Roman Catholic mass.

Or to put it briefly, they were not good Catholics; they had not “kept the faith, baby.”

We shall examine their ministries in some detail in this chapter, but before doing so, a brief look at the signposts and highway markers on the historical “interstate” is needed so the student can orient himself and find the paths where the real evangelistic “heretics” witnessed for Jesus Christ.

The first of these highway markers says, “God wills it!” On the back side of the same sign it says, ‘ ‘It is the will of Allah! ’' (Two conflicting authorities.) With the Godhead thus divided against Himself and duties conflicting (all apostates recommend conflicting authorities), a religious war broke out in the Near East that was to last off-and-on for over two hundred years. As we could suspect, it was touched off by a Bible per­verting “pope.”

Otto (or Odo de Lagny) reigned on Constantine’s pagan throne as “pope” from 1088-1099. He was a Frenchman who became a monk and then an archdeacon. He became the prior of the monastery at Cluny and later was the chief advisor to Gregory VII. When he was elected as pope, he excommunicated another “Vicar of Christ” (Clement III) and Henry IV, an emperor. It was quite simple to excommunicate or dethrone another pope if you had a big enough police force behind you; all you had to do was to declare that he was an “anti-pope.” At one time there were three anti-popes fighting each other to get into the high chair (St. Peter’s),22 and all of them were calling each other “Anti­christ.” (It might have been well to believe all three of them.) Anyway, Otto called a council at Clermont in 1095 to help out Christians who were making pilgrimages to Palestine and were being mistreated there by the Moslems (chapter 12, notes 17-18). At the Council, Pope Urban (alias “Otto,” see above) got up and preached a fiery Adolph Hitler type of Beer Hall Putsch speech against the “infidels.” Otto (alias Urban, see above) promised as much, or more, than Adolph. He not only prom­ised to help pilgrims, but he also promised the emperor of Constantinople (Alexis) that he (with the help of the European armies, of course) woul “liberate Palestine from the unbelievers,” and then (to make sure that he didn’t have to raise the army himself) Otto (alias Urban) gracious y consented to pass out eternal life as an earned reward (Rom. 6.2 ) anyone who died or fell in combat during the “liberation. It did n0 occur to several hundred thousand “Catholics” that this would be Ji for a pope (who wouldn’tfight) in order to earn hell (“death is a *■ Rom. 6:23) rather than dying for Jesus Christ to get rewart* 1 6eav

In the next fifty years the popes sent out Marco Polo and his family (1371), five monks (1278), and a mission led by a Franciscan (1289). When this Franciscan (John of Monte Corvino) found Bible believing people in south China (Peking, 1292) and got some of them to help him proselytize Christians into a Roman communion, the pope saw the time was ripe (as Adrian and Gregory had seen it: see above) to put out some lights (chapter 10, notes 3^4), so Pope Clement V made Johnny the Catholic archbishop of Peking.'9 Naturally the political conquest of China was in the pope’s mind—“evangelizing the untold millions of lost souls” or “sending workers into the harvest fields” never were factors (and never have been factors) in papal religious politics.

But the Chinese, a Shemitic people, were far more intelligent in spotting a spiritual fakir than the Europeans who had been “conned” by Japhetic “evangelizers” (Gen. 9:26). In 1346 the papal legates in Cathay dropped slap out of sight, and when Pope Urban V (1370) sent eighty priests and an archbishop to see what had happened to “holy mother church” in the Far East, they were swallowed up and never reported back. These religious politicians simply vanished into thin air, and Peking had no more dealing with Christians until Bible believing missionaries entered the land with a King James Bible in their hands.20 Likewise, when the Japanese discerned the true nature of the Vatican

state and its political designs—always disguised as an “apostolic CHURCH*1—their monks and priests were banned by the government.21 According to Shem, what appeared to be a flock of sheep led by a shepherd

was actually a pack of dogs led by a wolf.

The only lights (Biblical lights) that continued to shine in a dark place in the Sardis period were the Biblical offspring and spiritual descen­dants of the Novatians, Priscillians, Paulicians, Paterines, Messalines, Euchites, Nestorians, Sabellians, and Manichaeans. In the Sardis period they came to be known as Vaudois, Brethren, Bogomiles, Albigenses, Waldenses, Henricians, Bulgarians, Petrobrusians, Berengerians, Amold- ists, and Cathari. Although they vary sometimes in their closeness or distance from the Catholic creedal statements (and they also vary in their attitudes towards some finer points of theology), they all had five things in common:

1 • They professed to believe that the Bible alone was the final author- *ty in all issues when any issue came up.

| 2. They would not sprinkle or baptize babies.

3- They did not believe the state had any business dictating to a a church in matters of religious belief or practices.

I • They would not pray to the saints or pray for the dead.

5. They rejected the Roman Catholic mass.

Or to put it briefly, they were not good Catholics; they had not “kept the faith, baby.”

We shall examine their ministries in some detail in this chapter, but before doing so, a brief look at the signposts and highway markers on the historical “interstate” is needed so the student can orient himself and find the paths where the real evangelistic “heretics” witnessed for Jesus Christ.

The first of these highway markers says, “God wills it!’’ On the back side of the same sign it says, “It is the will of Allah! ” (Two conflicting authorities.) With the Godhead thus divided against Himself and duties conflicting (all apostates recommend conflicting authorities), a religious war broke out in the Near East that was to last off-and-on for over two hundred years. As we could suspect, it was touched off by a Bible per­verting “pope.”

Otto (nr Odo de Lagny) reigned on Constantine’s pagan throne as “pope” from 1088-1D99, He was a Frenchman who became a monk and then an archdeacon. He became the prior of the monastery at Cluny and later was the chief advisor to Gregory VII. When he was elected as pope, he excommunicated another “Vicar of Christ” (Clement III) and Henry IV, an emperor. It was quite simple to excommunicate or dethrone another pope if you had a big enough police force behind you; all you had to do was to declare that he was an “anti-pope.” At one time there were three anti-popes fighting each other to get into the high chair (St. Peter’s),22 and all of them were calling each other “Anti­christ.” (It might have been well to believe all three of them.) Anyway, Otto called a council at Clermont in 1095 to help out Christians who were making pilgrimages to Palestine and were being mistreated there by the Moslems (chapter 12, notes 17-18). At the Council, Pope Urban (alias “Otto,” see above) got up and preached a fiery Adolph Hitler type of Beer Hall Putsch speech against the “infidels. ” Otto (alias Urban, see above) promised as much, or more, than Adolph. He not only prom­ised to help pilgrims, but he also promised the emperor of Constantinople (Alexis) that he (with the help of the European armies, of course) would “liberate Palestine from the unbelievers, ” and then (to make sure that he didn’t have to raise the army himself) Otto (alias Urban) gracious y consented to pass out eternal life as an earned rewardJRom. 6.2 ) anyone who died or fell in combat during the “liberation.’ It did no occur to several hundred thousand “Catholics” that this would be for a pope (whowouldn’tfight) in order to earn hell (“death” is » Rom. 6:23) rather than dying for Jesus Christ to get rewards ih cave

But in the spiritual condition the Catholic church was in by this time (a diseased hog wallow), one could expect little else. If ignorance could be pleaded for Catholics because of their Bible perversions and bloody crimes of 325-800 A.D., it certainly could be pleaded again now, for Catholics had been going downhill spiritually for six hundred years with the only bright lights in their midnight of apostasy (doing the work of Biblical evangelizing, chapter 11) being people who didn’t agree with them, didn’t follow their leadership, didn’t worship with them, and rejected (chapter 10, notes 43-47) their “shepherd,” the so-called “Vicar of Christ.”

Pope Urban outdid himself on this day, and Ranke (Weltgeschichte) says that his speech at Clermont, as a high-point of history, was worthy of being compared with the coronation of Charlemagne on Christmas day (800 A.D., chapter 12, note 68). According to Urban, everybody in the assembly at Clermont was ‘ ‘tfae elect of God, ’ ’ while every Turk was a member of ‘ ‘an accursed race/*23 So Jesus Christ Himself would give everyone doing the killing ‘ ‘an incorruptible crown’ ’ (a perversion of 1 Cor. 9:25). Since Urban already had his own crown^ obviously he didn’t have to lead the army or go with it. Upon the close of this inflammatory, rabble-rousing harangue, the deluded Papists jumped up and down, screaming “God wills it!”

What followed was the greatest non-Christian debacle since the burn­ing of Jerusalem to the ground under Titus (70 A.D.).

Swanns^of beggars, peasants, soldiers, adventurers, priests, and f .noblemen began to march on Jerusalem. The first mob was under Walter the Penniless. They marched through Hungary and were cut to pieces while trying to conquer Belgrade. Those who survived starved in the Bulgarian forests, while a few stragglers reached Constantinople.24 A second mob led by Peter the Hermit, numbering around forty thousand, \ marched through Bulgaria in the footsteps of their predecessors, who had left a path well marked by burned buildings, sacked monasteries, jmdcorpses. Peter’s bunch got to Constantinople in pitiful condition, and while they waited there for the pope’s other armies to show up, they began to maraud and plunder to stay alive (or else to get rich);

ey were finally surrounded and massacred by the Turkish calvary, and their bones were piled up in a pyramid.25 “God wills it!’’

third horde of ‘ ‘the elect’ ’ (see above) was massacred by Hungar- I . and another mob began its “crusade” by killing and robbing the I ews in Mainz; this rabble panicked and fled when they finally encoun- red 3 re®u'ar army fr°m Hungary. Out of fifteen thousand^ more than \«i_thoUsand were butchered 26 “God wills it!”

ians.

About thirty thousand troops composed the actual army that was going to do the fighting. The leaders were Godfrey of Bouillon, Hugh of Vermandois, Bohemund, Raymund of Toulouse, Robert the Duke of Normandy, and Stephen of Blois, with Tancred (the cousin of Bohe­mund); these nobles represented the cream of French, Norman, and Italian “lords.” These armored knights took Nicaea (June 19, 1097), and a year later they captured Antioch, although their ranks were deci­mated by famine, pestilence, and desertion. They had to eat horseflesh, camels, dogs, and mice, and many of them died form drinking urine.27 They might have all defected if some priest had not “accidentally” dis­covered the “Lance of Longinus” (the one that pierced the Saviour’s side, according to the popes).28 Taking heart, the crusader^ went on and eventually conquered Jerusalem on July 15, 1099. At that battle a UFO showed up (St. George was seen in full armor standing on the Mount of Olives29), and some very observant character noticed that Georgie had showed up at three o ’clock, which had been the hour of the Lord’s death (Matt. 27:45). Following this miraculous “Christian” vision based on the “holy Bible, ’ ’ the Christian crusaders were so inspired that a carnage followed that was absolutely indescribable. The Jews in Jerusalem were burnt with their synagogues along with the Turks (Gen. 12:1-4; Rom. 11:28-33). Three hundred Turkish captives who were promised mercy if they surrendered were butchered in cold blood. Saracen women and children were decapitated and disemboweled and were thrown off the city walls; blood ran to the horses’ bridles. “God wills it!’’

Urban II (alias Otto) died two weeks after the fall of Jerusalem, and so he didn’t have time to move into the temple of God (2 Thess. 2) and show himself that he was God (2 Thess. 2) on the Millennial throne (Rev. 20:4-6).

A Latin (Roman) Kingdom (chapter 12, note 68) was then set up at Jerusalem, with Godfrey as “king” (Matt. 5:35). He was succeeded by Baldwin (1100-1188). During this time the crusaders reared up castles all over Palestine to help “bring in the kingdom.” They conquered Caesarea, Ptolemais, Beirut, Sidon, and Petra. Other “kings” followed, with replacements and recruits for the occupation forces coming front Europe.30

However, Saladin arose (1138-1193) and united all the Mos entf»| leading them against this foreign army of occupation. Saladin co i with Guy of Lusignan at Hattin, a hill above Tiberias, and there the place where Christ was supposed to have said “Blessed are peacemakers,” etc.) Saladin decisively whipped the crusaders, t a humiliating defeat because at the time the Knights Temp ars

Hospitalers were in force and carrying “the true cross.’’31 This time it turned out for them to be the sign of a cursejchapter 7, notes 2-4). Jerusalem was soon retaken by the Moslems\(1187)J with the notable difference that this time there was no slaughtering or butchering of the inhabitants.32 “Allah,” the God of Saladin, evidently had more self­control than the bloody “god” of the Catholic popes.

The Second Crusade was led by two kings, Konrad III and Louis VII (both of France). Bernard of Clairvaux was the recruiting sergeant for this police action, and he stirred up thousands of Catholics in France and Germany to “jine up.” This time the army accomplished none of its objectives; famine, fever, and enemy attacks whittled it down to shav­ings, and instead of going on to attack Acre or Jerusalem, the army decided to attack Damascus and Edessa. They didn’t take either one. “God wills it!’’

The recruiting sergeant (Bernard) slipped out under the tent flap with this pious explanation: “Was Moses to blame in the wilderness who promised to lead the children of Israel to the promised land? Was it not rather the sins of the people which interrupted the progress of their journey?”33 Bernard blamed the troops. In his day the suckers were almost as plentiful as they are now. Bernard wasn’t Moses; the Gentiles weren ’t Jews; nobody promised any land to the popes or Catho­lics; and above all, Bernard forgot his Bible when he likened himself to Moses: Moses didn’t get into the land, either. (Bible study never has been a strong suit in a Catholic stacked deck.)

The Third Crusade was intended to get Jerusalem back from Saladin (1187). It was almost a complete failure, despite its glamorization in literature and art for nearly ten centuries. The leaders at this time were Frederick Barbarossa, Philip Augustus of France, and Richard I the Lion-Hearted of England. Acre was taken in July of 1191 after a two year siege, and the crusaders got the “true cross” back after the city capitulated.34 Richard murdered twenty-seven prisoners in cold blood, and Saladin retaliated by killing a few himself.35 Jaffa and Ascalon were captured. The crusaders never recaptured Jerusalem; instead, they signed a treaty with Saladin to protect pilgrims. On the way back to England to straighten out his brother John, Richard I was seized by Leopold

Duke of Austria and held for ransom. “God wills it!’’

The Children's Crusade (1212) was a nightmare of tragedy. Ashep- erd boy near Chartres, France (see notes 162-164), had a vision in ■ *ch he insisted that Christ told him to gather all the children in Europe ®nd walk down to the Mediterranean Sea, where God would dry it up 1 e he did for Moses: see Bernard above, using Moses) and let the

children “seek for the holy cross.”36 Since this expedition turned out to be a horror beyond telling, the Catholic writers insist that the shepherd boy received his orders from a Bible believing Christian (i.e., a “hereti­cal ’ ’ Albigensian).37 If the water had opened up, you could bet the pope’s Ouija board that the vision would have been “heaven sent” from Bernadette. At any rate, an army of thirteen thousand of these waifs between eight and seventeen years old reached Marseilles, from the Pyrenees, Brittany, and Germany. The “Red Sea” did not part. The pitiful band of children went on through the Alps to Genoa, Italy, where their number was reduced from thirteen thousand to about seven thou­sand. In the end they were deceived by two unscrupulous characters into boarding vessels going to North Africa (the birthplace of the Catholic church, chapters 5, 9). Two of these boats shipwrecked on the island of San Pietro, and the five ships that got to North Africa sold their living cargo to the Mohammedans for slaves.

Pope Gregory IX atoned for his silence (consent) throughout the whole affair by building a neat little chapel on San Pietro for the “mar­tyrs,”38 and when Innocent III tried to drum up another crusade, he appealed to the needless sacrifice of these children by saying, “While they rush to the recovery of the Holy Land, we sleep. They put us to shame. ”39 And there is the greatest verbal demonstration of papal ambi­guity that ever proceeded out of the mouth of a religious hypocrite for fifteen centuries. It is one in a series of thousands of examples of what we call “Vatican diplomacy”;40 an outstanding sample of how a pope thinks and speaks when dealing with his own sins and failures to stop senseless killing and dying in unholy and ungodly “causes."

For a modern example, the student of history should study the “sayings” of John Paul 7/(1979-1980) on his worldwide tour to Com­munist countries in an effort to rally Soviet Communists to the banner of International Socialism; all is as smooth and slick and sweet and greasy as blackstrap molasses poured on honey. If Pope Innocent had been an Irish pope in 1970, he would have said, “What a terrible thing is going on in the Emerald Isle these days! Let us all be instruments of peace and light a candle in the darkness rather than curse the darkness, let us pray for the day that all of the children of God in Ireland may be ONE!” No man can be elected as a Catholic pope until he lines up with the “god of this world” (Luke 4:6) and cultivates a tongue (1 rov. 26:23) like his FATHER (Rom. 16:17, 18, 20; John 8 Jn the Fourth Crusade (I20Q-12Q4) Constantinople.

but this time, instead of setting up a Holy Latin Empire the Roman popes decided to overthrow what was left of the

at Jerusalem.

dox church and empire, thereby converting Constantinople into a Latin satellite of Rome.41 Although Constantinople was “second best” to Jerusalem, still it was better than nothing. From Constantinople the Papists took the following items back to Europe with them: the head of St. Stephen, a thorn from the crown of thorns, Mary’s girdle, the Lord’s towel that He girded Himself with in John 13, one of John the Baptist’s arms, and the finger of Thomas that was thrust into Christ’s side (John 20:27); they also got the head of James the Just, a tear that Christ shed, and some of Christ’s actual BLOOD (!) that was shed on the cross.42 "God wills it!’’

Frederick 11 (Stupor Mundi: the wonder of the world) conducted''' the Fifth Crusade (1229). He was joined by William of Holland with some Germans and Danes and Andreas of Hungary. Frederick decided that discretion was the better part of valor, so he split up Jerusalem with the Moslems and then crowned himself king JMarch 19, 1229). Pope Gregory IX (alias something or other) never did appreciate anyone on a throne in Jerusalem unless it was himself, so he excommunicated Freddy.43

The last crusade took place in 1248-1270 under St. Louis (Louis

IX ofFrance).. Itwas a monumental flop. In vain did Pope Gregory"

X try to get another crusade in gear: the valve heads and pistons^ were worn out. In 1289 A.D. Tripoli was lost, and Acre surrendered to the Mohammedans in 1291 The description of the last ditch stand of the Knights Templars and Hospitalers at Antioch is given in its most lurid and accurate particulars in the work by Harold Lamb called Iron Men and Saints. The siege of Acre (1291) and its destruction is found in the last chapter of the work The Flame of Islam. The parting shot to the Catholic crusaders is sent in a message from Baibars, “the one-eyed Panther” (see Mark of the Beast, 1959), who did not fail to inform the pope’s “bully boys” that his own people (half-breed Negroid Egyptians) had raped the French, German, and Italian women in the sanctuary of the Catholic churches while they despoiled the altars, burning Bibles and breaking crosses on the bodies of victims. Baibars left no doubt tn anyone’s mind about the power of ANY pope in Palestine.

"God wills it!”

This hasty and intemperate battle cry which came from the lips of tical Papists, after an appeal by Urban to imitate the deeds of rlemagne (who “destroyed pagans and infidels,” note 23), found •natch-meet in Islam: "It is the will of Allah!” In this two hundred long skirmish, “Allah” put the fictitious “god” of Charlemagne 1 1 e popes out of business.

A product of the Catholic crusades were the three great military orders: the Knights of St. John, the Knight Templars, and the Teutonic Knights; from such titles there developed a name for the underground fifth column of subversives in America (1900-1990)—“the Knights of Columbus.’’ The three orders were courted by the popes, made rich by kings, and idolized by the people; they were the SS of the pope’s Gestapo (Heydrich, Goering, Himmler, Bormann, and Hitler were all Papists, and none were excommunicated from the Roman Catholic church). The Knights of St. John were French, the Teutonic Knights, obviously, were German, and the Templars were somewhere on the Rhine or Alsace-Lorraine, as far as their membership went. The orders of St. John were called Hospitalers; they were hyper-wealthy, with immense privileges granted them by the popes.44 (Later they were killed by the popes in order to regain this wealth—see note 46). They went to Cyprus after the defeat at Acre and then fell themselves into decay about 1500 A.D. The Templars met their end tragically in 1312 A.D. after growing to a membership of over nine thousand. They were indi­vidually wealthy, and their organization was tax exempt. The head of this order was called a “Grand Master,” as in Masonry. But the order outlived its usefulness, and Philip the Fair of France decided to have it disbanded. When the reigning ‘ ‘pope” (Clement V) refused to cooper­ate, Philip had all of the members of the order in France arrested and thrown in jail.45 In the summer of 1308 the pope decided to “drift with the current” (that’s what all popes do when they don’t have the guts to swim against it), so he ordered prosecution of the “Knights” wher­ever they might still be found. The Templars were charged with spitting on the cross, worshipping an idol (an outlandish charge coming from a pope! See chapter 13), and offences against moral decency such as sodomy. They were accused of holding “black masses” and meeting with the devil in the form of a BLACK CAT (CAT-holic, see Mark of the Beast, 1959), and having intercourse with female demons.

The king, the pope, the Dominican order of monks, and the Univer­sity of Paris all lined up against these veterans of foreign wars (the Cru-, sades), and in Paris thirty-six of them died under torture, fifty-four o them were burned at the stake, and hundreds of them perished in prison. This sanguinary order was given by Pope Clement V. On March , 1312, Clement issued a decree abolishing the order. They were is banded, all their property and wealth was split up between church an state officials (HEW), and that was the end of them. God wills

The reader must understand that by this time torturing, and beheading were common punishments passed out by the qg,

successors of “Blessed Simon Peter” and the sons of “Holy Mary,” the Mother of “the faithful.” The most expedient excuse for torturing a man to death to get his property was to accuse him of witchcraft (see the “black cat,” above). Unlike the Salem trials, Holy Mother church managed to do away with about fifty thousand people on these charges.46 A “witch” in Roman Catholic mythology was anyone who didn’t agree with the hierarchy in political and economic matters (chapter 15, notes 47-48). What had begun as declaring a man a heretic if he did not profess to believe certain doctrinal things that dealt with religion, wound up in declaring a man a heretic if he didn’t shell out MONEY or didn’t allow spies to operate in his government cabinet.47 John XXII, Augustine, Leo XIII, “The Interrogatory ’’ of Bernard Guy (1320), Olradus, pro­fessoral Bologna and Avignon (1325), Alexander IV (1258-1260), and the University of Paris (1378) all helped the priests and bishops to kill as many anti-Catholics as possible in the shortest possible time.48 Burn­ing and torturing of these nonconformists was official Vatican policy by the Roman Catholic popes themselves.49

Two college graduates (Alexandrian Cult for Christian education) who were Dominican Inquisitors (Heinrich Institoris and Jacob Sprenger) wrote a book called The Witch’s Hammer (1486), which prescribed holy water and salt for getting rid of demons, and the Lord’s Prayer and crosses forgetting rid of hexes.50 For the unfortunate Waldenses, Cathari, Albigenses, “New Manichaeans,” Vaudois, and Bulgarians caught in the coils of the Catholic cobra, there awaited charges of cohabitating with the devil, kissing his posterior parts, riding broomsticks, partici­pating in sex orgies, stepping on crosses, urinating on the “host, ’ ’ eating children, and casting “spells” on people. Thirty thousand “witches” were murdered in a hundred and fifty years51 in northern Italy (chapter 10, notes 91-95); over one hundred women were burned at the stake in twenty-five years.52

When the Catholic historians attempt to gloss over these ghastly killings, they like to refer to the battles of Cromwell (1649-1658) and the Salem witchcraft trials (1600’s). Such a perverted comparison could only come from a perverted mind. A conservative estimate of the number of anti-Catholics who have been killed outside of armed combat (battle) tn fifteen centuries would come to about 2,500,000people; Dowling, citing Scott’s Church History, lists 1,000,000 Waldenses in France, 36,000 hristians in Holland, 150,000 put to death by the Spanish Inquisition,

.0(X) Bible believing people slain by Jesuits, plus numbers that come c $0,000,000 murders from 325 to 1870 A.D.53 To hide behind the lns of Puritan witch burners who managed to do away with a half a

278

THE HISTORY OF THE NEW TESTAMENT CHURCH

dozen people is the height and depth of depravity. It is the equivalent of saying that the SS concentration camp system of Germany (1939-1945) was justified because of the camps set up by the British in Africa during the Boer War (1899-1902).

Throughout all of this godless depravity, the conflicts between the emperors and the popes grew. It could not be otherwise, for both pro­fessed to be temporal rulers of geographical and economic areas. Fur­thermore, after the Crusades, European rulers had a much tighter grasp on their nobles and vassals (chapter 13, note 55). The war had produced some “hero-kings” who had proved that they were able to unify armies and fight while “holy Papa” stayed home granting indulgences; this ( lowered the Papa’s stock considerably. The kings who followed 1200 A.D. were not as easy to deal with as the “barons” and “lords” of 800-1000 A.D. Incidents like Henry IV’s trip to Canossa (1077), the murder of Thomas a Becket (1170), King John’s signing of the Magna Charta (1215), and Philip the Fair’s correspondence with Boniface (1301) showed that “god” (chapter 12, note 68) was having a hard time crown­ing the right “Caesar” (chapter 12, note 68). His “leadership by the Holy Ghost” was not as infallible in practice as in theory. (He must have been under the influence of alcohol when he crowned Philip the Fair.) The “Babylonian Captivity ” of the church (1309-1379 or 1305- 1377) witnessed two holy cities with two ' ‘holy fathers ’ ’ who both turned out to be an/z-holy fathers.

< The Crusades became a whiplash to the rascals who had invented and encouraged them. Scores of Europeans came back from the Near East completely disillusioned with papal aims and objectives. Thousands more had seen with their own eyes the wisdom, learning, art, culture, and riches of the “infidels”;54 and no Papist was about to convince them (if they were unconverted themselves, which hundreds of themi were) that the God of the. Christian was any smarter or more powerful i than the God of Saladin.

Greek grammars by Greek grammarians began to pop up here and , there in Europe following 1230 A.D.,55 and there came about a revival t of interest in Greek culture and Byzantine culture (instead of Roman) following the year 1200 A.D. All of this forecasted no good for the| fascist dictators ruling in Rome, for as surely as God made pretty little volcanoes, any manuscripts, books, grammars, or lexicons from Asia | Minor would eventually erupt into the Greek Textus Receptus of t e King James Bible (see chapter 3). During this period Wycliffe j 1384, the “Morning Star of the Reformation”) appears, and w'^ a passel of street preachers who teach and preach that the Bib e

the pope) is the final authority in all matters of faith and practice.56 Coupled with this ghastly “heresy” is a ready-made audience of people who are being exposed to Bible believing preachers on the Continent, many of whom are declaring that not only is the pope not the “Vicar of Christ,” but that he is the ANTICHRIST (Rev. 13:18): old “six-six- six” himself.57

The Crusades had opened trade routes to the east; these served as an inspiration for Columbus to find a “shorter route” to Cathay. His discoveries eventually opened the door to persecuted dissenters in Europe so they had somewhere to run besides into the arms of the Turks (west to east). Furthermore, the Crusades opened the door to small towns, small businesses, and trading markets, which eventually developed into a Third Estate—the scourge of Lenin and Marx: the Bourgeois. Not only this, but the Crusades also settled in history once and for all the matter of the direction that Biblical Christianity was to take: it was to go according to the plan laid down in the King James Bible ofl 611 —east to west (see Acts 16:1-6 and Gen. 4:16 with comments in those commen­taries). These good “side effects” of the debacle are interpreted by most church historians as omens of “peace on earth, good will to men,” and all of the A-millennial and Post-millennial historians (Barnes, Vedder,

Fisher, Drummond, Walker, Schaff, et al.) look upon the Crusades as further Biblical fulfillment of an evolutionary process that gradually was to ‘ ‘bring in the kingdom. ’ ’58 Such irrational private interpretations

are not to be superimposed over the facts of history or the statements of scripture. The crusaders also had shown the popes (after Urban II) how to handle Bible believing “hell raisers” or “trouble makers” in Europe, who were going around “splitting churches.” All you had to do was sic a king or a duke on them and let him raise an army, and then (in the name of “Holy Mary,” for the “glory of God,” etc.) kill them. That way you (the pope) could come out of mass murder smelling like a rose. “God wills it!’’

The trouble makers (anti-Catholics) in the Sardis period are more plentiful and more effective than at any time in church history up until 1200 A.D. The first of these will be the Bogomiles (sometimes Bogmiles or Bogomils), whom Schaff and Latourette (both professing Christians) call an heretic sect. ” The Bogomiles, as the Paulicians and Albigenses, ^re always associated in the minds of reprobates like Schaff, Pope °’ Latourette, and Pope Innocent with the heresy of Mani (“Mani- C.ean‘sm’ ’’chapter 12, notes 92-98), whose main crime was his theory ® ut what took place between Genesis 1:1 andGenesis 1:3. Toassociate anichaeans with Gnostics, the Catholic heretics of Constantine’s time

(and later) pretended that “dualism” was a form of heresy. This over­looked the Biblical fact that God versus the devil, heaven as an alternative to hell, righteousness opposed to wickedness (see the preface to the Bible Believer’s Commentary on Proverbs, 1972), up instead of down, back instead of forth, and black instead of white is the realistic view of sane men. Perhaps the silence of church historians about Satan’s part in history (see preface) is an indication of their rejection of Biblical dualism: it is certainly a Bible truth found anywhere in the New Testament (Matt. 6:24; Rev. 3:15; Gal. 6:8; etc.).

At any rate, the Bogomiles (Bogomile in Schaff) came up from Asia Minor into Bulgaria; the chief information we have on them is from their bitterest enemies—the so-called ‘ ‘orthodox’ ’ Catholics. Philip Schaff allows for no origins of the Bogomiles before the tenth century, forget­ting that their ancestors (the Paulicians) came from the same place back in the sixth and seventh centuries. Both groups came from a place in Asia Minor, through Constantinople, headed for the Balkans.59 One of their outstanding pastors was a physician named Basil, who was burned at the stake by the Greek Orthodox Emperor Alexis Comnenus I. Whatever fault the orthodox ecclesiastical politicians may have found with ‘ ‘dualism, ’ ’ their real hatred for the Bogomiles was based on doctrines much more substantial and much easier to define: the Bogomiles declared that the Catholic “mass” was a sacrifice to DEVILS,60 that the church ‘ ‘ fathers ’ ’ who contradicted the Bible werefalse prophets, that organized Roman Catholicism was Satanic, and, above all, that they would baptize no one but an adult believer.61 (Why pick on “dualism” when you have that much to work with?)

The Bogomiles were anti-Catholic; in church history those who are anti-Catholic have to be either heathen or heretics because most

church histories are written by people who major in anti-church history (chapter 12, notes 5-7). Throughout the entire anti-church history of Catholicism, every group who believed what the Bogomiles believed was called Arian or Manichaean.62 They appear mainly in northern Italy and southern France, and when they do, their name has been changed again in order to cut off from history any Biblical succession whic would connect them with the New Testament. In France and Italy they were called “Cathari.”63 The term “Cathari” in the minds of enemies64 was associated with a BLACK CAT (notes 45-47) by t ng the first three letters of the word “CAThari” out and using them I a sign for the “cult’ ’ (like the old IX (iota-chi) deal the Catholics pu e^ off on the ‘ ‘fish representing Christ, ’ ’ see chapter 9). It seemed to na never occurred to any Catholic engaged in this alphabet soup game

the word CAT contained the first three letters in CATholic (see Mark of the Beast, 1959). And in addition, the word “Cathari” was formed from the Greek (KaOapi^co, catharidzo), meaning to purify or cleanse, whereas the word “Catholic” meant “wholly given to a CAT.” Very often hypocrites are looking in mirrors when they attack “heretics.”

Forgetting that it was Eusebius (way back in 330 A.D.) who called the Novations ‘ ‘Cathari, ’ ’65 the historians tell us that the Bogomiles and Paulicians became “Cathari” or “New Manichaeans”: that is, “here­tics” in the eyes of the pope. In southern France these Cathari were called “Albigenses,” and in the Balkans they were called Bulgarians (or Bulgari, Bugares, orBugres); other titles wereTesserants, Textores, and Publicani (and later Bogards, Picards, etc.). The trick in every case was to produce the impression that true New Testament succession was CATHOLIC because the godless reprobates in that political organization had stuck to one NAME since they adopted it while the other groups couldn’t possibly prove New Testament succession because their NAMES changed. By changing the names of anti-Catholic Bible believers con­stantly, you could prove that your church (Catholic) was the “one true church.”

The papal method of dealing with these people who would not wor­ship Mary, sprinkle babies, use crosses, pray to the dead, etc., was the simple and quite effective: they burned them alive. In 1022, fifteen were tried and thirteen of them were burned at the stake.66 Some of them in Liege (1025) were asked to adore the crosses and take the Eucha­rist; they refused and were all burned at the stake. In 1145 A.D. eight men and three women were burnt at Cologne. At Rheims (where Hincmar had been, chapter 12, note 119) in 1157, the Papists burned some more of them. In 1161 some of them were whipped and branded during the reign of a “true son of the faith,” the Emperor Henry II.67

There were so many of the Cathari popping up in Europe around ' the time of the Crusades that the Dominican Rainerius gives 4,000,000 as a safe estimate of their numbers.68 In southern France, where the / Novatians, Donatists, and Paterines had prepared the way, the Catholic^ priests were made objects of ridicule (Matt. 23:24). All Cathari taught the Roman Catholic church was not the true church. If they were telling the truth, this meant that the missionary endeavors of the Franciscans, ominicans, Augustinians, and Jesuits in China, Japan, and India were ; orthless, for they had nothing to do with the “true faith,” though this E ow it is stated by K.S. Latourette.69 Dark Age Cathari taught two

basic truths from the start: 1) The pope was the Antichrist (Matt.

’ ' J°hn 4; John 5:43), and 2) The Roman Catholic church was the

WHORE of Revelation 7 7.70 However they may have been misguided in their interpretations of the Old Testament and the “classes of believ­ers,” they didn’t miss the main point: the main point was that those in the Sardis period who professed to be orthodox in their Christology, anthropology, soteriology, theology, and ecclesiology were Satanic in their attitude toward Biblical authority, Biblical preaching, Biblical sal­vation, and Biblical conduct. The Cathari renounced priestly vestments, altars, and crosses, and they called the sign of the cross the mark of the beast.71 Since all of them were Bible believers, none of them gave credence to indulgences or any such “isle of somewhere” as “purga­tory.” Dr. Lea, an eminent authority on the Catholic Inquisition, says that the Cathari had more martyrs on their list who never defected from their beliefs than any other group.72

The second outstanding group of street preaching Bible believers were the Waldenses; they lived completely apart from the Catholic church, and they were the strictly Biblical sect of the Middle Ages, coming from Asia Minor (see chapter 3) to southern France. From there they spread into the Piedmont, Austria, and Germany; they supposedly derived their name from Peter Waldus (or Valdez)73 and were called “Sandalati” or the “Poor Men of Lyons.” (Other writers insist the word Waldenses—valley dwellers—is the simple derivative from “valley” in Italian, French, and Spanish.74)

The Waldenses appeared out of nowhere at the Third Lateran Coun­cil of 1179 A.D. They asked Alexander III to let them preach on the streets and even gave him a copy of their Bible which they had translated from the Old Latin of the King James Bible.15 They were forbidden to preach and were laughed out of the council.76 Later their Bibles were committed to the flames, and eighty of their preachers were burned at the stake in Strasbourg (1212). They spread out into Austria, Swabia, Kbnigsberg, Poland, Bavaria, Bohemia, and Passau. They were very active in the distribution of scriptures since they esteemed the Bible to be the final authority in all matters of faith and practice. Where popes, cardinals, bishops, and priests refused to abide by its precepts, they I were to be ignored.77 According to Waldensian beliefs, laymen coul I preach the Bible, and any layman could baptize a believing adult, but I no one was to baptize infants.16 They went much beyond this and a so taught eternal security for the believer and his justification by fait m I the finished atonement of Jesus Christ.79 In short, they were Bible be iev I Jng Baptists at work all over Europe more than three hundred yea I "before Luther or Calvin were born. Dr. Miller, a Presbyterian ,t I of Church History), accuses the Baptist historian Jones of falsifying

in regards to the strongly Baptistic doctrines of the Waldenses.80 A cer­tain Dr. Rice also made the same charge, with the main issue being the accounts of Paul Perris versus Mr. Jones on the report of the commis­sioners to Louis XII of France about the Waldenses. Both charges (Rice and Miller) were proved to be deliberate slander.81 The Waldenses never, baptized infants or even children. As all Cathari, the Waldenses pro­nounced the Roman Catholic church to be the Babylonian WHORE of Revelation 17.82 What practical Christian truths St. Francis, Dominic, and Bernard were able to pick up (and counterfeit) they got from the Waldenses, not their own ecclesiastical hierarchy. The monk’s counter­feit of Waldensian Christianity—imitate the poor and the “choice of poverty” bit—was very successful in leading thousands of strays back into the arms of the Babylonian Whore.83

The Albigenses were the spiritual descendants of the Novatians,\ Arians, Donatists, and other assorted “heretics” who went north of’ Rome through Lombardy into southern France. Councils beginning with Toulouse (1119) issued articles against these heretics and called upon the secular powers to punish them. Innocent III believed that Bible believ­ing dissidents were worse than infidels (Saracens, Moslems, and Turks), for they threatened the unity of the Whore’s family in her own backyard —Europe. So Innocent III sponsored four “crusades” to exterminate the Albigenses. Innocent (what a name!) called upon Louis VII to do his killing for him, and he also enjoined Raymond VI to assist him. Raymond rebelled against the thought of murdering his loyal subjects for the sake of a foreign dictator, so he was excommunicated by the pope's legate.84 In order to raise the necessary Mafia, the Cistercian order of Catholic monks were then commissioned to preach all over France, Flanders, and Germany for the purpose of raising an army suffi­cient to kill the Bible believers. All who volunteered to take part in these mass murders were promised that they would receive the same reward as those who had sallied forth to kill Moslems (i.e., forgiveness of sins and eternal life). The Albigenses were referred to in Pope Innocent’s Sunday morning messages as “servants of the old serpent. ”85 Innocent promised the killers a heavenly kingdom if they took up their swords against unarmed populaces. ,

Now Raymond VI (against his own, personal convictions) had to\ ack up, for he saw the “rising tide.” He reversed field and went along | W1th the “majority of recognized scholars” and “qualified Biblicists” ® is day to retain his standing.86 In July of 1209 A.D. an army of 60 ^at^°'*cs attacked Beziers (also “Bezieres”) and murdered

’MyO unarmed civilians, killing men, women, and children. The whole t

city was sacked, and when someone complained that Catholics were being killed as well as “heretics,” the papal legate (in the best traditions of Pope Pius XII87) told them to go on killing and not to worry about it for ‘ ‘the Lord knows His own. ’ ’ At Carcassonne, France, all the inhab­itants were driven out of town with nothing but the clothes they had on. At Minerve, 14,000 Christians were put to death in the flames, and ears, noses, and lips of the “heretics” were cut off by the “faithful.”88 “God wills it! ’’ The machinery of the Inquisition was then put into full action (1229), and in 1233 and 1234 A.D. Pope Gregory IV raised a German army to kill several hundred thousand more Albigenses near Bremen and Oldenburg.89

The Waldenses passed through thirty-six persecutions, the worst being the crusade of Simon de Montfort90 (1208). Pope Innocent III calls the Waldenses “Samson’s foxes. They appear to be different, but tKelr tails are tied together. ”91 (A candid admission from a bloody killer that thirty different names for heretics couldn’t break the history of New Testament, Biblical succession.) The Waldenses were driven out of their homes in the wintertime and forced into peaks of mountains or into barren forests where they starved or froze to death. Of the “godly” Dominicans who arranged their destruction, they said that they were ‘ 'Domini Canes ’ ’ (the Lord’s dogs—Phil. 3:2).92 These Christians were cast from high precipices and dashed to pieces; some were driven into caverns, and by filling the mouths of these caves with lighted fagots they were suffo­cated. Tottering old men, babies, and children were hung in cold blood, ripped open and disemboweled, pierced with prongs, drowned, racked limb from limb, stabbed to death, torn to pieces by dogs, and crucified with their heads downward.

This was the logical end and predestinated outcome of Augustine’s positive view of Roman Catholicism (chapter 7, notes 33-39). If dissi­dents were accursed (chapter 6, notes 79-88), then certainly God wanted them killed, and since a good, orthodox Catholic should practice what he professed...! The furious hatred which these vicious Catholic apostates had against the Waldenses, Cathari, and Bogomiles was due to the nega­tive preaching of these groups: all Bible preaching is negative where it deals with Rome (see chapter 2). The Bible says absolutely nothing positive about Rome or Egypt. If Catholicism is “Roman,’ then t^'er^ is only one attitude that a real Christian can take towards it: the Bib ic attitude (Acts 12; 28; Dan. 2; Rev. 17; and John 18-19). I

The Inquisition was directly established by the pope, who not on | gave Dominic the authority to be the first inquisitor, but throug the ages enforced the Satanic system by bulls. Pope Alexandei / (

established an Inquisition in Italy and gave his subjects an exhortation to help them out.93 Pope Urban /K(1262) issued a bull asking the office of the Inquisition to exterminate heretics so that the “vine of the Lord” might bear the “fruit of Catholic purity.”94 Pope Urban didn’t know his “vines” (Deut. 32:31-32). Genocide—the extermination of whole populaces—was not an innovation of Herr Hitler and the Nazi party; it had been official papal doctrine put forth by the Roman Catholic church into practice more than six hundred years before the Catholic Hitler was born. x

Clement IV (1311) stated that a bishop must have an inquisitor with him at all times to expose heretics to torture.95 Saint (!) Liguori says that on the testimony of one man a Christian can be put to torture.96 (Of course, Liguori would not think of calling an Albigensian or a Cathari or a Waldensian a “Christian.” Christians, to St. Liguori, would be the Catholic bishops, monks, and inquisitors in charge of TORTURING.)

“Saint” Dominic is regarded as the founder of this Satanic, anti-' church establishment. After finding that armies of 500,000 men could not kill all of the Bible believers in Europe, Dominic was selected by the pope as the man in charge of finishing off the work. He was a Span­iard, born in 1170, and the founder of the Dominican order of monks/ The Inquisition was organized into Signori Patentati, Consultori, Familghari (men who presided over the councils), and the Avocato De Rei; and it had Cancelliere, Mandataries, and Barrigelos to assist them. The modern terms are Waffen SS, Gestapo, Bunker Commandos, Kapos, Block leaders, NKVD, labor camps, and protective custody (OSHA). The Inquisition was purely and uniquely a Catholic institution; it was\ founded for the express purpose of exterminating every human being in Europe who differed from Roman Catholic beliefs and practices. It/ spread out from France, Milan, Geneva, Aragon, and Sardinia to Poland (fourteenth century) and then to Bohemia and Rome (1543). ,It was not abolished in Spain until 1820.

With 125 curses placed on the head of every Baptist, Methodist, Lutheran, Episcopalian, and Presbyterian in the United States (Council of Trent, 1546), the Roman Catholic church still allows herself a “pure conscience” with the “true faith” while murdering Bible believers.97 An Unholy Mother Whore (Rev. 17), she had been true to her commis­sion and calling. She is a bloody cutthroat (Rev. 17) and will lie her .ay around the charges no matter what history records. Nowhere in ® urch history does she reveal her true and lethal nature (the Catholic F urch never changes, Rome the eternal city, all roads lead to Rome, I •) more than in the Sardis period (the period of the “Red Ones,”

Rev. 3:1), where she had unlimited power to back up her convictions and was not hampered with any restraints. The Inquisition was the evo­lutionary and logical development of anti-church history as taught by Origen, Papias, Cyprian, Clement, Eusebius, Augustine, and the popes. It proves that the ‘ ‘growth and expansion of Christianity ’ ’ from 500-1400 A.D. was also the growth and expansion of a depravity and wickedness the like of which the world had never seen until that time: “By their fruits ye shall know them.”

These Catholic butchers do not cease their killing, looting, and tor­turing with the end of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries; they go right on into the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. For example, in the seventeenth century (1641) the Catholics in Ireland fixed October 23 Tthefeast of IghatiusLoydla) as a massacre day for Christians and pro­ceeded to kill 150,000 Protestants in oncifeyj, which is more than twice as many Catholics as were killed in armed combat fightingjOliver" ^Cromwgll (T599-1658) in a year.9* Bible believing Protestants were buried in the ground up to their necks till they starved; one man waT forced to go to mass, after which they ripped him open and let him bleed to death. Another they sawed asunder, slit his wife’s throat, dashed out the brains of his young child, and threw the corpse into a pigsty to be eaten by swine." Several_Christians were strippednaked, fastened toTiorses by ropes placed around their middles, and dragged through bogs until they expired^Thousands were mutilated by having arms, hands. and legs cut off and by being left toTHeed'to death; three hundred were .drowned in one day in the county of Tyrone, and fifty or sixty were 1 _put into one house which was set on fire, While these “faithful sons” of “Holy Mother church” (carrying out “the expansion of Christian-j ity”) killed babies and women, they would holler, “Your soul to thg__ dgyiP’’100 Catholic historians like Weber and White 101 like to pretend." that none of this happened, and that the only killing going on in Ireland^ was done by Cromwell. Whitewashed hypocrites often have a persecu­tion complex (John 11:47-51).

Under Pope Clement VIII, as late as January 25, 1655, armed mobs I were following up Bible believers in the Piedmont area; and, backe up by the Duke of Savoy (Catholic), the following ‘ ‘missionary program was carried out: Giovanni Andrea Michialin (La Torre) had three o ] his children hacked to pieces in front of him, and a soldier picke up I the fourth by the legs and dashed its brains out on a wal 1.'02 The Catho w ■ proceeded to roast a ten year old girl over a fire and then killed a mo 9 with her infant, after pursuing her into a cave in the woods.105 Gio^^S Rostagnal (eighty years old) had his nose and ears cut oft an si

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taken from the fleshy parts of his body till he bled to death. Jacob Birone, a school master, was stripped naked, had the nails of his toes and fingers tom out with red-hot pincers, and had a cord tied around his middle; he was then led through the streets with a Catholic on each side cutting a gash in his flesh till he nearly bled to death. Every few minutes he was asked, “WILL YOU GO TO MASS?” (see chapter 13, notes 83-95). Since he believed, as all Paulicians and Bogomiles believed, that “mass” was of the devil,104 they had to cut off his head and throw his corpse

into the river. Jacob Roseno was commanded to pray to the saints, but since no Manichaean, Bulgarian, or other “heretic” would do such a blasphemous thing (1 Tim. 2:5), the soldiers beat him violently and then fired several shots into him. During the agonies of death they cried to him, “Will you pray to the saints?” To which he answered (as any “trouble making fanatic” would), “NO.” They decapitated him with a sword.105 The Catholics proceeded to cut off the genital organs of a servant of Jacopo Michalino of Robio, applying a burning candle to the stumps to stop the blood; they then tore off his nails with pincers and killed him by tying a cord around his head so tight that his eyes and brains came out.106

And let no one think for a moment that these killings were excep­tional cases of Catholic laymen under bad leadership or temporarily driven to “excesses.” The original order for exterminating ALL Wal­denses came from the pen of the pope himself (Pope Innocent, a Latin bull issued in 1487).107

Daniel Rambaut of Villaro, a father of a large family, was arrested and was visited by several “priests” who attempted to get him to save his life by turning Papist. The issues they presented before him (as we would expect) had nothing to do with the Trinity,nor “dualism” (chapter 12, notes 92-98), nor the nature of Christ (chapter 8, notes 3-16), nor predestination (chapter 13, note 78). The issues were clear: if he wanted to stay alive he must believe in purgatory, transubstantiation, the infalli­bility of the pope, and the remission of sins by praying to dead saints. Anyone could guess what happened. When a saved, Bible believer is faced with the unholy demands of a demon-possessed Catholic, only one thing can happen if the Catholic is armed. The priest ordered one Joint of his finger cut off every day till all his fingers were gone, then same thing with his toes, and then finally one hand and one foot ^®ch day till he bled to death.108 The only way you can take a Bible 4 ever s religion from him is to kill him. You cannot take it away stealing his candles, busting his beads, killing his priest, burning E *ble, ordumping out his holy water (Judg. 18:24). All Roman Cath­

olics know this instinctively; their own “religion’ ’ forces them to acknowl­edge it.

A Christian lady named Constantia Bellione was arrested,and she was told that if she would renounce the devil and go to “mass”(chapter 13, notes 98-105) she would live. She said, “If I should comply with your desire and go to mass I should be sure to meet him [the devil] in a variety of shapes.” They ordered slices of her flesh to be cut off from several parts of her body, but this only prompted her to say, ‘ ‘What horrid and lasting torments will you suffer in hell for the trifling and temporary pains which I now endure.” They shot her.109

To help offset this bloody history of demon-possessed Catholics, the British Broadcasting Corporation (in conjunction with Pope Paul VI) presented a terrifying narration (1970) of the days of Bonnie Prince Charlie and Lord Cumberland. The gist of this historic movie was that the poor Catholics in Scotland suffered such terrible injustices at that hands of the English in one year that one should not mention the twelve century record of Catholic atrocities—which would have made English Protestants look like apostles. To further brainwash Europeans with this lopsided documentation of the truth, the BBC then refused to let Avro Manhattan present his book Religious Terror in Ireland over the air waves of the BBC or its TV channels.110 (The news media in England and in America never dares print both sides of a Bible versus Catholicism dispute: it never has and never will.)

Now, the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries belong to the Phila­delphia period, but we have made reference to them at this time to remind the student of anti-church history that “Rome never changes” and that ‘ ‘the spirit of the times ’ ’ is not in the least connected with the persecuting spirit of Catholic bigots like Hitler, Pius XII, Franco, Mussolini, Pope John Paul, and Ted Kennedy. The amount of killing is never determined by the times; it is determined by how much killing can safely be done without reprisals.111

The Synod of Tours (1163) called upon the bishops and clergy t(M forbid Catholics from mingling with Albigenses and having any com­mercial dealings with them (see Hitler’s Nuremberg Laws); Rome has always been terrorized by the thought that any of their membership sho come face-to-face in a mouth-to-mouth confrontation with a Bible behev ing Christian.112 The ThirdLateran Council (1117) gave kings and princ®® power to make slaves out of Bible believers. At Toulouse(V222)bis were commanded by the pope to appoint one priest and one laymMB in every parish to search for “heretics.” Peter of Aragon (119) ished Bible believers from his dominion and threatened them wt u

ing at the stake if they returned.113 Don Jayme I (1226) forbade anyone from reading the Bible in his own language.114 At his coronation, Frederick Il condemned all Bible believers to having their tongues torn out or being burned at the stake if they disregarded any teaching of Catholicism on any point."5

There is no use to go into a long and detailed account of the proceed­ings and tortures that were carried out by the Inquisition. Foxe’s Book of Martyrs and Popery in Its Social Aspects (Rev. R.P.G. Blakeney) have scores of cases documented with eyewitnesses.116 The Courier Francois shows that when the Lisbon, Portugal, facilities for the Inquisi­tion were examined they revealed exactly the same cell set-ups and guard set-ups described by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn in the Gulag Archipelago (two volumes) and by Haralan Popov in his autobiography on thirteen years in Communist Bulgaria (Torturedfor His Faith). There is nothing new under the sun. ""

Every frightful torture that could be invented by the depraved nature of a Christ rejecting sinner was practiced or encouraged by the loathsome “partakers of the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass” (the monks, priests, bish­ops, archbishops, and archdeacons): pouring boiling oil and tar on vic­tims, racking their bones out of joint, whipping the soles of their feet with rods, disemboweling them and leading them around by their intes­tines, running the women through with spears from their crotch to their necks,117 tightening chains on their foreheads till their eyes came out, planting firebrands on the breasts of women and the genital organs of men, cutting off pieces of breasts with scissors, raking flesh with graters, grilling naked bodies on iron grills and eating them,118 putting the thumb­screws on people, cutting off their tongues, cutting off their lips, noses, ears, fingers, and toes, breaking their bones one at a time, putting gun­powder in their mouths and lighting it, burying them alive strapped into coffins, pulling needles and wires through their flesh, etc., etc. Hellish Mother church was never outdone by Russia (Communism: 1920-1970) or Germany (Nazism: 1933-1945). Hellish Mother church taught her children (Rev. 17:1-6) how to handle Bible believing Christians, or any­one who was “anti-establishment."(The historian Lorent says that in"? Spain from 1480-1498 over eight thousand people were burned alive and ninety thousand were subject to other punishments. From 1499-1506 rnore than sixteen hundred were burned alive and another 2,536 between • ,U7'1515. By 1524 over twenty thousand “heretics” had been pun- zL ed’ and a thousand of them had been burned at the stake in one city riana Seville).119 After documenting this bloody, Satanic terror, Philip c aff says blandly that we should not rejoice that Spain ceased to be

a power after this treatment of people, nor should we rejoice because Protestants have gained the ascendancy in world affairs; rather we are to have a “sympathetic consideration” for Spain, and it should call forth “no spirit of denunciation,” but rather a hope that Spain’s greatness will be renewed.120

When it came to Biblical truth, Philip Schaff couldn’t find a bowling ball in a bathtub.

Philip had just called Bible believing dissenters “heretical sects’’ andhaddenownredHincmarofRheims(chapter 13, note79)asarascal.

Now, this constant failure to Biblically interpret history, character, actions, doctrines, teachings, and the fruits of those involved (Matt. 7:20) comes from two sources: ignorance and cowardice. These writers, under the pretence of being OBJECTIVE and “neutral,”121 refuse to draw judgment (John 18:39) where it is required (see 1 Cor. 6:2-3). Having abandoned the final, infallible authority for making value judg­ments (Isa. 8:20), they have only “relative truths,” “relative opinions,” “trustworthy translations,” “reliable versions,” and “relative prefer­ences” to deal with; with these it is impossible to draw judgment where their social standing or income is threatened. When these two things are threatened, SELF will arise to defend SELF and in so doing will abandon any standard of judgment (or accept any standard) that is expe­dient to SELF-preservation.

In the twentieth century who was the ‘ ‘greatest’' man, Jack Kennedy or Billy Sunday? Now, there is a test that will finish off a Christian who believes in relative standards.122

You see, the adjective “greatest” is where the fur hits the fan. It is a relative term (how “GREAT” is “great”?) if one rejects 2 Kings 4:8; Acts 10:34; 1 Kings 10:23; Genesis49:8; and Genesis 22:16. When we try to look for the “greatest man” in church history, we keep running into Leo the Great, Gregory the Great, Charles the Great. Frederick the Great, Peter the Great, and so forth, with no reference to any fixed standard for “great” found anywhere in either Testament. Who was the greatest man in the eighteenth century, George Washington or John Wesley? How about the nineteenth century? Who was the greatest man in that century: Napoleon or Charles G. Finney? Beethoven or George Mueller?

Now, if these comparisons do not emphasize the point, let us put it this way: which men were the most Biblical? That is, which men came the closest to achieving “greatness’ ’ according to what Godrevea e about “greatness" in His Book? Was Leo “the GREAT’ greater than Arnold of Brescia ? Schaff and Latourette don’t say. Was Charlen®

greater than Peter of Bruys? Hamack and Mosheim don’t say. Was Xavier greater than Zinzendorf? Fisher and Newman don’t say. Was Menno Simon greater than King Henry VIII? Dollinger and D’Aubigne have no comment. Who was greater, Bob Jones, Sr., or his son? Who was greater, Dr. M.R. DeHaan or his son? Jack Hyles or his son? Charles Fuller or his son?

There is an easy way to avoid answering these questions like a Bible believing Christian should answer them—it has never taken intelligence or scholarship to duck issues. When faced with Christ or Barabbas, Pilate tried four different ways to get around acting on a “value judgment” (compromise, cowardice, carelessness, and cleverness) that he had already made. Knowing that Barabbas was guilty (Matt. 27:16), and knowing that Christ was innocent (John 19:4), Pilate got around any definitive judgment by relativity. When Pilate spoke (not “asked”) his famous words, “WHAT IS TRUTH” for every apostate Fundamentalist and Conservative in America, every Papist in Europe and South America, every Communist in Asia and Russia, and every agnostic, atheist, and anarchist who ever lived anywhere, he could not stand by the judgment he knew was right. You see, “truth” had to be on a shifting pedestal if an issue came up which involved his own social standing, income, position, or authority. Pilate, therefore, had no absolute standard of truth by which to judge ANY truths (John 18:38; 19:14), so he had to wash his hands of the whole mess. This he did (Matt. 27:24), like Schaff, Dollinger, Fisher, et al.

Returning to the value judgment “play-offs,” what can be learned from church history (that a man could learn) if he can’t even decide who is Biblical and who is not? If God the Holy Spirit suddenly appeared on the scene and drew judgment, would He say that Pope John XXIII was a better Christian than Savonarola? Would He say (in line with what He already WROTE and preserved) that Luther was a better Chris­tian than Philip the Fair of France? Would God the Holy Spirit have any absolute standards by which to judge a man? Would He be afraid to write them down ? Did you ever read them? Do you ever use them?

In the minds of Schaff, Latourette, Durant, Wells, and others, there is no standard for deciding these matters; so, the following stratagems re resorted to, to avoid getting involved and committing oneself to a Christian conclusion:

1- You cannot compare the two men because they were “great” •n different ways.

You cannot compare the two men because they lived and worked Iferent times in history (i.e., the Bible can’t cover all periods of history).

3. You cannot compare the two men because each was great in his own field (i.e., the Bible doesn’t apply to certain fields).

4. Therefore, you cannot judge greatness (Matt. 7:1)—eventhough you continue to write about certain characters as4 ‘THE GREAT’ ’—and further, you cannot really tell what is TRUTH and what is error123 because this would reveal a subjective prejudice.

This is the approach of Westcott and Hort (1884) to the Greek New Testament,124 and this is the approach of Panosian (Bob Jones Univer­sity), Robert Sumner (The Biblical Evangelist), Curtis Hutson (The Sword of the Lord, and FredAfman (Tennessee Temple Schools) to the authority of the King James Bible: it is also the approach of the faculty members at Yale, Columbia, Harvard, Berkeley, New York City College, and the University of Chicago.

If John the Baptist was “great” in the sight of the Lord, was he great in the sight of church historians? Can you find more material on John the Baptist than you can find on Abraham Lincoln or Charlemagne? Why is this? Isn’t it because Charlie and Abe were worldly heroes who lived in the world, of the world, by the world, and for the world in the realm of ANTI-church history; and, therefore, the materials on them (see Exodus 15 and comments in that commentary) are abundant? It cannot be that there was more information available on anyone in Charlemagne’s day than in John’s day, for there is enough information on worldlings before John’s time to fill a library (Socrates, Caesar, Plato, Aristotle, Cyrus, Alexander the Great, et al.). Was Paul more spiritual than Pope Urban II and Pope Gregory I? They why didn’t the church historians compare their lives with his? Simple: it would spoil the “his­tory.” Alongside Paul, Urban II and Gregory “the Great” would look like two hippies that fell off the back end of a dump truck.125

If the great woman of Shunem (2 Kings 4:8) was “great,” why was she great? Wasn’t it because she didn’t panic at the death of her son, and because she held God to His word through a prophet of God (2 Kings 4:12-28)? How do you make a pope or a bishop—Thomas a Becket, for instance—“great” in church history when hedidn't believei a word of God that he had and didn’t know one tenth of what a Christian should know about4 ‘greatness” after reading that word of God. Bee ket. Urban, and Gregory all had copies of the Bible available any time they wanted to read them. Why all the squeamishness when listing the out> standing characters and the “leaders” and “shepherds” in church history, j

Simple: Schaff, Fisher, Renan, Flacius, Howson, Hamack, an^.i others never believed for five minutes that there was any absolute sta ■ ard for judging any man’s work; they judged every man s wor^ V

reputation and his “times. ” If they had lived in the days of Barabbas and Christ and had been called upon to judge between them, they would have had to say that although Barabbas was a murderer (like Pope Inno­cent III), guilty of sedition (like Boniface VIII), and a thief (like any pope who steals God’s title for Himself—John 17:11), he was, in his own way, a ‘ ‘product of the times, ’ ’ with ‘ ‘obvious handicaps and disad­vantages,” and we should not be too ‘‘harsh in our judgment of his Christianity” which ‘‘in those days,” etc., etc. Thieves of a feather steal together (Matt. 13:32). The reason why the only thing men learn from history is that men never learn from history is because no major historian believed there was anything you could learn for certain to start with. If you read forty major historians (Sozomen, D’Aubigne, Migne, Eusebius, LaGarde, Newman, Froom, Drummond, Fisher, Latourette, H.G. Wells, Durant, Spengler, Mezeray, Socrates, Josephus, Vedder, Van Loon, Schaff, Churchill, Mosheim, Lea, et al.), you would come out with: some good, some bad, look up, the future is bright, but there are clouds on the horizon, we need to get together, we’ll muddle through some way because we always have, let’s don’t fuss and argue: let’s UNITE.126

If there is one thing that church history does not teach, that is it. If there is one thing the Bible doesn’t teach, that is it. If there is any conclusion more false than that conclusion, it hasn’t been put in print unless the Illuminati or the Bilderbergers wrote it.

The failure of the church historians to judge church history by the constitution of the church (the Holy Bible) and to judge by it instead of by Karl Marx’s philosophy (“unite!”) or Darwin’s philosophy nulli­fies the work before it is over and relegates it to fiction by the time it is finished. Refusal to place the Bible down as the yardstick for church history produces ANTI-church history—the history of the political and ecumenical efforts of Roman Catholicism and apostate Protestantism to rule the world. There isn’t any question about the “greatness” of, say, Johnny Carson compared with, say, Glenn Schunk; the Bible never leaves anyone in doubt about what “greatness” is in God’s sight. The people who give fallen nature the benefit of a doubt and the motives of depraved sinners the benefit of a doubt never hesitate to spit in the face of God Almighty every time He draws a value judgment in these matters (Eph. 2:M; Matt. 23:33; John 8:40; Isa. 64:6). They will not even draw a clear line between the saved and the lost (Eph. 2:1-4), let one between professing Christians who pay no more attention to the word of God than Buddha or Confucius and Christians who stand by ,,e °(>°k- Cowardice is their motive, and ignorance of the Bible is their alibi fop not tatino itc z* '

Where these men venture opinions about “greatness,” they are to be ignored, for their opinions are not based on Biblical truth at all; they are based on humanistic liberalism and the fear of man.

When the Post-millennial and A-millennial historian is asked (or feels called upon) to comment on such matters, he finds himself in a bind. The old alibi of “those were dark times” or “ignorance of true Christianity, ’ ’ etc., will no longer fill the bill in absolving the criminals; other tactics must be resorted to.

Now, the standard way to obliterate the truth, or cover it up, prac­ticed by all educated people (lawyers, scholars, teachers, scientists, soci­ologists, doctors, and writers) is to raise up more than one conflicting authority so that neither authority can posit a clear-cut judgment: confuse the issue. If the final authority is there (as in the case of a judge in a court of law), the issues are to be muddled and misrepresented127 with extraneous details until it appears to the final authority (the judge, for example) that no clear-cut decision can be arrived at. Einstein’s Theory of Relativity was constructed along these lines: by the use of hypothetical situations, imaginary problems, and conflicting “findings,” a decision was arrived at which declared, in effect, that there are no absolute stan­dards for ANYTHING—not even time, motion, and space. In the moral realm this means anarchy, with all actions based on opinions or ‘ ‘prefer­ences.”128 When Durant and Latourette are called upon to pass judg­ment on what they have just documented, all that either of them could say would be that “it was one of the blacker pages in the history of many who were really trying to edify and help out,” etc. The most that either could say is that ‘ ‘certainly these actions could not be condoned or justified in the name of the lowly Nazarene, who taught,” etc. But this is not a faithful record of the history or the system or the times or the movements or the “teachings of the lowly Nazarene.”

The hideous and appalling/acts, written in the red letters of human blood, are that the dirty reprobates who ordered the killings we have been documenting (and many times helped carry them out) professed to belong to the Bride of Jesus Christ and to be members of the only one, true church that Jesus ever founded; and to this day they believe and profess exactly the same thing. How is anyone to believe that any of them would act any differently if the “times” occurred again that occurred back then? There is nothing about the Spanish Inquisition that was “the spirit of the times." The “spirit of the Inquisition is t e spirit of the Roman Catholic church and the Roman Catholic empire when they were unfettered, unshackled, and able to operate wii:o restraint to carry out their own designs.129 It is the Roman Cap1

spirit in the twentieth century, as in any other century.130 That “spirit” is located in Ephesians 2:1 -2 and John 8:40 in every Bible on the market, or off the market, and the “times” have nothing to do with it. Schaff and Latourette simply pretend that Satan is no longer involved in church history (see preface). With bibliographies running into two thousand selections of source material, neither man could tell you what God did in the history of the church or what the devil did in the history of the church or even what the CHURCH was. What God did by the Holy Spirit, these characters call ‘ ‘the Christian impulse” or ‘ ‘heretical sects” or “schismatic groups” or “the Christian conscience” or “moral awakenings’ ’ or “missionary endeavors, ’ ’ and what Satan accomplished by his spirit (Luke 4:6; 2 Cor. 4:4; Eph. 2:2) is called ‘ ‘errors, mistakes, non-Christian attitudes or conduct, ” a ‘ ‘persecuting spirit, ” or an ‘ ‘un- Christlike spirit.” Church historians are great compromising humani­tarians when it comes to calling a spade a spade. Actually, there isn’t any question about the work or the activity of the Roman Catholic church in the Dark Ages: with a devil’s Bible and a devil’s plan of salvation and a devil’s ambition to guide her, why would ANYONE think that she was the proper subject of “church” history? What church? With the ‘ ‘Vicar of Christ” at her head—supposedly the visible representative of Godon this earth131—and a claim to infallible guidance (1 Tim. 3:15) under a “Virgin Mother’ ’ and a sinless Saviour (Heb. 4:15) with decrees so perfect that God agreed with all of them (Matt. 16:19), how could such a ‘ ‘church” murder ANY Christian? Or an atheist, for that matter? When was the last time a Bible believing Baptist ever killed an atheist for ANY of his “convictions”?

No, one cannot call the history of Roman Catholicism a history of the church nor the “expansion of Christianity,” nor can one call it “church history” unless one has discarded the New Testament before attempting to write. A “church” guilty of 900,000 bloody murders in less than two hundred years (and over 40,000,000 in fifteen centuries, according to some)132 is certainly not connected with “the pillar and ground of the truth” (1 Tim. 3:15): she is not close enough to the ground where that pillar is planted to see it with a telescope. Such a church” is no more the Bride of Christ (2 Cor. 11:2) than the NKVD or the Mafia are. _

God junked Spain politically, socially, and economically for her foul and sadistic conduct in dealing with Bible believing Christians and God sancient covenant people, the Jews. She has never been a third-rate world power since the sinking of the Armada, and she has never figured as afifth-rate world power since 1800 A.D. When Torquemada burned

six thousand copies of the Hebrew Old Testament133 at Seville in 1490, he sealed the fate of the overseas empire that was about to rise under Columbus, Magellan, Cortez, Coronado, Ponce de Leon, and Balboa. - Schaff, and many others, simply cannot understand the importance of the Bible as it is related to church history. He would never connect its use or misuse, perversion or disuse, recovery, preaching, or propa­gation with a single major movement in the history of the church before Luther. But when Spain, France, and Italy mounted the vendetta against “heretics,” the Lord mounted a couple of His own vendettas:

-> 1. He split Hellish Mother church right down her seams and put one Antichrist in Avignon, France, and the other in Rome to silence forever the mouths of Catholics liars who claim that Rome was always “ONE holy, apostolic church,” etc.

2. He raised up one heretic in England (Wycliffe) who drove a wedge so deep between London and Rome that the pope never fully recovered St. Paul’s.

3. He sent the Black Death to Europe and quietly wiped out over 5,000,000 people, 90% of whom were members ofHoly Mother church.

We shall talk about these matters in more detail, but first we shall examine the lives of nine great Sardis period “heretics”: Arnold of Brescia, John Wycliffe, John Huss, Girolamo Savonarola, Henry of Lausanne, Leuthard, Tanchelm of Flanders, Berthold of Rumania, Meister Eckhart.

Arnold of Brescia (1110-1155)

Arnold came from north Italy (Lombardy), in the heart of Waldensian, Paulician, and “New Manichaean” territory.134 He was condemned as a schismatic at the Synod ofLateran (1139) and again at a Council of Sens (1140). He was expelled from Italy and then expelled from France; from there he went into Bohemia into the area that had been evangelized by the missionaries from Iona.135 The Bulgarians, Arian “Goths, and Paulicians were there to meet him. Arnold got permission to come back to Rome, where he incited a riot136 and was banished again as a "here­tic.” Pope Adrian IV finally got Frederick I to have Arnold arrested. He was hanged, and after his death his body was burned and his ashes were thrown into the Tiber River.

Now, why would a “Vicar of Christ” treat one of his church mem bers in this fashion? It was quite simple: Arnold has "unsound not'°^j regarding the sacrament of the altar [chapter 13, notes 83-93] andI f fl baptism of CHILDREN.”'31 St. Bernard referred to Arnold’s Biblica convictions as “poison.”138 Baronius calls him “the father of p®1 1 .

heresies.”139 Arnold’s ‘‘political heresy” was crystal clear; he thought that the church had no business being lined up with any government of a secular nature and that no clergyman should have any state or politi­cal entanglements. That is, Arnold was a Baptist in his position on water baptism and separation of church and state, and he was the forerunner (by over five hundred years) of Roger Williams. Separation of church and state, of course, is ‘‘heresy,” according to all modern popes (John XXIII, Paul VI, and John Paul II), and all American citizens are heretics if they believe in it. At least, that is the documented evidence presented by the Catholic church in regards to the matter.140 Since he believed exactly what the Waldenses and Albigenses believed about infant bap­tism and the “Eucharist,” there was only one thing that could be done to him: he had to be killed.

John Wycliffe (1320-1384)

Wycliffe (sometimes Wyclif) was called ' ‘the Morning Star of the Reformation. ” He was born of Saxon blood in England. John became chaplain to the king in 1366 and was granted a Doctor of Theology in 1374. He soon became outspoken in his condemnation of Roman Catholicism and was summoned before the Bishop of London at St. Paul’s for a tribunal. The pope condemned all of Wycliffe’s writings at this time, and with them went a ban on the first Bible in the English language. Wycliffe had translated the Bible from Latin to English, and although he was reputed to have used only Jerome’s Vulgate, a man named John Purvey'41 had to do a little “revising” to bring Wycliffe’s translation back into line with Jerome’s New ASV. Wycliffe evidently had Old Latin Bibles and some Old Latin manuscripts to work with which disagreed with Jerome in some places.142 While alive, Wycliffe was protected by powerful nobles in England and by the common people, who “heard him gladly.”

John enlisted from the graduates at Oxford a body of ‘ ‘poor priests ’ ’ to preach the Bible all over England. They became known as “Lollards,” and although hard to trace its source, it is interesting to note that the Poor Men of Lyons” (Lionists in France) who were called ‘ ‘Humilitai and * ‘Fratricelli ’ ’ were street preaching men who voluntarily embraced poverty (see notes 74 and 83), as did the Lollards. The conclusion offered by D.B. Ray143 that a Waldensian pastor from the Piedmont named Walter Lollard was the source for their name is as sound as any. Wycliffe died in 1384 while attending church. His writings were rigidly suppressed, and in 1415 the Council of Constance ordered his books to be burned. ~^ter, his remains were dug up out of the grave and burned with them;

is had been decreed at the Lateran Council of 1413

John Huss was accused of being a “Wycliffite.”

By now, no one needs to guess why the dead corpse of Wycliffe received such brutal treatment. Certainly it wasn’t because Wycliffe was an “Arian” or had “Manichaean” tendencies; these lying accusa­tions might have gotten a Catholic butcher through 300-1000 A. D., but now other names had to be invented to justify killing off the opposition. No, the reason why Wycliffe’s body was exhumed and burnt was because he—as the Arians, Manichaeans, Donatists, Paulicians, Paterines, Vaudois, Bulgarians, Albigenses, Waldenses, and Cathari—taught that the pope was the ANTICHRIST,144 that his worldly prelates were ser­vants of the devil, and that no church needed hiim. Further, Wycliffe did noLacceptdhe_African black magic of Radbertus’s “transubstantia- tionlZ (see chapter 13, notes 83-93).

Wycliffe, as all of the Antiochan Christians, was a Bible literalist who believed the Bible was the absolute and final authority in all matters of faith and practice; it was the ‘ ‘WHOLE TRUTH ’ ’ which every Chris­tian (not just church leaders) should study. Whatever is in accord with the Bible is true; whatever disagrees with it is false.145 By the standards of Wheaton College, Dallas Theological Seminary, Maranatha Bible Institute, and Tennessee Temple Schools, Wycliffe was a “BIBLIO­LATER,” for he thought that every syllable of the New Testament was true and nothing was to be believed that was not founded upon the Book.146 Wycliffe charged the Roman Catholics with heresy in denying the laity the privilege of having the Bible in their own language. He also rejected infant baptism (see Arnold, above), Mariolatry, purgatory, prayers for the dead, the rosary, the worship of relics, the mass, and the Apocrypha: he was a Bible believing Baptist, and surely you couldn’t find a worse heretic than that! Pope John Paul II (1979) and Ted Kennedy (1980) would both have to call him a heretic by the dogmatic decrees of their church, to which they profess to subscribe.

Nicolas Hereford translated the Apocryphal books, which were stuck into Wycliffe’s translation to make it appear that Wycliffe had only used the official Roman Catholic Bible from North Africa (see chapter 5). John Purvey revised the work later147 to bring it closer to Jerome, but Purvey (though a Lollard) recanted on his beliefs in 1400 A.D. after being imprisoned, and when he swore to Mary that he would be a good boy, he was promoted to the vicarage of Hythe by the Catholic archbishop.148 Of John Wycliffe and his English Bible the archbishop (Arundel) had said: “that pestilent wretch of damnable memory... ,ore runner of and disciple of Antichrist,” etc.149

The Lollards (Wycliffe’s street preachers) filled England and EuropJ ' ' ' ’ “ • ” a numh?r of them were burne

William Sawtre in 1401, John Badly, Richard Tunning, John Claydon, William Taylor (a priest), William White, Richard Hovden, Richard Wyche, Thomas Bangley (a priest), and Sir John Oldcastle. The first woman to be burned at the stake in England was a Lollard (Joane Broughton, burned at Smithfield, 1494), and her daughter was burned at the stake with her. In 1511, John Brewster and William Sweeting were burned alive at Smithfield, and James Resby was burned at Perth, Scotland, in 1407. Hellish Mother church was busily engaged in “the expansion of Christianity,” to cite the church historian Kenneth Scott Latourette.

John Huss of Bohemia (1369-1415)

Huss was born of peasant stock in Hosinetz, Bohemia. He became a lecturer in theology at the University of Prague (1398) and was ordained to the priesthood in 1401. He translated the writings of John Wycliffe into his native tongue and was promptly branded as a heretic by Hellish Mother church. His followers were called “Hussites” (see chapter 10, notes 39-40), and at one time nearly the whole nation (Czechoslovakia) followed him. Huss was excommunicated by the pope, but he continued to preach and write. In 1414 he was summoned before the Council of Constance. Though promised safe conduct there and back by the emperor and by the pope (Sigismund and Pope John XXIII), he was arrested, thrown in prison, hastily tried, and then burned at the stake (1415). The homicidal Catholic cutthroats who executed him could not plead that he was an Arian, a Bogomile, or a Paterine, nor could they pin the damning title of Albigensian or Manichaean on him (chapter 12, notes 96-105), although it is certain that he got his slant on Biblical truth from those groups while in Bohemia; Bohemia was one of the main headquarters of the Waldenses.150 Huss’s “heresy” wac that he ejected IhfiJlhskmagicof the African “mass” (see chapter 12). and he believed ULpreaching anywfiere,.not just in cathedrals and church buildings; he also denied the infallibility of the pope and went so far as to preach jhat the one “true, holy, apostolic church” could exist without cardinals, popes, or archbishops. There.seemed to be no end of his ‘ ‘blasphemies”: he even thought the church was built on Jesus Christ (the Rock, Deut. 32:4; 1 Peter 2:8) instead of Peter (Satan, Matt. 16:23). Thus, John Huss set himself clearly against the whole ultramontane theory of the church and its head.

Hellish Mother church did the only thing with John that a “HOLY, apostolic church” would do if it was truly “following in the steps of cssed Simon Peter and Blessed John the Baptist”: they burned him

at the stake. The pope’s alibi for lying to John Huss about giving him safe conduct to and from the council was amazingly simple: no one had to keep his word to a “heretic.”151 (That is, anyone who didn’t believe what a pope believed.) This “mental reservation” used by the Jesuits so effectively later,152 when they plotted to murder Abraham Lincoln, was brutally simple in practical application. It meant that any good Catholic could lie under oath, in or out of court, anytime he felt like it, if it brought “glory” (unity and power) to the Catholic church. This standard of moral conduct is just as much a part of orthodox doctrine for an orthodox Catholic in America in 1980 as it was in 1450.153

Girolamo Savonarola (1452-1498)

Savonarola was an Italian reformer born in Ferrara, Italy. He left home to enter a Dominican monastery in 1474; there he studied the Bible and the works of Augustine. Being raised on these two conflicting authorities, Savonarola never did attain to the evangelistic and Biblical level of his contemporaries (Waldenses, Lollards, Hussites, etc.); how­ever, he became a great preacher of righteousness (as Chrysostom) and spoke out boldly against the evils of Roman Catholic priests and bishops until he had Italy in an uproar. The city of Florence (northern Italy, the home of the Paterines, Waldenses, and Fratricelli) assumed the pro­portions of Calvin’s Geneva (chapter 16) under this preaching, and in a vain attempt to shut him up, Pope Alexander VI offered him a cardinal’s hat (the red hat). Savonarola replied that he would take a “red hat” all right, one made out of blood.154 During the Sardis period (“the red ones”) Savonarola had no delusions about the proper place for a Bible preaching Christian who was preaching against the sins of Rome.

Savonarola is exactly the man to notice at this time in history for his martyrdom settles once and for all the issue about “why” Catholics consistently slaughtered Christians for fifteen centuries; it also clearly shows the basic, fundamental nature of the Fascist hierarchy which rules that church.

You see, Savonarola, unlike Wycliffe and Huss, believed in all seven Catholic sacraments and was a devout Roman Catholic until the day of his death. Savonarola was not like Arnold of Brescia; to the contrary, he was as orthodox as Augustine and Athanasius. However, he made three terrible mistakes: ,

In the first place, he sympathized with the Bohemian Brethren, who were the descendants of the Bulgarians and Paulicians ’

69). Bohemia has been called “the cradle of the Reformation, aI~l these Bible believing people had just experienced a sudden swelling 1

their ranks at the time of Zizka (1420), a Bohemian soldier, and a king whose followers were known as “Taborites.” There is no doubt about the Taborites’ theology: they rejected infant baptism and didn’t accept one single teaching by any church father where it conflicted with scripture —which they HAD.157 Fifty years before Wycliffe’s Bible was printed there were four editions of the Bohemian Bible in use in Bohemia. In 1498 the Bohemian Brethren published their own Bible.

In the second place, when it came to religious liberty and love for the Bible, Savonarola would have to be called a “heretic,” for no pope loved either.15*

In the third place, Savonarola said that Pope Boniface VIII (the author of the bull Unum Sanctum) was a wicked man who began his reign like a fox and ended it like a dog.159 This blew out several fuse boxes at one time. But Savonarola went on and added that if God’s pres­ence left a pope, that pope was nothing but a “broken tool.”160 Upon this, the “Vicar of Christ” did the only thing with Savonarola that a good, godly, humble, Christian man would do: he had the preacher tortured for two months and then burned him at the stake.

When Savonarola was tied to the stake, the pope’s prelate said to him: “I separate thee from the church militant and the church trium­phant" just like he thought he could do it! To which the incorrigible evangelist replied, “Not from the church triumphant; that is not thine to do.”161 His last words were “Jesus, Jesus.” To make sure that no sympathetic bystanders might mistake his death for the death of a Chris­tian martyr (and be tempted to preserve his bones as “relics”), Savonarola’s corpse was burned to ashes, and the ashes were thrown into the Arno River.

Luther said later that it was God who “canonized” Savonarola— i.e., made a saint out of him. The moral quality of the Roman Catholic church’s spirituality is not hard to ascertain when one notes that they canonized the head of the Inquisition (Dominic) but would not canonize Savonarola.

While on the subject of canonized saints, the case of Joan of Arc is interesting. Jeanne D’Arc (1412-1431) was bom in Lorraine. She began to hear celestial voices when she was thirteen years old. In 1429, when the English were about to capture Orleans during the Hundred Years War, she heard voices telling her to come to the aid of her country. Since Rome will always take to “any old port in a storm” to maintain er unity and power, a board of priests examined Joan’s theology and ound that slf vas “Biblical” and “apostolic” and therefore able to ead troops, although King Charles VII of France considered her to be

insane.162 She was captured by the English later (or rather, captured by her own people, French Catholics, and sold to English Catholics). Since at this time the pope, with the Archbishop of Canterbury, con­trolled the Roman Catholic crown of England and the clergy,163 he did the only thing with her that a “Holy Father’’ would do: he had her burned at the stake as a witch. Twenty-five years after her death the “Holy Father” (Pope Benedict XV) realized that the church had made an infallible boo-boo (twentieth century cliche), so he garnished her sepulcher (Matt. 23:29) and reversed the opinion of the court in regards to Joan’s sorceries and “heresies.”164 An old fox always covers his tracks.

Henry of Lausanne (1090-1145)

Henry, the original pastor of the Henricians, was bom in Italy and for a time was a Benedictine monk at the monastery of Cluny. He was later arrested and imprisoned for preaching on the corruption among the Roman Catholic clergymen. He was released but expelled by his bishop. Henry went to the hotbed of heresy (southern France)165 and joined in the street preaching crusades of the followers of Peter of Bruys.166 The pope then sent high church officials into southern France to “stamp out the Henrician heresy,” and Henry was again arrested and thrown into the slammer; this time he was condemned to life impris­onment, and he died in jail.167 His followers were absorbed by the Waldenses. Both Peter of Bruys and Henry had ridiculed water baptism, the mass, and the use of images.168 Peter (1080-1126) claimed that church buildings should not be built, that the cross was not deserving of worship, and that prayers for the dead were useless.169

Since Peter of Bruys was obviously a terrible “heretic,” the pope did the only thing with Peter that a good, sincere, godly, pious, “Holy” father would do: he had Peter burned at the stake.170

Leuthard and Tanchelm of Flanders

These two gentlemen appear preaching on the streets all over Europe. They are “dark horses” as far as Newman, Schaff, and La- tourette are concerned. Leuthard was a Catharist, as Henry of Lausanne. Tanchelm preached in Flanders and denounced the vices of the clergy. He declared to the people that the sacraments administered by the corrupt priests of the Catholic church were valueless172—without perhaps know ing that this was the original position ofNovatus and the Novations (see chapter 4,5). His preaching was followed by a statement at the Cotinci of Toulouse (1119) that heretics who refused to take the sacraments v/e

<- thr-v dwelt. I

Tanchelm was a “radical” according to Norbett, but according to Dargan, “rare and persuasive gifts accompanied his preaching.”174 LaGarde says that the common people (Mark 12:37) had a respect for Tanchelm and his preaching that “bordered on idolatry.”175 Since the leaders of the Catholic church had been immersed in idolatry for eight centuries, they obviously could not stand for any competition. They did the only thing with Tanchelm that the “elect of God” (see note 23) could do: they had a Catholic priest assassinate him.176

Bruno of Segni (1049) was a noted Cathari. He was a counselor to several popes, and in the shadow of the Vatican he propagated the ancient heresy of Pre-millennialism (Chiliasm) over which Origen, Clem­ent, Eusebius, and Augustine had fought so bitterly all of their lives (chapter 7, notes 33-45). This was the first time the heresy appeared in the headquarters of a pope since the Council of Nicaea.

Robert Grosseteste (1175) also denounced the pope as the Antichrist. He preached in the open against papal abuses, and he prevented the pope from collecting the tithe of the clergy during the reign of Henry III.177

Gerald of York (1108) bitterly contended against Anselm and the “schoolmen,” and he insisted on the priesthood of the laity and no pri­macy of any Bishop of Rome.178

Eon de L ’Etoile and Arnold of Brescia followed in the wake of the Catharists, the former pillaging monasteries as he went.179

The noise became louder: the pressure rose in the cooker. Popular preachers spoke from the Bible and relied upon it solely: among them were Bernard of Thiron, Robert of Abrisse, and Vitalis of Savigny.180 The Cathari overflowed Austria, Germany, Switzerland, France, and the Balkans.

Arnold of Villanova was jailed for predicting the coming of the Anti­christ to Paris (about 1300).181 He only missed the date by about nine years (see chapter 15) and had the right country (France) but the wrong city (Avignon).

Joachim of Floris is said to have been responsible for a schism in the Franciscans and the withdrawal of the more spiritual ones from that group. Joachim called Rome “Babylon” (Rev. 17) and identified the P°pe as the Antichrist.182 He was a Chiliast like all of the early church athers except those who followed the leadership of Origen and Clement of Alexandria.

Earnest and aggressive preachers wr 3 spreading all over Italy and |^thern France. And while the scholastic^ were trying to make up their

Aether they were Nominalists or Realists and were fishing around

in the junkyards of Neo-Platonism, Aristotelianism, and dialectics, the word of God continued to be preached.

When Roger Bacon (1219-1294) came out with accusations that the Roman Catholics had corrupted the New Testament text183 and emphasized the disregard they had for the Bible as a source of knowl­edge, he was imprisoned in a monastery.184

Of the tenderfeet (see chapter 11) who stayed within the pale of Unholy Mother church (Gerson, Catherine of Siena, Ferrer, Nicolas of Cusa, et al.), St. Francis of Assisi (1182-1226) has as much claim as any to being harmless while at the same time contributing something to Biblical Christianity. Small, prodigious, evangelistic movements fol­lowed Francis wherever he went, according to LaGarde.185 Francis preached from door to door, sleeping in haylofts, witnessing in leper hospitals, and preaching on hillsides. He made tours through Italy, Syria, and Egypt, travelling barefoot many days at a time. Where he obediently followed the precepts he had borrowed from the Waldensian and Lyonist preachers, he did a certain amount of good, and of course, where he deviated from them (in order to stay out of jail), he helped spread the typical Romanist line. You see, it was the Albigenses, Lyonists, and Waldensian preachers who were “traveling evangelists,” living from hand to mouth. St. Francis imitated them. In his favor it may be said that he was contemptuously dismissed by the papal legates for trying to convert Mohammedans. Contempt from the pope’s Gestapo always indicates a man is on the right track.

Raymond Lully (1236-1315), who had a burden for the Moham­medans, was also up against the same group of Pharisees. After two trips to North Africa on his own he was stoned to death for preaching on the street. Lully (sometimes Lull) was constantly in disfavor with the popes.186

Franciscans went to Peking and Morocco, and they even accom­panied Columbus on his second journey; they were also active in the region of the Great Lakes and the St. Lawrence River before 1600. What little Biblical knowledge the Franciscans had and what little Biblical evangelism they engaged in they learned from heretics.187 Within a few months following the death of Francis, as in the case of St. Pat, the majority of his teachings were revised and brought in line with Catholic heresy; they were perverted by the schoolmen and then enforced in the monasteries by the pope’s Gestapo.188 Pope Gregory IX canonized Francis in 1229, but in less than forty years Pope Alexander began to destroy his work while reverencing him as a saint (see Patrick, Coluni a, et al.). William of Ockham was the only schoolman who held to e

Hildegard (1148) was a Catholic mystic and a pro-Catharist. She lamented the low condition of the clergy and told her hearers to look to Jesus Christ for salvation instead of the Catholic priests.190

Eberhard II, Archbishop of Salzburg (1200-1246), said that the papacy was the “little horn’’ of Daniel 8:9-13. Eberhard was the first man to show how the papacy developed from pagan Rome.191 The arch­bishop, of course, was seated dead center in the heart of “the hotbed of heresy”—the region around Bohemia and Bavaria that had been sat­urated with Bible believing witnesses from 300-800 A.D.

Berthold of Rumania (1210-1272)

Berthold of Ratisbon (Berthold Von Regensburg) was an itinerant Franciscan evangelist. He had larger crowds coming to hear him preach than those who heard Whitefield or Moody in the eighteenth and nine­teenth centuries (sometimes as many as sixty thousand). Berthold exalted Christ as the only Saviour from an everlasting hell; he scorned the cheats, the fakirs, the dicers and dancers, the lazy, and the gluttonous. Dargan describes his preaching as “fresh...vivid...sometimes coarse.”192 He spoke three languages (German, Slavic, and Latin), and although he was not a real “heretic” or “dissenter” in the eyes of the hierarchy—that is, he was not Biblical enough to upset the apostates—he still preached against indulgences and told his audience that praying to the saints and trying to get help from Mary was wasted time.193

Bernardino of Siena (1380-1444) preached, and Dargan says that he used a little “sensationalism” in his preaching194 because he illustrated his sermons with chalk talks.

John Ruysbroeck preached in the Netherlands. Jean Charlier and John Veghe preached the gospel in Paris.193 Groot was a traveling evangelist.

During this period (1200-1500) the Waldenses were all over the Continent, coming mainly from southeastern Germany (Moravia, Bohemia, and Bavaria). They were required to memorize two Gospels and to be able to preach in two languages before they were ordained.196 The might of popedom could not stop them. They swarmed all over Italy, Austria, and the Piedmont into France, where later they were called Huguenots. Europe became a powder keg, and through no fault of scholarship, politics, bulls, councils, or the “R't >ssance.” The Waldenses were “lay evangelists,” and they distributed scriptures to the people as they went. Their work was so potent that national tongues finally displaced Latin as the languages of the pulpits.197 Despite all e scholastics could do, despite all of the “secondary separation” behind

the barbed wire fences of the “Christian universities,” and despite ail of the religious chicanery of Rome, the Bible continued to be preached throughout the land; it determined to a large extent the future destiny of the Roman church.

Following the destruction of St. Francis’s work came historical land­marks: the Black Death (1340-1355) and the Babylonian Captivity of the Church (chapter 15, notes 57-58), which witnessed two popes calling each other “Antichrist.”198 “Antichrist” was not a theme of Scholastic theology; it was not connected with the revival of arts and learning; it was not connected with the Crusades; it was not connected with “reli­able translations” recommended by “godly monks.” Antichrist was the theme of the STREET PREACHING, Bible believing evangelists who preached from the book of Revelation. You see, the Waldenses had taught from the start that all sinners who obeyed the Roman church were DAMNED.199 The popes were evidently not the only ones who had ideas about who was “anathema” and who wasn’t.

The real issue, then, in the Dark Ages became clearer by the minute after the return of the crusaders. It was connected with the Bible and street preaching; it had nothing to do with the Renaissance, the merchants’ “guilds,” nationalism, or Scholasticism. It was not even connected with Christology or “Manichaeanism.” The real issue was related to the commandments of God given in an authoritative Book: the commission to go into all the world and preach the gospel. That authoritative Book—the absolute and final authority—identified the Roman Catholic church as a PROSTITUTE (Rev. 17).

Meister Eckhart (1260-1327)

Eckhart was a member of that class of introspective saints we call “mystics,” one who majors in the inner, devotional life of the believer (Watchman Nee, Ruth Paxton, Andrew Murray, Keswick Convention, et al.). He was the earliest theologian to write in German. He was accused of heresy by Henry of Vimeburg, the Archbishop of Cologne, in 1325. In a bull dated March 17, 1329, Pope John XXII announced that/i/te^ of Eckhart’s teachings were heretical and eleven had at least the 'savor of heresy.”200 (By now the reader should have mastered thoroughly the doctrine of “heresy” when identified as such by any Roman Catholic. Heresy, to a Catholic, is anti-Catholic truth found in the Bible.) Eckhart s “heresy” was that he did not dwell on the sacraments and the authority of the church and that he taught that good works could sanctify nothing, holy living comes from holy being, and righteous acts do not make on righteous (Rom. 3-10).201 Such a teaching set Eckhart (also Ekha

against the entire sacramental system of the church. According to the Council of Trent later (1545-1546), Eckhart was cursed of God. You see, the form and content of Eckhart’s teaching had a tendency to turn people from the authority of the Catholic priesthood and the ritual legal­ism of the sacraments to the Holy Spirit HIMSELF: hence the charge of “heresy.”

You must understand that while all of these charges were being hurled about, the popes themselves believed they had a piece of Noah’s ark, some drops of sweat that Christ sweat in Gethsemane, a full bottle of Mary’s milk, some earth from a field where God made Adam, Mary’s girdle, straw from the manger, and pieces of a stone where Christ sat when He wept over Jerusalem.202 This was the deluded bunch of idiots who referred to humanists like John Colet, Ulrich Von Hutten, Hegius, Wimpheling, Trithemius, Huisman, and Sir Thomas More as “heretics. ” There are “heretics,” and then there are heretics.

The constant eruption of heretics between 1200 and 1500 A.D. who needed to be burned at the stake should have been a warning to any church historian that there was a great movement going on underground during this period that was not connected with anti-church history (the history of the Roman Catholic church). What was going on was the result of the preaching of Cathari and Waldenses, Albigenses and Bohe­mian Brethren, who were not only calling the pope Antichrist (see below) but were distributing Bibles and tracts with scriptural portions on them all over the empire. No pope could sit easily on his Roman throne any more; there was too much “light.”

Before 1520 no less than 199 printed editions of Gutenberg’s Bible were in circulation: 156 in Latin, 17 in German, 11 in Italian, 2 in Bohe­mian, and 1 in Russian. Down to the fifteenth century, 203 manuscripts can be found, which include ten complete New and Old I .aments in German.203 There was a complete French version coming out of the Albigensian stronghold in southeast France (Lyons, note 166) by 1477, and Tyndale’s “heretical” version (chapter 16) was on the market at a rate of six thousand copies in a single edition (1525-1526). Sooner or later “adjustments” would have to be made by the popes to cover up their phony authority. Although Tyndale belongs properly to the Phil­adelphia church period of history (1500-1900; Rev. 3:8), it is interesting to note that he suffers exactly the same fate at the hands of the Papists t at Savonarola and John Huss suffered earlier: he was burned at the stake.

The first English monarch who regularly burned “heretics” at the stake was Henry IV(1399). In 1401 he had immoral laws passed making

capital punishment the sentence for anyone disagreeing with the Roman Catholic pope in ANY matter. English sheriffs were forced to take an oath that they would harass and persecute every Bible believer in England.204 The pope at this time dictated English law, and the Catholic Archbishop Chickeley said openly (1416) that killing heretics ought to be “the principle CARE of the church,” not the spiritual conversion of anyone.

When John Badly, a Lollard, was brought before Archbishop Arundel (March 1, 1409), he said that if every wafer in the sacraments was Christ’s veritable body, then there would be twenty thousand gods in England. For this sound piece of scriptural logic he was bound and burned at the stake.205

John Florence, accused of heresy, renounced his “Wycliffism” but was still whipped for three Sundays before the congregation of Norwich Cathedral.206

During this terrible period (fourteenth and fifteenth centuries) the English people were nothing but serfs and peons under the control of a demoniac despot at Rome. When a “heretic” was condemned, the church bells would toll, and a priest would seize a lighted candle from the altar and cry out, “Just as this candle is deprived of its light, so let him be deprived of his soul in hell.”207 In the Dark Ages, Roman Catholics had one main job: putting out lights as fast as they were turned on (chapter 10, notes 97-101).

When Henry VIII and his bishops framed the “Six Article Acts” they said simply and as blasphemously as the popes whom they learned from that if any Christian denied that the mass was not a reincarnation of the literal corpse of Jesus Christ, that he should be burned to death.208

To add a touch of the theatrical to their atrocities the Catholics forced Tylesworth’s only daughter to take a brand and set fire to a pile which consumed her own father.209 He was burned at Amersham in 1506. The SS men at Dachau (1940) and the Communists on the Gulag Archipelago (1930-1960) never improved on that.

The only “light” that Roman Catholics kindled in the Dark Ages (that is, those who stayed in fellowship with the “one, unholy, apostate whore”—Rev. 17:1) were the lights that came from bonfires where Bible believers were being assassinated. The Holy Spirit is not speaking face­tiously when He says this female Whore was not only drinking the filth­iness of her own fornication (Rev. 17:4) but was also “drunken with the blood of the saints, and with the blood of the martyrs of Jesus (Rev. 17:6). In the Bible she is not Christ’s bride—that is the private interpretation of Roman Catholics—she is Satan's bride, and she rides

a “beast” who sports the names of BLASPHEMY (Rev. 17:3). Pagan Rome could never compete with papal Rome when it came to slaugh­tering Christians.

From the standpoint of the “expansion of Christianity” we may say of this period that the motive for expansion was world domination; the tools for expansion were blackmail, murder, interdictions, and excommunication (see chapter 13, notes 29-33); the weapons of expan­sion were fire and the sword; and the “missionaries” were the church state officials who were subservient to a foreign government (Rome) instead of the Lord Jesus Christ.

Only a continental disaster could follow this atrocious treatment of human beings. Outstripping every gang of perverted butchers in the history of slaughter, with the possible exception of the Mongol hordes under Genghis Khan and Tamerlane, the Roman Catholics of 1000-1500 A.D. behaved exactly as any Bible believer would expect them to behave if they ever got into a position of absolute power. All totalitarian systems are corrupt: power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. If a man can learn nothing from church history but that one, basic truth, he will have his guard up at any conference table where a Communist or a Catholic or a Fascist or a Socialist has met him in “detente” to “help mankind out” and “end man’s inhumanity to man,” etc. All four systems are totalitarian dictatorships or oligarchies.210

There are other famous characters of this time: John Tauler, John Colet, John Reuchlin, and Geiler of Strasbourg; and we shallvMefly examine them later. However, we need to go back again into anti -nurch history and examine the political and cultural climate of the Sardis period. In the very middle of this period there was a split in the Roman Catholic church that was the scandal of the Middle Ages; to understand it one should know something about the Machiavellian power politics which developed in Europe as the popes sought to establish themselves as supreme dictators of the western world. When the pope claimed immu­nity from the laws of God and man,211 he was honored as a “Holy Father” by over twenty million superstitious pagans; when Adolph Hitler asked for unconditional obedience,212 without requiring anyone to call him “holy father,” he was looked upon as a madman.

The kings of Europe were not as dumb as they looked; they knew a competitor when they saw one. All power-mad demagogues do. They recognized in the pope a first-class enemy so powerful that they would do well to “go along with him” as far as they could without antagonizing him. Stalin and Molotov felt the same way about their “friendly” treaty with Ribbentrop and Adolph (1939). Peaceful terms were not negotiated

on the basis of mutual trust or “peaceful coexistence” but rather on the grounds of mutual terror. No pope wanted a king at the head of an army sailing down to Rome and throwing him in the slammer (see chapter 15); conversely, no king wanted an assassin’s arrow or dagger sliding into his thoracic cage (spare ribs) because some pope had prom­ised “remission of sins” to a Catholic criminal willing to commit mur­der. The rise, then, of the European kings in this period posed a threat to a pope who—knowing on which side his bread was buttered—was willing to make any concession to a king as long as the Catholic church was allowed complete freedom to operate in that nation (see John Paul II, 1979, from Communist Poland, and the Moscow Rome Axis, 1978-1990). Selling God and the Bible out for “favors” is the standard operating procedure for a religious whore (Rev. 17:5). Under the lead­ership of demoniac popes, the Roman Catholics sold their birthright (Heb. 12:16) for a mess of pottage, for as John the apostle says, “the world passeth away, and the lusts thereof’ (1 John 2:17). When you love this present world, like most Catholics do, you have to sell heaven out to keep it (2 Tim. 4:10).

The real beginnings of this “button, button, who’s got the button?” operation began with Constantine; it continued under Clovis and accel­erated under Charlemagne. This contest between worldly rulers who were of the world, by the world, and for the world, and to whom the world listened (1 John 4:5), was now about the erupt into a public spec­tacle; it belongs to the realm of anti-church history, since all of the popes, cardinals, archbishops, monks, nuns, and priests have nothing to do with the New Testament church to start with. Because they were all connected with the power play in the “power structure” of the world system, the world listened to them (1 John). The monks and nuns, as we have noted (chapter 11), were those who had fled to the hideouts for Christians who wanted to appear “godly” or “UNWORLDLY while staying in communion with the most depraved, godless, fleshy, worldly system the world has ever seen: Hellish Mother church.

ENGLAND

PARIS

GREEK ORTHODOX

FRANCE

ARAGON

ROME1

CASTILE

MOSLEM STATES

AVIGNON

NAVARRE •

ORTHODOX

HOLY ROMAN EMPIRE

BACKING THE ROMAN POPE AS PETER’S SUCCESSOR BACKING THE FRENCH POPE AT AVIGNON

UNDECIDED ABOUT WHICH POPE WAS THE VICAR

THE GREAT CHURCH SPLIT WITH 2 AND 3 POPES CALLING EACH OTHER “ANTI-CHRIST”

A.D. 1309—1379

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Anti-Church History

“With him is strength and wisdom: the deceived and the deceiver are his. He leadeth counsellors away spoiled, and maketh the judges fools. He looseth the bonds of kings, and girdeth their loins with a girdle...He poureth con­tempt upon princes, and weakeneth the strength of the > mighty.” Job 12:16-18, 2f

Henry III, the king of Germany (1039-1056), was the Holy Roman Emperor from 1046-1056. He went to Rome in 1046 and called a council that put an end to three rival “vicars of Christ” (Sylvester III, Benedict IX, and Gregory VI). Since “apostolic succession” from “blessed Simon Peter” could very well go in any direction, depending upon who had the biggest army to back him up, a fourth pope was drummed up out of thin air (Clement II). Henry put Clement II up in the high chair and tucked his bib in; in return for this favor, Clement promptly crowned Henry III (chapter 12, note 68) as “Emperor crowned by God,” etc. Since this “leapfrog” operation was pleasant to all involved, Henry took the next jump and appointed the next four popes.

His successor, Henry IV (1050-1106), was a German king bom in Prussia. Having conquered the Saxons in 1075, he made the mistake of thinking he could appoint his own bishops, abbots, and archbishops: I mean, after all, didn’t Henry III appoint “popes”? But Henry over­stepped himself, for now the District Court Judges in Germany, under the HEW at Rome, had decided that only a foreigner could run Germany: Rome was to appoint the bishops, etc. When the pope threatened Hank with excommunication, Hank called a Council at Worms (1076) and excommunicated Pope Gregory on the grounds of witchcraft, treason, impurity, making a covenant with the devil, etc. (which, in the light of the past and subsequent history of the popes, was probably more truth than fiction).' On the next day Gregory (Hildebrand) excommu­

nicated the Holy Roman Emperor in the name of St. Peter.2 Gregory (alias Hildebrand) piously quoted Matthew 16:18 just like he wanted someone to think he was a Bible believer. Along with taking Henry off of the SS roll, Gregory kicked out all of the German and Italian bishops from the church who had met with Henry at Worms.3

At this time the remembrance of Charlie’s Academy Award winning show in the Super Bowl (chapter 12, note 68) came in handy, for public sentiment turned against the German emperor when all of his subjects remembered that, after all, the one who sets kings on their thrones surely has the power to dethrone them, for he was “God” when he crowned them. This power was obviously Gregory’s because, surely, when the pope crowned Charlie (Christmas, 800 A.D.), all of his church members had claimed that he was “God” (chapter 12, note 69). So Henry’s own subjects decided—without reference to any Biblical authority or Bible text or Bible teaching or Bible truth—that Henry should repent of his sins and submit to the pope. It was decide that he should seek “absolu­tion” in twelve months or else forfeit his crown (1076 A.D.). Well, Henry was simply f-u-u-rious! but there was nothing he could do about it; so, in the winter of 1077, Henry publicly acted in such a way as to encourage all future kings to collapse at the feet of a Fascist dictator in humble submission. Accompanied by his wife and son and one servant, Henry took out across the Alps to Canossa (a city in north Italy, south of Reggio) and declared his willingness to submit to the holy papa if papa would release him from the “interdict” (chapter 13, notes 30-31). Gregory (alias Hildebrand) knew when he had the cat in the bag, so he refused to grant Henry absolution until Henry was willing to confess that all kings had to give their crowns to the pope for distribution as he saw fit.

Henry abased himself to the ground and knocked at the pope’s gate­way for three days, with bare feet and head, shivering in the snow. After three days the inner gate was opened and Hank rushed in to his “benefactor” crying, “Spare me, Holy Father, spare me!” The Holy Father (John 17:11!) absolved the sucker and have him an “apostolic blessing” and a Baalite mass. After some fatherly warnings he let Hank go home.

The result of this disgusting scene was a civil war in Germany and Italy.4 After three years of bloody fighting between Henry and Rudolph (the Duke of Swabia), Gregory (“his holiness,” etc.) magnanimously gave Germany to Rudolph (his armies were on top at that time) and kept Italy for himself.5 When that piece of “good news" got out, thirty German and Italian bishops promptly met at Brixen in the Tyrol (1080)

and kicked Greg off the papal throne again (twenty-seven bishops signed the document).

“The worm [Henry] could turn.”

This time Hank didn’t play hanky-panky. He crossed the Alps with an army instead of one servant (see above) and arrested the old, two-faced trouble maker at Rome and pitched him into the hoosegow (1084). How­ever, doing time in the slammer didn’t teach Gregory anything: the dirty, old hypocrite was just as “godly” and as “pious” as Augustine. He claimed to the end that he was “not afraid of the threats of the wicked and would rather sacrifice his life than consent to EVIL. ”6 Considering what Roman Catholic standards were for good and evil by this time, no thoughtful man would have taken Gregory seriously.

Henry now proceeded to put Wibert on St. Peter’s throne aft* he conquered Rome (June 28, 1083) and let old Gregory hurl anathemas around like popcorn and confetti. After a while Gregory (alias Hilde­brand) saw that “sticks and stones would break Hank’s bones, but names would never hurt him,” so he sent for a Norman chief named Wiscard (Robert Guiscard) to help him. Wiscard came with thirty thousand infan­trymen and six thousand horsemen, among whom were Saracens and Lombards. He liberated the pope all right (May 1084), but Gregory’s tactics backfired on him. Wiscard and his troops pillaged the city of Rome, raped and slaughtered many of the pope’s supporters, as well as his enemies, and then sold several thousand good “Catholics” into slavery.7

But “never say die,” so Gregory (a pope in exile in Salerno) still spit out bans and damns against Henry, who probably went grouse hunt­ing or falconing. After causing the raping, robbery, and murder of hun­dreds of his subjects in Rome, and the death and destruction of thousands of Germans outside of Italy, Gregory (“Hildebrand” in most histories) said, “I have loved righteousness and hated iniquity, therefore I die in exile.”8 To which one of his deluded flunkies said, “Nay, in exile thou canst not die who as the Vicar of Christ and His apostles hast re­ceived ALL THE NATIONS for thine inheritance.”9 Thus the God­forsaken rascal had stolen the promise of Psalm 2:8 given to JESUS CHRIST (by God the Father)—to be fulfilled in the Millennium—and applied it to a power-mad, egotistical, mortal sinner. But such are the ways of those deluded fanatics who took Augustine to be a Bible scholar (chapter 10, notes 76-77).

Thomas a Becket and King Henry II of England belong to the papal realm of fairyland “church history.” As a result of the constant friction between church and state (see The Sure Word of Prophecy, 1969), there

arose a situation in England where either an English king or a Roman dictator had to be obeyed. The story is well-known, being propagated with pious sentiments down through the ages to make people feel deeply disturbed over the murder of one Catholic. However, thousands of mur­dered Christians (see the previous chapter) have never been made much of by the press, radio, television, newspapers, or movies. Thomas a Becket stands out in the prostitute press and theater world as a “great” (chapter 14, notes 120-131) martyr because, after all, he did stand up for Roman policies in Great Britain. You understand, it is a sin to stand up for ENGLISH policies in Ireland (Avro Manhattan, Religious Terror in Ireland, 1972); it is also a grievous sin (yea, “mortal sin”!) to stand up for Communist policies in SPAIN (Spanish Civil War, 1936). How­ever, it is always proper to promote and encourage and defend ROMAN policies in Mexico, South America, Spain, Ireland, England, Scotland, Germany, or the United States. With two standards of authority (chapter 5, note 42) one can alter foreign policy to match the odds: you simply reshuffle the deck if you don’t get dealt the right hand the first ten times.

Thomas a Becket (1118-1170) was born in London and became the Archbishop of Canterbury (chapter 12, notes 21-22), the main source of England’s seditions, civil wars, phony Bibles, church splits, and burn­ing of Lollards (see chapter 14). In 1155 King Henry II raised Thomas to the chancellorship of England, and until he became archbishop he was a bosom friend to Henry. Becket led troops into battle (Toulouse), attacked castles, razed towns, burned down houses, and carried out car­nage in general in the king’s service.10 According to some writers, he engaged in a moderate amount of immorality, drinking, feasts, and obscene jesting with the king,11 although pro-Catholic writers vigorously deny this (Philip Schaff, for instance) and insist that the cruelty he showed when leading troops was “quite compatible with medieval conceptions of piety and charity,” etc.12 That is, it was non-Biblical, non-Christian, pagan, and not worthy of being mentioned in any true history of “the church.”

When Henry installed Thomas as archbishop, Tommy warned him that he was about to lose a friend. Thomas was ordained and immediately acknowledged Alexander III as the rightful pope (Alexander granted indulgences for people who killed Bible believing Christians13). Then Tommy underwent a radical change; he daily washed the bare feet of thirteen beggars, he began to whip himself to pay for his sins, he dressed in sackcloth infested with vermin, he fed on roots, and he began to pro mote priestcraft.14 Of this “turn for the better,” Schaff says that it was only “unnatural and artificial.” A more honest observer might add that

it was non-Biblical, non-Christian, and completely contrary to everything found in the New Testament (Col. 2:20-23, Eph. 2:8-9). Tommy out- poped the pope when it came to ecclesiastical Pharisaism. However! He was careful never to rebuke his old buddy Hank for his sins against God and the Bible: he only mentions Hank’s actions against the politics of the Roman hierarchy.15

Secular taxation was the first rupture that put Tommy and Hank at “loggerheads” with each other. Since both of them represented a totalitarian system (an absolute monarchy versus an absolute poparchy), they eventually had to collide. Henry decided that if his people were taxed that the tax money should go to the English government (hinf f) instead of the Catholic church (the pope). Thomas, employed by the pope, naturally thought that tax money should go to the church, because, really, didn’t he draw his support from the church? In Thomas’s way of thinking, tax money should be used for Catholic schools, Catholic buses, Catholic nuns in the public school system, and it should be side­tracked in CARE packages to go to Catholic populations, etc. Thomas, therefore, immediately informed the king that England was “THOMAS’S LAND”—not the king’s.16 This probably came as quite a shock to Henry, who would have had a hard time conceiving of a whole kingdom belonging to a man with no more royal blood in him than a chimney sweep.

The next thing that happened was that a certain clerk (Philip of Broi) was acquitted of a murder charge in a bishops’ court because he was working for the bishops; he escaped trial by a civil court, although he murdered a citizen. In keeping with Catholic practice, “holy mother church” reserved for herself the right to judge her own clerics; that way she could let any killer off who might be useful later in overthrowing a government, and she could also kill off any of her “own” who might be picking up “heretical” ideas like those of the Lollards and the Bohe­mian Brethren. As a matter of fact, a court of bishops never sent any Catholic cleric to death for any crime except ' ‘heresy. ’ ’*7 Murder, adul­tery, rape, fornication, embezzlement, kidnapping, lying, stealing, fraud, and drunkenness were minor offences compared with teaching the Bible. Only flagellation, imprisonment, and degradation were passed out for other offences. When King Henry demanded that the murderer be tried where all murderers were tried—in a civil court—Thomas went to bat for the local Mafia and pleaded Nahum 1:9 and 1 Samuel 1-2-3 as scrip­tural proof that clerics were exceptions. Quite naturally, Thomas quoted the fifth column or Origen’s Hexapla,1* known to superstitious students, then as now, as “the Septuagint.” Incensed at Thomas’s sedition, Henry

drew up sixteen statutes called “The Clarendon Constitutions’’ (1164), which state, in effect, that clergymen are subject to the law of the land like anyone else (Rom. 13:1), that the church is not an independent foreign power with the right to overthrow the laws of nations, and that the king has the power to appoint his own bishops in his own country. Becket himself violated civil law and was summoned before a council. He appealed to the pope to help him “beat the rap,”19 and then, in case help was late in coming, Thomas snuck out of the land at night and fled for his life to France, where he spent six years in exile.

As soon as Thomas checked out, Henry confiscated all of his wealth (archbishops all become extremely wealthy after their “vows of pov­erty,” “foot-washing,” etc.), which was considerable. King Louis of France—an ardent persecutor of Albigenses and Waldenses—-spoke highly of Thomas and recommended him to the pope as a man who could be trusted to stir up and sustain sedition in England. So, the pope at this time in France (not Rome) gave back to Tommy all of his wealth and land in England (not in France, where Tommy was) that Henry had confiscated when Tommy took it on the lam. Tommy (in France, not England) then proceeded to excommunicate all Englishmen who agreed with the Constitutions of Clarendon and added that all Roman Catholic priests were the MASTERS of kings.20 Henry told him to “go jump in the lake.”

Well, after prolonged negotiations with the papal court and the king, Becket returned to England because by now, due to papal propaganda through the local priests, nunneries, and monasteries in England, Becket was able to return like Napoleon from Elba or MacArthur from Australia, or more properly, like Hitler to Vienna (1938). But once back, Thomas had to deal with the priests and prelates he had excommunicated when he was in France (see above). Being just as crafty as Thomas, they went to the king—who was then in a castle in Bayeux, Normandy—and “scouted him out” for his feelings about Thomas. After sensing the king’s temper and attitude, four of them went, without instructions, to Saltwood, England, and there they collected a band of a dozen armed men. They reached St. Augustine’s Abbey outside of the walls of Canterbury (chapter 12, notes 21-22) on December 29. They demanded from Thomas that he absolve all of the Englishmen whom he had excom­municated when he was hobnobbing with the pope in France. Becket refused on the grounds that the pope (not God) was his Lord and that he was obeying “God” (the pope) by defying the laws of the English kingdom (Rom. 13:1). That is, he could have saved his life if he had obeyed God (Rom. 13:1) instead of the pope. Thomas chose sacrilege

instead. This time his Bible rejecting idolatry and rebellion against the direct commandments of God (Rom. 13:1-4) cost him his life.

A few minutes before five the vesper bell tolled for “mass,” and Becket went to the high altar; he was followed by some knights who were clad in mail and carried drawn swords. The knights tried to drag him out of the sanctuary, but he braced himself against some pillars between “the altars of the Virgin” and “St. Benedict,” and while he was being struck down with swords and axes, he cried, “Lord receive my spirit.”21 However, just before saying this he told three whopping big lies: he called the Roman Catholic hierarchy “the church of God” (which it has not been, nor ever shall be); he called his own disobedience to the laws of England a “means for obtaining PEACE and LIBERTY” (same old gas); and, finally, Thomas pretended that the papal hierarchy he was dying for was Christ’s church, which it was not, nor ever shall be, world without end, amen.

However, the death of this one Bible perverting Catholic received more publicity and more sympathy than the massacre of 100,000 Bible believing people in France (see chapters 14, 17) and Holland. Miracles were supposed to have taken place in Becket’s room after his death; his fanatical partners in the hierarchy used Matthew 11:5 (!) as a proof text,22 carefully omitting, however, the last nine words in the verse— the last nine words refer to the preaching of the Gospel (chapter 7, note 75).

Becket was naturally canonized by Alexander III (while he was kill­ing Christians), as he saw the tide was now moving in his direction, and this put such a bind on Henry that he had to roll around in sackcloth and ashes a few days and whip himself to prove that he had no part in the assassination. Ultimately, Henry had to promise the pope every­thing short of his soul that he would prove he was “a true son of the faith,” so he went around in a woolen shirt, with bleeding feet, kissing sacred stones and crying on the crypt, etc.,23 in order to hold his kingdom together; it held.

By this highly publicized stage show, Canterbury became the great­est sacred spot on the globe outside of Rome and Jerusalem; everyone from tinkers and mechanics to priests, nobles, and barons came there; plenary indulgences were granted to pilgrims. The offerings to “Saint” Thomas exceeded those given to any other saint—even to the Holy Virgin.24

In short, the theatrical fiasco was a howling success. Pope Alexander in France had succeeded in finding a chump who was gullible enough to fight his battle in England for him under the illusion that he was serving

God—exactly as the French kings were enlisted to kill Bible believers for him under the same illusion (John 16:2)—and he got him to lay down his life to create a rallying point for disobedience to English law and for dictatorial control over the populace of Europe. When Admiral Coligny was murdered (St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre, August 18, 1572) by Catholic butchers, no crypt was erected, no pilgrimages were made to his tomb, no indulgences were granted to anyone but his killers, and “offerings” were out of the question. Admiral Coligny had the misfortune to be a Bible believing Huguenot instead of a papal wor­shipping politician.

Moral: if you get murdered by Catholics in France, you don’t get a by-line on the fourth page; if you get murdered by anti-Catholics in England, you get the whole front page for the next five hundred years.

The next chump into the ring was King John of England, but this time the pope (Innocent III, the killer of the Albigenses) failed to pick a winner. Pope Innocent came into conflict with John over the successor to Archbishop Hubert of Canterbury (chapter 12, notes 21-22). Stephen Langton got it, and King Johnny didn’t like Stevie, so he confiscated all the property of Canterbury chapel and expelled the monks. Innocent III threatened an interdict, which he not only placed on England, but he added a little curse on Johnny just to make it stick.25 In 1212 the pope declared the throne of England to be vacant, as he (the pope) was “god,” and “God” set up “the powers that be” (chapter 14, note 211). By 1214 John had fallen into line, and on May 15, 1213, he signed over the entire British Empire to the pope: “We do freely offer and grant to.. .the holy Roman Church our MOTHER.. .and to the Pope and his catholic successors THE WHOLE REALM OF ENGLAND.”26 What a modern pope wouldn’t give to get a present like that for Christ­mas! One could not ask for a better deal, and the pope was highly pleased with it—until a yewe after he lifted the interdict. At that time (June 15, 1215) John's nobles and many of his bishops ganged up on him and placed before him the first declaration of independence known to the English people: they made him sign the Magna Charta. Among other things, it said that a man was entitled to a trial by jury, that he could not be incarcerated for months at a time waiting for trial, and that, above all, the king couldn’t levy taxes against ANYONE anymore until a vote had been given by a common council of the realm.2''

That tied the rag on the bush.

Johnny phoned up his erstwhile buddy Pope Innocent Ill and said, "I goofed...I done signed a piece of paper that...." (Well, it wasn t exactly like that, but you get the idea). Innocent, recognizing immediately

that anyone’s liberty was detrimental to Catholicism, absolved John of his oath that he had sworn28 when signing the paper because, obviously, the Magna Charta would eventually be the death of every pope as well as every king. After all, both of them were Fascist dictators propagating a totalitarian system. Any independent liberties granted to anyone would be a threat to both of them, so Pope Innocent (what a name) now took sides with the man he had just cursed and interdicted. When you have two standards of authority, you can always switch back and forth, so both of them are only “relative”: relative to what you are trying to obtain, since YOU are the final authority (chapter 5, note 42). Pope Innocent declared the Magna Charta “null and void for all time,”29 absolved John of his oath, cursed all the prelates who sided with the Charta, put England under a papal ban, and then kicked the bucket.

Now, lest the reader should think we are speaking of church history with tongue in cheek, let him note that there is no more resemblance between the conduct of Henry, Tommy, Johnny, or Pope Innocent (given above) and the conduct of a New Testament Christian than there is be­tween the conduct of a pogrom and a Bible conference. No one is dealing with church history in describing any of the things listed above. He is dealing with papal politics and ambitions versus monarchial nation­alism. Church history is completely out of the question.

Anti-church history would also properly include a brief examination of the university system (Scholasticism) that arose in Europe following the Crusades. This represented the “Culture” which followed the Bible preaching and teaching of the Albigenses, Waldenses, Poor Men of Lyons, Lollards, etc. Culture, in this case, amounted to the theological speculations of unsaved philosophers who were counting on baby sprin­kling to give them the new birth.

Again, one can find “good” coming from “evil” (chapter 5), if he looks close enough for it, but when he has to look as hard as we are having to look in the Dark Ages to find a New Testament witness, there is something obviously wrong with the “stage lighting.” Where someone has thrown the main breaker, we are left to matches and flash­lights to find something on the stage that resembles church history. There is nothing about the beliefs or teachings of Anselm, Abelard, Duns Scotus, Aquinas, or Bonaventure that would make anyone familiar with the Bible think that any of them were connected with New Testament Christianity.

The universities were a cultural product of the Bible rejecting Cath­olic mind; like Charlemagne’s culture, they were a substitute for believ­ing the Book and going by it. They first arose in Italy (Salerno and

Bologna) and were followed by schools in Paris, Prague, Vienna, Erfurt, Heidelberg, Cologne, and Glasgow. The ones at Toulouse and Rome were founded by papal bulls; the ones at Padua, Oxford, and Cambridge were not under a papal or royal charter. The Spanish universities (Salamanca, Seville, and Valencia) were founded by the kings of Castile. University (universitas vestra) means “your body’’ or “all of you.” It was a kind of UNIVERSAL (“Catholic”) way of saying “all of you who make up the body.” Four faculties were taught: philosophy (see Col. 2:8), law (Luke 11:46), medicine, and theology; there were three ranks of degrees which followed the Jewish degrees (Rab, Rabbi, and Rabbak) after Origen’s North African system (chapter 5, notes 45-46): bachelor, licentiate, and doctor, which corresponds to the three grades of the merchant’s guilds: apprentice, assistant (journeyman), and master. Lectures were given in Latin; Paris, Bologna, and Oxford were the three main universities.

The big bull-shooting sessions that went on in these Catholic schools had to do with Plato and Aristotle (see Col. 2:8 and comments in that commentary), exactly as the mess had gone on in Alexandria between 100-400 A.D. Realism and nominalism became the cute, little names for the cute, little games that the Alexandrian Cult played while their church was burning, stabbing, drowning, racking, whipping, impris­oning, exiling, and strangling Bible believing Christians (1000-1400 A.D.).

Anselm (1033-1109) was a perfect example of Alexandrian culture preserved by the Cult: he said that there were two courses of knowledge and both agreed with a third: that is, two conflicting authorities (chapter 4, note 5), with the third playing “god” as the decisive authority. This third authority to Anselm was philosophy (Col. 2:8). We may scratch Anselm if we have learned anything from history.

Peter Abelard (1079-1142) was bold enough to say that the scriptures had no errors in them30 and that some of the church fathers had erred, so he was promptly accused of “Sabellianism” (chapter 9, notes 12-13). He got around the charges, however, by holding to infant baptism, the black magic of the mass, etc., which, after all, were the big issues any­way. Sabellianism was never a real issue any more than Arianism or “Monophysitism” or Gay Liberation (chapter 14, notes 144-146).

Peter the Lombard (1100-1160) was the father of systematic theology in the Roman church and the “greatest” (chapter 14, notes 121-131) teacher and representative of scholastic theology. He believed in bap tismal regeneration by sprinkling babies, the literal drinking of Christ s unbloody blood at mass, no assurance of salvation till death, purgatory

the whole, sick bit. Peter the Lombard would kill a Bible believer as quick as look at him.

Thomas Aquinas (1227-1274) was an Italian Catholic from Naples. He was educated in the well-known Benedictine monastery of Monte Cassino, where he became a Dominican monk. He studied under Albertus Magnus (1200-1280), a German philosopher (Bishop of Ratisbon) who was canonized by Pope Pius XI in 1932. Thomas wrote the Summa Theologia, which is a mass of perverted scripture, distorted doctrine, tortuous rationalization, pagan philosophy, and Alexandrian hot air. He is commended by Elgin Moyer31 for his “industry” and “logical dis­cernment.” Aquinas was about as logical as Charles Darwin or Richard Nixon, but you have to say something good about any Catholic who was reputed to have been “good.” Thomas Aquinas is called by religious fanatics “the Angelic Doctor” (Doctor Angelicas) or the “Prince of the Schoolmen,” and Schaff places him next to Augustine and Origen32 (which is pretty good placement). Thomas Aquinas was a man of “rare genius,” slobbers Schaff, “a man with wisdom and purity of life,” etc. He was also one of the outstanding Bible rejecting apostates of his­tory who gave his unqualified support to the torturing and killing of “heretics” by the Inquisition.33

Professing (as Bob Jones, III; Panosian; Custer; Sumner; Rice; and Neal) to believe that the scriptures were the FINAL AUTHORITY and that the testimony of the church fathers was only “probable,”34 Thomas proceeded to dish up this fantastic imbroglio of preposterous nonsense.

1. Infants are detained in hell for the sin of Adam. If the sacrament of baptism is not given, the babies are lost forever, for there is no sal­vation without Roman Catholic water baptism.35

2. The Catholic church can save or damn anyone by giving or refus­ing to give water baptism to them.36

3. The corpse of Jesus Christ is completely whole in 150,000 wafers and 150,000 chalices every Sunday morning without there being more than one corpse.31

4. There is no Millennium, no restoration of Israel, no Judgment Seat of Christ, no Rapture, and no Tribulation.

5. The pope has the right to kill “heretics,”38 and all kings should be in subjection to the Roman Catholic “pope.”

For a man who professed to believe in the final authority of the Bible (like Machen, Warfield, Robertson, Hort, Horton, Hutson, Sumner, and Laird Harris), Thomas was about as consistent as United States foreign policy. Luther identified the Summa as “the fountain and original soup of all error and Gospel havoc,”3’ but the head of the ASV

committee of 1901 is careful to correct the German reformer by saying that Thomas Aquinas must merit our admiration for his “candor and clearness" and by his “sincerity and purity" as an ethical thinker.40 His ethics (commending an Inquisition) were about as pure as a septic tank, and he is about as “clear” on Biblical truth as Origen and Constantine.

Schaff simply was either too cowardly (which Luther was not) or too ignorant to call a spade a spade (chapter 14, notes 121-131). It would have given his church history an “anti-Roman” flavor; someone might have accused Schaff of being prejudiced if he had given God the benefit of a doubt or the Bible credit for being able to estimate a man and his work better than the “passing of time.” Schaff, as all religious evolu­tionists, believed implicitly that every dispensation ended higher than when it began (see chapter 5, notes 1-7).

William of Ockham (1300-1349) is the only Schoolman who even approached a Biblical theology. He is considered to be the last of the Scholastics. Ockham was born in Surrey, England, and studied at Oxford, which meant he was subjected to English anti-Roman Christi­anity (chapter 12, notes 10-16) long before he began to teach in Paris. Ockham taught that the Bible alone was inerrant and that a Christian should not believe ANYTHING not found in that Book, no matter who authorized it or who recommended it.41 That is to say, in the eyes of a modern, apostate Fundamentalist (1940-1990), Ockham was a “hell raising nut” trying to start a “cult” of “Bibliolators.” Human nature doesn’t change. Further, Ockham taught that the New Testament church was not the Roman Catholic hierarchy, but the “community of the faith­ful.” William flatly denied the infallibility of any pope. Consequently, Pope John XXII tried him and found him guilty of heresy and had him imprisoned.42 He was also excommunicated by Benedict XII.43

While Ockham was teaching these Bible truths, the teachings of Duns Scotus (1265-1308) were all over Europe. Duns Scotus (from whom comes the term “dunce”) taught that Mary was conceived sinless and that one must accept transubstantiation as dogma even though it couldn’t be a FACT.44

Returning to the “dog eat dog” contest between the papal Fascists and the European monarchs, we find in this corner Pope Boniface, (1294-1303) squaring off with the French King Philip "d™ ^a'r (1268-1314). All of which belongs properly to anti-church history . Dante (Divina Commedia) calls Boniface the “Prince of modern Pharisees and refers to his “Holy See” (the Vatican Hill) as “a sewer of corrup­tion”—which, one will have to admit, is not a very kindly way to talk

about the “Holy Father.” Dante graciously deposits Boniface into the lowest circle of hell with Pope Nicolas Ill and Pope Clement V, two other “Vicars of Jesus Christ,” etc.45 In Philip the Fair of France, Boniface met his match; it was sort of like Laban and Jacob trying each other out for size (Gen. 30:27-29) or like Franco and Hitler trying to work out the Gibraltar Agreements (October 1940). Like the Catholic popes, Philip was treacherous, double-tongued, imperious, and utterly unscrupulous in the use of means to secure ends; albeit, he did not demand to be called “holy father.” One might say that Philip was a “pope without a folio.”

Boniface claimed with all the modesty of the Antichrist that the Roman pontiff (himself) was “known in all the earth and ALONE is MOST HIGH over princes.”46 And, after all, this was an extremely modest viewpoint since the pagan pontiffs for five hundred years before Boniface had reserved for themselves (without blushing) the exclusive title given to God the Father by Jesus Christ (John 17:11). Philip got off to a bad start with the “most high” (see above) by taxing the French clergy so he could get enough money to fight the English. Taxing Cath­olic priests is a “no, no.” It is all right to tax Baptist, Methodist, Pres­byterian, and Lutheran ministers in America (1980-1990) and make them fill out income tax reports, but not so with the subversive agents from Rome: they are tax exempt.45

Boniface threatened to interdict Philip if he didn’t straighten up and fly right (shape up or ship out, etc.). The pope called a council and declared in a “bull” (Dec. 5, 1301) that the pope’s orders transcended those of the king of France or anyone in the kingdom of France; all citizens of France were to obey the pope in Italy instead of their own king in their own country. Hoping to bring Philip down on his knees in the snow like Henry at Canossa (notes 2-3), or at least to a groveling position on a dead priest’s grave (like Henry at Canterbury, note 23), Boniface wrote to Philip and said: “Listen, you jerk....” (Or at least something like that.)

“Boniface Bishop, servant of the servants of God, to Philip King of the French. Fear God and keep His commandments. We desire thee to take notice that thou art subject to us both in spiritual and in temporal matters... those who think otherwise we account HERETICS.”48

Now, note! Observe, to a Catholic, HERESY is not a matter of Biblical perversion, false teaching, religious convictions, or doctrinal error: HERESY is a matter of not donating money to HIS CHURCH when his church demands it.

This was a candid threat that if Philip didn’t shell out he would

be burned at the stake; that’s what the popes did with “heretics” (see chapter 14).

But Philip the Fair was one of those rare characters in history, like Gallio or Richard the Lion Hearted, whom you couldn’t scare with a scaring machine. Upon receiving this outrageous epistle from the ego­maniac, Philip responded with “Philip, by the grace of God King of the French, to Boniface who enacts the Sovereign Pontiff: small greetings or none. Let thy SUPERLATIVE FATUITY take notice that we are subject to no one in temporal matters. Those who think otherwise we account FOOLS AND MADMEN."”

And there Philip faced the issue which no Congress of Fundamen­talists in America (1970-1990) ever dared face: he faced the issue of FINAL AUTHORITY and told the qualified, recognized authority to go take a flying jump at his rosary. Philip had called the supreme authority of the holy, apostolic, Roman Catholic church an INSANE FOOL (see above).

If the wording had been “updated” under different circumstances, one might have read this curious correspondence: “The body of godly, Conservative scholars who are qualified and recognized Biblical author­ities, to the Bible believing Christians: fear God and follow our prefer­ences and recommendations. We desire you to take notice that you are subject to us both in church and school matters; those who think other­wise we account as RUCKMANITES.” And in return, “Peter S. Ruckman, by the grace of God a saved sinner, to the entire body of Conservative scholars who pretend to be the final authority in matters of Biblical interpretation: small greetings or none. Let you puffed up, bloated egotists take notice that we Bible believers are not subject to you in ANY matters, let alone matters of Biblical scholarship, and those who think otherwise we account as APOSTATE LUNATICS.”

Sometimes “updating the archaic English” produces strange results.

At any rate, Boniface interdicted France, cursed Philip, and then issued a bull (Unum Sanctum) which became a classic in Catholic “ortho­doxy.” It has never been altered or rescinded by any twentieth century pope. Unum Sanctum states that the Roman Catholic church is the true church and outside of it there is no salvation, that the pope is the Vicar of Christ, that literal weapons can be used to kill those who disagree with him, and finally that every human being on earth (a totalitarian system) must obey the Catholic pope in Italy or go to hell.50 One clause in this naked and revealing “confession of faith” stated that everyone who resisted the pope was a “MANICHAEAN” (chapter 14, notes 58-62). Thus Philip or anyone else could become a “heretic on non

doctrinal grounds (chapter 14, notes 152-157) by pretending that he erred on doctrinal grounds. Thus, there finally came to light after nine hundred years of camouflaged piety the true purpose and intent of the original “Council of Nicaea’’ (see chapter 8): the purpose was to set Bible believers up for the kill if they would not obey the Bride of Satan.

Philip had found himself in the position of Savonarola and Joan of Arc: a theological heretic because he wouldn’t knuckle down to a pope in MONEY matters. Evidently the pope’s “god” was his BELLY (Rom. 16:18). Having confounded the temporal with the spiritual, the literal with the figurative, and the Kingdom of God with the Kingdom of Heaven, the perverted four-flusher decided that LACK OF INCOME was proof of “unorthodox beliefs."

Boniface kicked Philip off his throne (verbally) en absentee and told the German king (Frederick II) that he could have it: popes are as generous with other people’s money and lands as the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare. Papa Boniface had decided to put the ban on Philip on September 8 and release his subjects from allegiance, but he never got to carry out his plans. A professor of law at Montpelier in France (William of Nogaret)—whose parents had been burned at the stake in southern France because they were Cathari (chapter 14, note 63)—got together with three hundred Frenchmen and went down to see “his superlative fatuity.” They entered the papal residence and found “the most high” seated on a throne with a crown on his head and a crucifix in one hand and the keys of Janus in the other51 (and probably a bat in his belfry). After some pious claptrap about being “willing to die for Christ and His church” (see Becket, notes 21-22)—meaning my power and my own authority (i.e., my belly)—Boniface was arrested by Nogaret, who dragged him out of his palace and tossed him into the clink. Unfortunately, in the scuffle that took place a vase was turned over and broken which contained “milk from Mary’s breasts.”52 (It probably didn’t spill, however, as milk that is 1200 years old has usually clabbered.)

Boniface died of melancholy and despair and, according to some, as Philip had pegged him all along: insane.53

While men like Philip and Boniface were playing ring-around-the- rosy following Henry and Innocent (notes 25-28) or Henry and Alexander (notes 20-23), the Lord was disseminating Biblical truth through under­ground sources. We call this work "tractarian literature,” and it floods Europe in the twelfth, thirteenth, and fourteenth centuries. Dante, Aegidius Colonna, Henry of Cassaloci, John of Paris, and Pierre Dubois all wrote out strongly against papal Catholicism, and their literary attacks

augmented the constant street preaching of Lollards, Waldenses, Bohe­mian Brethren, Arnoldists, Henricians, and Vaudois. This tractarian literature gave the popes a fit.54 Among other things it stated that:

1. The pope had no right to punish anyone with penalties like death, imprisonment, fines, or exile, and the church had the right to call any pope to account for his sins.

2. Priests should be allowed to marry, and the pope had no business messing in the affairs of state.

3. The “church” is the Body of Christ, not a Roman Catholic hier­archy, and the head of the “church” (1 Cor. 12:1-13) is Jesus Christ, not some “pope” (Eph. 1:22; Col. 1:18).

With these terrible “heresies” being circulated all over Europe, and particularly in southern France and northern Italy (chapter 14, notes 52, 68, 73), the popes found their worldly influence shrinking and their spirituality being questioned daily in the marketplaces. As a consequence, they were driven to desperate measures and bloodier methods (chapter 14) in order to prove that “the gates of hell” would not prevail against THEM, since they fancied themselves to be the “head of the church” mentioned in Matthew 16:18.

The most Biblical of these tractarian works was a writing by Marsilius of Padua (1270-1343) which stated the position already taken by the Bogomiles, Paulicians, Waldenses, and Paterines more than five hundred years before it was written. With the help of a certain John of Jandun, Marsilius wrote the Defensor Pads, which states that:

1. There are no political successors of St. Peter, only those who imitate his life of humility and devotion.

2. No Catholic can forgive sins or punish sins, be he priest or pope.

3. No bishop or priest has the right to interdict or excommunicate anyone without the consent of their own government.

4. Peter was not any more powerful or authoritative than any other apostle, and he was the bishop of ANTIOCH (chapter 11, note 76), not ROME. (Someone was doing some Bible reading.)

5. The ultimate and final authority for the church is the Bible, and the Bible does not get its authority from the church, but rather visa versa.

Catholic historians refer to Marsilius as the forerunner of Calvin and Luther,55 forgetting that the Waldenses taught all this a hundred years before Marsilius was born.56

Pope Clement VI found no less than 240 “heretical clauses in this work; Marsilius himself referred to Pope John XII (1327) as the devil of Revelation 12:9—“the great dragon,” “that old serpent.

The heat was on.

The successor to Boniface (returning to anti-church history) was Benedict XI (1303-1304), who bowed before Philip and put an end to their conflict. Benedict’s death was ascribed to poison put into a dish of figs.57 A conclave was then called in Perugia to get a new “papa.” It was torn by factions. The problem was simple: the French king was too powerful and had too big an army; obviously, France would have to have some special “dispensations” or “blessings” from the Vatican due to her threatening position. (When your god is your belly, you have to take care that somebody doesn’t rip your belly open.) The French party naturally won out in the election and chose a character by the name of Bertrand DeGot (Archbishop of Bordeaux), who took on the alias of “Clement V. ’’However, Bertrand never got to cross the Alps to Rome, the “holy city.” The French king figured that a bird in the hand was better than one in the bush; that is, you could control a pope better from Paris if the pope was in France instead of Rome, so Pope Clement V sat down in Avignon, France, in 1309, after holding courts in Bordeaux, Poitiers (sometimes Poictiers), and Toulouse.

And thus, at the drop of a hat (or a crown, or a tiara, or something), the Eternal City, the Holy See of Blessed Simon Peter at St. Peters, etc., was discarded like a worn-out billfold: it was no longer politically expedient.

From this time (1309-1379 or 1305-1377) began the so-called “Babylonian Captivity of the Church.” The nomenclature was chosen by perfidious Catholics who liked to think that Rome was Babylon when Peter said “Babylon” in 1 Peter 5:13 (proving he was in Rome, not Babylon: see Taylor’s “Living Bible, ” 1 Peter 5:13), but now Avignon was Babylon—not Rome. When you have more than one authority (see any of the faculty members at Bob Jones University, Falwell’s school in Lynchburg, Pensacola Christian College, etc.) you can always switch the dice when the heat gets on.

Transplanted from its sacred soil, the papacy was now cut loose from all the hallowed associations connected with five to ten centuries of murder, fraud, lying, cheating, stealing, lying degrees, embezzlement, forged documents, and downright blasphemy. What could be worse? The next seven popes were all of French extraction: Clement, John, Benedict, Clement, Innocent, Urban, and Gregory. To go into the details of the lives of these twice-plucked-up-by-the-roots charlatans is a waste of time for a church historian. When the papacy returned to Rome there had been no change in the Biblical climate of Rome or Avignon. Although Satan may have been divided against himself for a few years, he still had enough power in 1379 to pick up the business of killing Christians right on through the Renaissance (see chapter 14).

Since the propagation of the word of God is always attended by revivals of learning, increases in liberty, the raising of moral standards, and higher standards of living, so the constant efforts of the “heretics” in these times (1100-1300) had to bring forth cultural fruits of a better kind than those produced by Bible rejecting sacramentalists whose first concern was power politics. Modern Communists and atheists (1900-1990) wrongly ascribe the horrors and superstitions of the Dark Ages to Bible preaching or Bible teaching; this shows their phenomenal lack of education and intelligence. No man who studies church history would believe (not even if he read a church history written by a Catholic historian) that the religious insanity and moral degeneration of the times had anything to do with anybody even reading a Bible, let alone teaching or preaching it.

As the stomach of the “Holy” (saints preserve us!) Roman Empire was growling from its inability to digest all of the “dissenters” and “heretics” within it—probably over 8,000,000 if one counts the Cathari and Lollards in with the Waldenses. Albigenses, Bohemian Brethren, and other “Manichaeans” (notes 50-51)—some movement toward the truth had to be made. Since the halfway measures adopted by the ancho­rites and flagpole sitters had worked in their day (see chapter 11), the intelligentsia in the Catholic church began to devise a halfway out of the mess they found themselves in. Men of good taste, even if uncon­verted, could hardly tolerate a fat-head who thought that everyone on earth must obey him (Boniface, Unum Sanctum). Further, no thinking man of any intellectual degree (saved or lost) could stomach the smell of burning flesh coming off of the mutilated bodies of women and chil­dren, including infants less than five years old. Compromisers and men pleasers within the church were forced again (see chapter 11) to run for shelter somewhere so they would not be “misunderstood.” Turn to the Bible they could not, for they didn’t have the courage (John 12:42-43). Anyplace was safer than standing with your feet planted on the eternal word of the living God. So the most logical thing to do now was to turn to art, literature, and music; which they did. CULTURE always follows evangelism and Bible teaching (chapter 5, notes 18-19).

Historians call this “rebirth” of learning the Renaissance; some of the historians date it with Dante (1264-1321), while other with the Avignon split (1309). The Renaissance for southern Europe amounted to a return to Greek and Roman classicism with an emphasis on nude bodies in sculpture and art. In northern Europe it amounted to an empha sis on the dignity of man (humanism) and classical studies in the literature of ancient Greece and Rome—particularly the church fathers and the

New Testament manuscripts. Dante, Michelangelo, DaVinci, Raphael, Titian, Perugino, Petrarca, Boccaccio, and Palestrina belong properly to non-church history, that is, secular history. Their associations with popes and Catholic patrons have nothing to do with church history. Since, unlike the popes, they do not become engaged in militant attempts to eradicate Biblical Christianity, they cannot properly be the subject of anti-church history. (Perhaps they should be the subject of semi-church history.) Since our major concern is to document the history of the New Testament church, such men will have to occupy very small niches in the “hall of fame.” Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, for example (and the Decameron of Boccaccio) were nothing but anthologies from Playboy and Esquire magazines; they were plainly pornographic, although if you call pornography “art” (1980), you can get away with it.

Dante cooked up a story where Vergil and Beatrice led him through heaven, purgatory, and hell, and when he got to hell he found a few “Holy Fathers” there (Anastasius II, Nicolas III, Boniface VIII, et al.). Cato of Utica and Trajan were messing around in purgatory; Trajan because Pope Gregory I was supposed to have prayed him out of hell. Dante has the devil reigning in hell instead of roaming about on the earth (1 Peter 5:8), so I am sure no one could accuse him of “dualism”: the religious powers on earth had no devil around to bother them.

Petrarca (1304-1374) wrote Italian sonnets and songs. He always carried a copy of Augustine’s Confessions with him, and he idolized Cicero and Vergil—two heathen poets. Petrarca liked Plato (Col. 2:8). There is no evidence that he believed the Bible any more than any pope. Boccaccio (1313-1375) wrote nothing that could be classified as Christian literature one way or another. Various names are connected with the progress and the patrons of classical studies: Leonardo Bruni, Cosimo de’Medici, Lorenzo de’Medici, Lamndino, Pico della Mirandola, Federigo da Montefletro, Alfonso of Naples, Nicolas V (1447-1455), Besarion, Emmanuel Chrysolarus, Carlo Marsuppini, Francesco Filelfo, Pietro Bembo, Biacopo Sadoieto, Aleander, and others. This was the gang that Savonarola preached against (chapter 14, notes 154-157), and when he thundered against the rich prelates with their “chalices of gold and silver and their hearts of wood,” he was referring to Pope Nicolas, among others. One of Savonarola’s main theme songs was the “doctors of humanities” who spent their time messing around with art, poetry, and music while the world was going to hell all around them.58

Following the infallible cycle: Evangelism, Teaching, Culture, Apostasy, and Paganism, the world of Renaissance fell to pieces under the hands of the “restorers of arts and sciences” and the “brilliant

geniuses of those who recovered the lost culture of,” etc. Paganism was restored (1400-1500) to Rome. When culture is substituted for Bib­lical Christianity it merely produces a milder paganism than Roman Catholicism: Roman Catholicism substituted TRADITION for the Bible. The humanists sacrificed in secret to the gods of Greece and Rome rather than the “god” of Catholicism—the pope. It came out Satan either way (2 Cor. 4:4).

The chief thing wrong with the art, music, literature, and philosophy of humanism was that humanism was (and is) simply one more dead end into which intelligentsia ran in an effort to duck out of Bible truth. The pagan humanists, Socialists, agnostics, writers, atheists, artists, scientists, or Communists of any age are always getting holed up in some blind alley every time they run from falsehood. In the Renaissance you had the humanists holed up in one blind alley and the Catholics (nuns, monks, popes, prelates, archbishops, etc.) holed up in another one. By 1490 there were 6,800 public prostitutes in Rome, not counting the pope’s and priests’ concubines.59 The terminus of the Renaissance in southern Europe could be anticipated: Pope Leo X sitting in a theater in Rome enjoying a comedy called Suppositi. The scenery was painted by Raphael, and the play was about the seduction of a girl by her father’s servant.60 Such plays were not on the Catholic “Index.” The kind of plays that are on the Index are plays like “Abbie’s Irish Rose.”

‘‘But is it art?” is the question that always arises when sex is glam­orized or pornography is promoted. The glamorization of the nude body was what eventually consigned Greece to the scrap heap of the nations (400-100 B.C.). The parading of the marriage bed on the screen, first privately in theaters and then universally in the living rooms through television, finished America off in 1970 as a nation. We recognize, of course, that rejection of the word of God is always the primary cause for degeneration, apostasy, and deterioration, but this rejection is fol­lowed immediately by CULTURE (Evangelism, Education, Culture, Apostasy). What appears as the genius of man, the outflowing of artistic impulses, the creative spontaneity of the human spirit, the flowering of humanity’s aspirations, etc., is often just adultery and murder var­nished and veneered with the right amount of paint (Macbeth, Il Trovatore, Othello) so it will please the taste buds (Siegfried, Madam Butterfly, La Boheme) of refined adulterers and murderers (Il Pagliacci, Cavalleria Rusticana, Carmen, etc.). The point with the Bible believer is not “how much good do these things accomplish?” A hurricane or a tornado can accomplish some “good,” depending upon which standard of authority you are using to define your own terms. There is no point

of asking “what would we do without such things?” The point is “WHAT DID GOD SA Y ABOUT SUCH THINGS? ’' According to the major his­torians, major philosophers, and major educators, God said NOTHING. They never let any verse in either Testament interfere with their own book sales based on their “preferences.”

Everywhere we turn in the history of man we are faced with this problem: what is the final standard of authority by which a man can judge art, literature, music, philosophy, science, education, politics, and history itself? The final authority for the child of God is the Holy Bible; not once does a pope, or a cardinal, ambassador, professor, or scientist ever enter that area: they are here to give conflicting or assenting opinions to what has already been FIXED. With one standard there can be no confusion or anarchy, no doubt, and no possibility of apostasy, at least not where that Book is loved and obeyed. Loving a religion and obeying a “pope” is something else. Two standards of authority are always erected to produce confusion or anarchy so that a third authority can slip in behind the confusion and take over. If history (secular or sacred) teaches one lesson, it teaches THAT.

However much one becomes enchanted and even fascinated by the spirit of man (the Bible never brags about man’s art, literature, music, or philosophy) manifested in his art, music, and literature (the Renais­sance), one must never forget that it is still the unregenerate spirit of the Adamic nature (Eph. 2:1-4) controlled by the “prince of the power of the air.” However charitable, artistic, benevolent, humanistic, and refined this spirit may be, it is still under the direct control of its parent (Eph. 2:2), the father of lies (John 8:40-46). Humanism is deceptive (Matt. 10:17). It is the smile on the face of a tiger. It is man’s substituting the second commandment for the first one: it is man’s substitute for believing and obeying God. “See? Look what I’ve done!”

If there is any doubt in the reader’s mind about the outcome of the culture of this period (or any other period), let him face the brutal facts of 1400-1500 A.D. In the midst of the Renaissance and following all of this “return to the classics,” this “great literary effort of the talented humanists,” etc., Europe was under the iron bondage of the Roman Catholic church; and following her demonic leadership, the populace of Europe (with the exceptions of those being burned at the stake for not following her leadership) was practicing “Christianity” according to these formulas:

1 • Paganism was to be tolerated and encouraged as long as it did not hurt the unity and power of the bishops in the area where it was being practiced. Leo XIII says, “It has been and always will be the

intent of the tradition of the Apostolic See to make large allowances in all that is right and GOOD for the primitive tradition and special customs of every nation. ”61 What this means is that the pagan customs of any nation are to be retained if they are “good.” Note that when a Roman Catholic pope says ‘ ‘good, ’ ’ he has no reference to one verse of scripture anywhere in any Bible. “Good” in Catholic fiction means “favorable to the papacy.” That should be abundantly clear by this time in history.

The introduction of fraud and superstitious ideas into the “purity” of the Catholic church is no reason for abolishing “received, popular, reasonable, and consoling institutions.”62 In the foregoing, “reasonable and consoling” is not a reference to anything Biblical; it means anything that the hierarchy considers to be “reasonable and consoling,” by what­ever standard of authority they choose to use at that time (New ASV one time, NIV the next time, AV the next time, etc.). This approach guarantees that no populace evangelized by Catholic Augustinians, Fri­ars, Jesuits, Dominicans, or Franciscans ever gets rid of its paganism (chapter 12, notes 5-8, 34). It also explains why Italy, Spain, Cuba, and Central and South America are the most fertile fields today for Communism. A mass of unconverted pagans has no Lord or God to comfort them or supply their needs: they will have to submit to a Catholic-Soviet dictatorship. “Evangelism” or the “expansion of Chris­tianity ’ ’ that is based on infant baptism or enforced baptism (chapter 12, note 52), allowing the “convert” to retain any anti-Biblical insti­tutions he wants to as long as he knuckles down to Roman dominion produces nothing but a double-damned “child of hell’’ (Matt. 23:15), according to the Author and Founder of “Christianity” (Heb. 12:2).

The proof of this is in the pudding. Following the “rebirth” of learning (the Renaissance), the Catholic membership under the popes went right on praying to Adalard (deceased) when beset by fever and typhus, praying to St. Denis for headaches, to St. Appolonis for tooth­aches, to St. Andrew for a good catch of fish, to St. Anastasus, the patron saint of goldsmiths, to St. Stanislas Kostka for palpitation of the heart, to St. Ouen for deafness, to St. Panteleon for consumption, to St. Vitus for nervousness, to St. Hilary for trouble with snakes, to St. Lawrence for lumbago, and to St. Gregory of Neo Caesarea for trouble with floods.63 That is about one-fifth of the list. Rome allowed any “Christian” to pray to his pagan gods as long as a Catholic list was substituted for the originals.64 The Vatican edition of the Catholic Dic­tionary lists over sixty saints that a Catholic is to pray to.65 Also, one must never forget that it is the Council of Trent that followed the Renats-

sance (1546). The Council of Trent (after two hundred years of art, culture, literature, and music) stated (Canon X) that if “anyone says that all Christians have power to administer the WORD, let him be anath­ema."66

That’s what the “rebirth of learning” did for the leaders of the Catholic church who sat around looking at nudes painted and sculptured by “artists.”

2. The central point of idolatry remained the black African magic of the sacrificial “altar,” where a Baalite priest conjured up a corpse. Christians were told they must never CHEW Jesus Christ,67 they must simply swallow Him, and it would be wise for them not to spit any time during the day after they swallowed “Jesus Christ.”68 The fantastic expansion of this blasphemous fraud issued in low masses, high masses, conventual masses, nuptial masses, golden masses, private masses, votive masses, evening masses, midnight masses, requiem masses, etc., with the explicit understanding that any child who died “unbaptized” was excluded from the “benefits” in performing an act of black magic for a dead person.69 According to what authority? Easy: according to any authority you need in order to contradict the word of God.70 If one trans­lation won’t back up the heresy, buy another one; if one church father doesn’t teach it, get one that does; if one pope doesn’t condone it, find one that does; if one Greek text doesn’t have it, find one that does. Every criminal politician, professional huckster, con man, religious per­vert, and every killer on the face of this earth held to some authority higher than THE BOOK.

We are dealing here with anti-church history.

The blasphemous claims of these Bible perverting murderers are beyond anything that Stalin, Hitler, or Mao Tse-tung ever claimed for themselves. Neither Karl Marx, nor Engels, nor the writers of the ‘‘Protocols" in their wildest tirades against liberty and humanity (in the name of liberty and humanity, of course) ever attained the obscene and outrageous heights scaled by the Catholic hierarchy. They said that their priests were more than “Christ hanging on the cross,” and the priest “is not just the cross, he is CHRIST HIMSELF."1' That was writ­ten by “Father” Brigante, a Texas Catholic in the twentieth century.

Witchcraft, according to the popes, suddenly became terribly aggra­vated just before the Reformation broke out. This curious coincidence is even more “coincidental” when we note that the mania for “witches” began in Rome, and from there it went to Spain before entering Germany, France, and Scotland.72 Gregory IX, addressing the bishops of Mainz and Hildesheim (1233), recommended executing witches on the grounds

of 1 Kings 18. Since all popes were Post-millennial (as Augustine) and “theocratic kingdom builders” (as Calvin), they did not hesitate to go to the Old Testament when they wanted to resort to carnal warfare—in direct violation of the New Testament (2 Cor. 10:4).

Witches naturally had “forsaken the Catholic faith” and were con­sorting with demons (according to Pope Innocent VIII, 1484): “demons,” in this case, would mean Albigensian, Petrobrusian, Waldensian, and Cathari Bible believing preachers. The official policy of the Papal See was that witches should be burned to death.73 No suc­cessor to Pope Innocent (including all twentieth century popes—Paul VI, John Paul II, et al.) has ever expressed any regret over Pope Innocent’s bull consigning thousands of men and women to bonfires; nor has the Catholic Inquisitor’s official book on how to torture and burn anti-Catholics (Malleus Maleficarium) ever been consigned to any Catholic list of “forbidden books” (the Index). Foxe’s Book of Martyrs is on the Index of forbidden books. This well illustrates the real moral character and ethical standards of the popes, who spend so much time talking about peace, blessing people, and smiling for the camera.

From the highest position in the Alexandrian Cult at the University of Cologne came The Witches’ Hammer (1486), which we have men­tioned earlier. Augustine and Thomas Aquinas are appealed to in this work, written to show that witches exist and that they should be burned. Sabbats, night riding, black cats, succubi and incubi, sex orgies, ridi­culing the “sacraments,” stepping on the cross, killing unbaptized babies, etc.—the standard stock and trade found in all encyclopedias on demonology—were the charges brought against ANY Christian who objected to the cannibal mass or infant sprinkling.

The Vaudois (Valdenses, etc.) had to be tortured until they confessed that they had done “homage to the devil.” Naturally, Cathari all had to be involved with witchcraft, otherwise why wouldn’t they believe that a Christian should swallow a dead corpse every Sunday morning?74 In Brincon, France, 110 women and 57 men were burned or drowned for being “witches.” Between 1481 and 1486 more than forty-five were burned at the stake in Germany. In 1545 thirty-four women were burned or quartered in Geneva. In Louis of Palermo’s work (The Origin and Progress of the Inquisition) he states that 30,000 people were slain between 1447 and 1597. All Bible believing Christians who didn t con­fess immediately to having had intercourse with demons or the devil were tortured until they did confess to such practices. As late as 1628 (Bamberg, Germany) people were being tortured to within an inch of their life in order to get them to lie.75

In the thinking of the demon possessed popes and archbishops and many demon possessed priests and monks, such terms as “witchcraft,” “demonology,” “heretic,” “heathen,” “sorcery,” etc., were Christian and Biblical terms describing anyone who objected to Roman Catholicism or who criticized Roman Catholicism or who ridiculed Roman Cathol­icism or who pointed out the depraved and godless nature of Roman Catholicism. Bible believers were to be treated as “witches” or here­tics (same punishment for both) if, at any time, they went by the BOOK instead of the banshee (Webster: “a female demon spirit whose appear­ance or wailing warns a family of approaching DEATH”).

Nor has Rome changed her principles, goals, aims, or attitudes (see Vol. II). It is only the temporary “lull in the action” that prevents the popes from murdering every Bible believer in the United States and England. With fifteen hundred years experience in political maneuvering, no pope is going to issue the orders for a nationwide massacre or allow one to be ordered by his members unless it can be safely carried out (chapter 13, note 58, and chapter 18, note 61). Not even the Communists were that dumb when they began annihilating every Bible believing pas­tor and church in Russia, Rumania, and Bulgaria. The popes are not as dumb as they look; why expose yourself when you have Catholics like Hitler, Castro, and Napoleon (Vol. II) who can get rid of whole anti-Catholic populations for you?

The psychotic madman St. Liguori76 said that there is more certainty of a Christian doing the will of God by “obedience to his superiors than by obedience to Jesus Christ, should He appear in person and give His commands.” Two authorities. The fanatical “saint” goes on by saying that it is impossible for any Catholic to go to hell if he obeys his superiors in the hierarchy.77 The ominous overtones of this are that if a “superior” orders the Catholic to murder someone it is perfectly all right because “the priest’s power surpasses all the powers of heaven and earth, second only to the ineffable dignity of the Mother of God.”78 This puts the priest above Jesus Christ in power (Matt. 28:18) and above Satan in power (Luke 4:5-6). Incredibly, this deluded bunch of pagan fanatics appealed to Gregory Nazianzen and Clement of Alexandria (chapter 5) for their authority since it could be found nowhere in any Bible from cover to cover. Clement had attributed to priests the role of “redeemer,” and the Catholic John Eudes says that the priests are “visible GODS in the world” and further that “a priest is a God who makes gods."19

The Bible has some interesting comments to make on such sacrile­gious reviling (2 Cor. 4:4; Ps. 82:1, 6; Gen. 6:1-6; Acts 14:11).

Not having a Bible, or ignoring the Bible they had, or being unable to understand it when they read it, the Catholic priests had to abide by Clement of Alexandria and his deceived adherents in the Cult. (It would be like a modern, young minister abiding by A.T. Robertson or Kenneth Wuest since he couldn’t understand the Bible in his own language: AV 1611.)

The worst pope the Catholic church ever had, according to their own writers, followed the “rebirth of culture” (the Renaissance). He was Alexander VI (1492-1503), who had many illegitimate children by several women and made his eighteen year old son (Caesar) an arch­bishop two weeks after becoming pope.80 Culture, evidently, is not a cure-all for Bible rejecting scholars, if a cure for anything. It is true that there were beneficial results from the Renaissance in northern Europe, however, one must never forget that the reason was not that the culture was any more ’’cultured,” nor that the artists were any more “artistic,” nor that the musicians were any more “musical”: it was the fact that in the north the Renaissance revived an interest among anti- Roman Catholics in the authority of the word of God (see chapter 16, notes 164-166). There does not appear anywhere in the fifteen hundred year history of Roman Catholicism one major Bible student or Bible teacher who doesn’t either leave the church when he becomes proficient in the New Testament or who is not excommunicated by that church. There is something inherent in the New Testament that is so viciously “anti-Catholic” (no matter how many sweet Catholics are still in fel­lowship with the system) and so “heretical” (anti-papal) that those who choose the latter authority cannot remain true to the former: when dual authorities conflict, one has to be abandoned. As a converted priest once said, “The greatest book written against the Roman Catholic church was not written by a converted priest [Bernadino, Luther, Montano, Carrera, Zachello, et al.]; it was written by GOD." The alibi given for rejecting this Book is that “there are many fine Christian people who are Catholics,” or “I know of several good nuns who love the Lord,” or “You can’t deny that there are many good people who sin­cerely believe,” etc.

When humans worship humans, humanism replaces the first commandment.

Emotional and sentimental feelings about “mankind” (the second commandment perverted), when used as an alibi for sinning against God, always results in a system (Fascism, Communism, Socialism, humanism, Catholicism) that winds up killing, imprisoning, and torturing man­kind” (see The Sure Word of Prophecy, 1969). St. Francis of Assisi,

Catherine of Siena, and other tender souls were wasting their time and the Lord’s time staying in a communion devoted to the extermination of every Bible believing Christian in both hemispheres. The Lord’s com­mandment was clear (Rom. 16:17; 2 Cor. 4:4). Goodness and sweetness (Gen. 3:6) are just as deadly as badness and roughness; they are more deadly (Rom. 16:18), for they are deceptive. A good, sweet “Christian” who corrects the Bible (Custer, Neal, Panosian, Hort, Afman, Harris, MacRae, Robertson, Machen, Miller, Warfield) is ten times as deadly as a rough speaking infidel who denies it.

The Renaissance ends with a massive return to Grecian and Roman paganism. The official representative of religious belief, the self­confessed final authority in all matters of art, religion, literature, music, politics, and conduct is still Unholy Mother Whore (Rev. 17).

Rome never changes.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Replacing the New ASV With the King James Bible

“And when they brought out the money that was brought into the house of the Lord, Hilkiah the priest found a BOOK...And Hilkiah answered and said to Shaphan the scribe, I have found the BOOK...And Hilkiah delivered the BOOK to Shaphan. And Shaphan carried the BOOK to the king...And Shaphan read it before the king.”

2 Chronicles 34:14-18

If the title of the chapter seems a little farfetched or out of place in a 1500 A.D. setting, let the reader carefully examine what is about to follow and compare it with the documented facts of history already given in chapter three. Nothing has been worded incorrectly. The New ASV (as its grossly corrupt counterparts: the NIV of 1978 and the ASV of 1901) is the American form of Origen's Alexandrian text, used by Jerome (400 A.D.) and the National Council of Churches (see Vol. II) in America (RSVand New RSV). This Origenistic-Eusebian-Constantine text1 was the official book of the Dark Ages popes. It was the “bible” for the outfit which history has so vividly described between 500-1500 A.D. The Dark Ages began with the adoption of that text. All attempts by Dollinger, Newman, Schaff, LaGarde, Latourette, Mosheim, and others to ascribe that sudden blackout of truth from the scene to “bar­barian invasions,” “splits in the empire,” and “the feudal system” is wasted time and effort, for there is no recovery from this blackout until the Origenistic-Eusebian-Constantine text of Jerome2 is replaced with theAntiochan-Waldensian-SyriantextofSt. Pat, Columba, Chryso­stom, and the Albigenses.3 The barbarian invasions stopped, but the blackout continued; all of Europe was united during the crusades, but the blackout continued. You can’t blame a spiritual blackout of Biblical

truth on “the times” or the “systems.” More is involved than that: someone has taken your Bible away from you. The accidental conjunction of a spiritual blackout with the Greek New Testament text of the New ASV (1960-1980), with another accidental conjunction of a worldwide revival associated with the Greek text of the King James Bible, is a little too “accidental” to be an accident. (As Dave Gardner once said, “it must have been premeditated carelessness.”)

Granted that the printing press helped the dissemination of the truth, it would be granting too much glory to say that the press was the decisive factor in revival, for the modern printing press has probably put out more lies, more distortions of the truth, and more filth in the twentieth century than the popes put out in the twelfth through fifteenth centuries. The dissemination of literature is a double-headed Janus, as are also radio and television. It depends upon what is put out by whom. In the Philadelphia period now before us (1500-1900), it is the pure, unadul­terated word of God (Rev. 3:8) that is being put out by a church that kept that word (Rev. 3:8). Not having a Bible as a guideline for church history, Philip Schaff goes by the whole operation like a sleepwalker and winds up with Constantine correcting the true text with the Origenistic-Eusebian text.4 So did all the popes.5 Erasmus’s Greek text (1522) is the Greek text (with slight variations by Stephanus, Elzevir, Colinaeus, and Beza) that the Catholic church has never approved of and will never approve. They have already officially commended Bob Jones University and Pensacola Christian College for their toleration of the Roman Catholic Bible, for all Catholics can heartily recommend the Greek text of Nestle (Aland and Metzger) used for the ASV, New ASV, and NIV, since it is the text for their own bibles (Jerusalem, Amer­ican, etc.).6 This is not a matter of opinion or preference: it has been documented. Any pope would appreciate any Protestant interested in reverencing a “bible” that came from Alexandria, Egypt, and that ush­ered in the Dark Ages, where the popes controlled western civilization.

The Alexandrian Greek readings recommended by the faculty mem­bers at Bob Jones University are in the official Catholic New Testament manuscript kept under lock and key in the Vatican. “Vaticanus” con­tained the readings for deciding what was scriptural and what was not after the Dark Ages were over. It is not until all of the local assemblies and the majority of Christian scholars abandon this text that revival comes (1500-1900). This Alexandrian text has the ban and the curse of God upon it, as witnessed to by the blood of over 15,000,000 Bible believing people (see chapter 14, note 132) who opposed its custodians. This Alexandrian text is guaranteed to confound Bible knowledge and

scriptural understanding wherever it shows up, and history has already made its own defence of such a statement. There has never been a Bib­lical movement (soul winning, evangelism, church building, or mission­ary work of a Biblical nature) connected with this Alexandrian text since the day that Origen promoted it.1

With the Philadelphia church period there comes to the surface a church that had “kept” the word of God (Rev. 3:8). This church cer­tainly had no connections with the Neo-Platonic hogwash taught at Africa’s Most Unusual University (see chapter 5) or the depraved apos­tates (Origen) who taught soul sleep, transmigration of souls, water regeneration, no literal heaven or hell, no physical resurrection, that Genesis 3:1-3 was not literal (see chapter 5, note 11), and that babies could be saved by sprinkling (Cyprian in Carthage, North Africa).8

With Biblical street preachers all over the face of Europe (1330- 1500) the light began to get brighter and brighter. The precious, perse­cuted witnesses who called themselves Waldenses had adopted for their motto “Lux Lucet in Tenebris’’9 (a light shining in darkness). They had rejected every doctrine which could not be verified in the scripture, and now, at last, they were about to be justified for their centuries of “heretical teaching.” Having stated in their “Noble Lesson” that before the Antichrist would come he would be preceded by many Antichrists,10 the Waldenses passed the torch on to others.

Francesco Petrarch (1304-1374) identified Avignon as the seat of the Antichrist.11 Vincent Ferrer (1350-1415) preached against the popes; mass violence accompanied his preaching.12 Writers in England began to say that the pope was the “man of sin” (2 Thess. 2:3). Among these were Sir John Oldcastle (who was burned at the stake), Walter Brute, and John Purvey.13 The Lollards applied the term “Antichrist” to all popes collectively and individually. Three fiery preachers preceded John Huss: Konrad of Waldhausen, Militz, and Matthias of Janow. Militz preached from the book of Revelation.14 Not being content to post a thesis on a door in Germany, Militz raised the ante on Martin Luther by a good sum: he marched into Rome and nailed his notice to the door °f St. Peters Cathedral. His dispatch said that if the Catholic church didn’t repent, the Antichrist was going to come and take it over.15 If this weren’t enough, Militz proceeded to mount the altar at St. Peters and preach. He was imprisoned, but by a miracle of God he escaped and went back to Prague, where he set up a school for preachers.16 He continued to be an insurgent against Unholy Mother Whore till the day of his death.

By now the raw ulcers in the stomach of the Holy Roman Empire were bleeding.

Nicolas of Cusa (1400-1464), a doctor of law, preached in the ver­nacular and wrote a treatise on “LearnedIgnorance, ’’deriding the sober and proud “Schoolmen.”17 John Colet (1466-1519) referred to the fol­lowers of Duns Scotus as “stupid blockheads.”18 People wept, groaned, and fainted under the preaching of John Tauler (1300-1361).19 It was in the middle of this anti-papal uproar in England, the Balkans, southern France, and Germany that a Bible witness stepped out of Florence, Italy, and cried (within throwing distance of Rome): “In the primitive church the chalices were of wood and the prelates of gold...in these days the church hath chalices of gold and prelates of wood.”20

It was our Italian Catholic “heretic” of chapter 15 (notes 56-57).

The prima donnas of the Reformation are so well known to the stu­dents of history that we will not take up a great deal of space in discussing their lives or their works. The biographies of Martin Luther, John Knox, and John Calvin are almost as extensive as the works on Napoleon and Abraham Lincoln (and more recently on Adolph Hitler). We shall confine our notes to the main highlights of their lives; highlights which are in line with the Book that they professed to believe, the Book they confessed to be the “light” for their pathway and the “lamp” for their feet. Neither Luther nor Calvin ever escaped completely from their church-state baby sprinkling systems, and to say that they were entirely scriptural in their dealings with the “brethren” (notes 148-166) would be dishonest. When it came to their understanding of the New Testament local assemblies (chapter 3), they often erred as much doctrinally as their Jesuitical ances­tors. As many have noted, the Reformation reformed nothing; it was an attempt at reformation that obviously miscarried and turned into a revolution. The Roman Catholic church was not (and is not) about to be reformed by God or the Bible, let alone Bible believing Christians (Rev. 2:21).

The important thing to note about the Reformation is that God the Holy Spirit—who wrote the Bible and promised to preserve it (Ps. 12:6-7)—worked with, and used, a text to bring about a worldwide revival that since its recovery has had SEVEN things against it:

1. This text was called “vile" in the nineteenth and twentieth cen­turies by Westcott and Hort, and “corrupt” by Philip Schaff and Bishop Lightfoot.21

2. It was said to be full of errors because it came from “late manu­scripts,” according to the faculty members at Moody Bible Institute, Dallas Theological Seminary, Harvard, Bob Jones University,22 Yale, Princeton, Tennessee Temple, Union Theological Seminary, Pensacola Christian College, and Columbia University.

3. It wasn’t based on the “best manuscripts” because anyone knows that a trained body of professional scribes in a university (see chapter 5) would do a better job of transcribing than a bunch of street preaching laymen (chapter 14, note 76) who were being murdered for their preaching.

4. This text was condemned by every pope in the history of the church from the time of Augustine till the time of President Carter (400-1980 A.D.).

5. It contained seven thousand changes from the “best and oldest manuscripts,” therefore, it had to be altered at least 5,800 times in the New Testament to become a "pure text” for the /1SK, RV, NASV, RSV, NRSV, IV, and NIV.23

6. Translations from this text were burned by the Papists as soon as they were found anywhere.24

7. No recognized, qualified “scholar” in the eighteenth or nine­teenth centuries recommended it, not even if he was “godly.”

With these odds against it, this Greek text was translated into 1,600 languages with 900,000,000 copies of it in the English language alone (1611-1980). The English translation built the British Empire and the republic of America, and it determined the thinking and planning of the founding fathers of the United States of America when they framed the Constitution. It also brought about the evangelical conversion of over 40,000,000 sinners to Jesus Christ (not some “church”) under the ministries of Luther, Calvin, Knox, Beza, Wesley, Edwards, White- field, Torrey, Moody, Sunday, Finney, Spurgeon, Norris, Jones, DeHaan, Brainerd, Moorhouse, Ham, Scofield, McCheyne, Haldane, and others. Its acceptance (albeit its 5800-7000 errors!) by Bible believ­ing Christians brought about the Philadelphia church period (1500-1900): its rejection by Bible believing Christians brought in the Laodicean period of church apostasy (1900-1990). The men who led in this apostasy were the teachers and faculty members of Conservative and Fundamentalist colleges, universities, and seminaries between 1900 and 1980 (see Vol. H).

Martin Luther (1483-1546)

The background of Luther is well-known. He had a humble, rustic origin and worked his way through school at Eisenach, Germany, by singing on the streets.25 The material on Martin Luther is so voluminous that it approaches the work done by secular writers of the person and teachings of Christ. Pope Leo X called him “a drunken German”;26 Peter Moselanus said he was “polite, clever, fresh, cheerful, at

ease...”;27 Jerome Aleander called Luther a “Fool,” “Dog,” and “Rib­ald”;28 and Cajetan, the Papist emissary, described him as “a deep-eyed German beast.”29

Luther was outlawed by the church and state, condemned by the pope, the emperor, and the universities, and was cast out of human soci­ety to be left exposed to a violent death. Schaff says that his famous Thesis was strongly assailed by all the champions of scholastic theology and traditional orthodoxy,30 that is, by all intelligent, educated, religious Roman Catholics. The appellation “popular preacher” was his as well. Heinrich Heine, a German Jewish writer, says of Luther: “He was a dreamy mystic and a practical man of action.... A cold stickler for words and an inspired, divinely intoxicated prophet.... Full of the most awful fear of God...full of consecration to the Holy Spirit...a complete man; I might say ‘an absolute man.’ ”31

In answer to anyone who might be seeking for the cause of the upheaval that followed in his tracks, Luther said: “I simply taught, preached, wrote God’s word, otherwise, I did nothing... The word did it all." “Do not think,” he said at another time, “that the Gospel can be advanced without tumult, trouble, and uproar.”32 “Dost thou hear this, O Pope! Not the most holy, but the most sinful! Would that God would hurl thy chair headlong from heaven and cast it down into the abyss of hell! Who gave you the power to exalt yourself above God? O Lord Christ! Look down upon this.... Let the Day of Judgment come and destroy the devil’s liar at Rome! If this is not Antichrist, I do not know what it is!"33

There is no doubt as to Luther’s views on Antichrist, the famous eschatological subject of pre-Reformation times. Luther was even Pre­millennial in his exposition of the second chapter of Daniel;34 but prac­tically speaking he was A-millennial, believing in a general resurrection and final judgment at the Second Advent.35

As a practical theologian Luther excelled all men of his day. He had full command over the vocabulary of his times. He used common sense, irony, vituperation, and abuse, resorting at times to coarse and vulgar expressions which even in that age offended men of culture and taste and set “a bad example for his admirers.”36 Luther developed his theology before the eyes of the public. Schaff says he had a genial heart but a violent temper.37 He could express the deepest thought in the clearest and strongest language, and he had abundant resources of juicy and forcible epithets which he used constantly. He used the proof­text method to a large extent in preaching,38 and his translation of the scripture is a landmark in the history of theology, education, and lanauaee alike.

Luther naturally approached the matter of translation from the “grammatico historico” standpoint instead of the allegorical; that is, he adhered to the principles of the Antiochan school of Syria (see chapter 3) instead of the principles of the Alexandrian school in Egypt (see chap­ter 5).39 “Scripture itself is its own best interpreter,” according to Luther.40 He felt that scripture alone “should reign”— sola scriptura. He spoke of the Bible as “the Holy Spirit’s own peculiar book” with God “in every syllable.”41 W. Schwarz, of the University College in London, states that Luther’s approach to translating might rightly be called “inspirational” or “inspired.”42 By this he did not mean verbal, plenary inspiration of a divine nature, but he did mean that Luther was conscious of the Holy Spirit’s presence and power in handling every word of his translating work. This is the position we take on the AV of 1611; both that Bible and Luther’s came from the Received Text of Syria in Antioch.

Luther, unlike Jerome and Origen, approached the scriptures UN­CRITICALLY and stated that the true Christian pilgrimage was not to Rome or Jerusalem but to the Prophets, the Psalms, and the Gospels.43 Luther read the New Testament in the light of the Pauline epistles,™ exactly as the ancient heretics had done (the Paulicians, chapter 12, notes 89-97). The thing that distinguishes Luther’s translation from such trash as the New ASV, the ASV, the NIV, the RSV, the New RSV, and the NEB is the feature of INSPIRATION.45 Luther relies on the Holy Spirit in translating and seeks to put Jesus Christ at the center of every passage and verse he handles. Reumann gets so full of his subject in discussing Luther’s prowess as a translator that the Pauline Obsession (see preface) comes blindly through his work and he (Reumann) classifies LUTHER with PHILO and AUGUSTINE!™ Luther would no more con­sult the Catholic church for her opinion about a doctrine than he would a Mohammedan: Augustine would not even believe on Christ unless told to do it by the “Catholic church” (chapter 7, notes 59-70). Further­more, Luther held the Septuagint translators to be falsifiers of the truth and never through for a moment that the LXX was “inspired.”47

Luther’s German Receptus is the first complete Bible translation from the original languages into a modern vernacular language of Europe. Low German translations were made of it. A Dutch New Testament from Luther’s was published in 1523. The Danish New Tes­tament of 1524 was based on Luther’s work. The Swedish New Testa­ment by Olaus Petri came from Luther, as Olaus had attended Luther’s lectures at Wittenburg.48 The Icelandic New Testament (1540) borrowed much from Luther. A Hebrew New Testament for missionary work

among the Jews and a Bible in Slovenian (Yugoslavia, 1584) came from Luther’s Receptus, plus a Croatian New Testament (1562) and a Hun­garian New Testament (1541).

Roland Bainton has rightly said that nearly every German will own up to the fact that the translation by Luther is good German because “that is the way in which a German would speak,’’ when the truth of the matter is that nearly every German—Catholics included—has been reared on Luther’s German version of the Bible.49 They speak the way they speak because their language was given to them by Martin Luther. "Hoch Deutsch’’ is the German of Martin Luther, and he put it into his Bible by rambling around the fishing docks, the marketplaces, the street corners, and the shops, picking up the expressions of his own people. When he was criticized for being so coarse and common in his approach, one of his followers told the Catholics that they were a bunch of subtle fools for not knowing that wives, maidens, maids, students, handworkers, tailors, bakers, shoemakers, and knights were getting to know the Bible better than all of the professors in the Catholic schools of Paris and Cologne and all of the Papists in the world.50 This is a commonplace truth of history: there were children (10-14 years old) in Sunday school of the First Baptist Church of Fort Worth, Texas (1920-1940), who knew the Bible better than J. Gresham Machen, Ben­jamin Warfield, Dr. A. T. Robertson, Philip Mauro, and Robert Dick Wilson (see Vol. II).

Providence used Luther’s violent temper as an instrument to com­plete the battering process against the papal system begun many years earlier. He graciously addressed Pope Paul III as “Your Hellishness,” and again as “Most Hellish Father.”51 If the Bible was tough on Rome,52 Luther was in agreement with it:

“The court of Rome is more corrupt than Babylon or Sodom... the most lawless den of thieves, the most shameless of all brothels, the very kingdom of sin, death, and hell...so that not even Antichrist if he were to come could devise any addition to its wickedness.”53

Luther’s strong suit was his preaching, not his theology.

At Erfurt, on the way to the Diet of Worms, his preaching “melted the hearts as the vernal sun melts the snow...neither Demosthenes nor Cicero nor Paul so stirred their audiences as Luther’s sermon.”54 Luther preached in two languages and had the audacity to publicly warn the emperor of judgment in the midst of a trial where his (Luther’s) ortho­doxy was at stake! Luther was absolutely without fear in the face ot all opponents, ecclesiastical or political. He roared against Henry VIII. “he openly and deliberately lies...now that damnable rottenness and

worm deliberately and consciously concocts lies against the majesty of my King in heaven. Granted that he is the defender of the church, yet it is of the purple-clad harlot, drunken and mother of abominations. ”35 “The papacy is the most pestilential abomination of Prince Satan that has ever or ever shall be... the fire and fury of silly asses and Thomist wine....But let those swine come on and burn me if they dare. Here I am and I will wait for them, and my ashes alone, having been cast after my death into a thousand seas, will come back and persecute and harass this abominable crowd.’’56

Luther did not underestimate the moral character of Catholics.

In contrasting Luther and Melanchthon, Schaff has well said that Luther was a man of war, Melanchthon a man of peace. Luther’s writings smell of powder; “his words are battles,” and he “overwhelms his opponents with a roaring cannonade of argument, eloquence, passion, and abuse.”57 Luther’s Demonology is markedly strong. His attitude toward the inspiration of scripture is still a current topic of theological debate (1900-1970) among Reformed theologians and the Neo-orthodox; but, practically speaking, Martin staked his very life on the Old and New Testaments. For example: “What God says is true whether my senses corroborate it or not...though I do not fully comprehend it....I shall know it all in the life to come.”58

Luther was not really a Catholic: he was a Bible believer.

“I am conquered by the Holy Scriptures quoted by me, and my conscience is bound in the word of God; I cannot and will not recant anything, since it is unsafe and dangerous to do anything against the conscience.”59 Luther’s conscience had been brought into submission to a Syrian-Antiochan Greek text of the Holy Bible: every one of his opponents had submitted his conscience to a depraved egomaniac in possession of an Alexandrian text from Africa.

Luther’s preaching against unfaithful preachers is as contempora­neous as though written yesterday morning.60 He combined exposition with application in his preaching. He abolished indulgences in his own sphere of influence, rejected five sacraments and other forms of ritual, omitted the mass, and has three services on Sunday with weekly com­munion. He lived and moved in the Bible. When he preached, Luther “hit the nail on the head...he was bold and brave and spared neither the devil nor the pope. He was never dull nor tedious,”61 and you couldn't possibly remain neutral after hearing him.

Luther’s motto for a preacher was “start fresh, speak out, stop short.” He disregarded the scholars among his audience and aimed at the common people.

The influences that molded Luther’s theology are numerous. It is of interest, from the standpoint of practical theology, to notice the fol­lowing estimates of him given by historians: 1) “Paul’s doctrines inspired him.”62 2) “Staupitz was of the school of Catholic Pietism and practical mysticism.”63 3) “He referred to Ockham as ‘my master Ockham.’ ”64 It is true that the Augustinian doctrines of justification and grace affected his theology, but mainly in the abstract sense: Luther was far removed from Augustine when it came to “sacraments” and “cities of God.”

Philipp Melanchthon (1497-1560)

Melanchthon worked with Luther. The connection between Luther and Calvin is doubtful, at least in a personal and practical sense, and it is this personal, vital contact that must be traced in discussing the history of New Testament Christianity. Luther read, say, probably only two books by Calvin in his lifetime, but he enjoyed reading them very much, according to his reply in a letter to a friend; these two documents were Calvin’s Reply to Sadolet and Calvin’s treatise on the Lord's Sup­per.65 Although Melanchthon’s Loci Theologici preceded Calvin’s Insti­tutes, Calvin is called the “Leader and Standard-Bearer of Theology” for the Reformation.66 Luther’s theology, from a scholastic standpoint, was unsystematized (like Paul’s), if we are to go by the judgment of the average historian. Martin Luther said that he was drawn to Melanchthon as a fellow reformer because he knew that he himself was incapable of systematizing anything.67

Philipp Melanchthon gained the literary circles for the cause of the Reformation, but in so doing his character revealed the “handwriting on the wall” for the evangelism and teaching of Martin: CULTURE had reared its ugly head. It has been noted that Melanchthon “quietly and naturally ” attained his theological position without violent changes and struggles like those of Luther.68 (The same way may be said of Richard DeHaan; David Hyles; Bob Jones, Jr.; Dan Fuller; and many others; see Vol. II.)

It is interesting to note that the first systematic work Melanchthon produced was written in the interest of practical Christianity and not scientific theology; evangelism always precedes culture. The theologi­cal scrambles which took place after the Augsburg Confession (1530) were Melanchthon’s bread and butter, but they were the farthest thing imaginable from the spirit in which Luther set about to accomplish his mission. He himself said plainly, “Leave my name alone, and do not call yourselves Lutherans, but Christians.”69

The efforts of Melanchthon as a mediator between agnostics and supporters of Luther during his lifetime shows not only a commendable

spirit of Christian charity (Billy Graham, Ockenga, John R. Rice, et al.), but a compromising spirit of Christian carnality. Melanchthon stood somewhere between Erasmus and Eusebius. “He could not stand a split and was always trying to heal the breach.”70 When Emil Brunner wrote his preface to The Christian Doctrine of God (Vol. I), he traces his own type of theology back to Peter Lombard, to Calvin, and then to the Loci Theologici of Melanchthon.71 This is an accurate classification in some respects, although it magnifies the sterility of Calvin’s impact as com­pared with Luther’s, and this is not entirely true, as will be observed.72

The seeds of the destruction of the revival that occurred in Germany in Luther’s day are to be found in the same place they were found in apostolic days: in a representative body of cultured dignitaries who became involved in theological controversy instead of preaching the Bible. Culture follows evangelism and teaching every time.

John Calvin (1509-1561)

Calvin, as a practical theologian, occupies a very small place in the history of New Testament local assemblies. “Calvin, more than any other man that has ever lived, deserves to be called the Pope of Protestantism. ”73 Richard Hooker compares him with Peter Lombard.14 “Calvin is the least satisfactory of all the Protestant leaders regarding prophecies in general.”75 Luther longed for the Second Advent and hoped that it would be less than one hundred years away.76 This heart attitude is conspicuously absent in the methodical preaching of Calvin and consequently is conspicuously absent in the pulpits of Machen, Warfield, Spurgeon, Edwards, Wilson, Hort, Robertson, et al.

Calvin's famous five point system (TULIP) gave the educational philosophers in the church (see chapter 5) four non-Biblical theologies to hash over. The first one (total depravity) was an invention: a man’s will is said to be “free” in Ezra 7:13 and Exodus 35, and the term “free will” is a Bible term. “Total depravity” is a non-Biblicalphilo­sophical concept borrowed from Augustine, the first real Roman Catholic (chapter 8, notes 10-18). The second lie was called “unconditional elec­tion, ’’which was a blatant denial of 1 Peter 1:2 and Romans 8:29, where we are told that both election and predestination are conditioned; and we are told the “condition” on which they are conditioned. The third gimcrack was “limited atonement, ”a doctrine of Satan refuted by the Holy Spirit in 1 Timothy 2:1-6; 2 Peter 2:1; Hebrews 10; and many other places. The fourth invention was called “irresistible grace” and was built on the non-Biblical idea that if a sinner was dead in sin (Eph. 2) he couldn’t respond to the Gospel of his own will (Phil. 2:13), so

he had to be born again before he could believe on Christ. According to Calvin and Cornelius Stam (1980), the new birth precedes belief on Christ since BOTH are brought into operation by the action of the Holy Spirit on a dead man. Being a very shallow student of the Bible (as Stam, Baker, O’Hair, et al.), Calvin failed to notice that there wasn’t a single saint in the entire Old Testament who was “quickened” by anything (Gen. 5:1-4); they were all “dead in trespasses and sins’’ (Eph. 2:1) even though thousands of them went to Paradise (David, Moses, Hezekiah, Jacob, et al.). John Calvin imagined that all acts of worship in Exodus 35 were carried on by regenerated saints “chosen in Christ before the foundation of the world” (Eph. 1:4), while the truth of it is that none of them were regenerated and none of them were in Christ, then or now. No Calvinist could ever understand this simple, basic, primary, Old Testament truth. Four of Calvin’s points are theo­logical hot air. Of Calvin’s main contribution to theology—the perverting and misapplication of the words in Romans 8:29 and Ephesians 1:4—Charles Wesley wrote: “O horrible decree, worthy of whence it came! Forgive their hellish blasphemy who charge it to the Lamb!”77

John Calvin left Paris (1533-1536) as a fugitive evangelist and was evicted once from Geneva before the town was finally brought “under control.” His preaching was characterized by systematics, and Fisher says that in this characteristic he may be compared with Thomas Aquinas; “he has been appropriately styled the Aristotle of the Reformation. ”78 That is, Calvin (as Origen, Aquinas, Plato, Clement, Eusebius, and Augustine) was a PHILOSOPHER (Col. 2:8). His favorite source was Augustine, although Schaff denies that Calvinism was the completion of the work begun by Augustine.19

Dr. William Cunningham says that the Institutes were the most important work in the history of theological science,80 and to this most authors agree. It cannot be denied that Calvin’s theology had a tremen­dous impact later on the Christian world, but one must never forget that Qalvin’s example of burning people at the stake who didn’t accept his theology also “impacted” the Christian world: his followers in New England decided to imitate their “master” (Salem witchcraft trials by Calvinists,: 1664-1692).

In Geneva, Calvin was persecuted at night by mobs crying for his death, he was spit at while walking down the street, and he had libels circulated against him throughout the town; however, this was not due to soul winning efforts: it was self-imposed due to his aspirations to be an ecclesiastical dictator.

Servetus attacked Calvin, Melanchthon, and the pope but did not argue with Luther’s doctrines. Melanchthon agreed with Calvin in his

dealings with the “Servetus affair. ”81 That is, Luther, the coarse, bad- tempered, brutal “roughneck,” would not bum his adversaries at the stake; but the smooth, slick, cultured diplomat (Melanchthon) WOULD. Melanchthon still had enough Roman Catholic in him (as Augustine and Calvin) to enjoy a good bonfire.

Whatever else may be said about Calvin, it is obvious that his works are more closely related to Melanchthon’s than Luther’s. Calvin had a great practical polemic ministry, but his ideas about personal com­munion with God lack the maturity and vitality of Luther, Wesley, or any number of others.82

Calvin’s method of congregational worship at Strasbourg around 1540 gives an insight into the style of worship that had developed by this time:

1) The invocation. 2) A confession of sins and absolution. 3) The reading of the scriptures followed by singing. 4) Free prayer. 5) The sermon. 6) A long prayer followed by the Lord’s prayer. 7) Congrega­tional singing followed by a benediction.83

The outstanding work of Calvin, from a practical point of view, was his municipal demonstration of an Old Testament theocracy in the city of Geneva. The literature on the subject is exhaustive. Striking instances of discipline in Geneva are these: 1) A man was banished from the city for three months because he heard an ass bray and said jestingly, “He prays a beautiful Psalm.” 2) Three men who had laughed during a sermon were imprisoned for three days. 3) Three children were pun­ished because they remained outside of a church to eat some cakes. 4) A child was whipped publicly for calling his mother a thief. 5) A girl who struck her parents was beheaded to vindicate the dignity of the Fifth Commandment. 6) A person was imprisoned for four days because he wanted to call his child Claude (the name of a Catholic saint) instead of Xbraham.84 It can be seen from the above that many of the persecu­tions which John endured were not for “well doing” (1 Peter 2:20): they were for carrying on like a fool engaged in “bringing in the King­dom.”

Among numerous accomplishments, John Calvin was said by some to be the founder of the “grammatico-historical” method of exegesis.85

William Farel (1489-1565), the man who preceded Calvin in Swit­zerland, resembles Pauline practice much better than Calvin. He was a traveling evangelist always in motion, a bom fighter. He had to deal with priests who carried firearms and clubs under their frocks. Once he was fired at but the gun burst, and turning around Farel said to the priest, “I am not afraid of your shots.”86 William Farel was beaten,

reviled, shot at, and covered with spittle and bruises in the course of his preaching itinerary. (Following Farel, Peter Viret and Anthony Froment preached through Switzerland.)

Calvin’s fifth point in TULIP was the “preservation of the saints, ” and this is the only Bible doctrine in Calvin’s five-point system; the other four are flagrant violations of the word of God. Now, any Bible believer could see at a glance that if a man would pervert the word of God that many times on PHILOSOPHICAL grounds (Col. 2:8), he wouldn’t hesitate to bum a man at the stake who disagreed with him. Servetus (1511-1533) was burned at the stake with Calvin’s approval, the only catch being that Calvin would rather have had him murdered by the sword instead. These punitive measures at Geneva were not because of “a lack of printed Bibles” or because ‘‘the printing press had not yet been invented” or because ‘‘it was the spirit of the times,” etc. No, Alibi Ike has to run out of hot air sometime. No, the trouble with Calvin was pure egotism and rejection of the truths of God due to willful ignorance. Calvin was trying to set up a ‘‘City of God” to compete with Augustine’s home town (see chapter 12), except this would be a Reformed City of God instead of a Roman City of God: Johnny decided that Geneva would have a better Millennial reign than Rome (or Avignon). But if a theocracy was to be set up denying the Pre­millennial return of Christ (all Calvinists were A-millennial until 1940), John had to use the Old Testament as a pattern, so he pretended that all of the Old Testament saints were ‘‘Christians” regenerated by the Spirit of God: imagination is a remarkable thing.

Granted that John Calvin’s influence was responsible for much of the theology of the Scotch Presbyterians and Dutch and German Reformed groups and their development of high moral standards and orthodox confessions of faith, Calvin’s teaching was a long way removed from the New Testament concept of the local church and the proper form of baptism; and for those audacious souls who tend to treat the ‘‘manner” and “mode” of water baptism as a non-essential doctrine, may we drop a gentle reminder: all Calvinist groups, as all Catholic groups, confound water sprinkling with the new birth (see chapter 6). If you are not straight on the new birth, you are LOST (1 Cor. 1-2; John 3:12). At least we may thank God that Calvin had enough sense to use the Textus Receptus of Erasmus (as also did Tyndale and Martin Luther) instead of the grossly corrupt Alexandrian text of the ASV (1901), New ASV(1960), RSK(1952), NewRSV(1970), and NIV(1978), which is called by the Roman Catholics the Jesuit Rheims text (1582).

Ulrich Zwingli (1484-1531)

Zwingli was the guiding light in Zurich, Switzerland, opposite Geneva. He became a parish priest in 1506 and became chief pastor of the Great Minster Church in Zurich in 1519. He became a Protestant Bible believer through reading the Bible, and he struck out at clerical celibacy and the selling of indulgences. Zwingli was the “most clear headed of the reformers... he shocked Luther and Calvin with plain exe­gesis.”87 Zwingli preached nothing that he could not prove from the scripture as the only rule of Christian faith and practice—at least in pro­fession; however, when he got to infant baptism (see above) he slipped back to Rome’s traditions. His iconoclastic procedures during the Ref­ormation are well-known, but what is not so well-known was his stand against the radical uprisings of the peasants which was actually similar to Luther’s stand. “Luther,” says Schaff, “confounded Zwingli with Carlstadt and Munzer and the radicals.”88

Zwingli remained a humanist and openly broke with Rome after studying the works of Martin Luther (1522). He maintained (as any Bible believer would) that the scripture was the only infallible authority and that dual authorities (the Bible and tradition, etc.) were out of the question. Zwingli helped translate the Bible into Swiss-German, and as all sound Bible scholars he rejected the Alexandrian text of the NIV and New ASV, choosing instead the Greek Receptus of Antioch in Syria. Zwingli was killed on the battlefield in a war between Catholics and Protestants; he passed his work on to Heinrich Bullinger.

Never getting completely clear of his Satanic heritage (Roman Catholicism), Zwingli, as the followers of John Calvin, was guilty of approving the terrible atrocities committed on Bible believing Baptists and Anabaptists; these atrocities were all the more heinous in view of the fact that the German Baptists were Waldenses and were not connected at all with the riots of excess that took place under Munzer, Matthys, and other radical Anabaptists.89

Zwingli’s position on the Lord’s Supper was much closer to the Baptist position than Luther’s (consubstantiation), but to the end Zwingli held to Augustine’s heresies of infant baptism backed up by a church state; the germinal seed of these two hellish doctrines, which Cyprian and Augustine planted, never ceased to bear corrupt fruit in the life of any believer who did not break completely with Rome where she crossed scripture at any point: the Baptists in the Reformation had no trouble making a clean break, for their predecessors, the Novatians, Donatists, Nestorians, Euchites, Paulicians, Bogomiles, and Petrobrus- ians, had been ‘ ‘breaking it off ’ with the Catholic church for thirteen

centuries. Five hundred years before the Reformation the Albigenses and Waldenses had rejected infant baptism, and two hundred years before the Reformation Walter Lollard had infested England (through Wycliffe) with Baptists.

The English Reformers

Over in merry England, merry Mary Tudor was following the usual dictates laid down for her by Hellish Mother church; she was burning Christians at the stake. Latimer, Ridley, Cranmer, and others lit up the sky around Smithfield as Bloody Mary Tudor (1516-1558) tried the best she could to “win back to the true faith” the “scattered sheep” who needed “ONE FOLD WITH ONE SHEPHERD,” etc. Bloody Mary had the dice loaded against her this time, however, because a whole series of English Bibles began rolling off the presses, and none of them were the authorized Jesuit Bible of Jerome (ASV, NASV, NIV). The first man that Bloody Mary burned at the stake was the man who had put out the Matthew’s Bible (1537). This was John Rogers; Rogers made the first real revision of Tyndale’s Bible, which fortunately came from Erasmus’s “late, corrupt, and poorly copied manuscripts,” (to quote the modem, lying, apostate Fundamentalists in Christian colleges and seminaries).

The Great Bible (1539) and Taverner’s Bible (1539) were followed by the Geneva Bible (1560) and the Bishop’s Bible (1568). Since all of these Bibles departed from the official Dark Ages Roman Catholic text (the Greek text of the NASV and the NIV), the Jesuit priests in France finally yielded to the pressure—contrary to all of their past “convic­tions”90—and abased themselves to the disgusting, non-Catholic task of making a translation of the Bible into the English vernacular. It was called the Douay Rheims edition of the Bible.91 Quite naturally the Jesuit priests jettisoned the Text us Receptus as found in Stephanus, Erasmus, Beza, and Colinaeus and re-introduced our old friend of the family: Origen’s Alexandrian monstrosity (ASV, RV, NASV, NIV, RSV), which had introduced Europe to the Dark Ages. This Greek text (the one Jerome used for Pope Damasus, see chapter 11) was the one adopted by Westcott and Hort in 1881 and is now being promoted by every deluded apostate in America (1901-1980).

The Geneva Bible was another revision of Tyndale made by Whittington; it omitted the Apocrypha altogether. It used “late manu­scripts” to correct Vaticanus (the main manuscript for the ASV, NASV, and NIV) and used instead the old French translations from the Albigenses and the old German translations from Bohemia.92 Tyndale,

then, was the main force behind the English translations, and although Catholic rumors have always had it that the “AV was based on the Bishop’s Bible, ”92 it certainly was not. The AV of 1611 is ninety per­cent the English of Tyndale. If the AV committee didn’t follow their orders to “go by the Bishop’s Bible," no apostate Fundamentalist should be too upset: after all, Westcott and Hort, after professing to be engaged in making as few changes in the AV text as possible—and then lying about “only one word in a thousand makes any difference’’94—pro­duced a devil’s Catholic Bible with 35,000 changes of text in it.95 To tell the whole truth and nothing but the truth about it, the so-called Bishop’s Bible was written to offset the Geneva Bible and make the Receptus a little more palatable to the English monarchs. By the time of Bloody Mary (1516-1557) or shortly after, there were extant in Europe a Swiss German Bible by Zwingli, a Lutheran German Bible in Ger­many, a French Bible in Paris (Lefevre, 1523-1530), an Italian Bible in Italy (Brucioli, 1530), a Spanish version (Del Reina, 1569), plus Dan­ish, Portuguese, Norwegian, Swedish, Polish, Hungarian, and Bohe­mian Bibles; there were also New Testaments in Slavonic (1581) and Russian (1554).

But the ghastly thing about this “heretical” situation (if you look at it from the standpoint of Philip Schaff and the Catholic popes) was not just that the people all over Europe and eventually all over the world were getting to read and study the word of God; the ghastly thing was that they were all getting the WRONG BIBLE! Horrors! Instead of the “pure word of God” (ASV, RV, NASV) from the “best and oldest manuscripts” (RSV, NRSV, NIV) guarded with the utmost care by “Holy Mother church,” these heretical “Protestants” were getting the corrupt Textus Receptus preserved through the Dark Ages by the Paulicians, Bogomiles, Waldenses, Novatians, Donatists, Henricians, Petrobrusians, Vaudois, Albigenses, Manichaeans, and other unscholarly “Sabellian” groups who didn’t have any “recognized scholars” or “qualified authorities” to “labor in recovering the ORIGINALS.”96

A whole new generation of heretics had arisen who had to be labeled quickly, and of course the words “Christian” or “Bible believer” were out of the question; that would sound too “orthodox.” So “Holy Mother church” (and those of like mind) immediately fabricated the following (to keep up the unwavering impression that anyone who was not “Cath­olic” was in a splinter group): Separatist, Protestant, Lutheran, Wycliffite, Hussite, Calvinist, Socinian, Jansenist, Puritan, Arminian, and Pietist. This time (1500-1900) the impression was hard to sustain, for the “splinter groups” ran the last Catholic monarch off of the throne

of England, caused the last Catholic monarch to get off the throne of France (Louis XVI, 1793), split Germany down the middle, reduced Spain and Italy to fourth and fifth rate powers, and produced a brand of Biblical Christianity in North America so strong that the pope could not get control of Washington, D.C., until nearly four hundred years later.

However, the leaders of the Reformation were never able to com­pletely get over their Roman Catholic hangovers (infant baptism and a church state)-, they did, by the grace of God, accomplish four remark­able things: they broke the control of a universal, foreign dictatorship over national groups of Christians; they made a penetrating wound into the bosom of Rome’s authority (the popes and priests) by their emphasis on the authority of the scriptures and the priesthood of the believers; they stimulated the capitalistic system where the third estate (the middle class) acted as a buffer to any demagogue who wanted to install another totalitarian system; and finally they brought about a revival of preaching that affected the moral tone of every nation where Bible believing preach­ers were allowed to speak up. Any Christian can see at a glance that this is a description of some of the activity of the New Testament local church in the book of Acts (see Acts 2:41-47 and comments in that commentary).

The devil would certainly not take such an operation lying down.

Failing to capture the British Empire for Hellish Mother church- due to the shrewdness of “Bluff King Hal” (Henry VIII, the Bluebeard of the English speaking people)—the pope got Mary Tudor, Henry’s daughter (by Catherine of Aragon—Spain, not England), on the throne. Mary promptly married a Spanish Catholic (Philip II, 1554, not an Englishman) so that the methods of the Inquisition—then in full operation in Spain after the ministry of Torquemada—could be applied to “here­tics” who didn’t practice cannibalism on Sunday morning (see chapter 14). Latimer, Cranmer, and Ridley were burned at the stake after being examined by the Papists John (Bishop of Lincoln), James of Gloucester, and John of Bristol.97

The charges brought against Latimer and Ridley had nothing to do with “Manichaeanism” or “Arianism” (see chapter 9) or any other lying accusation from any two-faced hypocrite who professed to be con­cerned with Bible doctrines when his first concern was his belly. The charges were: 1) That Ridley, Latimer, and Cranmer did not believe that the Catholic mass was a propitiatory “sacrifice for the DEAD (which it is NOT). 2) That they did not believe a priest could reproduce Christ’s literal corpse in a church building on Sunday morning (which

he CAN’T). On these grounds—Catholic mythology—these Christian gentlemen were burned at the stake.

Rev. Laurence Saunders was burned at Coventry on February 8, 1555. Rawlins White was burned at the stake after asking the Papist bishop to teach him the Bible because he desired to be “reformed out of the word of God as a Christian ought to be.”98 The bishop had him burned (at Cardiff) because no Catholic bishop who ever lived knew enough about the New Testament to reform any Bible believer. Catholic bishops know ten verses in Matthew 16; John 20; Luke 22; Matthew 26; John 3; John 2; 1 Corinthians 3; John 6; and 1 Timothy 3, and that is the LIMIT of their knowledge of the New Testament local church and Biblical practice.

Rev. George March was burned at the stake on April 24, 1555, in Westchester. William Flower attended him the same day at St. Margaret’s churchyard in Westminster. John Cardmaker and John Wame were burned at the stake on May 30, 1555. Thomas Haulkes was burned on June 10. Thomas was first examined and condemned by Bishop Bonner, the Bishop of London. When the bishop threatened to light a faggot and bum Haulkes for not believing that the Lord’s Supper was t)ie “sacrament of the altar,” Haulkes replied, “I fig for your faggot! What God thinketh meet to be done, that shall ye do, and more ye shall not do.”99 After Bonner had pulled out the whole bag of tricks he had learned from Jesuit casuistry to prove Augustine’s “evolutionary ubiq­uity” (chapter 6, note 85, and chapter 7, note 70), Haulkes said, “Except you teach me by the word of God I will never credit you nor believe you. ”100 Since the bishop (Bonner) could not teach any Bible to anyone­being a member of the infallible church (1 Tim. 3:15) and fulfilling all the teaching requirements for the office of bishop (1 Tim. 3:1-7)— he did the only thing with Haulkes that a pastor would do if he was careful to have a “good report of them which are without” (1 Tim. 3:7): he had the Bible believer burned at the stake.

John Frankesh, Humphrey Middleton, and Nicholas Sheterden were all burned at the stake at Canterbury (chapter 15, note 24) on June 25, 1555. Hellish Mother church then proceeded to murder Dirick Carver, Brewer of Brighthelmstorm, John Launder, Thomas Iveson, John Ale­worth, James Abbes, John Denly, John Newman, Patrick Packingham, Christopher Waid, Romer Smith, Robert Samuel, and three hundred other “heretics.”101

Now, the student of history must realize that when the AV translators sat down to their work in 1604, their mothers and fathers had witnessed what we have described above. You would never fool such gentlemen

about “older and better manuscripts’’ when it came to a choice between the corrupt ASV and NIV (Douay Rheims, 1582, Jesuit Vulgate) and the Textus Receptus of the martyrs. The AV translators had a guideline much more accurate and much more scientific than silly little “do- hickeys” about “intrinsic probabilities” and “exclusively Syrian read­ings” and “neutral texts” to play with for the entertainment of dead orthodox apostates (1881-1990). The AV translators of the King James Bible (1611) knew all about the FRUITS of the Catholic Bibles, Catholic teachings, Catholic monarchs, and the “good, dedicated, godly Cath­olics” (like St. Francis), who though “misguided,” were still “good Christians,” etc. They had smelled the fruits of Catholicism in their noses: it was the stink of burning flesh.

When Bloody Mary finally popped off (as the British say), the prel­ates of Hellish Mother church were in a dither to get a Spanish king (Philip) on the throne; not enough Christians had been burned yet. If they had succeeded in doing this, North America from Alaska to the Rio Grande would have assumed the financial, social, economic, and international status of Honduras. But Elizabeth (“of happy memory”) took the throne (1533-1603). The pope (Pius V, 1570) promptly excom­municated her on the grounds that she wouldn’t submit to him, and he gave the Spanish government permission to attack England and kill any­one they pleased; there is more than one way to replace an English ruler in England with a Spanish ruler. In addition to this, Pope Pius V set up the school at Douai on the French coast to train Jesuits for the purpose of infiltrating the Church of England'02 and regaining the crown for Rome by taking over the Anglican church from the inside through Canterbury.'03 This judicious move (Josh. 9:4-15) was made in case the Spanish Armada sank: which it did. The Jesuit operation terminated in 1884 with the restoration of the Dark Ages Catholic Bible to Canter­bury and London (RV1884) through the labor of two of the most vicious and treacherous turncoats who ever lived—apostates who would put Marcion (chapter 3, note 31) and Julian (chapter 10, note 17) to shame— Messrs. Westcott and Hort.104

With the Spanish King Philip able now to attack England with a clear conscience and the added incentive of “forgiveness of sins” by Papa (see chapter 14, note 23), the Spanish Armada gallantly approached the coast of England for an invasion.

And at about this point—if we are to believe, as all good Catholics, in the prayers of the dead saints—the scattered ashes of John Wycliffe and the burned corpse of Tyndale began to cry from the ground (Heb. 11:4) for vengeance; and the God of the Bible, the God of history, the

God of the martyrs, the God of believers, the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ—the God of VENGEANCE (Heb. 12:29)—said to Himself, “All right, if Englishmen are going to try to keep my word [Rev. 3:8] and Spaniards are not, then I will take the appropriate action, since both nations are seafarers and my word is about to go around the entire world.”

The Spanish fleet was neatly placed in Davey Jones’s Locker (it sank) in the waters off of Great Britain, Ireland, and Scotland (1588), and Spain was reduced to a fifth rate world power and never recovered again.

With the end of a seafaring nation that opposed truth and righteous­ness (see chapter 14, note 120), the way was at last clear for the pro­duction of a Bible in the universal language of the end time (English): a Bible put out by a nation of seafaring people who had stood for the truth and proved it by burned corpses in their home towns. This Book translated under a “king” (Eccl. 8:4) could reach “the ends of the earth.” The Philadelphia door (Rev. 3:7) now opens and swings back on its hinges and guarantees a worldwide opportunity for Bible believers to fulfill the original commission given to them in Acts 1:8 and 2 Cor­inthians 5:20. All the Lord needed was a Bible in line with what He had already written and preserved; since He had already decreed (in 1000 B.C.) that there had to be present “the word of a KING” (Eccl. 8:4) before there could be any spiritual “power” in that word (Rom. 13:1-4), and since His King was a JEW (John 18:33)—not a pope, and since the oracles of God were given to the JEWS (Rom. 3:2)—not the popes, God needed a king with a Jewish name; He got one. This time the king was not Edward, Alfred, Richard, Ethelbert, Henry, Philip, or George: this time it was “JAMES.” James is the English word for JACOB (Greek, laKtoPoc;, lacabos).,05

Knowing the Bible a great deal better than the apostate Fundamen­talists of the twentieth century, Satan had prepared to offset this God­given Book. No sooner had the order been given—in answer to a Puritan petition: not ANGLICAN106—than the Papists attempted to bomb the Parliament107 and prevent the Book from being produced. In 1605, as soon as the A V translators had seated themselves to work, the explosives were planted. The plot was found out, and thirty-six barrels of gun­powder were confiscated from under the House of Lords where ten days later the Parliament would have met; the Catholic assassins were arrested and executed (persecuted and “unjustly sentenced,” if you are a Catholic historian).

The Thirty Years War (1618-1648)

Back in Deutschland, the Bride of Satan was just as busy. Following a peasants’ war in the middle of the Reformation, a war lasting thirty years took place, as the Catholics tried to exterminate every Protestant in Germany.108 The Thirty Years War, as all Roman Catholic wars, was started by the Catholic church’s basic assumption that she was God- ordained to rule the world and bring every human being on earth into subjection to herself (Rev. 17:18).

This is, of course, what underlay the self-immplation of Thich Quang Due in Saigon (June 1963), touching off the Vietnam massacre. Buddhists in Vietnam were sick and tired of a Catholic church state trying to destroy their country with a minority of Fascists.109 Exactly the same thing may be said of Ulster (1966-1980).110 The Catholic church, by now in our history, should be readily manifest to the most unobservant soul, for what she is, and has been and always will be: A TOTALITARIAN, FASCIST STATE headed up by a demoniac dictator and self-commissioned (as Communism) to rid the earth of Bible believ­ing Christianity. At any attempt by anyone to free themselves from the coils of this hellish political hierarchy—posing as a “church”—retaliation is immediate.111 Catholics may parade in Belfast to celebrate the “wear­ing o’ the green,” but Ulstermen may NOT parade in their own city for the “wearing o’ the orange,”"2 The Catholic church has always reserved for herself all the civil rights and human rights which she pro­fesses to believe in, and these rights are for herself exclusively.113

At the sudden eruption of scores of noblemen and scholars who no longer believed in a pope or Catholic “sacraments” in Germany, the pope was faced with an economic problem.1'4 How could he keep $150,000,000 worth of property (see Abraham Lincoln’s problem with Ft. Sumter in South Carolina!) and goods in Germany if the electors and princes of those territories left his church? Think of the trouble New England would have been in if the South had seceded (1861) suc­cessfully! Slavery in someone else’s territory would have been a very small matter alongside bankruptcy in your own territory. The popes, bishops, and cardinals were dependent on their high living from money extracted from the “laity,” so they did the only thing they could do; they organized every Catholic elector and nobleman in Germany into an army and attacked every other elector and nobleman who wasn’t “Catholic.” Naturally the popes came out of the slaughter smelling like a rose. (So did Eisenhower after betraying the trust of allied troops;115 so did General Abrams after losing a war;116 so did Alger Hiss after selling out the Balkans;117 so did Martin Luther King, Jr.,

after forcing the passage of the greatest Communist and anti­Constitutional piece of legislation that America ever had seen;118 so did * ‘Honest Abe ’ ’ after forcing military conscription and personal income taxes on the people without their consent, while taking about “govern­ment of the people, by the people,” etc.)

There is nothing new under the sun.

The Thirty Years War was sparked by a typical “Ulster” incident. In a town which was ninety percent Protestant (Donauworth) the Cath­olics were still allowed to operate monasteries.119 The Catholics used this open door to demonstrate, and during one demonstration they had some stones thrown at them by some Germans who obviously knew what a monastery was doing there and what the pope intended to do with it in relation to the civil government. Immediately the Catholic Duke of Bavaria (Maximilian, 1597-1651) called out troops and occupied the Protestant downtown section with a Catholic army.120 Subsequently, the Catholics (who made up less than fifteen percent of the population) had an army to back them up in their demands; they immediately demanded the return of all ecclesiastical property (former Catholic build­ings and lands) for the pope. An opposing union was formed, headed up by Elector Frederick IV of the Palatinate, who was a Calvinist.121

After the death of Rudolph II (1576-1612), the king of Bohemia, the laws of toleration (the Majestatsbrief) were put aside by a fanatical Catholic named Ferdinand, who, although he was not a descendant of Rudolph n, still managed to get the throne through his Jesuit training122— although the inhabitants of the land had actually elected Frederick, not Ferdinand.123 Ferdinand immediately attempted (as Mary Tudor, Jack Kennedy, Archbishop Stepinec, et al.) to enforce Roman Catholicism on the Protestant population (as Diehm, Cortez, Tilly, Wallenstein, Torquemada, et al.). Several Protestants who believed in religious liberty and knew that Rome was the greatest enemy of that freedom on the face of this earth pitched two of Ferdy’s Catholic regiments out of a window because, obviously, they had made some demands much like Boniface made to Philip the Fair. The war started. Two Catholic generals (Tilly and Wallenstein) succeeded in wiping out Bible believing Prot­estantism from Austria, Bohemia, and Moravia. It was replaced by an ironclad Catholic dictatorship with an army to back up the pope’s designs upon anyone stepping out of line. The Edict of Restoration (1629) returned one hundred monasteries and two hundred parish churches back into the Dark Ages set-up of 500-1500 A.D. So, as one could have guessed, from this area came the political intrigues for World War I (see Vol. II) and the leader who instigated World War II—the Roman Catholic from Austria Arlnlnh Hitler

These events belong properly to anti-church history. It is known to all that Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden (1594-1632) came to the Con­tinent to lead the Protestant German armies, and after the Peace of Westphalia (1648) Germany was split into north and south Germany (later, the Roman Catholic Hitler split it into East and West Germany), the Rhineland, Bavaria, Bohemia, Moravia, and Austria returned to the Dark Ages to hatch forth a thousand plots (1600-1960) which terminated in the French Revolution, the American Revolution, the War of the Span­ish Succession, and two World Wars (see Vol. II). In the main, the northern provinces went Lutheran. Since both religions (Lutheran and Catholic) were baby-sprinkling, church state set-ups, it didn’t make a great deal of difference after a hundred years. What the followers of Luther gained in sound doctrine and Biblical truth they nearly lost by 1800. The Pietists under Zinzendorf( 1700-1760), Jacob Spener(1635- 1705), August Francke (1663-1727), August Spangenberg (1704-1792), Peter Bohler (1712-1775), and others were the Biblical reaction to the dead orthodoxy that disfigured and distorted Luther’s teachings following his death.

It is a sobering thought when one realizes that every casualty in the wars between France, Austria, Spain, England, Italy, Germany, and Bohemia from 400 A.D. to 1980 was caused directly or indirectly by the ambitious desires of ecclesiastical politicians who wanted to enforce a totalitarian state church system on Europe as a substitute for the Millennial reign of Jesus Christ124 (see The Sure Word of Prophecy, 1971). The blood shed in the European wars from 400-1980 was shed on religious grounds; i.e., to bring about the perfect society on earth. Every war that was ever fought on these grounds was fought because neither side would abide by the Book as the final authority in religious and political matters; there is no way to shed blood in religious dispu­tation or economic disputation if a believer goes by the BOOK (1 Peter 2-3). The real Bible believer would never kill or imprison any man to enforce any belief—not even belief in the Bible. That is the work of Bible rejecting “ecclesio-politico bosses” like Jim Jones (the Guyana Massacre, 1978) and the nuncios, Charismatic healers, cardinals, priests, NAACP “reverends,” and Methodist bishops.

The Bible is never speaking facetiously when it lays blood guilt upon a man (2 Sam. 21) or a nation (Ezek. 16; 23) or a city (Rev. 11:8). When the Bible states that “all of the blood of those slain upon the earth” (Rev. 18:24) was connected with one CITY (Rev. 17:6), the Bible believer is to take it at face value. And whether this blood be the blood “of the martyrs of Jesus” shed by Rome (Rev. 17:6) or the

blood of unsaved crusaders shed by Rome (chapter 14), a hideous fact must be faced: if the saints were “chosen in Christ before the foun­dation of the world,” whoever killed Jesus Christ was responsible indi­rectly for the death of every Christian who ever died a violent death. But the passage goes far beyond this (Rev. 17), for when one examines the roots and sources for the major wars that have devastated Europe for fifteen centuries, he finds that the Roman Catholic leaders are involved in every one of them. A brief list follows.

1. The wars of the Frankish kings (600-1000) carried on either to protect the popes, to consolidate the pope’s territorial possessions, to obtain new territories for the pope’s control, or to get plunder and booty from a country which was “out of fellowship” with the popes. Clovis, Martel, Pepin, and Charlemagne filled the bill.

2. The Crusades (1090-1291), resulting in the death of over a mil­lion Moslems and Catholics. They were fought for the pope’s benefit under the unholy and ungodly theory that Palestine and Jerusalem be­longed to the Catholic church; which they don't.

3. The Hundred Years War (1337-1453) was encouraged by all popes, as it would weaken England and France and make either country easier for the popes at Rome to control. No pope ever suggested that either country quit fighting. No pope ever suggests that any opposing forces quit fighting unless it is under the guidance and arbitration of a Roman Catholic pope (see Vietnam and World War II, Vol. II).

4. All of the Indians in America who were killed for either not getting baptized or not giving up their gold (1492-1700) were killed on a Roman Catholic basis: submit to Catholicism or else.

5. The Hapsburgs versus the Bourbons (Austria versus France). Since both families were Roman Catholics, it was just a matter of Cath­olics killing Catholics to get possessions. No pope has ever objected to Catholics killing Catholics (see chapter 15, note 8), and when a hun­dred to a thousand Catholics were killed trying to cross the Rapido River in Italy (by Monte Cassino during World War II), the pope was only interested in maintaining the monastery there on the high ground over­looking the allied troops by the river; it made a nice observation post for German artillery. Of course, the Germans wouldn’t think of using it for that! Oh my, no! Whoever heard of a German Wehrmacht colonel or an SS Oberst who would use high ground for an artillery OP!

6. The Treaty of Augsburg (1555) stopped Catholics from killing Germans in Germany after ten years of war. The German Catholics insisted that death for their German “landsleute” was better than reading the Textus Receptus of Martin Luther.125

7. Philip II of Spain (Catholic) and the Duke of Alva (Catholic) killed more than 50,000 Hollanders in six years (1567-1573), trying to set up a Catholic church state in the Netherlands.

8. The War of the Three Henrys was between three Roman Catholics in France (1589-1598), and it wound up in the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre of over 48,000 Bible believing Christians: it also led to the ascension of Louis XIV, who took France down the tube: a Roman Cath­olic tube.

9. The Civil War in England was started by Archbishop Laud, the pro-Catholic bishop of Charles I, who was a solid Roman Catholic. After a sanguinary war, a bloodless revolution was achieved in England (1688-1689), but only by the skin of James H’s teeth: he ran off to France as Thomas a Becket had done. James II was pro-Catholic.

10. Cardinal Richelieu, a staunch Papist, helped organize an army to fight his own people (Catholics) in the Thirty Years War, which was the Roman Catholic “missionary and evangelistic effort” to force Ger­many back into the Dark Ages.

11. The destruction of France as a nation, which reduced her to almost feudal conditions, was the work of Louis XIV (a first rate Papist), whose minister was Cardinal Mazarin (a Papist). Louis XIV made France the strongest military power in Europe through Don Conde and Turenne (two Catholic generals). Louis’s militarism initiated a period of taxing and over-expansion that brought France to the brink of financial ruin.126

12. The Thirty Years War (1618-1649) destroyed two-thirds of the moveable property in Germany and killed over nine million of its inhabitants.127 While Catholics were enraged in this “expansion of Chris­tianity,” Richelieu (French Catholic) did a little mopping up in Austria and Spanish territory, taking advantage of the fact that his spiritual leader (the “Holy Father”) had Germany engaged in such a deadly massacre that it could not fight France anywhere.

13. The War of the Spanish Succession (1702-1713) was brought about by an attempted alliance of Louis XIV (Catholic) with his own grandson, who took the throne of Spain (state church Catholic). Louis had in mind conquering Holland after the Duke of Alva failed.

14. The War of the Austrian Succession (1740-1748). In this, as in number 13, the hand of the Catholic popes can be found. When the Holy Roman Emperor (Charles VI) kicked the bucket, predominantly Protestant Prussia attacked predominantly Catholic Austria; since France and Spain were both Catholic they had to join in the war also.

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attacked Austria,” etc., when the truth of the matter is there is no such thing as England, Spain, etc. These wars are the works of INDIVID­UALS within those nations who are carrying out the orders of INDI­VIDUALS according to what INDIVIDUALS thought about politics, government, religion, and control. Popes and archbishops, Catholic kings and cardinals are always very careful to blame all of this hell-raising (1400-1900) on the ambitions of COUNTRIES. Countries, per se, don’t have ambitions (James 4:1-4): ambitions belong to individuals.

15. The Seven Years War (1756-1763). Maria Theresa of Austria, a good Roman Catholic, lined up with France (Roman Catholic) and took on Frederick the Great of Prussia: he whipped both of them (1757).

16. Napoleon reinstated the Roman Catholic church as the state church of France128 since he himself, as Hitler, was a Roman Catholic dictator. Naturally he, as Hitler (Catholic), signed a concordat with the pope, as did also Mussolini, in 1801, before the big killing spree began. The pope would naturally tolerate any killing under such circumstances, for killing, torture, and murder are not “sins” in a pope’s mind unless they are carried out by someone who is a threat to the hierarchy.

17. Metternich (a good Catholic), from Austria, interfered with the government of Spain in 1823 and tried to do it again in Greece and Turkey.129 The popes never quit; no totalitarian system can.

18. Even after the French Revolution, Charles X tried to set up a dictatorial church state (Roman Catholic) in France in an attempt to censor speech and the press; this developed into an armed revolt. Nor did matters end here; the Roman Catholics, especially the clergy, lined themselves up with the monarchists of France in 1889 and tried to set up a military dictatorship. Captain Dreyfus, a Jew, was tried and con­victed by Roman Catholics on charges of treason; later it was found out that the charges were fraudulent and the men who had brought them were Roman Catholics trying to get rid of the French Republic and restore it to the feudal Roman Catholic church state monarchy; all mon­archs, of course, in sworn allegiance to the pope.130

Nor did matters end here (see Vol. II). The final goal and ambition of every Roman Catholic pope, cardinal, and archbishop in the hierarchy from 500 A.D. to the present (1980) had to have the absolute dictatorial control over the private, public, and religious lives of every individual on the face of this earth131 “in the name of God, for the glory of Mary, God wills it, blah, blah, blah.” Lurking in the background behind the Danish War (1864), the Austro-Prussian War (1886), the Franco- Prussian War (1870), the American Revolution (1776), and the War of 1812 will be found the smirking faces of Roman Catholic professional

politicians who care nothing about peace on earth unless it is a Pax Romana—Roman peace. Nations destroying each other are the hope of the Roman See for regaining the control which she lost at the time of the Reformation, exactly as the barons and lords destroying each other (500-1000 A.D.) was her hope of controlling medieval Europe.

The ghastly thing to note is that all of the appendages and side results of these wars affected the entire national lives of whole populaces not even engaged in the actual fighting; the broken homes, the lack of food, the torn-up farmlands, the pilfering and plundering by “strays,” the altered town and country economics, the black markets, the thievery, the assaults of highwaymen, and the entire retinue that accompanies WAR can eventually be laid at the feet of a few bloodthirsty tyrants— Catholic madmen—who were genuine religious fanatics and professed to be the leaders of the church of Jesus Christ on this earth.

“And in her was found the blood...of all that were slain upon the earth” (Rev. 18:24).

Not only war, then, but the side effects of war, with their manifold complications, are tied up with the loathsome ministry of the popes and bishops of Roman Catholicism (see Vol. II). One cannot absolve that church of its Millennial long criminal guilt; in her position of power and authority in the world—she is the only branch of Christendom that can still compel senators and representatives to obey her—she could have stopped the killing a thousand times in a thousand places by a thou­sand means: she refused. It was not in her best interests to stop war; her best interests (Job 2:4) lay in crying “peace, peace” when there was no peace (Isa. 48:22); in crying “make me an instrument of Thy peace” while encouraging the nations to attack each other (1 Thess. 5:1-6); and in crying “peace on earth to men of good will” when she is quoting the New ASV of Bob Jones University or the NIV of Moody Bible Institute: that reading, just quoted, is the Catholic reading for Luke 2:14, not the Protestant reading of the Reformation text.

Following the death of Luther’s preaching and teaching (that is Evan­gelism and Education) came the inevitable CULTURE: this time in the person of Melanchthon. With him came the Antinomian controversy, the Majoristic controversy, the Flacian controversy, the Osiandrian con­troversy, the Stancarist controversy, the Adiaphoristic controversy, the Eucharistic controversy, and the Intermistic controversy. Despite Martin Luther’s warning to the university theologians to “banish without mercy all thoughts about God which are not clearly expressed in scripture,”132 Lutherans became embroiled in discussions as nebulous and impractical as the Trinitarian arguments of Nicene days.133 Following these philo­

sophical bull sessions and blasts of theological hot air, apostasy set in and Lutheranism became a “kissing cousin” of Catholicism; or as one has so aptly put it, “An Episcopalian is just a Catholic who flunked his Latin.”

Since thoroughness is a German characteristic (which the Germans carry almost to the point of sin, sometimes), the Bible believing groups in Germany who rejected Luther’s church state and wanted to go “whole hog” for separation began to assume rabid proportions. A madhouse of riot, revolt, persecution, and war became so entangled with the preach­ing of the Bible in this period that it is nearly impossible to follow with certainty the New Testament local church.

The Anabaptists of Germany were Pre-millennialists, so Henry Vedder is quick to tell us that they are not to be associated with the “true Baptistic line.”134 (Where that puts Billy Graham and R.G. Lee is a little hard to say.) But it wasn’t just Pre-millennial Baptists who were involved in the Munster riots; as a matter of fact, no real Pre- millennialist would be caught dead trying to “set up a kingdom’’ in Munster or anywhere else; that is what Catholics and Post-millennial ists do.135 There were Biblical Anabaptists, mystical Anabaptists, pantheistic Anabaptists, and just plain Baptists.136 Their work culminated in the Schmalkald Wars (1546-1552). Great preachers (Storch, Stubner, Hubmaier, Muller, Tauler, Gross, Schwenkfeld, and others) were asso­ciated with the real radicals in these movements. Schwenkfeld had much to do with the formation of the Quakers (Society of Friends) in England later.137

As every movement against a church state is accompanied by excesses, so the “back to the Bible movement” was accompanied by attempts to burn down monasteries, smash up cathedrals, kill monks and nuns, etc. Carlstadt, Rothmann, Storch, Hoffman, Matthys, and Munzer decided that Luther had not gone far enough in departing from Rome, so they went “whole hog” and decided to get Strasbourg and Munster (cities) ready for the Second Advent. The debacle that followed138 pretty well destroyed the testimony of any future Baptists that might show up in Germany, so to this day only two groups are recognized there as “Christian” groups: Catholische and Evangelische. Baptists in Germany (1900-1980) hold about the same status as Jehovah’s Witnesses.

Out of the Reformation came the Mennonites, Dunkers, Moravians, and Amish. Menno Simons (1496-1516) gave up his priesthood in the Catholic church in 1536 and took on the views of the Paulicians, Donatists, Montanists, Albigenses, Patarins (Paterines), and Waldenses.

He insisted upon the absolute authority of the Bible as the final, infallible rule for faith and practice and taught that the pure church was to be an association of regenerated believers: not a state church full of sanc­tified devils.13’

Menno Simons was born in Friesland in 1492.140 Upon beholding the sickening spectacle of a common tailor beheaded with a sword (because he had rebaptized an adult Catholic,141 Menno decided to start searching the scripture; he became intrigued with the idea of “more than one baptism” and he thought surely he could find some trace of “rebaptizing” in the Bible. He found it (Acts 19:1-5) but was horrified to learn that there wasn’t one case where any infant was baptized. Where­upon he read Luther’s works and then went and talked to Bullinger and Bucer142 about the matter; he found out that they could no more justify infant baptism than praying to dead saints. Until his own death (1559), Menno became an apostle of Baptist truth and went all over Europe setting up independent, local, Baptist churches (Westphalia, Friesland, Holland, Brabant, and the German provinces on the Baltic).143 Menno’s followers in Lithuania emigrated to Russia and founded scores of churches in the Crimea.144 Charles V (1535) said that all of Menno’s followers should be burned at the stake. The governor of Friesland (1542) said anyone giving him food, shelter, or assistance would be killed as a heretic.145 Fourteen of his followers were burned in 1534 (England) and four more in 1538. Menno published several works (Renunciation of Rome, Testimony against Jan Van Leyden, and The Foundation Book).146

Balthasar Hubmaier (1480-1528) left the priesthood and came boldly out into the position of a Bible believing Baptist: he was burned at the stake, and the Papists in Vienna drowned his wife in the Danube River.147

When the Bible believing Protestants in the Netherlands tore down the images in Catholic churches (1566), Philip of Spain sent ten thousand Spanish Catholics up into Holland, under the Duke of Alva, and killed over nine thousand Bible believing people between 1567-1573.148 The murderous Duke of Alva—who ranks with such butchers in history as Lenin, Bonner, Tilly, Stalin, Bloody Mary, Hitler, and Torquemada— inspired William of Orange to raise up a revolt (1568) which at first was unsuccessful but later ran the Spaniards out of the country. The Duke of Alva slaughtered another seven thousand Bible believers in 1576 (Antwerp) and by this act so infuriated the entire nation that Holland and Belgium united with France and Germany in their efforts to drive the Spanish out. In twelve years the Spanish navy was in Davey Jones’s Locker off the shores of Belgium and Holland (notes 104-105).

Erasmus’s innocent, little “carelessly copied’’ Greek manuscripts from “late dates” were evidently causing a continental upheaval. With the publication and preaching of this text in over twenty major languages, Hellish Mother church gathered her bloody skirts together for one last, all-out attack on Bible believing Christianity in Europe. Sadly enough, Zwingli and Calvin joined her in some of the crusade, at least where Catholic “orthodoxy” touched those two star performers we found lurk­ing around backstage at Nicaea and Carthage more than ten centuries in the past: infant baptism and a church state.

The greatest recipients of these religious debaucheries were the Anabaptists. The Anabaptists had come from a long line of believers who never at any time practiced infant baptism nor at any time approved of a state church; further, there is no evidence that they, at any time, were deceived by the “traditions of the fathers.” This made them a target not only of the psychotic Papists but also the target of Calvinists, Zwinglians, and Lutherans, who would not follow them that far in obey­ing the word of God. While the Catholics continued to slaughter Prot­estants—sometimes at the rate of five thousand a week (more than ten thousand on St. Bartholomew’s Day)—the fanatical followers of the Reformers, who still had papal blood in their veins, went at the Ana­baptists with a fury. Satan did not take the worldwide return to the true Bible text—the Receptus of the Reformation—without raising a storm of protest.

Felix Mainz (1498-1527) fell out with Zwingli and the town fathers in Zurich. They set his execution day for January 5, 1527. They bound him hand and foot, took him out into Lake Zurich in a boat, and threw him overboard. On the way out Felix preached to the people on the shore; a reformed pastor in the boat tried to silence him, but he went on anyway. They put a black cap over his head before dumping him out of the boat.149

George Blaurock (died 1529) was another Swiss Baptist. He put Zwingli to shame when the two debated over the subject of water bap­tism. George told Zwingli that he had the same right to separate from him as Zwingli had to separate from the pope (i.e., South Carolina in 1861 had as much right to separate from Washington, D.C., as New England did from England, 1776). Blaurock was put into chains and led through the streets of Zurich, being beaten by the town councilmen till the blood flowed in his tracks.150 He was then sent back to prison but later released. He was exiled from Zurich and then pursued from place to place by Papists and Reformers until Catholics burned him at the stake in Innsbruck (1529).

Ludwig Hetzer was decapitated (Feb. 1529) at Constance for teach­ing that water was not connected with salvation in any form.151 In Basel, Switzerland, five Baptists were drowned. When Gastius reported on the torturing of a Baptist (by the followers of Zwingli and Calvin!) he said the man cried: “Why do you not kill me. I will not betray my breth­ren even if you tear me to pieces. My body is yours, burn it, scathe it, lacerate it, destroy it, if you please. Increase your cruelty! You will gain nothing!”152 He then spat in the face of the “Christians” who were torturing him. This particular man’s sin was that he had been immersed in water following his conversion to Christ; such an act was an open admission that “Covenant Theology” (visit Holland, Michigan, some­time) was powerless and that the infant baptism which supposedly was a “seal of the covenant” (Constantine, see chapter 7) did nothing but dampen a baby.

As quickly as the state church sacramentalists had associated Donatism and Novatianism with Manichaeanism (chapter 9), they now associated the Bible believing Baptists in Germany with the Munster radicals. Strangely enough, those who complained the loudest about the violence and the impurity of the Anabaptist movement in Munster set quite an example themselves. Luther was not dead set against multiple wives,153 and on the papal side, John XII, Innocent VIII, and Sixtus IV were not exactly blushing roses; one of them maintained a cat house and received twenty thousand ducats a year from his “call girls.”154 Some of the Munsterites had gone around in the nude, and suddenly everyone forgot that from 347 to 1500 A.D. Catholics had adult candi­dates for baptism stripping to the nude.155 If the Munsterites were guilty of self-mutilation and of other excesses, it could be brought to mind that the Catholic flagellants had been whipping themselves through the streets of Bavaria, France, Spain, Austria, and Italy for five hundred years before this (see chapter 13, note 44), exactly as they still do in the Philippines today (1980): the custom was a “pagan tradition" that was “reasonable and consoling" (chapter 12, note 7). If any of the Ger­man Anabaptists had been “furious fanatics” (as some avow), what would THAT mean? They had been taught by their mother for nearly a thousand years, and when did Unholy Mother Whore believe in sound doctrine or sound practice? Do you think a church that would murder over 20,000,000 people is not led by "FURIOUS FANATICS"? Jim Jones (Guyana Massacre) couldn’t even get in the running.

When Hubmaier left Zurich (1526) he had gone to Moravia; the local churches there began to multiply rapidly. Some of the congregations moved to Austerlitz. All of these Baptist groups were welcomed by their

“heretical” brethren, the Hussites.156 There were sixty congregations of these Baptists by 1576, and many of them settled in Hungary and Transylvania. Hubmaier’s death at the stake did nothing to shake the Baptist congregations. They knew when it came to Biblical arguments that Hubmaier had Zwingli between a rock and a hard place all of his life. In their debates, Zwingli had appealed to 1 Corinthians 7:14 as proof that children of saved parents had to be saved. Hubmaier quoted John 3:3. When Zwingli replied that surely John the Baptist must have baptized a few infants157 and that there must have been some children in “the household of Stephanas” (1 Cor. 1:16), Hubmaier quoted 1 Corinthians 1:14-15 to him and called it to his attention that Paul wasn’t worried about baptizing ANYONE, let alone infants. “You may as well be still,” Hubmaier had said to Zwingli. When Zwingli persisted in going on with the old Campbellite argument (“There are many things not expressly mentioned in the Bible that are not against God”), Hubmaier reminded him that he had really better shut up because that is exactly what the Catholic priest (Father Faber) had said to Zwingli when those two were in a scriptural debate.158 Neither Zwingli nor Calvin got rid of all their Roman blood when they “reformed.”

Bishop Fabri published six sermons against the Baptists in Prague (1528). Dr. Leopold Dick published a tractate against them in 1531. Bullinger (Zwingli’s successor) wrote extensively against them. Prince William V offered a reward for every Baptist captured; consequently many of the Baptists were hanged, and some had their tongues cut out.159 Soon the prisons in Austria, Germany, and Switzerland were crowded with Baptists; they were branded, drowned, or burned at the stake by “Christians.”

A certain George Wagner was captured in Munich, thrown in jail, and subsequently burned at the stake.160 Seventeen Baptists were burned alive at the stake in Regensburg, while those who recanted had the priv­ilege of being beheaded before they were burned. In Rothenburg on the Neckar (1527), Michael Sattler, a converted monk, was brought out in public and had his tongue cut out, his flesh tom with hot pincers, and then he was burned to ashes while the local Catholic constabulary drowned his wife and several of his friends. Sixty-five Baptists were killed in Kitzbuhel, sixty-six at Rattenburg, and twenty-two at Kuffstein. The Catholics outdid the Lutherans in the slaughter as usual; over a thousand Baptists were murdered in the Tyrol between 1500 and 1531.161 Dr. Keller of Munster says that six hundred were killed at Enzisheim, seventy-three at Linz, and two hundred of them were killed in the Palatinate. Under an edict of 1530, all houses in southeast Germany

were searched to see who wasn’t coming to mass and whose children had not yet been sprinkled. Jacob Huter, a Baptist leader, came to Moravia to help these people, but King Ferdinand had him arrested. The Papists proceeded to gag him, and then they dunked him alternately into boiling and freezing water; they tore his flesh open with hooks, poured brandy into the wounds, and then set him on fire.162

While some of the followers of Zwingli, Calvin, and Luther occa­sionally joined in with Hellish Mother church in these operations, the leaders themselves could not help but expressing Baptist views at times.163 Keller shows that most of the Reformers, by virtue of the strong stand they took for the Bible, stood on semi-Baptist grounds even though they didn’t dare to trust God far enough to step out from under the protection of their state armies and state electors. William Farel (1528), Luther (1526), and Zwingli all leaned toward the Baptist position because when they professed to have one final authority for practice (the Bible) they saw very clearly that their position on the LOCAL CHURCH and INFANT BAPTISM was “sleazy”—to say the least.164 Leonard Kayser, a close friend of Luther, was burned at the stake in Passau, Austria. When he was martyred, Luther was lavish in his praise of how well Kayser went to his death: Kayser was an elder in a Baptist church in Scherding.165

It is apparent from church history that neither Luther, Zwingli, nor Calvin ever attempted to live by faith (Rom. 1:17) when dealing with political and religious enemies, at least not after they were established. All of them felt the need for the “tax shelter” of some form of armed forces under governmental auspices. This, of course, is completely con­trary to the New Testament. The “good” that these men did, therefore, was not that they restored the New Testament church to its primitive simplicity or its scriptural functions. The good they did was this: through their constant use and quoting of the Bible in public and private, they drove multitudes, including the Papists themselves, to BIBLE STUDY. The mass of spiritual movements that came out of the Reformation were not so much due to the orthodoxy of Knox, Beza, Calvin, Melanchthon, and Luther, as due to the emphasis they gave to the reading and believing of the BOOK. In England, the Anglicans got to reading their Bibles and split into High and Low churches (Puritans); some of the Puritans kept on reading their Bibles and split into Presbyterians and Congre­gational churches; the Congregationalists who kept on with the Book split into Separatists and non-Separatists, and the Separatists who kept on reading the Book split into Brownists and Baptists. And God forbid the Baptists should ever maintain ecclesiastical unity! The Baptists imme-

diately divided into General and Particular Baptists, who wound up as Primitive Baptists, Conservative Baptists, Hard Shell Baptists, Freewill Baptists, German Baptists, Southern Baptists, Landmark Baptists, Amer­ican Baptists, Northern Baptists, and Bible believing Baptists.

The Bible evidently does not produce ecumenical harmony to pave the way for a political and social kingdom on this earth. Evidently, the Bible doesn’t produce Christians who worry too much about “one shep­herd and one fold” at Rome. Evidently the Book produces a rugged individualism that concerns itself with getting sinners saved and out of the man-made political and social utopias of this earth (Gal. 1:4; John 18:36). What appeared to Luther, the popes, Zwingli, Schaff (1880), the cardinals, Calvin, the Associated Press (1980), and nuns as “schis­matic, trouble making fanatics” whose “divisive heresies undermined the unity of the body” was just the Holy Spirit encouraging people to get back to the word of God and leave the “kingdom builders” (see The Sure Word of Prophecy, 1971) to stew in their own juices. Luke 16:15 is the slide rule forjudging these matters, and where you find in history (in any century) this political gaff about “one fold and one shepherd ’’—being quoted by some psychotic madman who passes off as “holy” because he drips piety (Rom. 16:18)—you will find death and hell following him (Rev. 6:1-8). Kingdom builders are the bloodiest killers on this earth: Socialists, humanists, Fascists, Communists, Khans, Catholics, and evolutionists. Few modem men could compete with James Jones (1978), who called himself “the Father” and desired nothing more than racial integration, civil rights, social equality, and a classless soci­ety—he got it.

The most important thing the Reformation accomplished, then, was not that it split the Roman church into national churches, which it did; nor yet that it emphasized the priesthood of the believer, which it did; nor yet that it pointed out how mean and contemptible the “vicars of Christ” were, and they were; nor even that it encouraged public edu­cation and capitalism, which it did. The main event was the restoration on a worldwide scale of the Received Text of the local church in the New Testament: the members of this church (Peter, James, John, Jude, Paul, et al.) had written these New Testament epistles.

With the advent of the printing press, truth now could be propagated just as quickly as falsehood, and the news media was no longer the exclu­sive property of the enemies of the local church. Until this time nearly all the literature that church historians had access to regarding the New Testament local assemblies was written by the greatest enemies of New Testament local assemblies the world ever produced: the members of

the Bride of Satan (Rev. 17). With the Reformation comes the aban­donment on a worldwide scale of this Bride’s “bible”—the bastardized, mongrel, African text from Alexandria, written by Origen and copied out for Constantine by Eusebius (see chapter 10). With the abandonment of this corrupt text (the text used for the ASV, NASV, RV, RSV, NIV, and NRSV) the Dark Ages end, and the real Bride of Christ (Song of Sol. 6:9) shines forth with a flood of light (Gen. 1:18), and we no longer have to walk by the glow of fireflies and shooting meteors: the full moon rises (Song of Sol. 6:10). It is now bright enough at night to read a newspaper (2 Peter 1:19).

The King James Bible and Martin Luther’s Bible are the English and German authorized Bibles from the Byzantine Syrian text of the Antiochan Christians. The King James Bible in this present age (1900- 2000) is superior to ANY Greek text, or any set of Greek manuscripts, for a number of reasons:

1. It is in the universal language: none of the Greek texts are.

2. It has paragraph and chapter divisions which the “originals” did not have, and it has verse markings to enable the Christian to check any other phony Bible out with; the originals do not have this, if we are to believe any of the material the scholars print about them.

3. It is written in poetic and rhythmical cadences which are easy to memorize. Anyone who knows the Greek or Latin of the first and second centuries knows the stilted quality of those languages.

4. It is laid out in a Pre-millennial order even though the translators were not Pre-millennialists: the originals were not.

5. It has been responsible for the salvation of well over 150,000,000 souls, whereas the “original Greek” manuscripts would have been responsible for something like a thousandth of that number.

6. It has been translated into more languages than any other two books combined (over eight hundred languages) and so has reached more people, over a larger area, than all of the originals combined and all of the Greek copies of them for more than three hundred years.

It is this Bible that finally blows the lid off of the Reformation and finishes the work which Luther and Calvin only began. This Bible pro­duces a rugged individualism of such a nature that the country that adopted it and believed it (America) was quite able to whip the country that produced it and shelved it (England) two times in a row and then was able to save that same country on two other occasions (World War I and World War II) from being blotted off the face of the map. Why was this? It was because after 1611 England did not abandon a church state system: America did.

As a matter of historical fact, it was only one Bible believing preacher (a King James man, at that) who saved England from a revo­lution (Vol. II). Erasmus’s Greek text (1516-1555), with the other Receptus editions by Stephanus (1546-1555), Colinaeus (1534), Beza (1559-1598), and Elzevir (1624-1641), formed the “eclectic text” (mod­em cliche) for the greatest Book the world ever saw or read. That Book was the direct production of the Reformation: it is the ONE BOOK that no Catholic pope, priest, nun, monk, bishop, or cardinal can recommend for anyone to read. No Catholic Bible in America (Challoner, Rheims Douay, Jerusalem, American, Common, etc.) is from the eclectic text of Erasmus, Stephanus, et al. Every Roman Catholic Bible in Europe, South America, and the United States is from the “eclectic text” of the NIV, the ASV, the NASV, the RSV, and the New RSV.166 Opinions to the contrary are not to be taken seriously by anyone who is acquainted with half the facts.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

The Bride of Satan

“Such is the way of an adulteress woman; she eateth, and wipeth her mouth, and saith, I have done no wickedness. But her end is bitter as wormwood, sharp as a two-edged sword. Her feet go down to death; her steps take hold on hell.” Proverbs 30:20; 5:4-5

The Catholic literature regarding the Reformation varies from ecu­menical efforts by modem Soviet-Catholics to restoring “straying breth­ren” on the grounds that though “you did cause us trouble, it was the spirit of the times” and “now that we are enlightened and understand each other,” etc.1 (Rom. 16:18), to the more honest writers who look upon the revival of Bible believing Christianity as the most horrible calamity to come upon civilization since Julian the Apostate (332-363).2 According to these writers, America and Europe are still suffering from the Reformation’s incalculable damage: “If we had all just stuck to Rome and kept on burning Baptists and Manichaeans, the kingdom would have come by now, and ‘God’s will’ could be done on this earth,” etc.3 As it is (according to this view), we Bible believers must harvest our noxious crop of “rebellion” which we sowed and wait for “Mother church” to help us out and restore us to our former estate: being burned alive.

The cause of all the evil in the present world system (Gal. 1:4), according to the Papists, is DISUNITY: and this problem will never be solved until all the world unites under “the pope” (often mistaken for the “shepherd” of John 10:16, whereas he has clearly proved him­self to be the “shepherd” of Zech. 11:17), The ideal thing for this world, according to the Catholic plan for the United Nations, would be for a black pope* to head up the UN with a Soviet-German army behind him to enforce “human rights,” “civil liberties,” and “liberation of oppressed minorities” so that a “just society might blah, blah, blah.” It would be a sort of an HEW headed up by Idi Amin; that is, like all

totalitarian systems, the agenda would call for mass murder and mass imprisonment.

So when Luther, Calvin, Beza, Knox, Zwingli, and others began to kick off the traces, Holy Mother church looked upon the rebellion as “the powers of hell" (see NIV and New ASV, where the word “gates” has been allegorized to fit Catholic interpretation) attempting to over­throw the “one, true, holy, apostolic church,” but (praise St. Denis!) they could never do it, for had not Christ Himself promised that they could not? Always a great believer in a faith-and-works plan of salvation (James 2), Rome immediately put her faith into practice, or “released her faith” as Oral Roberts and Reverend Ike would put it, and took steps to stop the spread of Biblical Christianity; after all, Mother Whore’s main job for fifteen centuries was turning out lights.

In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Rome took seven steps which have often been ludicrously called “The Counter-Reformation" in order to stamp out the hated Textus Receptus of Antioch in Syria.

1. The popes ordered all Catholic kings to kill as many Bible believ­ing people as quickly as possible: Bloody Mary, Charles V, and Ferdi­nand are three prime examples of obedient errand boys (or girls), along with Louis XIV.5

2. Rome ordered all inquisitors to step up the inquisition and kill as many believers as possible by accusing them of being “witches” or holding “black masses” and “witches’ sabbats” (see chapter 15, note 72).

3. The Papists at Trent drew up an official list of non-recommended reading called “The Index” to guarantee that anything that came off of the deadly printing press would never be read unless it was approved of by the Fascist dictators at Rome.

4. Rome allowed Ignatius Loyola (1491 -1556) to set up the “ Society of Jesus” as a group of militant EDUCATORS, whose job was to meet Bible believers on an intellectual level (no Catholic could meet them on a Biblical level) and convert them to Romanism by sophistry and “Jesuitry.”6 The reading of the Bible was producing thousands of edu­cated sinners in every branch of society, including slaves, servants, cooks, and merchants, and the pope saw the danger for the first time of an educated membership that was anti-Catholic. True education—Bib­lical knowledge (Prov. 1:1-6)—never develops a tolerance for Roman Catholic fables.

5. Rome called a Council of Trent (1545-1564) whose job was to clarify, define, and establish correct “orthodox beliefs” exactly as they had done it in Nicaea, and this time to pronounce 125 curses on every

president of the United States except John F. Kennedy. Since the decrees of a Catholic council “duly called” are binding upon the consciences of all Catholics,1 by the infallible teaching of the infallible “church,”8 every Roman Catholic in Central, North, and South America is to believe that Washington, Franklin, Adams, Jefferson, Queen Victoria, Grant, Roosevelt, Truman, Madison, Jackson, Wilson, Hoover, Lincoln, et al., went to HELL. The fact that ninety-five percent of the Catholics in America would deny that shows that they are consummate hypocrites: they belong to a church and take orders from a church that has officially stated that position and put it in writing.9 They are religious hypocrites like their mother who begat them.

6. An extensive counterfeit “missionary” burden was placed on all the monks, with a counterfeit (2 Cor. 11:6-14) expansion of Chris­tianity, making the Franciscans, Dominicans, Augustinians, and Jesuits run all over Central and South America, China, India, Japan, the Phil­ippines, and the Rio Grande “converting the heathen to the truth faith” by water baptism (chapter 6).

7. A fifth column CIA of underground agents was established in Roman Catholic France following the murder of fifty thousand Bible believing Huguenots; this clandestine nest of spies began to infiltrate the Church of England through the Archbishop of Canterbury and the faculty members of Oxford and Cambridge.10 Sensing that “to be found was to be shot” (the English caught Charles I hiring foreign troops to invade England), they had to play it cool until Rationalism (Vol. II) and Deism had done their destructive work and destroyed the faith of many of the upper class English clergymen and scholars in the final and infallible authority of God.11 These subversive agents, representing a foreign government (Soviet Rome), did not surface until 1880. When they did, they surfaced in the RVcommittee headed up by Westcott and Hort. With the aid of these two traitors they succeeded in converting the English clergy to a Roman Catholic Bible—the Dark Ages Bible of Alexandria in North Africa.12 As we have already noted, this is the “Bible” defended and sometimes promoted by John R. Rice; Robert Sumner; Bob Jones, III; and the faculty members at Falwell’s school in Lynchburg. This Alexandrian Cult did not die out in 245 A.D.

The Council of Trent was called by Paul III. Since the English were in the ascendancy at that time, the Italians had to adopt a name like Paul, John, etc. If Russia had been on top of the pile, it would have been Boris, Ivan, Vladimir, etc. The council was called in an Italian city, and they sat down to work in December of 1545, ten years before Bloody Mary was burning Christians. The council lasted until 1564;

seventy-five percent of its constituents were Italian, and the pope and the Jesuits were in complete control13—so much so that the council had to ask the pope if he would issue a “bull” confirming their “convic­tions,” which he did (1564). The council transformed medieval theology into authoritative dogmas which are still binding on the Kennedy family, Bing Crosby, Mary Tudor, Clare Booth Luce, Ted Califano, Perry Como, Eddie Arnold, Mussolini, Castro, Fulton Sheen, Hitler, and every Catholic senator and governor in America.14

Few Americans since 1940 (due to a mammoth brainwashing job of the news media) have ever realized that their entire country, with the exception of the Catholics in it, is under 125 curses. The Council of Trent certainly fulfilled the description of Gentile depravity found in Romans 3:15-23, when they sat down with their mouths “full of cursing and bitterness,” for they pronounced thirty-three curses against anyone who believed in justification by faith (all Baptists and Presbyte­rians), fourteen curses for those who didn’t believe in regeneration by water (that took care of the Buddhists and Mohammedans), and then sixty-five more curses for good measure upon anyone who didn’t believe anything that the popes and cardinals thought they should believe (which knocked out all the Methodists and the Jews). According to the official, infallible, documented dogmas of Roman Catholicism, only one president of the United States escaped those curses, and he was assassinated after being “blessed” by the pope with the “sign of the cross" (see chapter 7, notes 1-6).

The Index was a list of “best sellers” which were considered to be “heretical.” Tops on the list were the writings of Luther, Zwingli, Calvin, Hubmaier, and Schwenkfeld—three Reformers and two Bap­tists. 15 When faced with the Monarch of the Books (the Holy Bible) and forced, at last, to say whether it was legal or verboten, the Council of Trent dodged and ducked about like a cat in a hailstorm. The fourth rule of the Index finally stumbled through the decision with this: “Inas­much as it is manifest from experience that if the Holy Bible is translated into the vulgar tongue and indiscriminately allowed to anyone...more evil than good will arise from it [i.e., it will enlighten people about the dirty, rotten sins of the Catholic church, and they will begin to rebel against if] the following rule must be adopted.” Whereupon they stated that no one could read the Bible in their own tongue unless permitted by a priest or a bishop, and then only with written permission, and then it has to be a Roman Catholic translation from the Alexandrian text of North Africa.16 This rule was cagily worded as follows: “This per­mission they must have in writing: the priest may permit the reading

Ul

II

I

1

1

I I I 1 n

H H 0

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of the Bible, translated into the vulgar tongue BY CATHOLIC AUTHORS."'1 No "Catholic author" would touch the Textus Receptus of Antioch (Beza, Erasmus, Colinaeus, Stephanus, and Elzevir) with a forty foot pole; all “Catholic authors" use the Greek text recommended at Bob Jones University, San Francisco Theological Seminary, and Fuller Seminary.18

Punishment for any Catholic found reading a King James Bible or Martin Luther’s Bible was excommunication,'9 plus no absolution for any sins he had committed. Punishment for reading an ASV, NIV, Living Bible, New ASV, or RSV would be nothing if permission was obtained from a local priest. After all, those "bibles" are Roman Catholic versions.

In regards to the Society of Jesus (one of the most blasphemous misapplications of the Name which is above every name), Mosheim has their number; he says in his history (Vols. XXXIV, XXXV) that the Jesuits disregarded motives for serving God as long as service was performed,20 and that they taught that no one sinned if he transgressed a divine law without fully understanding it, nor did a man sin if he hap­pened to “FORGET” the law when he sinned.2' These doctrines lead to every type of amoral and immoral speculation imaginable, and they wind up where they would have to wind up—considering the Bible’s definitions of the nature of sin (Rom. 3:8; 1 John 5:17)—they wind up teaching that the end justifies the means.22

When Roman Catholics took the witness stand during the trial of those who were guilty of the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, they were no more obligated to tell the truth23 than Pope Leo was in his deal­ings with Huss at the Council of Constance.

“Missionary” efforts carried out by such a crafty bunch of oppor­tunists could only end in disaster: they did. Since the missionaries went out with two ideas firmly planted in their heads that were Satanic, there was no chance that their converts would be anything but two-fold more the children of hell than themselves (Matt. 23:15). These two ideas were: any means can be adopted to glorify God and “His church,” and that the popes should be allowed to use force of arms in overthrowing any political entity that tolerated any religion but Roman Catholicism.24 In India the Jesuit Nobili pretended that he was a Brahmin in order to “win the people to Christ.”25 To prove this he produced forged documents26 (from Rome) which said that the Brahmins of Rome were more ancient than those of India. When put under oath by Indian officials about the source of these documents, Nobili (as serious as a heart attack) swore that he had derived his descent from the heathen god “Brahma.” He

might have been telling the truth,27 but it didn't make any difference anyway, because a sworn oath doesn’t obligate any Jesuit to tell the truth.

In China the Jesuits went along with a variety of heathen ceremonies and practices to get “converts” quicker. When they did this, some of the Dominicans and Franciscans objected; they were supported by the infallible pope (Innocent X, 1645) but were immediately overruled by the second infallible pope (Alexander VII, 1656). (The infallible popes often have a hard time agreeing to what is infallible and what isn’t.28) The Jesuit approach to China29 was finally condemned by another infal­lible pope (1693), but not before the sons of Shem, the Chinese, had read the Catholic church off the books.30 Shem saw what was going on: “honolable church was divided over final rerigious autholity.” Henceforth, the Chinese guessed that what the Papists were after was POLITICAL AUTHORITY. In view of the fact that the pope had just graciously willed all of the lands west of the Azores, from the North to the South Poles, to a Roman Catholic king in Spain (Ferdinand), the Chinese had good reason to doubt the “honolable intentions” of such an outfit.31 Xavier (1506-1552), trying to favorably impress the oriental “heathen” with such a Cosa Nostra, is about as funny as St. Francis trying to evangelize the masses with popes and cardinals hanging on his shirttails (see chapter 14). Francis and Xavier are what we call “stooges.” They are the “front men” for the big “behind the scenes” operation.

In the realm of anti-church history, one may study the length and detailed account of these Catholic “missionaries” between 1500 and 1900 in the Orient and other places, but one should be observant to note three things that accompany any Catholic “missionary effort.”

1. The retaining by the pagans of heathen statues, idols, incense, prayers, forms of service, music, symbols, art, and customs.

2. The constant attempts from overseas (Rome) to gain political control over every government official in the land—which they were eventually successful in doing in Cuba, Mexico, Central, and South America.

3. The absolute dearth of any Biblical knowledge of ANY kind in any land evangelized by monks, friars, or priests. Reading about the “expansion of Christianity” between 1500-1900 through Catholic spec­tacles is like rereading the Romanizing of Europe between 300-900 A.D. through Charlemagne’s spectacles. Or, to be more specific, it is like reading Mein Kampf with the author (Adolph) helping you over the rough places.

However, the “Counter-Reformation”—to use the term adopted f>w hictnrinne—had its greatest “revival” in the murdering of over

400,000 Bible believing Protestants. This, as always, was carried out through the civil rulers (kings, emperors, dukes, barons, etc.) so that no one would suspect a pope of being a killer. One must remember that all popes claimed the power to “wield the sword” against anyone who took a Biblical view of something instead of a Catholic view. Actions speak louder than words, so let the stubborn facts of history that follow speak for themselves. In this period (1500-1900) the Bride of Satan is fully dressed and adorned with all of her jewelry (Rev. 17:1-8), including her bloodstained heart, hands, clothes, and mouth (Prov. 30:20).

The Emperor Charles V (1500-1558) issued the Edict of Spires (1529) commanding the entire Holy Roman Empire to go on a crusade against the Baptists.32 His definition of a “Baptist” was anyone who neglected infant baptism. Under Charlie, Christians were hanged, beheaded, burned, or buried alive in the Netherlands. On June 10, 1535, he called for the death of every Bible believer in the land; if they recanted they would have the privilege of dying by the sword instead of by fire.33

Women were buried alive. They were placed in a tight coffin, and a rope was put around their neck and drawn through two holes in the bottom of the coffin. Three iron bars were driven through the coffin from side to side to keep the struggling body under the lid; the lid was then nailed down, and dirt was shoveled over the coffin.34 Dr. Rule relates the case of a harmless woman at Leeuward (1548) in whose house some Papist found a Latin Testament; since she didn’t have written per­mission to be reading it, she was put on the rack for torture and then beheaded.35 One Baptist sentenced to death escaped over a frozen lake (a certain Dirk Willemzoori). One of the Papist soldiers chasing him fell through the ice and began to scream for help; his two buddies deserted him, but Dirk came back and helped him out. Once out, the soldier’s buddies showed up; they arrested Dirk and took him back into prison, and he was burned at the stake the next day.36

Baptists met where they could to hear the Bible taught: in darkness, in bams, and in bushes (see the Stundists, Vol. II), and dragoons hunted them by the light of the moon and the stars. Under Charles V more than thirty thousand Baptists were killed in Friesland and Holland alone. Rule says, “The whole land was stricken with terror, and the cries of the tortured were heard perpetually...gallows and trees on the highway were hung with dead bodies...the very air was polluted with the stench, and the knell of death sounded heavily from every belfry.” This was the masterpiece created by Cyprian, Augustine, and Constantine. The Duke of Alva gloated;37 he had invented a new torture: you screwed an iron clamp on a man’s tongue and then burned the end of his tongue

with fire till it dropped off. When the victim screamed the soldiers would compliment him on his “fine singing. ” You understand that the Baptist victim is lined up with “the gates of hell” while the Catholic screwing the clamp on is a loyal “son of Christ’s church” who will “prevail over it” (Matt. 16:16-18). At least, that is what you are to believe if you are a good ‘ ‘Catholic. ’ ’

No country at this time was more thoroughly soaked with the blood of the saints than Holland, under Philip II of Spain and the Duke of Alva. However, the pope’s control of France was also strong enough at this time to sponsor a good bloodbath there. This one was called the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre.

Francis I was taken by his mother to see the pope one day. They discussed the most important issue which any Vicar of Christ could dis­cuss: how to kill every Protestant in France. France had been an open sore on the papacy’s nose ever since the Paterines, Fratricelli, Mani- chaeans, Albigenses, and Poor Men of Lyons moved in. There followed one debacle after another in the next few years, and when Francis died he was succeeded by Henry II, whose wife was Catherine de 'Medici. After one year in office, Henry II and his wife made a procession to Notre Dame (1549) and helped participate in the Catholic festivities there which, at this time, highlighted the roasting of Protestants at the Place De Greve by lowering them slowly over a bonfire on a makeshift crane.38

Several years later a marriage took place between Henry of Navarre (Henry IV) and Margaret de Valois. Henry’s mother was Jeanne D’Albret, a staunch Huguenot. Around this time a famous Bible believing Huguenot (Admiral De Coligny) and other distinguished guests were invited to the French king’s court, including Jeanne D’Albret, Queen of Navarre. When they had all assembled (supposedly on the best of terms—Henry of Navarre had fought on the Protestant side of the fence earlier with Coligny and the Prince De Conde), a Catholic assassin stabbed Coligny, and this sparked the Catholic “revival.” The cathedral bell of St. Germain le Auxerrois tolled at 2:00 a.m. (Aug. 24, 1572) as a prearranged signal for all Catholics to “prevail against the gates of hell,” etc. Mezeray says,

“The populace, being warmed by the smell of blood, sixty thousand men armed in different ways ran about wheresoever example, vengeance, rage, and the desire of plunder transported them. The air resounded with a horrible tempest of blasphemies and oaths of the murderers, of the firing of pistols and guns...of the pitiable cries of the dying, of the lamentations of the women whom they dragged by the hair... with furious

expressions, ‘Kill, stab, throw them out the window.’ Some were shot on the roofs of houses, others were cast out of windows. Some were cast into the water and knocked on the head with blows of iron bars or clubs; some were killed in their beds, some in the garrets, other in cellars; wives in the arms of their husbands; husbands on the bosoms of their wives; sons at the feet of fathers. They neither spared the aged, nor women great with child, nor even infants. A man was seen to stab one of them who was playing with the beard of its murderer. The streets were paved with the bodies of the dead or the dying. There were heaps of them in the squares. The streams were filled with blood.”

In three days six thousand houses were repeatedly pillaged, and more than four thousand people were massacred in Paris alone.39 Another six thousand were killed in other cities,40 and altogether fifty thousand were killed in less than forty days.

Now, how do you suppose that a Holy Father who was the ‘‘Vicar of Christ” from “blessed Simon Peter” would react to such news? How did “his holiness” Pope Gregory XII receive such tidings? Did he go into St. Peters and ask God to forgive his church members for carrying on like a bunch of psychotic killers? No. Did he kneel at the altar and pray for the poor “souls in purgatory” who may have gone there after getting murdered? No. No, of course not. He did exactly what any stu­dent of church history would expect a really “holy” pope to do: he marched straight to the Church of St. Mark (taking his cardinals with him), and there he solemnly gave thanks to God for the great “BLESS­ING” He had just conferred on the “CHRISTIAN WORLD.”41 Then he had fireworks discharged to celebrate it as a “triumph of the church militant ’’—and we do mean “militant.” “Militant Christianity” to a pope means armed warfare against unarmed civilians. Not content with a few bonfires, fireworks, and high masses, Gregory caused a medal to be struck commemorating the great “blessing.” It pictured himself (naturally) on one side and an angel on the other side: the angel was carrying a cross (chapter 7, notes 1-6) and a sword.*2

How do twentieth century Catholics explain this perverted lunacy? Easy: they say, “While the suffering of the Huguenots is to be regretted, Catholics were subjected to more severe persecution in some Protestant countries.”43 More severe? (See chapter 8, note 21.) In WHAT coun­tries? But even more hilarious: “The pope, relying on the report which first reached him, believed that the royal family and the Catholic leaders had been saved only by the timely discovery and punishment of con­spirators.”** What conspirators? Whose report? According to Catholic killers in the twentieth century, the whole affair was an accident, and

the church had nothing to do with it: it was just a “personal, political crime of an ambitious woman.” Rome never changes: she just “adjusts.”

In 1576, when it was safe to act like a Protestant again, Henry of Navarre renounced Catholicism, but when he saw it might cost him the throne he immediately confessed it again and renounced Protestantism (1593), declaring himself to be a Catholic for the second time.45 Upon obtaining the throne, he decided to go Protestant again, so he granted the Edict of Nantes (1598), which granted toleration to Protestants. But Henry had played shuffleboard with the pope too long; this time he was promptly assassinated by a Catholic,46 and a loyal son of the “true faith” was given the throne (Louis XIV): under him the Edict of Nantes was revoked (1685). Promptly, thousands of Bible believing Reformed and Huguenot Christians evacuated France for Holland, America, England, and Germany. They took their money, libraries, fine arts, manufacturing skills, and industry with them, almost catapulting France back into the Dark Ages. This time France lost the flower of her manhood (under the Roman Catholic Louis XIV) and was so denuded of high moral stan­dards, ethical principles, and Biblical knowledge that she came under the domination of a genuine Fascist dictator (1638-1715) who set France up for atheism and eventually for the Revolution (1789-1793).47 Louis XIV used police forces (dragoons) to enforce his belief that Protestant children should be kidnapped by the HEW and turned over to Catholic families to be raised.48

Hellish Mother church was not to be slowed down simply because the “gates of hell” were after her. Having been given “space to repent of her fornication” (Rev. 2:21), she refused to be reformed by anyone, let alone God. In the face of the rising tide of Biblical knowledge, with an escape hatch now open toward the west, Hellish Mother church was getting more desperate by the minute. In 1524, in Melden, France, one John Clerk affixed a bill to the church door in which he called the pope Antichrist; for this he was repeatedly whipped and then branded on the forehead. His mother, who was watching the whole thing, cried out, “Blessed be Christ and welcome these marks for His sake!” When the incorrigible John Clerk survived this torment, he went straight to Metz, in Lorraine, and smashed up some Catholic images; for this he had his right hand and his nose cut off, his arms and breasts torn with pincers, and then he was burned at the stake.49 Sixty Christians were slaughtered, and 250 were wounded in February of 1562 when the Duke of Guise (Joinville, France) took two hundred armed men to the village of Vassy. He met the Huguenots there in the middle of a church service (about

1,200 of them). Armed men rushed into the church with drawn swords, killing men, women, and children; those who endeavored to get out the doors were murdered by soldiers outside. Others, with their guns, fired at the people in the gallery who broke open the roof, jumped down over the city wall, and fled into the woods, some of them being wounded in flight by shots, and others being stabbed or cut in their heads by swords. Obviously, they had been engaged in a “conspiracy” (see note 44), and the killing was just the work of one man or woman, etc. The preacher, Mr. Morel, remained in the pulpit throughout. They arrested him and let a mob of Papists curse him and spit on him after calling his pulpit Bible “a Huguenot Book.”50

In England, the Catholics burned Anne Askew and Joan Boucher at the stake. Anne was arrested and thrown into the Tower of London for not attending ‘ ‘mass. ’ ’ Then she was put to the rack. Bishop Gardiner and Chancellor Wriothesley could not obtain a lying confession from her under torture, and when they ordered the torturer {Sir Anthony Knevett, the Lieutenant of the Tower) to increase the torture, he refused. Whereupon Chancellor Wriothesley, being a “faithful son of the true church that Christ founded,” etc., threw off his robes and turned the rack so severely he nearly tore Anne’s body in pieces. Anne stiil refused to lie. When asked about the cannibalism in the mass she said simply, “I have read that God made man, but that man can make God I have never read.”51 She was so badly maimed from the racking she had to be carried to the stake in a chair to be burned (1546) at the ripe old age of twenty-five.52

Joan Boucher had been busy circulating Tyndale’s “heretical” trans­lation when she was arrested (May 1549). She was condemned imme­diately as a terrible heretic because she denied that Mary was sinless. A number of ecclesiastical worthies tried to get Joan “off the hook” (John Rogers, Ridley, Cranmer, King Edward, et al.), but still she was burned on May 2, 1550. A certain Bishop Scorey preached at her while she was burning and vilified her as she suffered. No one remem­bers to this day what the bishop’s text was, but Joan’s reply to him, in the flames, will long be remembered, for it constitutes one of the most potent sermons ever preached to an apostate in less than ten seconds.53 While burning, Joan Boucher looked the Catholic rascal dead in the eye and said, “You lie like a rogue; go read the scriptures."

The Bride of Satan was never a lady to be intimidated by the docu­mented facts of the scripture. With three authorities to go by and choose from, she could justify herself with some authority for ANY action if necessary. You are FOR slavery until the South loses the war (1865),

then you ‘ ‘have always been against slavery. ”54 You are violently anti­Communist—so anti-Communist that your pope (Pius XII) stands whole­heartedly behind the Nazi Third Reich;55 so much so that he would open up diplomatic relations with Japan after the Death March in the Philip­pines (1942) and would not condemn Hitler’s attack on Norway (1939).56 But if the Fascists lose the war (1939-1945), then you can side with the big winner (the United States) and call your popes by English names (John XXIII, Paul VI, et al.) until the U.S. loses a war (Vietnam); then you push Paul and John together (John Paul) and prepare for a RUSSIAN name: Poland is an excellent move in that direction.57

It never bothered Hellish Mother Whore, when dealing with the lives of multitudes, to switch from a Berlin-Rome Axis to a Washington- Rome Axis to a Moscow-Rome Axis; after all, the deciding factors with the Catholic church have always been UNITY and POWER: what pos­sible moral considerations or ethical principles could be strong enough to deflect either in a church where the popes sanctioned burning women at the stake? The first law of Roman Catholicism (and any reader should have gathered this by now) is POLITICAL EXPEDIENCY. Bible truth is absolutely out of the question and has never been even a secondary factor in worldwide “Vatican diplomacy” once in sixteen hundred years.

The material given here is, of course, extremely brief, but it will give the student some idea of what historians call “the good” that was done by the Catholic church in “having stricter rules for the monks,” “cleaning up the lives of the clergy,” “teaching the priests how to read,” etc.58 They became educated murderers instead of illiterate murderers; smooth, clean killers instead of rough and nasty killers. They became fully equipped to be “kingdom builders” during the “Counter­Reformation.” All kingdom builders look at mass murder in a positive light, unless it is committed by some German like Hitler. This overlooks a very important historical fact: Hitler was bom Catholic, sprinkled Catholic, and raised Catholic. He said simply, “I am NOW [1943], as before [1939] a CATHOLIC and will always remain so.”59

He was never excommunicated or interdicted by any pope. Excom­munication and interdiction were for people like King James I and Eliz­abeth. Mass murderers were never subject to excommunication if they were people like Catherine de’Medici, Ferdinand, Himmler, Henry IV, Hoess, Charles V, Hitler, Mary Tudor, or Louis XIV. In Roman Cath­olic mythology these professional killers still come under the heading of “faithful sons and daughters of holy mother church.”

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

The Signs of the Times

“Ye hypocrites, ye can discern the face of the sky and of the earth; but how is it that ye do not discern this time?”

Luke 12:56

“Can ye not discern the signs of the times?”

Matthew 16:3

The words attributed to Horace Greeley, “Go west, young man, go west,” were the words of advice given by the Holy Spirit more than eighteen hundred years before Horace Greeley was bom (see Gen. 3:24 and comments in that commentary). With the spiritual explosion in Europe accompanied by the social, economic, and political frustrations of a populace caught between warring religious units, many Europeans began to cross the ocean blue. God had “made a way to escape that they might be able to bear it,” and exactly as the Huns, Vandals, Visigoths, Ostrogoths, and others drove civilization from Byzantium and Asia Minor into Germany and England, so the Hellish Mother Whore of Catholicism was now driving the “poor and huddled masses” to the coasts of America. The history of these movements will be taken up in Volume II; for now we shall take a brief look at the lives of some men who epitomize the early period of the Philadelphia church (Rev. 3:8), the period 1500-1700 in Europe. The lives of these men overlap Martin Luther, Beza, Zwingli, and Calvin and stretch up to the times of Handel, Bach, Zinzendorf, and John Locke. They need to be men­tioned because in their lives are reflected the post-Reformation times in which spiritual death again crept over Europe as it began its fourth return to paganism. As the Holy Spirit moved from east to west (see Acts 16 and comments in that commentary), the vacuum behind was filled with Culture (1700-1800), and the eventual Apostasy (1800-1900), and then Paganism (1900-1980).

John Knox (1513-1572)

John Knox of Scotland was raised under the preaching of a Bible believing Protestant (George Wishart) who was burned at the stake in 1546.1 Later, Knox was arrested and served as a galley slave for nineteen months. He returned to England and for five years preached the doctrines of the German Reformation.2 When Bloody Mary got on the throne, Knox escaped and went to Frankfurt, Germany, later going on to Geneva and talking with Calvin. He preached in France and Germany. Knox returned to Scotland in 1559 and boldly declared before his Catholic queen (Mary of Lorraine) that the Catholic mass was a mess and that the Roman Catholic church was a WHORE.3 Miraculously escaping death a second time, he lived to see Mary Stuart (1560) come on the throne; she had Knox arrested for treason (i.e., not believing in a cannibal sacrifice Sunday morning for the dead, etc.). A court acquitted Knox, and he continued to preach the Bible till he died of old age in 1572. The strong Protestant flavor of Scotch Christianity, especially in North­ern Ireland, is largely due to the work and ministry of John Knox.

Oliver Cromwell (1599-1658)

Cromwell, the soldier and statesman, was “Lord Protector” of the Commonwealth of England, Scotland, and Ireland, and no man in church history aside from Henry VIII, Martin Luther, and Avro Manhattan, and possibly Paul Blanshard, is so hated by the Catholic hierarchy. He was elected to the Parliament in 1628 and began a long fight against the opponents of Puritanism. He inclined toward the Independents and was for tolerating anyone’s religion: that is, he adopted the Baptist point of view. From the Catholic standpoint, this view is perfectly tolerable until Rome gets into power, and then it suddenly becomes intolerable.* In the First Civil War (1642-1646), Cromwell won every battle he fought. He and the Parliament eventually had to deal with the Catholic traitor in their midst (Charles I) who was for “toleration and religious liberty” until Rome could get into a powerful enough position to take it away from everyone else. Charlie had behaved himself exactly like any good Catholic would: when he saw that the English Parliament was not going to dissolve under his threats, he contacted the French and Spanish kings through their papal legates (that is what they are there for) and tried to raise a foreign army of Catholics to invade England and kill the Puritan Parliament.5 Parliament tried Charles I and found him guilty of sedition—real sedition, not some trumped up story about Coligny trying to unseat Henry (chapter 17, notes 43-44)—and cut off his head. In 1649 the Commonwealth of England was established, with

h s > b s a a b b b ■ ■ ■

Cromwell as “president.” This is referred to by all Catholic historians as the “absolute dictatorship of Cromwell” because they cannot see how their own popes could come under the same heading. All popes come under that heading; Cromwell would not take a crown on his head or even in his lap: every pope in the history of the church up till that time would and DID.6

Catholics throwing mud at Cromwell for his treatment of poor Cath­olics in Ireland is kind of like Gregory XIII (of St. Bartholomew’s fame) criticizing Calvin for burning Servetus. Some people really have their nerve. For this rough treatment of the Papists in Ireland, Charles II (1630-1685) had Cromwell’s corpse dug up, hung, and then buried beneath a gallows.7 But the Catholic historians seem to contract lockjaw when discussing why Cromwell was so hard on Paddy’s “wearin’ o’ the green.” The Irish massacres of 1641 are not a favorite subject of Catholic historians. On October 22, Sir Phelim O’Neil, upon a pretense of paying a visit to Lord Charlemont, seized a Protestant, killed his servants in front of his face, and then murdered him. On this day, the anniversary of the founder of the Jesuit Society (Loyola), an action was started in which 150,000 Protestants were murdered in Ireland three years before Cromwell came to fight against Irish troops: the 150,000 Protestants were not troops; they were unarmed civilians.6

The “dark stain” on the memory of Oliver Cromwell for this “brutal TREATMENT” of the Irish (to cite nearly any historian) is about as significant as a drop of milk on a tile floor, when compared with the bloody stains of Oliver’s contemporaries in Ireland, France, and Spain, who were murdering unarmed Christians right and left, not for any dev­ilment, but for their Biblical convictions. For example, Cromwell along­side Pope Urban II (or Pope Gregory XII, or Pope Innocent I, or Pope Gregory I, or Pope Pius XII) was a sanctified saint in company with thugs. Catholics, believing that the Kingdom of God and the Kingdom of Heaven are identical, always confused religion with politics and visa versa.

Desiderius Erasmus (1466-1536)

Erasmus of Rotterdam is one of the most controversial figures of the Reformation, with both sides appealing to him for support and both sides hating his guts and cursing him for his “neutrality.” Erasmus, a true Humanist and a true scholar (unlike Abelard, Anselm, Aquinas, Scotus, et al.), had just enough Catholic in him to hate church splits and schismatics and just enough Protestant in him to know that Jerome’s Alexandrian New Testament (ASV, NASV, NIV, RSV, NRSV) wasn’t

worth fifteen cents where it disagreed with the Old Latin of the Bohemian Brethren and the Brethren of the Common Life, who were in Holland with Erasmus when he was raised.9

He was considered by many to be, far and away, the most brilliant scholar of his day. At one time there were rumors of making him into a pope.10 He was held in high esteem by Popes Julius II, Leo X, Adrian VI, Clement VII, and Paul III; the last offering him a cardinal’s hat, which he (as Savonarola) refused. Erasmus was an expert Greek scholar with classical and scholastic learning. He sought to free the church from medieval formalism and tradition but would not leave the church; he sought reformation from the inside. In spite of Luther’s later vicious polemics against him,” it has rightly been said that “Erasmus laid the egg that Luther hatched.”

Contrary to the Roman Catholic propaganda broadcast by the faculty members at Bob Jones University, Baptist Bible College, and Liberty Baptist University (1960-1980), Erasmus had much more to work with in constructing his Greek Testament than his enemies would have you think. The same may be said of the A V translators, who had access to nearly every corrupt reading found in Sinaiticus and Vaticanus that the ASV, NASV, NIV, and RSV retained.12 The “eclectic” texts for these modem abominations are nothing but assorted combinations of Nestle, Aland, Metzger, Weiss, Tischendorf, and Hort, and all of these gen­tlemen worshipped Greek manuscripts—Greek manuscripts that dis­agreed with the Protestant text of the Reformation; with these manuscripts they corrected the God-honored text in more than 5,800 places. Eighty percent of the perversions found in Vaticanus and Sinaiticus (R and B), will be found in the NIV and the NASV and also will be found in the Jesuit Bible of1582, published in Rheims. (The AV translators had this corrupt Bible on the table when they translated.) The remaining twenty percent of the alterations were due to erratic conjectures of the RV com­mittee (1881) based on various Latin, Syriac, and Greek readings which the AV translators also had access to.13

Erasmus had an open door to any library in Europe, including the Vatican Library; and therefore he actually had a much wider range of sources to pick from than the leading scholars of 1884 (RV), for when these Puseyite bigots sat down with a predetermined prejudice that all sources should be judged by one or two manuscripts.14 This meant they really had access to only about one-tenth of the sources the AV translators had access to. The modem faculty members of Christian schools are stupid enough to believe that it doesn’t make any difference how many sources a man cancels out in his mind; he is still more accurate if he

had ACCESS to more sources. A housewife who goes to the store for the purpose of buying apples and oranges only is no authority at all on the price of potatoes, the weight of meat cuts, the lighting in the store, the size of the peanut butter jars, or the freshness of the spinach.

Erasmus had made his own Latin translation of the New Testament at Oxford in 1505 before he ever began his work in Basel (1515) with five Greek New Testament manuscripts.15 He got these Latin manuscripts from John Colet (chapter 16), and there is no doubt about the nature of the Latin text that Colet passed on, for Erasmus’s works (his five editions of the Greek New Testament) all show the anti-Catholic readings of the Albigensian and Waldensian Bibles. The Latin of Jerome matches the Vaticanus text of the NIVand the NASV in America. Erasmus’s Greek New Testament matches the Old Latin text of St. Pat and Columba found in the AV text of 1611.16 That is, even before he began to construct a Greek New Testament, Erasmus had a gauge for telling when Jerome’s Vulgate was right (Acts 8:37; Acts 9:5-6; Acts 20:28) and when it was wrong (Rev. 22:19).

Every important variant reading taken up by the NIV revisers in 1978 (and the NASVtranslators in 1969, and the ASVtranslators in 1901) was known more than four hundred and fifty years ago. It is the Madison Avenue pitch on “new” cars, soaps, Bibles, morality, etc., that sells the stupid sucker (any student at Bob Jones, Tennessee Temple, Moody, Fuller, Wheaton, Lynchburg, etc.) into thinking that the RV, ASV, NASV, and NZKhave access to something “new.” Why, Erasmus took sides against the NASV (1960) more than four hundred years ago (see Luke 2:14). He took sides against the ASV (1901) more than three hundred and fifty years ago (see 1 Tim. 3:16) and took sides against the New International Version (1978) more than four hundred and fifty years ago (see Matt. 6:13). Erasmus comments on these twentieth century readings because he already had the evidence in 1515 for what the mod­ern apostates call “newer light” from “older manuscripts.” Erasmus rejected these twentieth century versions because he knew more about the history of those variants than the modem Jesuits who are always talking about “the originals.”17 When the “majority of Greek manu­scripts” are found—over 1,800 of them—they testify to the “five late” manuscripts Erasmus used, not to the one or two manuscripts recom­mended by the supporters of the ASV, NASV, NIV, and other apostate corruptions. The gullible may attribute this to chance, but Erasmus had something working in his favor far more scriptural than “better and older manuscripts” from Origen’s cultural hellhole (see chapter 5): he had the right view on the preservation of the scriptures.18

Dr. Edward Hills had rightly noted that there were three views of the preservation of the New Testament in the days of Erasmus (as there are today): the humanistic view (Westcott and Hort), the scholastic view (Bob Jones University), and the common view (the Body of Christ). The last view was the view of faith. It was the middle ground between humanism and scholasticism. It assumed (and rightly so) that since the New Testament was written in Greek, the New Testament text probably had been preserved better in the Greek church than in the Roman church.19 Even the pope who commissioned Jerome was in favor of going to the Hebrew for a reliable Old Testament instead of to the Greek “Septuagint.” Even Pope Leo X (1513-1521), the mortal enemy of Luther, was in favor of a Greek New Testament instead of a Latin one.20 The Council of Trent later (1546) established the Alexandrian Latin of Jerome (from Origen) as the official Catholic Bible: Leo had better sense.

Following Erasmus’s editions came four editions from Stephanus (1546, 1549, 1550, and 1551), then Beza’s ten editions (1560-1598), and then Elzevir’s editions (1624, 1633). All of these were editions of the Text us Receptus; they came from Antioch in Syria and Asia Minor, where the majority of the “originals” were written. With these Greek Testaments came translations in over a thousand languages, most of them coming directly from Luther’s German or the King James English which (as any edition) came from “eclectic texts” (to quote the modem, apostate Fundamentalists). Their fruits speak for their roots. No Roman Catholic since Trent (1546) will recommend them or any translation from them; however, Catholics praised the Westcott and Hort text of the ASV, NASV, and N1Vto high heaven.21 Why? What does this mean in the light of church history versus anti-church history? Why, it means that no Bible believing Christian, who studied the facts of church history and took them to heart, would ever be guilty of recommending any form of the ASV (1901) or the New ASV (1960) or the NIV (1978). That would be Satanic collusion with the bloodiest Whore (Rev. 17) in the history of the New Testament church.

Menno Simons (1496-1559)

Menno Simons (sometimes Simon), whom we have mentioned ear­lier (see chapter 16, notes 140-146), was bom in Witmarus, Holland, and ordained as a Catholic priest in 1524. Along with the man he saw burned at the stake in 1531, he saw several hundred Baptists killed in a cloister near his home—among them his own brother.22 Menno gave up the priesthood, and at the age of forty (1536) he renounced the Cath­

5

olic church and left it. He kept right on studying the Bible and in a few months reached the conclusion that not even Calvin or Zwingli were far enough away from Rome when it came to the truths of the New Testament. He joined the Anabaptists in 1537 and became a leader among them. This automatically made him a “fugitive from justice” (i.e., Roman Catholic barbarism), and he had to spend the rest of his life running from place to place just ahead of the Catholic Gestapo and its assassins. He was a voluminous writer.

Mosheim says of the Dutch Baptists, with whom Menno allied him­self, that “their origin was difficult to discern.” However, Dr. Dermont and Dr. Ypeig, in reporting matters to the king of Holland, said, “The Baptists who were formerly called Anabaptists and in latter times Men- nonites, were the ORIGINAL WALDENSES.”23 According to the inves­tigations of Keller, Ten Kate Limborch, Van Bracht, Dermont, and DeHoop, what the reformers called “Anabaptists” in the Reformation were nothing but the old Waldenses who had fled to Austria, Germany, France, and Holland in the eleventh and twelfth centuries.24 They brought with them their Novatian, Donatist, Euchite, and Paulician heritage: no baptism of infants, no church state, and immersion of adult believers only after a profession of faith in Jesus Christ. They also had retained, for fourteen centuries, their godless, “Manichaean” heresy: since there were two forces at odds in the universe (good and evil) that the devil had his own church, Bible, preachers, ministers, apostles, and con­gregations (2 Cor. 11:1-4), exactly as the Lord had His. Superstitious Catholics call this “DUALISM.” Christians call it Holy Scripture (2 Thess. 2:1-13; Ezek. 14:1-12; 2 Cor. 11:11-14).

King James I (1566-1625)

The chief targets for Roman Catholic historians are Martin Luther, King Henry VIII, and Oliver Cromwell. On the other hand, the most hated character in English history for Greek and Hebrew scholars in the Protestant church (especially the modern Fundamentalist branch) is King James of Scotland (1567-1603) and England (1603-1625). James has been called by “militant Fundamentalists” everything from a tyrant to a homosexual.25 However, the “most high and mighty prince” did not earn these insulting epithets by virtue of his character, work, or treatment of Puritans nearly so much as by his association with the great­est Book the world has ever seen: a Book that Hebrew and Greek scholars have been trying to replace ever since it came out. This Book was so powerful and authoritative that wherever it was taught or preached, New Testament local churches sprang up like clover,26 welfare and social

reforms followed in tidal waves, progress in science, inventions, art, and music reached their peak, and standards of living were obtained that no country could touch that had shut its ears to the Book. No modem Fundamentalist Greek or Hebrew scholar has ever forgiven King James for his connection with the Authorized Version for it is and has always been DEATH on Protestant popes (as well as Catholic popes) who think they are smarter than the Holy Spirit.

Much has been said about James’s reaction to the Puritans’ “Mil­lenary Petition.” James was supposed to have said that Presbyterianism “agreeth as well with monarchy as God and the devil.”27 Subjective bigots (ready to catch at any straw in the wind) would take such a state­ment to mean that James rejected the idea of a New Testament local church; however, the Presbyterianism James spoke of was the Reformed brand of Calvin’s theocracy at Geneva: it was a MONARCHY within itself and just as deadly to a nation as the poparchy at Rome.28 James was always more spiritual than any pope, and whatever may be said in regards to his failings as an upright ruler, he certainly was more hum­ble than the popes of his day and more intelligent than the conservative Bible scholars of today. For example:

1. James did allow the Puritans to assemble and put out an anti­Catholic version of the Bible with a note in the preface that the pope was the “MAN OF SIN.” You could not say that of any revision com­mittee or “Lockman Foundation” since.

2. James was not as stupid as the New Scofield Board of Editors (1950-1980) or the Lockman Foundation (1960-1980). He knew a phony text when he saw it. His name, therefore, could never have been con­nected with the New International Version, or the American Standard Version, or the New American Standard Version, or any edition of any­thing LIKE them. James knew these twentieth century versions were editions of the Jesuit Rheims Bible of the Roman Catholic church.

3. There is no record, in spite of all the rumors about “arrogance,” that James was ever as psychotic as the sick satraps at Rome who let their subjects call them “Holy Father” and the “Vicar of Christ” (or “Holy Lord”29). That is, King James at his worst was twice as humble as any Catholic pope at his best—from Leo I to Leo X.

4. Whatever may be said of his “poor planning”30 that drew England into the Thirty Years War, he at least was a better planner than Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who got us involved in World War II, Harry S Truman, who got us involved in Korea, Adolph Hitler, who got Germany involved in global warfare, Jack Kennedy, who got us involved in the Bay of Pigs, and Pope Pius XII, who got us involved

in Vietnam. Sometimes a knowledge of history, coupled with a sense of humor, will give a very enlightening picture of the real stature of some “great” men. James I in the seventeenth century at his worst was better than many American Christian scholars and political leaders in the twentieth century.

The Philosophers (1500-1900)

We will lump these bull-shooters into a bunch, as none of them have anything to do with church history. Colossians 2:8 (the infallible text of the Final Authority) has already shown the believer what he should think about this class of hot air experts, and 1 Corinthians 1-2 confirms it (see Acts 17:18 and comments in that commentary). The thing to notice about philosophers is that modern western philosophy does not crop up until the publication of the King James Bible. The scholastic philos­ophers (Anselm, Abelard, Scotus, Aquinas, et al.) were nothing but rehashes of Plato and Aristotle, but upon the publication of the AV 1611 an amazing thing happens: suddenly there springs up from every quarter of Europe and England a group of intellectuals who can’t stand the Bible. Some of them are paleontologists, some are agnostics, some are Deists, some are rationalists, and some are biologists, but all of them major in philosophy (see Col. 2:8 and comments in that commentary). They mushroom by the hundreds from nowhere: it is almost as though the publication of the AV 1611 was a signal to start a race. Why they had remained hidden in the bushes until after 1611 is something for a modem historian to consider, but since none of them even noticed it, we shall list the dates for these men:

1. Rene Descartes (1596-1650) would have been fifteen years old when the first edition of the King James Bible came out. Descartes denied a literal heaven, a literal hell, the Virgin Birth, the Deity of Christ, the new birth, and the Bodily Resurrection.31 He is the “father of modem rationalism,” although he was a DEVOUT ROMAN CATHOLIC. He got his philosophical system from a dream.32 Strange, isn’t it, that the “father” of three centuries of Bible rejecting infidels should be a Roman Catholic who had access to a King James Bible ?

2. Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) was bom twenty-three years before the AV came out; it was the Bible of England and America during his entire lifetime, and he hated it with a purple passion. Hobbes was an atheistic materialist, one of the forerunners of Marx and Lenin.33 he rejected everything supernatural about the Bible and everything super­natural mentioned in it; he was a mechanistic mudball.

3. Gottfried Leibnitz (1646-1716) was a Deistic evolutionist who idolized the Greek philosophers. Leibnitz’s “god” was a “MONAD.”

He rejected the Virgin Birth, the Deity of Christ, the new birth, the Bodily Resurrection, and any future state (heaven or hell).

4. George Berkeley (1685-1753) was a Deist who believed in regen­eration by sprinkling, no restoration of Israel, no Judgment Seat of Christ, no Rapture, no Millennial reign of Christ, and no literal hell for anyone.

5. Francis Bacon (1561-1626) was one of the founders of the “inductive scientific method” (see Col. 2:8 and comments in that com­mentary). He was fined and imprisoned for bribery and corruption after stating that the test of a true philosophy was what it would do34 (i.e., land you in jail). As a utilitarian he advocated scientific pragmatism, later deified by Dewey, Russell, and James.

Now, the rest of the “crew” (Jean Lamarck, Auguste Comte, Voltaire, Rousseau, David Hume, Jeremy Bentham, John Mill, Herbert Spencer, Huxley, Schiller, Strauss, Lessing, Schleiermacher, Goethe, Schopenhauer, Fichte, Wolff, Kant, Nietzsche, Schelling, Feuerbach, Hegel, et al.) come along a little later (1700-1900, see Vol. II). They are sometimes called “Deists” or “Rationalists.” All have one great, common bond of affinity with the Roman Catholic priests, bishops, arch­bishops, and popes: a wholehearted rejection of the authority of the Textus Receptus Bible, from any translation, in their country or anyone else’s country. They are an elite corps raised up by their father (Gen. 3:1) to augment the Alexandrian Cult teachings in Oxford, Cambridge, Heidelberg, the Sorbonne, Stuttgart, Halle, Rome, and the University of Paris. They are the apostates who follow the “culture” of post­Reformation times: Evangelism, Education, Culture—APOSTASY.

Since the entire history of philosophy (Pericles, Gorgias, Aristippus, Zeno, Chrysippus, Cameades, Plutarch, Homer, Pythagoras, Heraclitus, Anaximenes, Xenophanes, Alcameon, and Parmenides on to Socrates, et al.) is ANTI-church history, we have no business going into further details. There is nothing about any man in the list from Pericles to Sartre that resembles a New Testament Bible believer, and not one man from Gorgias to Tillich was ever a member of a local church that resembled anything more than a social club or mental health fraternity (see Col. 2:8 and comments in that commentary). When commenting on the “greatness” of these men, the Holy Spirit says simple that they used “wisdom” as a means for attaining ignorance (1 Cor. 1-2) and specif­ically ignorance of God (I Cor. 1:21; 3:19). The important thing, from the standpoint of church history, is to notice that the mass of these pious infidels do not crop up after 325 A.D. until 1611 A.D.

Preparing the way for these great, educated apostates were the Chris- fione tknmcoivoc oAn wprA mainrino in “culture” between 1500 and

1700. Coming from such small beginnings as Andreas Masius’s work on Joshua (1574) and Carlstadt’s work on the canon of scripture (1521), came two works after 1611: a systematic theology by Father Pererius and an Origenian work by Father Richard Simon, of Dieppe, on the “styles of the New Testament writers.” Both of these Roman Catholics bitterly resent the A Vof 1611. Then up popped Fell’s attempt at Bible perversion (1675), Walton’s attempt at Bible perversion (1657), and Mills’s attempt at Bible perversion (1707).35 These last three gentlemen all published Greek texts hoping that they would replace the maligned Receptus used for the King James Bible. They misfired; however, they set the stage for successive perverts: Toinard (1807), Bentley (1720), Mace (1729), Bengel (1734), and Semler (1765), who acted out the whole drama for Lachmann (1850), Griesbach (1805), Harwood (1776), Scholtz (1830), and Alter (1878). This all-star play is now being acted out in the classroom36 of every Christian seminary, college, and university in America under the names of Weiss, Machen, Tischendorf, Warfield, Miller, Robertson, Wuest, Westcott, Hort, Rendall, Zodhiates, Yaeger, Anderson, and Schaff. It represents the accumulated blunders of three centuries of irrational speculation.

John Bunyan (1628-1688)

The author of Pilgrim’s Progress was an English Baptist, although he is often miscalled “Puritan” by pro-Catholic historians.37 John lived a reckless life as a boy and joined the army when he was sixteen or seventeen years old, continuing to live a godless and profane life. After his discharge John Bunyan became a tinker and married a fine, Christian girl who eventually led him to Christ. In 1655 he was baptized by immer­sion and joined the Bedford Baptist (not Puritan) Church.38 His wife died, leaving him with four small children, but he remarried four years later. Bunyan was arrested in 1660 for preaching without a license and without the permission of a bishop; he was thrown in jail where he stayed off and on for nearly thirteen years. In 1672 the Act of Pardon freed him, and he went back to preaching, with the exception of a few months in jail in 1675.39 His most famous work (Pilgrim’s Progress) is still read, and at one time was on the list of the ten most famous books (third place): only Foxe ’s Book ofMarytrs and the Bible were more important in the lives of the English speaking people than Bunyan’s famous allegory.

Johann Heinrich Bullinger (1504-1575)

Bullinger is the most satisfactory of the reformers as far as his Chris­tian attitude was concerned. Not as volatile as Luther, less vindictive

than Zwingli, and more scriptural than Calvin, Bullinger was the son of a highly respected, married Catholic priest in Switzerland. When Zwingli was killed in battle, Bullinger became pastor of the Great Minster Church in Zurich (1531). In 1536 he helped draw up the Helvidic Con­fession; in 1549 he helped compose the Consensus of Zurich (Consensus Tigurinus), which ended dogmatic disputes among Protestants in Swit­zerland. Bullinger was a staunch reformer, taking sides with Calvin and Zwingli against the Catholics and the Anabaptists, but unlike Calvin and Zwingli, he showed more toleration. Though disagreeing with both groups, Bullinger (as all Baptists) was not in favor of imprisoning or killing anyone for their religious convictions.

Blaise Pascal (1623-1662)

Pascal belonged to that class of lukewarm Catholics we call “Mystics” (Thomas a Kempis, Catherine of Siena, et al.), being con­nected with an evangelical group within the Catholic church called “Jansenists.” The Jansenists leaned towards Augustine’s interpretation of the Bible instead of Aquinas’s interpretation; this put them in a Tweedle-Dum Tweedie-Dee situation, as Augustine and Aquinas never were much when it came to Bible interpretation, one way or another; they were both Christian killing heretics. The movement took its name from Cornelius Jansen (1585-1638), a professor at Louvain, France. His book Augustinus simply taught Calvin’s system of irresistible grace.40 Naturally the Jesuits opposed the theology of it.

After a profound religious experience in 1654, Pascal spent much of his time in Bible study. He wrote a volume called Provincial Letters (1657) which attacked the Jesuits. The pope promptly condemned the writing and had every copy of it in Paris burned; Louis XIV (see chapter 17, notes 47-48) went to work to wipe out all of the “Jansenists.” The leader (Pasquier Quesnel) had to flee to Holland after Pope Clement XI condemned all of his writings in a papal bull (1713). Before he died, Pascal wrote a few devotional fragments which were called “The Thoughts” (Pensees) of Pascal,41 and they were published posthumously. He spent his last three years as a mystic living in retirement as the Cath­olic powers of France were now too strong for him to openly preach the Bible without getting burned at the stake. Louis XIV, you may remember (chapter 17, note 48), was the “Sun King” who ran the Huguenots out of France and demanded that Protestants turn their chil­dren over to Roman Catholics to be raised “in the true faith,” etc.42

Caspar Schwenkfeld (1489-1561)

Schwenkfeld was bom in Silesia; he was a close friend of Martin

Luther, although he developed a Biblical theology which was not acceptable to the reformers because it resembled the Baptist position too closely. Schwenkfeld insisted that the state had no right to dictate laws of conduct to any citizen contrary to that citizen’s religious con­science (see Roger Williams, Vol. II). As he moved closer and closer to New Testament Biblical Christianity, he moved further away from the “Lutherans. ” Caspar taught that a man was saved by grace through faith and that the Holy Spirit regenerated him without water baptism. He further taught that the Lord’s Supper was not a literal sacrifice and that infant baptism was heresy.43 He also believed that if a man professed the new birth he should have some visible evidence in his life that he was a “new creature.’’ In the eyes of Roman Catholics, Schwenkfeld was a first-rate heretic, a deadly enemy of the truth, a child of Satan, “in league with the gates of hell,’’ etc., in trying to “overthrow Holy Mother church, blah, blah, blah” (see note 15).

Jacob Arminius (1560-1609)

Jacob (or James) Arminius was the thorn in Calvin’s flesh and in the flesh of his followers. Bom in Oudewater, Holland, he received his education at Utrecht and Marburg; he studied in Geneva and Basel under Theodore Beza. He became professor of theology at the University of Leyden in 1603. Before his death in 1609 Arminius held a Synod of Reformed theologians for the purpose of clarifying some of Calvin’s more scrambled type of anti-scriptural guesswork (see chapter 16). After his death, Arminius’s followers (Hugo Grotius and others in “The Remonstrance”) presented a five point answer to Calvin’s five point TULIP system. Often slandered by Hyper-Calvinists, Arminius actually taught the system used by Billy Sunday, Dwight Moody, George Whitefield, George W. Truett, Dr. DeHaan, Charles Fuller, Jack Van Impe, Jack Hyles, Lee Roberson, John R. Rice, and Billy Graham. The only place where Arminius differed with the Fundamental soul winners of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries was that he taught that although God would give the saints grace so that “they need not fall,” still he thought that some scriptures "seemed to teach that it was possible for a MAN to fall away from salvation.”44 This was John Wesley’s position and the position of Sam Jones (Vol. II).

This consigned Arminius to the rack immediately, although strangely enough his Calvinistic opponents, who were supposed to believe in eter­nal security and election so strongly, in the same breath believed in baptismal regeneration by sprinkling babies. There are “heretics,” and then there are heretics (chapter 9). In view of the fact that the Episco­

palians, Methodists, Lutherans, Catholics, and Pentecostal groups all taught that a Christian could lose salvation (not “a MAN fall away from salvation,” see above), only a fool would think that they had not found something in the scripture to lead them to believe that. They had all found Hebrews 3:14; 6:1-6; 10:26-30; James 2:24; Galatians 5:4; Mat­thew 25:30; 24:50-51; Revelation 3:5; 22:14; and Acts 13:43; 10:35— like any good Campbellite (1980). The only thing was, what could they do with the passages if they were A-millennialists or Post-millennialists? The answer was “NOTHING,” for only the Pre-millennial system would straighten out eight of the passages, and neither Calvin nor Arminius were Pre-millennial—twelve hundred years of brainwashing by the Alexandrian Cult at Rome was hard to shake off.45 As a matter of fact, ninety percent of the Pre-millennialists today cannot handle Hebrews 4; 6; 10; or Matthew 24; 25 any better than Arminius, although they will side with Calvin to save face. But these are matters of Biblical exegesis, not church history (see Rev. 22:14; Matthew 24:13 and com­ments in those commentaries).

The modem Hard Shell or Primitive Baptist (Pink, Shelton, Barnard, Gilpin, Ross, Sovereign Book Club, Old Puritan Press, The Baptist Examiner, et al.) likes to call any Baptist an “Arminian” who doesn’t take all of “TULIP. ” The slander carried on by The Baptist Examiner*6 is to the effect that every soul winning Baptist in America is an “Arminian” if he doesn’t teach Limited Atonement and Irresistible Grace; the fact that he teaches the eternal security of the believer (per­severance of the saints) doesn’t matter to a dyed-in-the-wool fatalist. I was once asked by an examining board (for the Master’s degree) if I were a Calvinist or an Arminian. I told them that I was an Arminian till I got to Calvary, and after that I was a Calvinist. I was told, “That is not a very good answer.” I replied, “It wasn’t a very good question.”

Arminius believed that man was totally depraved, but his WILL was not depraved. He taught that Christ died for all sinners, including those who trod His blood under foot (Heb. 10:29) and those who rejected His Atonement (2 Peter 2:1). He also believed that election was condi­tioned on foreknowledge (1 Peter 1:2) because that is exactly what the scriptures stated;47 he taught that any sinner could resist the Holy Spirit and the grace of God, exactly as the scriptures stated the matter (Gen. 6:3; Acts 7:51). If Arminius erred on Hebrews 4; 6; 10; James 2; and Matthew 24; 25, he at least didn’t err on how a man got saved.48 Augustine and Calvin thought a man got saved by being elected when he was sprinkled, unless he wasn’t “elect” to start with, and then the sprinkling was actually a waste of time .49 Since many of the followers

of Calvin and Zwingli considered baby sprinkling so essential that they would KILL Christians who didn’t sprinkle babies (see chapters 16, 17), we may presume that in spite of their hot air profession about “elect” and “unconditional election,” they really believed that Sov­ereign Election was conditioned on their own leaders sprinkling with water; and so it is today in any Reformed or Roman Catholic church. Profession is not always any guarantee of sanctity or sincerity, or even sensibility.

In 1618 a synod was held at Dort for the purpose of putting thirteen Arminians on trial by 117 Calvinists. The Arminians were found guilty (what else?) and deprived of their clerical positions.50

The Lord retaliated with the greatest revival England ever saw (1740-1790) under the ministry of an Arminian—John Wesley—while the Presbyterian and Reformed churches in England and Holland went down the tube. Sam Jones (1847-1906); Bob Jones, Sr. (1882-1968); Bob Shuler (1800-1970); and Peter Cartwright (1785-1872) were “Arminians” (see Vol. II). Two of the greatest apostates in the twentieth century were “Calvinists” (Philip Schaff and Louis Berkhof)-

Since a moderate Calvinism is the best doctrine for preaching, according to one of the greatest (if not the greatest) evangelist who ever lived,51 it is not surprising that Charles Haddon Spurgeon never preached one sermon a year on “the five points of Calvinism.” Although he claimed to be a pure Calvinist, Spurgeon had more sense than to empha­size publicly what Calvin professed to have believed about salvation. Anyone reading the set of sermons from the Metropolitan Tabernacle (printed in more than ten volumes, containing more than fifty sermons to a volume) knows where Spurgeon put his emphasis: out of a thousand sermons, Spurgeon never wasted ten of them on “the FIVE POINTS OF CALVINISM.” Those who mention “Sovereign Grace” (not a Bible expression) and a Sovereign God (not a Bible expression) every time they open their mouths are not kin to Edwards, Spurgeon, Ian Paisley, or Whitefield, although they may fancy themselves to be.52

Lelio Sozzini (Socinus) (1525-1562)

Socinus was an apostate Roman Catholic from Sienna, Italy, who decided to speak up for Servetus when Calvin had him burned at the stake. Socinus, as Arius, decided that both Calvin and Servetus couldn’t be right, so he decided that neither of them were right: he took Eusebius’s position (see chapter 8), which led his nephew (Fausto Sozzini, 1539- 1604) to propagate a “Socinian” movement in Poland (1605). The mod­em Unitarian church (Vol. II) is a lineal descendant of the Socinians

in Poland who are now represented by an “orthodox” Catholic pope (1979) heading up the Communist Party for control of Europe.53

Socinianism teaches what Jim Jones (Guyana Massacre, 1978) taught: i.e., Christ was our example for being obedient unto death and gaining eternal life by good works.54 We gain eternal life by “good works” (i.e., doing good to our fellow man); for Jones this was racial equality, civil rights, social justice, integration, and the rest of the format promoted by both Houses of Congress, television, and the Associated Press. Quite naturally the Baptists and Anabaptists were linked with Socinianism by the reformers and Jesuits, but the motivation for this should be so obvious by now in church history that it isn’t worth dis­cussing; hypocrites always have to have an alibi for rejecting the Bible.

With these notations our first volume of church history is complete. When history next takes up its witness to the progress of the New Tes­tament church it is in its heyday of its glory here on earth. The period from 1700-1900 is by all odds the greatest period for soul winning, evangelizing, and Bible preaching and teaching the world has ever seen or will ever see. No other period (Ephesus, Smyrna, Pergamos, Thyatira, or Sardis) can compare with it. This Philadelphia church period began with the Reformation, but the key that opened the doors of the world to the preaching of the Gospel was the restoration of the God-given, God-honored, God-preserved text of the Holy Bible on a worldwide scale. If the student is tempted to think that such a fact is a prejudice, let him face the stubborn truth that at this moment the United States is still financing eighty percent of all the missionaries in the world who are still preaching and teaching the Bible; the remaining twenty percent are being financed by twenty other nations.

With the rise of America as a nation (1700-1900) and the rise of the British Empire (1700-1900) comes the worldwide distribution of the King James Bible. There is no doubt about its fruits, regardless of who attempts to explain it away or how they attempt to do it; the facts of history are quite stubborn. There are no great soul winners or Bible teachers among the English speaking people for three hundred years who do not teach or preach the Authorized Version. Sometimes the more intellectual among them (Robertson; Scofield; Bullinger; Torrey; Machen; et al.) or those among them who wish to appear scholarly (Rice; Riley; Bob Jones, III; Spurgeon; Theodore Epp; et al.) may take up the Cult line and adopt the Cultic mentality (i.e., “I am smart enough to correct it”) and may, occasionally, correct a few words or may refer to “more accurate translations,” etc., but on the whole (ninety-nine percent of the time) the men who get the results (Norris, Finney,

Cartwright, Whitefield, Wesley, Spurgeon, Moody, Sunday, Paton, Livingstone, Carey, Goforth, Edwards, Tennent, et al.) know what to use when they want results: they use THE BOOK. Occasional lapses may be attributed to the old, carnal nature (Rom. 6-7) that resides in every believer and its tendency to “show off’ at times by demonstrating its “scholarship.” We presume the men listed above were in the right mind when they held up the /IKand treated it as the final and infallible, absolute authority of God Almighty, and we presume that they were temporarily out of fellowship with God when they tried to show off their Adamic heritage from Alexandria.

When we next look in on the church, she is settling in a new land. With the Decline of the West (Spengler), the Holy Spirit moves on in His predetermined direction (Gen. 4:16 and comments in that commen­tary), and New Testament Christianity passes from Europe to America. Since all dispensations end in apostasy (chapter 5, notes 1-6), the expan­sion of Christianity in Europe ends right where it started in 100-200 A.D.— Paganism. Following the interminable cycle, the Gospel was preached; educational movements followed it as the ocean follows the shoreline; with this education the Alexandrian Cult inserted a CULTUR­AL AUTHORITY (science, philosophy, tradition, etc.) which eventu­ally overrode Biblical authority and produced apostasy. Whether apostasy generates pagans or whether pagans are called in to judge apostasy (Jer. 52), as in the cases of the barbarian tribes (400-600 A.D.) and the Mohammedans (700-1000), is beside the point; the results are the same: there is a return to pagan superstition, pagan practices, African rituals, and jungle morals. The survival of the fittest which Darwin and Huxley taught (1840-1890) was only their depraved natures reading their own images into the test tubes and Bunsen burners: the law of the jungle is for PAGANS. The new breed of pagans that shows up in Europe fol­lowing post-Reformation apostasy (1800-1900) are educated pagans; that they are heathen is beyond all controversy, for “by their fruits ye shall know them.” They are a law unto themselves and hold no god higher than the educated opinion of a military state (Vol. II). Their culture is what conceals their identity. One takes for granted that if a man can talk about psychosomatics, therapy, eclectic texts, categorical imperatives, reverent Biblicists, dialectics, recapitulation, existentialism, ontogeny, and reactionary revisionism while he is listening to Bach, Tchaikovsky, Beethoven, Wagner, Rachmaninoff, and Brahms that he must be civilized: we tend to forget that a wolf can wear sheep’s clothing.

When Marshal Kilduff, Herb Caen, and Ron Javers wrote up The Suicide Cult (Nov. 25, 1978) and its antics in Guyana under James Jones,

all three were baffled with frustrations when it came to interpreting the facts they had just documented. They were not only shocked and horrified by the Guyana massacre, but beyond that they were shocked because their own imaginations could not find a reason to explain why or how such a thing could have happened in the twentieth century. In spite of the fact that James Jones was an avowed Leninist-Marxist, a fornicating homosexual, and untrustworthy in money matters as well as domestic matters, and in spite of the fact that he hated the Bible while he was misusing it and told his congregation to listen to HIM, not the Bible, the reporters for the San Francisco Chronicle (see above) were so jaded themselves from serving the news media that they actually expressed amazement at WHY things turned out in Guyana as they did. Believing in exactly what Jim Jones believed in (social justice, racial equality, integration, tax sharing, Gay Liberation, Women’s Lib, and a “classless society”—and no Bible to be taken seriously all the time), Kilduff and Javers conclude their work with the pitiful statement that the “unbe­lievers” had become “too real” and the “unspeakable” had been given a tongue and voice, and the only question that was left was “WHY?”

That’s easy: Romans 1-3.

Kilduff and Javers never read Romans 1-3, and if they did they wouldn’t believe that it was an accurate picture of human nature; they wouldn’t dare. No positive thinking Kingdom builder can take Romans 1-3 to be a description of human nature; you can’t serve the news media and believe it. The news media must hold out a positive picture for man­kind in the future, exactly as Jim Jones did to his congregation.55 You see, Kilduff and Javers had been serving the prostitute press, which for more than forty years had been calling FORNICATION “premarital sex,” PROSTITUTION “hustling,” DOPE-HEADS “drug culture,” BUMS “street people,” COMMUNISM “civil rights,” SEX PER­VERTS “gays,” and ADULTERY “adult consent.” No wonder they couldn’t interpret the facts after assembling them: they were just as twisted as Jim Jones.

Jim Jones didn’t believe in violence any more than Gandhi or M.L. King.56 He just practiced it. Like any good “father” (that is what he called himself: “The father”—which is what Gandhi’s followers called him), he believed the end justifies the means: all unsaved popes, senators, congressmen, newspaper editors, liquor store dealers, theater operators, liberal preachers, Bible revisers, Catholic priests, and magazine pub­lishers believe EXACTLY THE SAME THING. They just don’t often get caught practicing illegal “means”: Jones was caught.

Wolves wear sheep’s clothing so they can eat sheep: “You gotta

make a livin’, don’t you?” (See Col. 2:8 and comments in that commentary.)

Following the Reformation the intellectual wolves of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries finished off Biblical Christianity in Europe, and the popes were powerless to stop them, having rejected Biblical Christianity themselves nearly twelve centuries earlier. But this is another volume (see Vol. II).

In closing our account of Volume I, we should be able to make some kind of summary about what church history has taught us, for ‘‘those who will not learn the lessons of history are condemned to repeat the lessons of history.”

Clearly, seven things stand out in church history as documented between 33 A.D. and 1611 A.D.

1. The greatest enemy of New Testament Biblical Christianity is ROME, in any form. (See Christ’s comment in Matt. 24:5.) Russia has not yet accomplished what Rome accomplished before 1700 A.D. in killing saved people.

2. The greatest traducers and seducers in western civilization are ecclesiastical or political leaders connected with Rome (bishops, priests, abbots, monks, kings, premiers, nuncios, archbishops, princes, dukes, presidents, etc.).

3. History moves from east to west, inexorably, and the New Tes­tament Biblical witness is never given credit for the effect of its witness in any listing of major events or ‘‘high points” as they are noted and magnified by the writers of those times.

4. There is a continual line of congregations from the apostle John to the Puritans of King James’s time who stand by the Book and will not compromise the line it draws between the unregenerated church member who has been baptized in water and the regenerated church member who believes the Book. That line of congregations (or individuals connected with them) will be persecuted, slandered, misrepresented, imprisoned, tortured, or murdered. The unbroken line runs as follows:

Bible believing martyrs: 70-313 A.D.

Montanists: 250-600 A.D. (Priscillianists, etc.).

Novations: 250-600 A.D. (Waldenses and Fratricelli later).

Nestorians: 490-1000 A.D. (Arians, etc.).

Euchites and Messalines: 300-800 A.D. (Bulgarians, Manichaeans). Donatists: 300-800 A.D. (New Manichaeans, Vaudois, Waldenses). Paulicians: 600-1200 A.D. (Bulgarians, Manichaeans, Nestorians,

Lyonists, Berengerians).

Bogomiles: 800-1200 A.D. (Waldenses, Albigenses, Cathari,

o »-z4 e Qnnkn rslc iA

Cathari: 1200-1500 (Albigenses, Waldenses, New Manichaeans, Henricians, Petrobrusians, Lollards, Hussites, etc.).

Waldenses: 1200-1980 (Baptists, Anabaptists, Cathari, etc.).

Anabaptists: 1400-1700 (Baptists, Protestants, radicals, Hussites, Brethren, Mennonites, etc.).

Protestants: 1520-1980 (Lutherans, Calvinists, Puritans, Evangelische).

Baptists: 1500-1980 (Separatists, Dispensationalists, Fundamen­talists, Norrisites, Ruckmanites).

BIBLE BELIEVING CHRISTIANS: 33-1990 A.D.

5. Fundamentalists vary from those who believe five things to those who believe ten (the Virgin Birth, the Deity of Christ, verbal inspiration of the originals, the Bodily Resurrection, the Blood Atonement, the Pre­Millennial Coming, separation of church and state, the autonomy of the local church, eternal security, etc.), while Fundamentalism in itself, without belief in and reliance on the BOOK, is a dead duck.

6. No Christian group can improve itself by going one step beyond believing the Bible and teaching it. God has limited His search warrant to “search the scriptures” (John 5:39) and His “study grants” to study­ing “the word of truth” (2 Tim. 2:15). No allowance has been made for anyone’s college curriculum, taught by ANYONE. Whatever does not agree with what the Book says and whatever goes contrary to what believers are to practice is not “education”—at least not according to the Book. One step beyond a BIBLICAL education lands the Bible believer in the lap of the Alexandrian Cult (chapter 5, CULT is from “culture”), and once this step is taken, the toboggan is faced downhill with a full load.

Evangelism and knowledge of the Bible are the limits of a Christian education, within the covers of the Book itself. Any additional material must be in subjection to its words or it will eventually replace those words: that is the desperate and tragic lesson that history demonstrates over ten thousand times in every century without one variation. The only “school” mentioned in the New Testament was that of a heathen philosopher (see Acts 19:8-9 and comments in that commentary).

The Biblical stance poses a threat to every member of the Alexan­drian Cult (150-1980 A.D.) who makes his living off of correcting the Bible or spiritualizing or allegorizing it (Aquinas, Origen, Augustine, Robertson, Machen, et al.).

7. Finally, we learned that the giant oaks from little acorns grow, or that (in the words of Paul), “a little leaven leaveneth the whole lump.” What began with an occasional insertion of philosophical terms

such as “Catholic,” “Nominalists,” “Gnostic,” the Didache, the Apos­tolic Constitutions, Tobit, Maccabees, and the reverencing of “good and godly men” where they deviated from the Bible a little (Eusebius, Papias, Cyprian, Polycarp, et al.) wound up in torturing children and burning women at the stake (1400-1700).

Positive thinkers would never get the connection. Their implicit faith in their own intelligence or the opinions of their fellow man (Prov. 17:16) is always nothing short of miraculous (see The Sure Word of Prophecy). Robinson’s Historical Point of View51 speaks up for the whole pack of historians; James Harvey Robinson says simply that the study of history enables us to develop sympathy, fairness, and caution in forming judgments, since two conflicting accounts of any one matter usually are unfair and therefore cancel each other out to some extent: i.e., there is no basis for which anyone can determine truth or error?8 “The spirit of the times” so alters reporting accounts that one must agree partially with all writers without judging ANY by the scripture. The same writer tells us without batting an eye that there is no reason for anyone thinking there were any Christians in Babylon for Peter to minister to in 1 Peter 5, therefore Peter was in Rome, not Babylon.59 Robinson got so sympathetic and fair-minded in forming “value judgments” that he just made a liar out of God and adopted a Catholic fable: typical.

It is now time to pick up the threads of truth as they cross the Atlantic Ocean and weave the Biblical tapestry of American Christianity in which America becomes by the grace of God the only nation in western civi­lization since the birth of Christ to be founded with the idea of separation of church and state in mind. The Pilgrim fathers in New England and the vast tracts of settlers on the seaboard were not running primarily from “poverty” and racial inequality when they came over here, like modem Africans. They were running mainly from oppressive taxes and religious restrictions set up by the HEW’s of their own lands. Those who do not learn the lessons of history are condemned to repeat them. These Christians who crossed the Atlantic were mainly interested in getting out from under the coils and jackhammers of state churches (Anglican, Reformed, Catholic, Lutheran, and Greek Orthodox). Even though some of them (the Anglicans and the Puritans) tried to retain a little “church state” set-up in America for a while, they found out before long that it was going to be death to their nation. They abandoned it (see Vol. II) and wrote a Constitution where no Baptist had to pay taxes to support an Anglican or Reformed clergyman. They had learned that Europe was no place for peace and security as long as any nation

adopted the Catholic custom of tying the bishop up with the king. Europe remained a battleground from 1600 to 1946.

Whatever motives the early settlers may have had for coming here (liberty, more land, something to eat, gold, adventure, change of scenery, etc.), the ones who finally wrote the Declaration of Independence rec­ognized that although God was to be honored, a state church of ANY kind was out of the question.60 Although this meant that the official anath­emas of Rome would fall upon the entire nation (since no pope can approve of separation of church and state without perjuring himself), the Americans went ahead. It was not until many years later (1900-1980) that Rome succeeded in confiscating Protestant tax dollars to reinstate Unholy Mother Whore as the guiding light in American politics.61

The only thing that men learn from history is that men never learn from history.

DEDICATION

This volume is affectionately dedicated to the last genera­tion of Bible-believing Christians who will undertake to witness for the Lord Jesus Christ before the Man of Sin takes over the United Nations from Rome.

PREFACE

This volume of church history is written on the same premise as the previous volume and with the same basic assumptions. The premise we operate on is that most church histories are ANTI- church histories; that is, they record the history of the growth and progress of a political, religious machine that turns out to be the worst enemy that the New Testament church ever had. In the last days (1970-1990) this machine is clearly identified as the Roman Catholic hierarchy coupled with international Communism. Schaff, McGiffert, Latourette, LaGarde, Dollinger, Hefele, and others deal mainly with the history of this Roman Catholic church, although it in no way resembles the history of the New Testament church (see Vol. I, Chap. 1, 2). The two conflicting records are so discordant and incompatible that an historian must resort to every kind of humanistic subterfuge, double-talk, apocryphal sources, alien witnesses, forged documents and sentimental fiction in order to connect the two churches. The New Testament church and the Roman Catholic church are not alike in organization, church polity, liturgy, rituals, destiny, beliefs, activity, purposes, goals, or fruit bearing (see Vol. I, Chap. 13-17).

There may also be such a thing as SEMI-church history which deals with those persons and events that cross the path of the New Testament church as it is moving through time and space, but semi­church history would deal with persons, institutions, events and circumstances which are not actively engaged in stopping the New Testament witness. Rome has always been actively engaged in stopping the New Testament witness. Secular history, of course, is supposed to deal with history apart from any religious aspects. Side references to church influences or to the literary endeavors of Christians may take up some space in such histories, but “history” by men like Wells, Durant, Spengler, Churchill, Gibbon, etc., is never really concerned with the New Testament church which we are about to study.1

Our assumptions are that the King James Authorized Version (1611) is the best and most accurate Bible ever translated or printed and that it is the supreme authority that God has revealed on this

earth before the Rapture; that is, it is the infallible and inerrant final authority in all matters of faith and practise for the Bible believer. In our previous volume we were careful to show the reader why we believed this. We spent a great deal of time and space in documenting the evidence so that the believer could find out the truth for himself and not be misled by a lot of quotations from “Fundamentalists” who professed to have found errors in it and not be misled by arguments about “verbal and plenary inspiration” of unknown “original autographs” that no man on earth has ever seen. Translations from the AV (in over 800 languages) will be blessed of God right on to the end of this age, especially Hebrew translations of the New Testament.

We have shown how the Greek Textus Receptus originated, how translations from it were made and preserved, who used them in the Dark Ages, who tried to exterminate them, and how the true Greek text finally triumphed through the German Reformation and the printing press. We were also careful to document (to the tune of over forty original sources) the origins of the Alexandrian text promoted by the Alexandrian Cult (the professors at Bob Jones University, Pensacola Christian College, Tennessee Temple, Lynchburg, etc.) and how this vile, counterfeit “Bible” was used to usher in the Dark Ages. This Alexandrian text, manufactured by Origen, Eusebius, Constantine and Jerome, was the official “Bible” during the worst period of history known to Western civilization. The teaching and preaching of its precepts by Catholic monks, bishops, priests, friars, Jesuits, and popes were accompanied by continual fraud, embezzlement, crooked politics, extortion, blackmail, mass imprisonments, torture, and mass murder within a religious setting (see Vol. I, Chap. 13-15). If we are to judge a book by its fruits, we may say without flinching that the Alexandrian text (the ASV, NIV, and New ASV of the twentieth century) is the most depraved and godless piece of Christ-insulting literature that has ever been promoted under the pretext of being a “Bible.” In the Dark Ages this Alexandrian forgery was called Jerome’s Latin Vulgate; in Reformation times it was called the Douay Rheims Version (1582), and in the present century it has blossomed into as many names (RV, ASV, NASV, RSV, NRSV, IV, NIV, NEB, TEV, etc.) as there are dead orthodox apostates in Christian colleges and universities.

As Volume II opens, the Christians in Europe who still believe in a local church separated from the state are about to desert the “alte Heimat” and search for new horizons. If they go north they will

freeze in Siberia, Spitsbergen, Novaya Zemlya, Iceland and Greenland; if they go south they will be back into Africa where the Catholic church started (Vol. I, Chap. 3, 4); if they go east they will run smack into the Turks, Saracens and Moslems who will consider it a privilege to kill them or to make slaves out of them; and if they stay where they are they will either have to sprinkle their babies or go to jail, or they will have to give up reading their Bibles unless they get permission from a Roman Catholic bishop. Furthermore, every Christian in England and Europe who really believed the New Testament had just been placed under 125 curses, pronounced on him by the state churches of France, Spain, Italy, Austria and South Germany (Council of Trent, 1545-1564). These curses are still in effect today, according to John Paul II, for every pope who is elected must subscribe to all of the official decrees which have been stated by the official church councils. The Council of Trent was the largest and the most important council in the history of the Catholic church.

With the Catholic popes busily engaged in setting European monarchs against each other so they could obliterate nationalism and set up a Catholic dictatorship over all nations, there is one continual war going on somewhere with no more Biblical purpose to it than Jim Jones’ Guyana massacre (1978). Only one escape hatch is open: it is “over the rolling waves” westward or perish. Hundreds of thousands of Europeans between 1600-1900 take this westward fire escape. The Christianity they bring to North America (in spite of later masses of Catholics from Ireland, Italy and Cuba) is basically PROTESTANT. It was built on the Geneva Bible (a revision of Tyndale’s Bible), which the Pilgrim fathers brought over with them in 1620, and on the King James Bible, which was the first English Bible printed in the United States. There was not one framer of the Declaration of Independepce or one leader in Constitution Hall in Philadelphia (1776) who believed that the Jesuit Rheims Bible of 1582 (ASV, NASV, RSV, NRSV, IV, NIV, etc.) was the word of God, or even a “reliable translation of the word of God.” That particular religious hallucination was not even countenanced by Queen Elizabeth or King James of England. Either one of those English rulers had more spiritual discernment than many of the faculty members of Liberty Baptist College, Wheaton, Hyles- Anderson, or San Francisco Theological Seminary (1983).

Since the King James Bible (AV) was also a revision of Tyndale (as was the Geneva Bible), America got off to a flying start; she became the first nation to be organized and established with a Bible

translated by anti-Catholic Christians whom Catholics had burned at the stake (Vol. I, Chap. 13-15). This was “unique,” one will have to admit, and it explains why no Catholic could get into the White House in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. [In those days the average man had a better sense of history than the editors of daily newspapers do today (1983).] Washington, Franklin, Jefferson, Adams and Madison all cut their teeth on the AV of 1611;2 and whether they knew it or not, the Book they took to be the “Holy Bible” was written under the wise regulation that if the Tyndale Version and the Geneva Version stood against the “Bishop’s Bible” (the nearest thing to an English ASV at that time), the Bishop’s Bible was to be rejected in favor of Tyndale.3

Two movements in Europe accelerated the migrations of the masses across the Atlantic to America. The first of these was the Pietist movement, which we shall speak of in our first chapter, and the second was the Methodist revival under John Wesley.

The link between America and Europe, as far as real “church history” is concerned, quite naturally had nothing to do with the Catholic church or any of her affiliates. Catholicism had become a pagan abomination long before 1000 A.D. (Vol. I, Chap. 6), so the link that finally joins Bible believers in America with Bible believers in Europe is forged in Germany by the Pietists and Moravians (Spener, Franke, Spangenberg, Zinzendorf, David Christian, etc.) and it was set in place by Peter Bohler and one of Peter’s converts— John Wesley. It is John Wesley and George Whitefield who bring to the shores of America the fiery type of evangelism that characterized American Christianity up to the repeal of Prohibition (1933), and both men owed their spiritual heritages to Martin Luther and the Pietists, who used the Textus Receptus of Martin Luther and Elzevir: not the New ASV (1969) and New International Version (1978) of the Roman Catholic popes.

Volume II of Church History deals with the Philadelphia (1500-1900 A.D.) and Laodicean church periods (1900-1990 A.D.). Our usual historical cycle will continue to appear: Evangelism (preaching), followed by Teaching (education), followed by Culture (science and philosophy), followed by Apostasy (ecumenical efforts and rejection of Biblical authority) and the eventual Paganism (communism, Catholicism, United Nations, League of Nations, etc.). One has truly said that every spiritual movement in the world follows the same pattern: there is a MAN, a MOVEMENT, a MACHINE and then a MONUMENT. The MAN is the preaching, the MOVEMENT is the teaching, the MACHINE is the culture and

the MONUMENT marks the apostasy. Every church or school in America—without reference to its profession of faith, its founder, its enrollment, its income or its reputation—is in one of those stages at this present writing. It is either following a man or it is involved in a movement or it is running a machine or it is displaying a tourist attraction for Christian TV viewers.

If one would like to see the monuments of Roman Catholicism and Lutheranism and Anglicanism, they are scattered all over England and Europe like museums; most of them became monuments before 1800, and many of them before 1200. The Roman Catholic church was a MACHINE before 1000A.D. One of the monuments in America today is found in Greenville, South Carolina, and we sport a super graveyard here in Pensacola that boasts of an enrollment of over 2,000 students.

They are deader than last year’s birds nest.

INTRODUCTION

An understanding of what is about to follow is almost impossible without a review of some of the material found in Volume I of this work. Our second volume must begin with events that take place between 1600 and 1700 A.D., and by this time the Roman church has gone through fourteen centuries of “development.” In her case the term “development” means apostasy. That is, the term “evolution” often means “degeneration." The churches that remained true to the original apostolic calling and revelations given to the Apostle Paul did not “develop” into much beyond the New Testament. It is true that church buildings were erected, although there is no precedent layed down for this in the New Testament. It is also true that various practices and confessions of faith were defined from time to time (Acts 15), but the “development” was left to the Roman church with its eastern branch (Greek Orthodox church), and this development, as we have seen, was the evolution of a grain of mustard seed into a green bay tree (Ps. 37:35) which became a nesting place for demons (Matt. 13:32). These religious demons were bloody murderers as well as theological liars and heretics, and no record (with the possible exception of the murders by Mao, Lenin and Stalin: 1920-1960) could match their record of burnings, torturings, butchering and assassinations. Further, unlike the killings of Mao Tse-tung, Lenin and Stalin, these atrocities were committed by church leaders in the Catholic church, in the name of Jesus Christ, with the official religious approval and oftentimes “blessing” of the church. There is no question about the official sanction and approval of the popes or the bishops.3-5 Atrocities committed “in the name of holy mother church” or “the sacred name of Mary” or some other such obnoxious blasphemy were quite common anywhere in Europe for a thousand years (see Vol. I, Chap. 13, 17).

Having come to the Reformation (or rather the completion of the Reformation: 1600-1700) we are well into the Philadelphia period of church history (see Introduction, Vol. I), and by now the reader should have clearly grasped the distinction between a New

Testament local church and a Roman Catholic religious whore (Rev. 17). Since all of the Reformers held that the pope was the Antichrist,4 it followed that to them the Catholic church was the Bride of Satan. And in spite of her “testimony” established by the rank and file of her peons through “works of mercy,” sisters of charity, hospitals, orphans homes, and support of the NAACP and communists in Latin America, the bloody face of this vicious killer of Christians still (1982) occasionally pokes through her mask (Rev. 17:5-9). In the seventeen centuries of church history which we have studied there are ten indelible marks that survive and they are stamped in letters of fire over the doors of the True Church and the False Church.

1. The true church has a Syrian-type Greek text from Antioch of Syria; the false church has a North African Greek text from Alexandria. Thus, their sources for FINAL AUTHORITY are different.

2. The true church will not include the Apocrypha as part of the inspired Old Testament canon; the false church will. Thus, the false church is a liar (Prov. 30:6).

3. The true church teaches regeneration by the new birth upon faith in the finished work of Jesus Christ; the false church teaches baptismal regeneration by sprinkling babies. Thus, their “plans of salvation” differ.

4. The true church teaches assurance of salvation; the false church teaches no assurance until death. Thus, they differ DOCTRINALLY.

5. The true church uses the Bible as the yardstick by which everything is to be judged; the false church will use tradition (“the historic Fundamentalist position” etc.), church fathers (“good, godly, dedicated men”), councils, philosophy, Greek scholarship, or any other yardstick to prove anything. Thus, the standards for morals and conduct differ.

6. The true church will baptize no one in water unless they are an adult believer or a child who openly professes conversion; the false church will baptize in water (saved or lost) and will call sprinkling “baptism.”

7. The true church’s main work is carried out by soul-winning evangelists, pastors and Bible teachers; the false church is engaged in political activity through monastic orders, papal ambassadors, nuncios, Jesuit organizations and lobbying. All popes in the twentieth century play up to the press and news media. Not one

pope in this century who has appeared on TV has ever given ANY plan of salvation, not even the Catholic plan. Modern popes are politicians, not preachers.

8. The true church will pray to no one but God, and then only in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ, through the Spirit; the false church will pray to dead saints or pray in the name of “Mary.”

9. The true church has never enjoyed worldly favor at any time and never will; the false church is the outstanding worldwide representative of “Christianity” in all history books, at all political gatherings, at all press conferences and at all ecumenical meetings.

10. The true church is connected with revivals, soul winning, street preaching, moral standards, evangelism, knowledge of the Bible and missionary endeavors; the false church has never been connected directly with one major revival of Biblical preaching or Biblical learning since 300 A.D.

One may find other differences if specific local assemblies with their specific beliefs are examined; however, these ten general points of incompatibility are outstanding in church history for seventeen centuries. They make it impossible for any man or woman who reads the Bible to be deceived about “which church Christ founded.” The only people who could be deceived about these matters would be people who reject the Bible for personal reasons (Eze. 14) or who court damnation (2 Thess. 2:9-11) through willful ignorance (2 Pet. 3:5).

We have also learned by careful and sometimes tedious ex­amination that a true Biblical church is never known by one single name throughout church history, for the false church is always busy creating the impression that true churches are “heretical” and are therefore “cults” or “sects,” whereas the false church itself is “orthodox” because it holds to “historic positions.” The false church believes that proof of its orthodoxy lies in an unbroken line of succession of so-called “popes” from Peter to John Paul II;5 therefore, this “one, universal church” is still here because it managed to retain one NAME throughout history—Catholic. As we have seen, the Bible recognizes no such church anywhere in either Testament, unless it is the idol reverencing “fathers” (Jud. 18) who wear long robes (Luke 20:46) and worship the Queen of Heaven (Jer. 44). The term “Catholic” is a non-Biblical word borrowed from Greek philosophy (Col. 2:8). There are no “Catholics" anywhere in the New Testament (Acts 11:26) either before or after the death of Christ.

Now, by 1600 A.D. the chickens are coming home to roost

(Matt. 13:32). They are three-headed chickens with clubfeet and forked tongues: they do not belong in anyone’s “sheep fold” (John 10:16). Their assemblies do not resemble a New Testament local church in any way, shape, form, or practise. A close examination of New Testament church histories shows that the real churches were all linked together right back to Montanus (200 A. D.) and Novatius (251 A.D.), who led the first defections from a body of corrupt apostates to a local group of “Puritans” (another name, as “Quakers” has been applied to Bible believers by enemies of the Bible). However, no one need waste any time trying to prove “succession.” The truth is thrust into the face of the observer in the twentieth century with such force that he would have to be deaf, dumb and blind to miss it. For when one compares the “one, true, holy, mother Catholic church” with the material recorded in the New Testament, one finds that:

1. No one in the New Testament congregations ever talked in foreign languages except as a SIGN (1 Cor. 14:22) to unbelieving Israelites; where they did otherwise, they were rebuked for it (1 Cor. 14:19).

2. No local church in the New Testament baptized anyone but a responsible believer and none of them prayed to Mary, honored her, remembered her, or spoke about her to anyone. Furthermore, none of them remembered the birthday of her Son!

3. All New Testament local congregations were self- sustaining, self-governing and self-propagating; and none of them concerned themselves with “community involvement,” “oppressed minorities,” “civil rights,” “human rights,” or any drives or causes other than the teaching and preaching of the word of God (Acts 6:4 and the comments on that passage in the Commentary).

4. All were engaged in missionary activity and no apostle in the New Testament ever said “a better translation should be” or “it is unfortunate that this was rendered as such and such” or “it should better be translated thusly.” This style of talk and these expressions are not the speech of any New Testament Christian.

5. No New Testament Christian ever asked an archbishop, priest, monk, or pope for advice; none of them used statues or pictures as “an aid to worship”; none of them observed Easter; and none of them believed in enforced communism (Acts 4:34) or communal owning of property (Acts 5:4) by law. No New Testament Christian ever wasted five minutes breath talking about the “poverty stricken masses” or the “social inequalities and injustices” of “Capitalistic Imperialists.”

So when we arrive at the year 1600 and look for the “line of succession,” we see on one hand a zoo with three-headed chickens, two-headed cobras, werewolves, vultures, fire-breathing lizards, four-horned billy goats, red-eyed bears and a score of sick sheep. This remarkable menagerie has the gall to profess that it is the Lord’s flock who started the journey out in 33 A.D. (or 70 A.D.) under “The Good Shepherd” and thus still can brag about having the marks of the “one true, holy, and apostolic faith.” Nothing about them resembles any New Testament flock of sheep. They are marked like hybrid monsters. The sheep they are engaged in slaughtering (1600)6 still look like the sheep of Romans 8:36, but these slaughtered sheep do not claim to be “Catholic”: they claim to be Bible-believing Christians.

Now, we have seen that throughout church history Bible believers are always under someone’s anathema. It is the word of God that causes this trouble (Gen. 3:1-6); and whether the anathema comes from deluded Fundamentalists like Ed Hindson, Robert Sumner and Bob Jones, III, (twentieth century) or from conceited Conservatives like Schaff, Machen and Warfield (nineteenth century) or from dead orthodox apostates like Hort, Robertson, Nestle, Aland, and Metzger, etc., it is still a continuous string of accusations (and many times downright persecutions) throughout the centuries. In America in the twentieth century this assumes its mildest forms: the believer is a “nut” or a “crackpot” or he is “misinformed” or “unintelligent”7 or he is a “Ruckmanite.” In the Dark Ages it was much stronger: he was a dangerous heretic,8 a vicious rebel against God’s authority, and a dispenser of spiritual poison.9

As we have also seen, these vicious, dangerous, poisonous, crackpot “nuts” were always labeled by the infidels (or the Bible­rejecting “Christians”) so that their assemblies would appear as cults or sects (Acts 24:5 and comments in that Commentary). Among the hundreds of misnomers placed on these Bible-believing Christians were Cataphyrgians, Hussites, Paterines, Vaudois, Norrisites, Petrobrusians, Henricians, Waldenses, Bulgarians, Huguenots, Fraticelli, Lollards, Arnoldists, Ruckmanites, Darbyites, Lutherans, Berangerians, Novatians,10 Donatists, Paulicians, etc., etc. Where these Bible believers differed in minor points they never differed when the subject of Final Authority came up. For them, the Book was “it,” and where the Book spoke, the ecclesiastical authorities were to keep silent. Since their apostolic “succession” was torn to shreds by historians in the apostate

churches around them, they couldn’t prove “succession” from anything except a succession of practise.

Now, within the zoo that had the red-eyed bears (see above) are half a dozen sheep as blind as bats and two or three sick old men and women fast asleep; this modest assembly, as we mentioned before, professes (piously, dear soul!) to be the New Testament church that Jesus Christ founded (Matt. 16:16-18). They are standing knee-deep in the blood of the “heretics” just listed. It is the blood of Bible believers who refused to join “the zoo.”

The real New Testament church in 1600 appears as a large sheepfold with an assortment of sheep: some crippled, some blind, some healthy, some strong, some weak, some asleep, some bleating and some chewing their cuds. They don’t claim to have “developed” from anything. They simply claim that they are Bible-believing Christians. Their claim is far more credible than Catholic claims, even if we cannot trace any of them back seventeen centuries by some one name which was adopted to convince an observer. After all, a church has been known to “have a name” (Rev. 3:1) and be deader than a hammer on a sand dune.

So now, when we arrive at the early part of the seventeenth century (1600), we have our “bearings.” We will not be looking for a “name” like “Fundamentalist” or “Baptist” or “Premillennialist.” We will be looking for a Bible believer who tries to “go by the Book.” “Historic positions” don’t always go by the Book. In the twentieth century apostates appeal to an “historic Fundamentalist position” while they are trying to usurp the authority of the Holy Spirit11 and this overlooks a very important fact: “historic positions” are often as wrong as sin, for they are the result of a select body of clergymen meeting in private to determine for the body of Christ what they should believe. This is the Catholic method and it is put into operation by replacing the Levitical priesthood of the Old Testament (1400-400 B.C.) with a priest class of scholars or bishops (200-500 A.D.). There is no priest class in the New Testament. The “historic position,” for example, of all the “Fundamentalists” up to the time of Luther was that a man was saved by faith and works. The Fundamentalist position on prophecy from Luther to 1840 was Amillennial or Postmillennial; neither position was right. The Council of Nicaea (made up entirely of Conservatives and Fundamentalists) didn’t even discuss the three most important issues of Christianity: the Second Coming of Christ, the Gospel imperative to win souls, and the defining of Absolute Authority. The “historic position” of Nicaea (325 A.D.) was a joke. Exactly as

the modern apostate Fundamentalist wastes time arguing about “verbal inspiration” (the dual nature of Scripture: human and divine), so the ancient apostate wasted time on the “mystery of the incarnation” (the dual natures of Christ: human and divine). What did any of this amount to with men who rejected the Bible they had as the final authority and didn’t believe it was superior to their own education and critical abilities? “Historic positions” are often alibies used to overthrow the authority of God Almighty.

Since we have covered the matters pertaining to King James and Oliver Cromwell in our previous Volume, we will now attend to matters on the Continent following the death of Martin Luther as these events are related to the history of the New Testament church.

With the coming of the Reformation, believers are labeled Quakers, Protestants, Puritans, Lutherans, Presbyterians, Methodists, Moravians, Stundists, Mennonites, Amish, Dunkers, etc., exactly as they were given other labels by “Catholics,” in the preceding centuries. They are never called “Catholics,” for unregenerate Catholics (ignorant or otherwise) comprise the Bride of Satan12 and constitute (wittingly or unwittingly) the greatest political force in the world for the destruction of Biblical Christianity. Communism is little more than a social application of the mass-leveling, infallible hierarchy that Rome has taught and practiced since 325 A.D. Stalin, as Lenin, studied for the priesthood.13 And this explains why the greatest communist leader in the world today (1983) is the pope and the greatest communist revolutionaries are the Catholics of Latin America.

In a recent fiasco (June 1979) the Catholic pope accepted the adoration of the news media for his “bold crusade” for the “rights of man” and the church in Poland. (The “church” in Poland is no reference to any Bible-believing Christian. It is a reference to the Roman Catholic church.) Shortly thereafter, the Polish trade unions demonstrated the true spirit of Lenin and Marx: they revolted. Unfortunately, things had changed; the communists of Russia had become capitalistic imperialists since 1950 and they would no longer tolerate “revolt against the establishment.” So it wound up with the Polish pope leading a communist revolt against capitalistic Russia (1980). He got shot (May 1981).

All popes believe in the freedom of THEIR church14 but “hu­man rights” are limited to obeying their church.15 Readers who know church history will not easily be misled by the propaganda they find in Our Sunday Visitor. The “nihil obstat” imprimatur of the bishops is on Catholic publications which teach that the Catho-

lie church alone has the right to be free and that all states should support it with tax money. When a pope goes on a “crusade for hu­man rights and church rights” it is quite similar to Hitler (a Catho­lic) going on a crusade to “liberate oppressed minorities” in the Sudetenland or in Austria (1938). Hitler, as all popes, belonged to the Catholic church, and Hitler thought seriously of becoming a Roman Catholic priest when he was a young man.16 So did Rudolph Hess, the commandant of Auschwitz.17 Auschwitz is in Poland.

Here in the seventeenth century we observe the old cycle at work (Evangelism, Education, Culture, Apostasy). Following the work of Martin Luther, the culture comes in with Melanchthon and apostasy follows as surely as night follows day. After Calvin and Knox, the “five-point” theologians show up and apostasy follows as surely as a caboose follows an engine. The next tide of revival that sweeps over the Continent passes on to England through Wesley and Whitefield and then westward to the United States through Edwards and Tennant, etc. Following these movements come the teachers (Oxford, Cambridge, Edinburgh, Dartmouth, Princeton, Columbia, Yale, etc.), and culture and apostasy attend them as certainly as slush follows a snow storm. As stated above, every school and church in America is at one of these points, and there hasn’t been one single exception in twenty centuries of church history. The first two steps are safe (the man and the movement, or preaching and teaching) because they are scriptural (Matt. 28, Acts 13); but once a man goes beyond teaching the Bible itself, he is exposed and stands on treacherous ground. Once you suggest that any source of information is more authoritative or more instructive than the Book, you go over the hill; on the other side it is a downgrade clear to the bottomless pit. Since those who fail to learn the lessons of history are condemned to repeat them and since the only thing that men learn from history is that men never learn from history, the reader may look forward to the next twenty years (if the Lord tarries) as the high-water mark of the greatest apostasy in the history of the church. It will originate with the faculty members of schools who profess to believe in “the verbally inspired originals.”18 That is where apostasy ALWAYS originates (Gen. 3:1).

In this second volume we will trace the church through the days of evangelism and revival (the Philadelphia period) and into the Laodicean period of apostasy where the church is characterized by lukewarmness (Rev. 3:16). Believe it or not, the church that “kept God’s words” (Rev. 3:8) “develops” eventually into a church that brags about her property, income, and her size; while she is doing

this she loses her “candlestick” (Rev. 2:5, Ps. 119:105).

The word “develop” can have disturbing connotations.

CHAPTER ONE

FLASHBACK

“And I gave her space to repent of her fornication; and she repented not. Behold, I will cast her into a bed, and them that commit adultery with her into great tribulation, except they repent of their deeds. And I will kill her children with death; and all the churches shall know that I am he which searcheth the reins and hearts: and I will give unto every one of you according to your works.” (Rev. 2:21-23)

If studied for positive values, history (especially church history), as the Bible, turns out to be anti-Catholic. That is, the documented facts of church history as well as the Bible reveal that Satan has a religious body (as Christ) which constitutes his “bride” (as Christ) and could properly be called a “church” (as Christ’s Church, Eph. 5:24-29). A fixed standard for determining this is the passage in Matthew 7:16, 17 which lays down the eternal principle that you can know the nature of a thing by its fruits. What the Roman Catholic church produces in 1500 years of history is eloquent testimony as to the true nature of her ecclesiastical organization, apart from her profession. It is true that the fruit basket is sprinkled with edible items: orphanages, government handouts to the downtrodden (Care packages, Vietnamese boat people, refugees from Cuba, etc.), hospitals (built on tax money), kindly nuns and humble “monks,” etc., and occasional ministries of relief and material goods to those parties who could be potential allies in a future struggle for world domination. There is some good in everything.1 All sex perverts (Gay Lib, etc.) and maniacal killers do some good in a lifetime. Didn’t Hitler build the Autobahn?2 Didn’t Charles Manson and the Son of Sam help sell a lot of newspapers and inspire some TV documentaries? Why of course! Think of all the good the NAACP did (1954-1980) in inspiring riots and assaults that led to 10,000 hospitalized teachers and students

and $80,000,000 worth of school vandalism. Just think of all the black children that had a chance to get “social promotions” during that time so they would not have to pass their subjects!

Catholic historians operate on this principle: emphasize the positive and don’t investigate over 5,000,000 bloody murders. When Chick (Chino, California) put out a pamphlet in 1980 on the vicious nature of the Catholic hierarchy, his books were banned in scores of bookstores across America. Nobody looked up anything about Rome to see if he had been telling the truth. Our Sunday Visitor simply stated that all of his information was false and then left it to the ignorance of their readers to side with them. Ignorance of church history is the strong suit among all Catholic writers. College educated Catholics have no more grasp of church history than the most ill informed people who never finished the sixth grade, and it is this ignorance that the Catholic writers capitalize on. With over a million Saracens, Moslems, “heretics” and assorted political opponents killed, in addition to 5,000,000 Bible-believing Christians, the Catholic approach is: “Water under the dam, it’s all slander anyway.” (Some estimates of Catholic killings run as high as 50,000,000 between 325 A.D. and 1980.3)

So before wading into the stream of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, we must have a “rerun” of the route we have traveled lest we misinterpret the billboards and highway markers “up ahead.” All historians agree that history is a great teacher and all agree that if a man fails to learn her lessons he flunks the course and must repeat the semester. Since every major historian is Postmillennial4 (whether he believes in any Bible or not) and only the Existential philosophers are unsure of continual “automatic progress” in the forward and upward sense,5 we would do well to re­examine the lessons documented in Volume I of this work.

I. THE ROMAN CATHOLIC CHURCH AT ITS BEST

At its best it believes that seven or eight things extracted from the New Testament are “fundamentals of the faith” (the Virgin Birth, the Deity of Christ, the Bodily Resurrection, etc.). With this profession it is prepared to pose as the one and only true Christian church (1 Tim. 3:15) and to claim the allegiance of anyone who believes in those Bible “fundamentals.” This enables her to absorb thousands of saved sinners who have experienced the new birth but who are completely ignorant of what the scriptures say about false religious systems and false doctrines. These poor sinners imagine that the “fundamentals” are the only doctrines that a Christian

should acquaint himself with and that further study of the Bible would be dangerous.6 It is true that the hierarchy would bitterly deny this, but then when did the hierarchy ever tell the truth about ANYTHING where its own sins and blasphemy were involved? At its best the Roman Catholic church sports several million common, ordinary people, some of whom are saved, but most of whom are lost, who don’t get in anyone’s way and often help folks out because they believe that their good works can affect their own salvation.'1

II. THE ROMAN CATHOLIC CHURCH AT ITS WORST

At its worst the Catholic church displays an international system of unregenerate politicians whose totalitarian designs are aimed at overthrowing every institution and government on the face of this earth by any means, including fraud,7-5 murder,8 torture,9 exile,10, imprisonment,11 extortion,12 and armed warfare.13 This system is identical with communism and fascism, although its profession is different. The procedure adopted by this Pharisaical hierarchy to gain world dominion is as follows:

1. If unable to move, lay low and wait (America: 1600-1800).

2. If able to move at all, plead for religious tolerance (America: 1800-1900).

3. Once obtained (British Parliament, 1829; America, 1900), go to work immediately in politics (Britain and Ireland, 1960-1980): America—Al Smith, the Kennedy family, Ted Califano, etc.

4. Profess nothing but peace, love, humility and unity until enough control has been gained to lay ahold of Protestant TAX money.14

5. Get control over every mayor, governor or senator who is born or raised Catholic to use him for the private interests of the church.

6. Wait until marriages and birth control guarantee a large pressure group. Keep all births in the church by telling them not to proselyte, thereby stopping the proselyting of others. When a majority is obtained, persecute any journalist in the news media everytime he says anything to hurt the totalitarian designs of the church. Anything truthful put out over radio or TV that is harmful to the hierarchy must be called “BIGOTRY” at once.15

7. When a majority is gained, use tax money to obtain monopolies and then demonstrate for unity and ecumenicism (America: 1940-1960).

8. Once all major leaders are Roman Catholic (Germany: Hitler, Hess, Goering, Himmler, Goebbels, Heydrich, Bormann,

Palitzsch, Kramer, etc.), enforce UNITY with a police state and politicians. Slander and harass resisters (Ireland: 1960-1990), jail and fine opponents, and eventually torture and murder opponents (Mueller, Goering, Eicke, Hoess, Himmler, etc.).

Fifteen hundred years of church history teaches that the greatest religious hypocrite on this earth is a pope (any pope) and that the greatest lying religious organization on the face of this earth is the Roman Catholic church. It will lie about religious liberty.16 It will lie about final authority.17 It will lie about manuscript evidence as related to the Bible.18 It will lie about its designs, goals and aims.19 It will lie about its political alliances and confederates.20 It will lie about its own bigotry and intolerance.21 It will lie about the activities of its members.22 And, above all, it will make any compromise necessary with anyone (communist or fascist: Hitler and Mussolini both signed concordants with the pope—1933 and 1928) including atheists, Jews or Moslems in order to obtain its own purpose, which is world domination.23 One must never forget that the Catholic church has not only promoted and encouraged armed warfare24 but its monks and bishops have led troops into battle against Bible-believing Christians.25 Nazism and communism could never claim as many victims on the grounds of religious deceit and religious hypocrisy because neither of them claimed to be churches, and their leaders did not profess to represent Jesus Christ at all. King James, the monarch of England who is much hated and maligned by modern Fundamentalists, never made any such a profession of importance or power as ANY pope who ever lived.26 Alongside the popes of his day (Clement VIII, Leo XI, Paul V, and Gregory XV), James I was a saint.

The past is the monitor of the future.

Charles I of England would hire foreign troops to kill his own people.26-5 If the English were “intolerant” of him, what then? He would as soon “draw and quarter” a Bible believer27 as look at him. Why would anyone be a “bigot” if they documented a case where he did it? Mary, Queen of Scots (dear little innocent that she was!), was quoted in a TV documentary in 1979 as telling John Knox that she believed in “freedom of conscience” when it came to religion.28 Could anything be more fraudulent? Why, in 1980 here in Pensacola we have Christian educators who advertise their own church as a Baptist church when it is interdenominational, and then they threaten to ship a student who goes to “the church of his choice” if that choice doesn’t agree with the choice of the principal’s wife! Would Mary, Queen of Scots, be more charitable? Mary, Queen of

Scots, wanted to hire the bloodiest killer Spain ever produced (the Duke of Alva) to come to England to do to her English subjects what he did to the Mennonites and Calvinists in the Netherlands (see Vol. I, Chap. 17).29 What a shame she had her own pretty little head cut off when if she had lived (instead of being treated with “BIGOTRY”), the Duke of Alva could have landed on English soil with a Catholic army and decapitated 100,000 Christian “bigots.”30

Genghis Khan (who could neither read nor write) was granting religious toleration to Christians (1200) while the Catholic popes were burning them at the stake.31 You are not supposed to believe that. You are to keep your church history books closed and not check on anything; that way you will think someone is “slandering” the pope. The greatest slaughter of Protestants in Ireland that ever took place, took place as soon as James / died; it happened in 1641 under the reign of a Catholic king (Charles I).32 You are not to believe that; you are to think that that is “bigoted” reporting. Just ignore the facts of history and then believe that those who pay attention to them are “bigots.” If Bible-believing Christians in Ireland and Scotland seem to be a little irreverent for singing the following, let it be remembered that it was sung after 150,000 Christians had been murdered:33

“Up the long ladder and down the short rope: three cheers for King William and to Hell with the Pope! And if that won’t do, we’ll cut them in two, and bury them under the orange and blue!”

This crude and tactless example of anti-Catholic doggerel is really only a mild copy of the original; the “original” runs like this:

1. All Protestants in England and Ireland are to be burned at the stake34 because they must go to hell as heretics.35

2. All Protestants in England and Ireland are to be cut in two36 along with Saracens, Jews, Moslems, and Anabaptists.

3. One hundred and fifty thousand Christians had just been buried under the “green” by Catholic killers (1641).37

Catholic history is not church history.

Catholic newspaper reporters are not honest men.

Catholic historians are not Bible believers, even when they profess to be.

A typical Catholic “history” or a typical reported article in Our Sunday Visitor is usually written in the following fashion:

“At his time (1870) many prejudiced bigots accused the Jesuits of trying to take over the public school system.”

And there the matter ends. No further comments. The reader is

to assume—without one shred of documented evidence or without any discussion of any of the material that was investigated—that if anyone believed Jesuits might try to take over a public school system, he was either insane or a BIGOT. All Catholic writers count on the reader’s ignorance of church history as the determining factor in carrying him on to a fraudulent conclusion.3* When Jack Chick {Chick Publications, Chino, California, 1980) put out a cartoon pamphlet (Alberto) exposing the totalitarian designs of the Roman church throughout the centuries, the Catholic reporting on it simply listed what he said that was TRUE without any evidence to show that it wasn’t true. The reader was supposed to come to the conclusion that THE TRUTH had to be a lie because it was so shocking. No historical facts were presented for one thing in that pamphlet which dealt with murdered babies, tortured Christians, the deification of Mary, and the infiltration of Charismatics by the hierarchy’s “stooges.” Not a word. Our Sunday Visitor—knowing the mind of their readers—knew that they didn’t have to explain one attack. Their readers, in the darkened recesses of their ignorance, would assume that any anti-Catholic truth was a LIE. For ninety- five percent of the readers of Our Sunday Visitor know no more about church history than Jack Kennedy or Bing Crosby.

Another sample:

“The bigotry that prevailed in America in those days (1800) was so intense that some people actually were afraid of the Roman pope taking over the American government through Catholics in America.”39

And there all discussion ends.

You are to assume since they haven’t done it yet that no one was ever engaged in it and that the pope would no more think of it than he would think of supporting the Communist revolutionaries in Latin America with his nuns (Dec. 1980). The historian is counting on his reader to throw up his hands and cry, “Oh, goodness gracious, what a terrible thought! How could any wicked person be so prejudiced as to say that against another person’s FAITH?!” This is only possible, however, where the reader has never studied Forbush, Robinson, Armitage, Vedder, Fox, Schaff, Newman, LaGarde, Kurtz, D’Aubigne, Hefele, Harnack, Mosheim, or Sattler (see Vol. I, Chap. 13-15). The Catholic historians make a statement and then count on the pure ignorance of their constituents to generate a Roman Catholic response: i.e., a narrow-minded, bigoted, one-sided, subjective rejection of historical fact. Not once is the documented evidence ever presented which shows that every

pope since 800 A.D. and every bishop and archbishop since 800 A.D. and every priest and cardinal since 800 A.D. had to believe (under penalty of being killed as a heretic) that:

1. Every human being on earth should be a Roman Catholic.40

2. The kingdom of heaven was to be brought on earth by sprinkling babies into the Roman Catholic system.41

3. Anyone opposing this process was to be whipped or beheaded or imprisoned or exiled or, in many cases, hung or burned at the stake.42

4. All political states owed allegiance to one church: the Catholic church.

Furthermore, since 1564, every one of these same priests (in the USA as well as in Italy and Spain) and every one of these cardinals and bishops (in the USA as well as in Mexico and Argentina) and every one of these popes believed and taught—under penalty of anathema—that every nation, land and government in the world was the possession of the Catholic church, so any means for obtaining control over that land or government was lawful means, even if it included false oaths,43 breaking treaties,44 inciting revolutions,45 or stealing tax money for religious purposes.46

The only people who are unaware of these Catholic “religious” convictions are people who won’t study church history. Therefore, church history is not found as a course in the grade school or junior high school curriculums in America. During the formative years no American (atheist, agnostic, Christian or otherwise) is allowed to learn the lessons of HISTORY where it is the religious history of the past. He is cut off from history’s lessons and led to believe that the contemporary political or religious situation in every country during his time has no religious roots in the past and no present religious connections; and, therefore, it is impossible to pass judgment on it without appearing prejudicial. This means, in effect, that ninety-five percent of the population of America cannot learn anything from history, for the controlling factor in Western political history from 325 A.D. to 1983 A.D has been the Roman Catholic church. Ignorance, therefore, of the ideals, operations, intrigues, wars, persecutions, aims and blasphemies of that unholy organization disqualifies any individual from being able to make a sound value judgment on future history.

Every generation in America from 1860 on is isolated from the truth by a “free press” which doesn’t dare print any historical information on the Catholic church. “Freedom of speech and of the press” does not guarantee that anyone will obtain enough truth to

learn the lessons of history. This will eventually mean that when the Catholic church joins the international Soviet (Rev. 12, 13, 17, 18), people will think “two opposites” have been reconciled: “Peace on earth, good will, etc.”

The briefest survey of the Catholic past is more enlightening than 200,000 volumes of nonsense taught in the public school system and propagated on TV and radio.

The Hapsburgs (the royal house in Austria) from the start were allied to the Jesuits.47 The Hollenzolerns (the royal house in Germany) were the ones who dumped Bismark because he was “anti-Catholic.”48 They promptly set up Catholic alliances (the Triple Entente) against Russia (Greek Orthodox) and quickly brought on World War I.49 The Bourbons (the royal house of France) were in alliance with the Jesuits and Rome throughout the entire history of their family, and Napoleon made a concordant with the Roman pope exactly as Mussolini and Hitler.50 Ignorance of those FACTS renders a newspaper reporter or a newscaster (or a senator or president) absolutely incapable of sound political comment in the twentieth century if the comment deals with national or international politics. The national and international realm of politics and diplomacy is so intertwined with Roman Catholic political imperialism51 that ignorance of the nature and goals of that imperialism is more deadly to civilization and progress than any other two factors combined. The Catholic plan for America is the Catholic plan for Germany, Russia and Ireland, and it is the Catholic plan for Spain, Italy and England as well as China, Japan, and France.51-5 The “emergency measures” passed under the brief tenure of Jack Kennedy52 give the outline of this plan as clearly as Hitler or Stalin ever carried it out: absolute control by a Roman dictator with seizure of goods, land, property and family and uncontrolled federal power to remove populaces, to arrest and imprison individuals and to compel citizens into forced labor. All dictators in the Western world are Roman Catholics (Charlemagne, Napoleon, Pope Boniface, Hitler, Castro, Trujillo, Allende, Batiste, Franco, Mussolini, etc.).

A flashback then (600-1600 A.D.) reveals a monstrous hybrid plant (Matt. 13:32) which nests demons with sheep (Dan. 4:12); it is destined to corrupt Christendom in all three of its major branches (Roman Catholic, Protestant and Greek Orthodox). It does this by false doctrine (Matt. 13:35) and by exchanging favors with world rulers (Rev. 17:1-5). Therefore, any Christian who is NOT anti- Catholic turns out to be the real bigot for he is prejudicially decided

in favor of a non-Christian, anti-Biblical, malevolent and Satanic force without examining the evidence. A flashback into church history (see Vol. I, Chap. 16, 17) shows that what the Catholic church calls “bigotry” and “prejudice” is usually cool, hard, objective fact; and what the Catholic church calls “heresy” is usually Biblical Christianity.

It follows then that any man who tolerates or joins the Roman system in the twentieth century is guilty, wittingly or unwittingly, of the very grossest crimes against humanity and “civil rights.” Catholic rulers have never been known to have practised a policy of equal rights or civil rights since the term “Catholic” was coined at Nicaea. Constantine killed Christians.53 Charlemagne killed Christians.54 The popes killed Christians.55 The Catholic rulers of England killed them56 and the Catholic rulers of France killed them.57 The Catholic rulers of Spain killed them58 and the Catholic rulers of Germany killed them.59 The Catholic rulers of Columbia killed them60 and the only reason the Catholic rulers in America (USA) have not been able to kill them yet is because they have not yet obtained enough political power and authority to do it. When they obtain this power and authority they will be obligatedto do it.61

A “rerun of oldies” has nothing to do with things like Cromwell (1649) using an English army against an Irish army after the Irish Catholics had murdered 150,000 civilians. We are not speaking in those terms. We are not talking about the “intolerance” of the British in dealing with a church that believes she should rule England.62 We are dealing with 5,000,000 to 10,000,000 bloody murders (some estimates run as high as 50,000,000) done “in the name of Jesus” or “for the glory of God” or for “holy Mother Mary,” etc.63 The “Mary” who Simon DeMontfort invoked64 before killing 5000 Bible-believing Christians (i.e., “anti-Catholics”) is the one to whom Pope John XXIII (1950, 1959) prayed and said, “Do not forget O Mother, Oh Queen of all LANDS and seas...”65 and “Mary is the SALVATION of the people of Rome.”66 Statues of Mary were just as holy to Pope John in 1964 as they were to Bloody Mary in 1555. (Since Mary is “queen of all lands” [see above], then obviously MARYland must contain the capital of the United States.)

In view of the foregoing (see Volume I), we may draw some sane and necessary conclusions in regards to the proper attitude of the Christian towards Roman Catholicism.

1. Any congressman who is NOT afraid of the political intrigues of the Vatican in dealing with Russia, Cuba, and Africa

(1981) is either willfully ignorant or mentally incompetent.

2. Any news media reporter (newspaper, magazine, TV or radio) who thinks the Jesuits are not in the USA to engineer the overthrowing of the Constitution (eventually) is an unreasonable man with a blind religious bias.

3. Any historian who thinks that the Catholic church is the “one true church that Jesus Christ founded” has been brainwashed through Satanic agents and agencies into an anti-Biblical position that defies the word of God and blasphemes the truth of God.

4. Any man who thinks that such remarks as those above are the remarks of a bigot or a “hate monger” needs psychotherapy. No Bible believer (200-1980) ever hated ANY Catholic enough to imprison him, torture him, kill him or exile him for his religious convictions or for his writings or speeches, regardless of how blasphemous they were.67 imprisoning, torturing, killing, and exiling in the religious realm are the exclusive properties of a STATE CHURCH religion patterned after Rome, or they are Rome itself. There isn’t a case in the history of the church (100-1990) where any Bible-believing Cathari (over 8,000,000 of them) or a Bible-believing Waldensen or Albigensen (over 1,000,000 of them) or a Lollard (over 1,000,000 of them) or a Baptist (over 20,000,000 of them) ever made any attempt to kill or torture or imprison ANYONE for their faith or for anything they wrote about their faith.

The real BIGOT is easy to spot: he will murder the people he disagrees with.™

Kidnapping is not verboten either with such people.69

At the close of the English and German Reformations, the people in England and Germany had learned something about the Roman Catholic church that no senator or congressman in America knows today; they had learned by experience that once a Catholic gets a foothold in any government or school, on any board of commissioners, in any chaplaincy or industry, he is obligated, by virtue of his upbringing and religious connections, to drag in after him the political hierarchy of his church.70 No Catholic is really a “good Catholic,” by Catholicism’s own double standards,71 who does not put the political and ecclesiastical ambitions of his church (i.e., “teachings, instructions, wishes, etc.”) ahead of local, state and national governments as they have been set up by ANY treaty or ANY constitution.72 Fortunately, there are still thousands of “sorry Catholics” in America who don’t follow the instructions and orders of their church. Many of them are so “heretical” that they actually

find Christ and experience salvation in spite of the teachings of the hierarchy.73 In Northern Florida there are so many of these “former” Catholics that the hierarchy under Bishop Gracida has to publish full-page ads in the Gannett newspapers (Nov.-Dec. 1980) trying to convince the populace that no Catholic can be a “former” Catholic even if he becomes a Bible believer and leaves the Catholic church and joins a Baptist church! Such are the ways of “Holy” Mother Church.

And now we shall draw aside the curtains of the Philadelphia church period again (1500-1900), rooted and grounded in past historical truth and thoroughly settled in sound doctrine (2 Tim. 3:10; 4:2, 3), which will enable us to spot any future religious hypocrites who mouth about “Christianity, Mary, and Jesus” while engineering the murder of whole populations. All fakirs and conmen in the next few centuries (sixteenth-twentieth centuries) will carry the earmarks of their forebearers. We know what these earmarks are; they are clearer than a watermarked stamp:

1. Origen’s philosophy of “Christians” conquering the earth through religious education or evolutionary processes that will “bring in the kingdom.”74

2. Cyprian’s blasphemous teaching that a hooded priest is “another Christ” and that salvation can only come through a bishop or his subordinates.75

3. Augustine’s teaching that the new birth is accomplished by sprinkling water on babies76 and that people who don’t believe this are to be persecuted.

4. The old Alexandrian Cult pitch of two or more conflicting authorities erected so that the “pitch man” can play God and be the deciding authority himself.

5. The confounding of the Kingdom of Heaven (literal and economic) with the Kingdom of God (spiritual and moral) so that armed force and politics may receive religious sanction as a means to “bring in a better way of life,” “make the world a better place to live in,” “end man’s inhumanity to man,” etc. (see The Sure Word of Prophecy, 1970).

6. Above all, any profession to emphasize “THE PEOPLE,” as Charlemagne did before he murdered, displaced and exiled several thousand Saxons77 who didn’t believe in sprinkling babies.78 “THE PEOPLE” (see the Bible Believer’s Commentary on Acts, Acts 21:28), apart from what the Bible says about people, will be the real brand that marks the Bible-rejecting religious hypocrites in the next few centuries (Rousseau, Voltaire, Marx, Engels, Lenin,

Castro, Stalin, Lincoln, etc.), for “THE PEOPLE” (Greek: laos) is the term which the Holy Ghost has used in Revelation 3:15 to brand the Laodicean church. The last apostate church—the lukewarm church of nauseous reputation (Rev. 3:16)—means “THE PEOPLE’S RIGHTS,” or, in the modern vernacular, “CIVIL RIGHTS”—the rights of the civilian populace. “Vox Pop” marks the germination of the apostate twentieth century church whose real religion will be HUMANISM: humanism of a Roman-Russian brand—Vatican communism (Rev. 13:1-3).

To be truly objective and neutral we must take the Bible’s anti­Catholic view of history, which is church history’s view of history. No objective observations can be made within the pale of Roman Catholicism where they deal with historical truth. Historical objectivity is one thing that is completely lacking in ANY publication by Roman Catholics when dealing with historical FACTS, and they have never produced one unbiased, unprejudiced thinker in the history of their existence where that thinker had to deal with the Scriptures. Not even the greatest apostate philosophers whom the Jesuits trained (Weiskopf, Leibnitz, Hume and Descarte) were objective in dealing with the Bible. Not even Erasmus or Luther escaped the deadly heresy of baby sprinkling which culminated in two church-state religions. To be truly objective and impartial we must take God’s view of the Roman church (Rev. 17), which is anything but “neutral,” and we must trust that the third person of the Godhead has a much better “objective view” of the truth (John 16:13) than a hierarchy of monks, priests, bishops, popes and cardinals who cursed Jesus Christ79 for altering the canon of their Old Testament.

“Popish persons” (AV Dedicatory) are not to be confined to the confirmed members of the Catholic church. “Popish persons” follow the six points we have just outlined. The AV translators knew a great deal more about these people than any Bible revision committee of the nineteenth and twentieth century. They knew that the right wing of Protestantism (the Calvinistic Puritans) still retained one trait of popish persons: they would burn people at the stake (Salem witchcraft trials, 1692) if they disagreed with them doctrinally.80

Luther said, “I do not want to struggle for the Gospel by violence and murder.”81 Those who called Luther a heretic were of quite another set of convictions. The Archbishop of Cologne rode into battle against Christians with the Duke of Alva; Pope Sixtus V volunteered to send a papal army into France to help Spaniards kill

Bible believers.82 The Abbot of Citeaux commanded a “crusaders” army at Beziers to kill 3000 Bible believers.83 The armed troops who murdered Christians in France (1200-1230) were headed up by “preaching”(!) friars.84

Avro Manhattan has done a great service to students of future church history by giving us his highly objective and impartially documented account of Fidel Castro’s operations. Manhattan published Castro’s remarks which no newspaper in America would dare publish. Castro says that the Roman Catholic priests in Latin America (not Soviets in Russia) are the armed revolutionaries of the late twentieth century.85 The Catholic priests and nuns will be for “THE PEOPLE”86 and the pope will not worry about scores of them being executed by local governments in South America, as long as his church controls the government. The trick the holy papa has to perform—which all “holy” papas have had to perform—is how to “stay in good” with both sides. This is done by claiming political asylum as a RELIGION instead of a political force.

Those who refuse to learn the lessons of history are condemned to repeat them.

CHAPTER TWO

THE KRAUTS COME THROUGH

“Now I beseech you, brethren, mark them which, cause divisions and offences contrary to the doctrine which ye have learned; and avoid them. For they that are such serve not our Lord Jesus Christ, but their own belly; and by good words and fair speeches deceive the hearts of the simple.” (Rom. 16:17-18)

In tracing the evangelistic movements of the Holy Spirit from the completion of the New Testament to the times of Martin Luther and John Knox, we have observed a northwestern intent that skirts Rome to the west and takes root in North Ireland and Iona;1 the same movement then skirts Rome to the east and rolls through the Balkans taking roots in Southeast Germany, Northern Italy and Northern Austria. It is obvious from a subsequent study of this spiritual movement that it eventually arrives on the Atlantic seaboard of North America and erupts into a series of movements called “The Great Awakening” (1720-1750).

Now, there is no way that any honest historian can trace this transatlantic movement without stumbling across the ministries of John Wesley and George Whitefield. Wesley and Whitefield were Englishmen who believed and used a King James 1611 Authorized Version2 so there is certainly no “apostolic succession” between any Catholic church in Europe (or any Catholic in Europe) and the two English revivalists. Certainly there is no connection between either of them and the church-states of England or Germany: neither were Lutherans and both of them were opposed by the Anglican church of their own country.3 In tracing the history of the New Testament churches, we must look for some other source than Anglicanism or Lutheranism to find any connection between the Continental Reformation and the ministries of Wesley and Whitefield. The connections, fortunately, are as clear as the Tarpon Springs in Florida. Wesley was converted under the ministry of Moravian Pietists who emphasized the grace doctrines as originally taught by

Luther.4 This means that the immediate successors of Martin Luther (who should have been his spiritual heirs) turned back from the “promised land” (Num. 13, 14) and refused to go a step further.5 God had to look elsewhere than to the education, culture and refinements of Melanchthon6 to continue with the propagation of Biblical truths. Culture and apostasy had followed the Lutheran church (1600-1700) with only individual pastors and evangelists surviving the onslaught of theological bull sessions7 which brought about, eventually, the rationalism of German “higher criticism” (1800-1900).

No one in France, Spain or Italy was associated with the revivals which swept England, under Wesley (1740-1790), or North America, under Whitefield, Tennant and Frelinghuysen (1720- 1750). The only connection that one can find between the revival under Luther and the next revival in England is the reading of Luther’s Preface to the Book of Romans to John Wesley at the Aldersgate Mission (May 24, 1738) and the “Holy Club” that Whitefield joined while attending Oxford.8 Wesley was introduced to Biblical Christianity (not Anglican baby sprinkling) by Peter Boehler and Spangenberg, two German Moravians who followed the line of Bible-believing Lutherans, as they departed from the established Lutheran church, after the death of Melanchthon. Therefore, if there is such a thing as “apostolic succession” in a spiritual sense, it is certain that it begins in Syria (Antioch, Acts 11, 13, 16) and moves up through the Balkans (Bulgaria, Yugoslavia and Rumania) into the hotspot of Europe (Southeast Germany), and from Germany to the United States via England. Rome and Roman Catholicism never enter the line of spiritual succession ONE time, as positive or Biblical forces. One may say, without batting an eye, that of around 40,000,000 people saved in England and America since 1611, not fifteen of them owe any debt to any pope, cardinal, bishop, priest, monk, nun or archbishop for their salvation. If the Roman church could have prevented their conversion it certainly would have prevented it.9

So it is the “Krautheads” who “bring home the bacon” as the expression goes. This august company are called Pietists, and from them come the Moravians, who are attended by Mennonites, Amish, Dunkers and Stundists. No people in the world are more dependent upon their leadership than the German people.10 One good leader like Martin Luther, a PROTESTANT, was able to turn three countries to God (Germany, England and the United States) through his influence. In like manner, though in reverse gear, one bad leader like Adolph Hitler (a ROMAN CATHOLIC) was able to

16 THE HISTOR Y OF THE NEW TESTAMENT CHURCH destroy 5,000,000 of his own people and about three times that many out of fifteen other countries.

Pietism was a spiritual reaction against the dead orthodoxy of the state church (the Lutheran church) in Germany. The convictions of the Pietists were simple: one, the Bible is the word of God" and there is no other authority close to it when it comes to faith, belief, or conduct. Two, Christians should win sinners to a saving faith in Jesus Christ. Three, a man is saved by grace through faith in the finished work of Christ apart from sacraments, ordinances, or works. Four, Christ is coming back to set up the Millennium and no kingdom will come until He returns. None of the Pietists believed that sprinkling affected any sinner one way or another and none of them believed that prayers to Joseph or Mary would get higher than the ceiling.12 All of them rejected the Roman mass, purgatory, prayers for the dead, state churches, and an ordained “priesthood.” In short, the Pietists were “Hussites” or “Waldenses” of the most dangerous sort13 and would have been called “Ruckmanites” or “Norrisites” by the “powers that be” if they had lived in America in the twentieth century. Their spiritual forefathers (the followers of Luther) had once believed these things; but with the eventual cycle of the ages (evangelism, education, culture and apostasy), Christian worship in Germany had assumed a formalistic and sacramental character that even a Catholic could tolerate. By 1700 the Lutheran church in Germany was only a step or two removed from its adul­teress mother, the Roman Church.13;5 The Thirty Years War (1618- 1648) had wearied the nation in regards to religious controversy and as the state church in the north (Lutheran) gradually slipped back into harness with the state church of Austria (and later Bavaria), genuine Bible believers were again faced with a cold, dead ritualism, formal speeches instead of preaching, theological arguments instead of Bible exposition, and the eternal, infernal sprinkling of babies as a replacement for “repentance toward God, and faith toward our Lord Jesus Christ” (Acts 20:21).

The Pietists and Moravians, as well as the Mennonites and Dunkers, believed that conversion was a matter of an individual placing his faith actively in the finished work of Jesus Christ; this operation had to be by someone who was old enough to know what they were doing when they did it. This inspired them to extensive evangelism, and so long before William Carey began his missionary work in India—decades before the British Foreign Missionary Society was established (1804) and centuries before the “World Council” was formed to “help the missionaries”—the Pietists were doing missionary work in Greenland, North America, Asia and the

West Indies.14 The Pietist movement with the Moravians could only develop into a worldwide missionary movement. And even before Spener and Francke began their work in Halle, another German (an Austrian) had called for the organization of a missionary society and had pointed out the missionary obligations of the church. This man was Baron Justinian Von Weitz (1621-1688). Failing in his attempts to arouse the dead orthodox Lutherans of his day, Von Weitz volunteered himself for the mission field and died on the field in Dutch Guiana in 1688. [The cultured theologians who followed Melanchthon’s slick type of Christianity (Vol. I, Chap. 15, notes 67- 70) called Von Weitz a fanatic, a heretic, a hypocrite and a blasphemer.15 They claimed that the Gospel was the “pearls” of Matthew 7:6 while the “dogs” and “swine” were unsaved Africans, Americans and Asiatics: typical Roman Catholic exegesis.16] But even before Baron Von Weitz volunteered for Dutch Guiana, another Krauthead (Peter Heyling) had gone to Egypt and Abyssinia (1660) to preach, and he had died a martyr’s death in Africa.17

The leaders of the Pietistic movement were Philip Jacob Spener (1635-1705) and August Hermann Francke (1663-1727). The leaders of the Moravian Brethren were Count Zinzendorf (1700-1760) and August Spangenberg (1704-1792). As in the case of Wesley and Luther, neither Spener nor Francke intended at the start to separate from the Lutheran church, although Spener was accused of turning away from the Lutheran faith.18 Zinzendorf was banished from Saxony by the state authorities (1736). [They learned what John R. Rice and R.G. Lee learned at a later date (1930- 1970).19 An apostate school or church is never “reformed” by anyone. A Christian who desires to stay in fellowship with the Lord must leave them. When the income of a school or church is dependent upon teachers or members who think they are smart enough to correct the Bible, that school or church can travel in only one direction: straight to the pit.]

Francke set up the first Christian university in Germany which was later the pattern for Bob Jones, Sr. (Bob Jones University), Hyles-Anderson, Falwell’s school in Lynchburg, and the entire day school movement in America (1930-1980), represented mainly by Horton’s school in Pensacola and other groups. Francke also founded an orphanage (as George Mueller, see p. 73) and raised his orphans to be Bible-believing missionaries and evangelists. The orphanage and school (grade school through university) was located in Halle, Germany, near Leipzig; from this school came forth a Biblical influence that affected nearly every educated

philosopher in the next 200 years. Science and philosophy, it must never be forgotten (Col. 2:8, 1 Tim. 6:20), are the two greatest enemies of Biblical Christianity to be found in the realm of education.19-5 What men called “scientific theories” and philosophical systems in the next 200 years were really only reactions against the preached or written words of Bible-believing Christians. As is the case today, the educated class of sinners (as a class) are unaware of their own vicious, unscientific prejudices against the Book (Eph. 4:18) which are deeply ingrained, sub­conscious, continual (Isa. 29:11) and absolutely IRRATION­AL.20 They are often brought to the boiling point by only a dozen words spoken from a witness for Christ. There are sur­geons and physicists in America in 1984 whose life courses of study were largely determined by nothing more than a desire to get rid of an unpleasant feeling they had when they were told (usually as a teenager) that they were going to hell. The Bohemian Brethren and the Moravian Brethren were trained by the graduates of Francke’s school in Halle, and their influence was a grass roots, underground current type of thing which irritated the intelligentsia of Europe to > the point of mental distraction.21

Philip Jacob Spener was born in Rappeltweiler in upper Alsace, and he was educated at Strassburg. He was strongly influenced during his years at Basel and Geneva by the Puritan writers of England (notably Richard Baxter) and the Dutch Pietists who inclined to the Baptistic teachings of Menno Simon.22 In 1670 Spener began holding private prayer meetings and Bible studies in his home at Frankfort, where he had pastored since 1666. The result of these meetings was a national revival among German Christians in regards to separation, soul winning, preaching and the emphasis on the new birth.23 Naturally Spener was accused of “heresy”24 and was harassed by the police. The people who had assembled at these meetings reached others personally, and by word of mouth the movement spread until there were “Pietists” all over Frankfort and even in the University of Leipzig. Immediately the faculty members at Leipzig and Wittenberg got all shook up—nearly as badly as the faculty members of Tennessee Temple and Bob Jones in the 1970’s!—and raised up opposition against Spener from the Elector of Saxony. August Francke was also “in Dutch” with the faculty members at Leipzig25 and they hindered his work, bitterly opposing his teaching their students that the new birth was necessary to be a Christian. The “Fundamentalists” at the university (exactly like Custer, Faulkner, Hindson, and Wisdom) claimed that Francke’s

Pietism was not only causing students to neglect their studies (destructive criticism of the Bible) but that it was also causing them to assume a “critical attitude” (towards destructive criticism: you have to read between the lines).26

About this time (1694) the Elector of Brandenburg decided to have a university of his own, so he commissioned a certain Christian Thomasius (1655-1728) to set one up in Halle. Thomasius had also been driven from Leipzig by the Lutheran theologians on the faculty; and although he was no Pietist, still he sympathized with Spener and Francke in opposing all forms of torture for any reason, in advocating religious toleration, and in being in favor of substituting German for Latin as the official language in the German universities.27 Francke came to this university at Halle, eventually, and set up an orphanage which trained over 2000 children (by 1727) while he himself was teaching at Halle. The school promptly turned out 6000 Pietists, all of them trained pastors and evangelists. Following this, the Moravians (trained at the same school) produced another 3000 missionaries in the next 200 years. In addition to this, Francke established a Bible institute, with the help of Karl Hildebrand Von Canstein (1667-1719), which continued into the twentieth century, publishing and circulating the scriptures in tract form.28 Colonial Lutheranism in America was evangelized by the pastors and teachers who came from Halle, Germany.

The first really Protestant mission that we know of came from Halle University. It was called the Danish-Halle Mission and was established in 1705 when Dr. Franz Lutkens, the court chaplain at Copenhagen, sent to Francke and Spener for missionaries to go to the East Indies. The two missionaries who volunteered were Bar­tholomew Ziegenbalg (1683-1719) and Heinrich Plutschau (1678- 1747). 29 Since most of the Lutheran churches would have nothing to do with their support, the students and faculty at Halle had to “tote the load.” The faculty members of Wittenberg (where Luther had nailed his original thesis) called Plutschau and Ziegenbalg “false prophets.”30 (Such are the ways of twentieth century apostate Fundamentalists who sit around in faculty lounges discussing the “erroneous translations” and “better readings” of the “original, verbally inspired text.”) From Halle also came Christian Friederich Schwartz (1726-1798), who labored forty-eight years in India. Ziegenbalg left a complete translation of the entire Bible in Tamil (Indian language) and led over 350 native Moslems and

Hindus to Christ.31 Obviously Schwartz, Plutschau and Ziegenbalg were not Irishmen or Englishmen.

Pietism not only affected the attitude of German Christians toward missions but also towards the pastorate, and men such as Theodore Untereyck (1653-1693) and Joachim Neander (1650- 1680) beefed up the dead services being held in Lutheran churches and cathedrals and began to preach the pure word of God to their congregations in plain language that they could understand. Gottfried Arnold (1666-1714), another Pietist, introduced a novel idea into church history by showing that not only were the great host of “heretics” found in church history wrongly named, but that as a whole they had a firmer grasp on Biblical truth than the orthodox establishment who was always talking about “historic positions.” The real heretics were the dead orthodox apostates who branded Bible believers as heretics.32

Count Nicolaus Ludwig Von Zinzendorf was born in Dresden in 1700. As Luther, he studied to be a lawyer, but the impact of the teaching he received at Halle, under Francke, prevented him from entering the profession wholeheartedly. When the German speaking Bohemians and Moravians began to seek refuge in Saxony (1722), Zinzendorf allowed them to build a village on his estate, which subsequently was named “ Hernnhut” (“The Lord’s Watch”). The birth of the Moravian church is generally given around this date (August 13, 1727); however, the church actually went way back to 1467 to a group which called themselves the “Unitas Fratrum” of Bohemia. After founding Hernnhut, an executive committee of four, developed from the elders and a general eldership, was formed with a certain Leonhard Dober (1706-1766), under Count Zinzen­dorf. Within twenty years of the commencement of their missionary work, the Moravian Brethren had started more missions than the Anglicans and Lutherans had started during a 200 year period.33 Dober and Nitzschmann (1696-1772) went as missionaries to the West Indies. Christian David (1690-1751) went to Greenland. In 1735 a large party under August Gottlieb Spangenberg (1704-1792) went to Georgia. It was on a trip to Georgia that John Wesley was confronted by Spangenberg with the embarrassing question of questions: “Do you know Jesus Christ?”34 Two more Moravians encountered John Wesley before he brought revival to England; both of them were Germans: Peter Boehler and Count Zinzendorf himself.35

On went the Krautheads! David Zeisberger (1721-1808) preached among the Creek Indians in Georgia and later (1743) went

to the Iroquois. A Moravian mission was established in Labrador; it was followed by missions in Surinam (1735), the Gold Coast, South Africa (1737), Jamaica (1754), and Antigua (1756). The German people being “provoked to good works” set up five missionary societies to keep up with things.36

As might be expected, the Moravians were ridiculed by the cultured Christians of their day,37 mainly because their first two missionaries to Greenland were grave diggers and the first two missionaries to the West Indies were a potter and a carpenter. Moravians lived and died in the foreign land of their adoption and put into practice the motto of their headmaster Zinzendorf who said, “I have but one mission, it is HE, HE only.” Their coat of arms was an ox standing by an altar with a plow lying beside the altar. The German inscription on it said, “READY FOR EITHER.” That is, they would let God hitch them up and work them in His fields or they would lay down their lives on the altar as a burnt offering for His glory. They were no more concerned with “historic Fundamentalist positions” or “verbally inspired originals” than with gnats. Several of the Moravians actually sold themselves into slavery so that they might better reach the African slaves who came into Puerto Rico and Jamaica. It was Moravians from Savannah, Georgia, who set up the evangelical base for the German settlers in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, in 1741.38 They went into Little Tibet and they set up a leper hospital in Jerusalem. Zeisberger preached to Indians in New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Michigan and prepared several translations of Martin Luther’s German Bible in Indian dialects.39 Johannes Megaolenses worked among the Mohawks in America.40

Now this is what the New Testament church was doing in Germany and around the world while the state churches of Europe (Anglican, Catholic, Reformed and Lutheran) were piddling around with the senile theories of Hume, Eichhorn, Leibnitz, Christian Wolff, Lessing, Mill, Bengel, Wetstein, Astruc, Semler, Ernesti, Kant, Rousseau, Descartes and Spinoza. Could anything have been more pitiful? The powerful influence of these Pietists and Moravians rumbles and roars along beneath the sanctimonious babblings of the seventeenth and eighteenth century philosophers like an underground cataract from the water of life. Every evangelistic group in England or the USA in the next few years was affected by them or by one of their converts, and every liberal, Bible­denying philosopher contemporaneous with them was affected by their work or their teaching. Kant came from a Pietist

background,41 as did the great Bible-rejecting Socialist Friedrich Schleiermacher;*2 and one of the worst liberals Germany ever produced (Albrecht Ritschl)studied at Halle after it passed from the education stage into the culture stage (1840).43

There can be no doubt, then, about “line of apostolic succession” from the German Reformation of Martin Luther(1500- 1560) to the Evangelical Awakenings of Great Britain (1740-1780) and the United States (1720-1750). They have nothing to do with “recognized scholars” or “accredited institutions” and they have absolutely nothing to do with “qualified authorities” whose “orthodoxy” was “unquestionable.” No major philosopher, Bible reviser or theologian was connected with the work of the Holy Spirit from 1600 to 1800. No Greek or Hebrew Bible professor shared in any part of the movement. It was a grass roots movement that was branded as “heresy” by Conservative professors and Funda­mentalist scholars.

On May 24, 1738, while attending an informal prayer meeting at Aldersgate Street in London, John Wesley was born again. It happened while he was listening to the reading of a famous work by a famous “heretic.” It was a Biblical work. It was written by one of the greatest hell-raising, church-splitting, trouble-making fanatics who ever used “foul and abusive language” when dealing with “recognized authorities who were good, godly, dedicated men.” It was written by Martin Luther. It was Luther’s Preface to the Book of Romans, which was being read by a German Moravian. Moravians, according to the pro-Catholic historian Latourette, included the remnant of the original WALDENSESIP* The Waldenses were the bunch who had given Rome such a shellacking 400 years before the Reformation got underway. Biblical and practical Christianity had now (1788) suddenly reappeared outside of the Lutheran state church and was moving across the channel from Wittenberg, Halle, Leipzig, Stuttgart, Berlin, and Heidelberg to London, Oxford, Cambridge and Bristol. The Holy Spirit moves East to West.

CHAPTER THREE

WESTWARD HO!

“But ye shall receive power, after that the Holy Ghost is come upon you: and ye shall be witnesses unto me both in Jerusalem, and in all Judaea, and in Samaria, and unto the uttermost part of the earth.” (Acts 1:8)

The life histories of Whitefield and Wesley—both of them left autobiographical accounts of their lives in “journals”—sound and read like the Acts of the Apostles. With the exception of the Jewish signs given to the Jews (because the “Jews require a sign,” 1 Cor. 1:22),1 the ministries of Whitefield and Wesley come as close to matching the work of the Apostle Paul as it is possible to come without the imprisonments. Both men were stoned; both men were attacked with whips and clubs; both men caused riots where they preached; both men preached “repentance toward God, and faith toward our Lord Jesus Christ” (Acts 10:21 and comments in The Bible Believer's Commentary on Acts, 1978); and both men were so completely sold out to the preaching of the gospel that one often preached until his throat bled and the other averaged twenty sermons a week for over fifty years.2 Both men were street preachers and field preachers; one was an Arminian (Vol. I, Chap. 18) and the other was a moderate Calvinist.

Bodily manifestations rarely accompanied Whitefield’s preaching, although it was more eloquent and emotional than Wesley’s.3 George Whitefield { 1714-1770) was stoned till bloody all over and nearly unconscious when he preached the gospel to a mob of Papists in Dublin in 1757. Wesley (1703-1791) was burned in effigy at Cork.4 Sometimes Wesley preached for over two hours and then he was mobbed or stoned. He traveled more than 45,000 miles a year on horseback and preached more than 20,000 sermons to crowds of up to 18,000 people; sometimes he began his day’s work before five in the morning.5

George Whitefield was accused by an Anglican bishop of

driving fifteen people mad.6 Wesley’s “dearly beloved” not only stole his private mail and forged his signature on papers but she also dragged him around the house by his hair. On several occasions she stood up during his sermonizing and hollered that he was a hypocrite and that she had seen him “drunk last night.”7 When she finally deserted him, Wesley said simply: “I did not dismiss her and I do not recall her.”

The Anglican church refused to give communion to Wesley’s converts, but the impact of his ministry was so great that by the time of his death in 1791 he had 77,000 “Methodists” to give his own communion to.8 Among other things, John Wesley gave the impetus to the Sunday school movement, which became the greatest promotional and attendance checking branch of Fundamentalism between 1930 and 1980. (Robert Raikes [1783], a Methodist, had opened a Sunday school class several years before the organized movement came.’) A Methodist revival broke out in 1776 after John Wesley had left the States to return to England, and a convert of Wesley’s (Nathaniel Gilbert) formed a Methodist Society in the West Indies which developed into a strong missionary field under Thomas Coke and George Liele.10 Wesley’s parish was truly “the world.”11

Nearly all of the historians agree that John Wesley was a great preacher and that he was the prime instrument in turning the English nation from a bloody revolution similar to the terrible catastrophe that befell Catholic France (1789-1790). But having noted this, the writers all contract “typewriter paralysis” (or “typewriter elbow” or whatever) and fail to notice HOW John accomplished this. A terrible blindness suddenly descends on the church historians and secular historians and they cannot get the pieces together that they have to deal with. You may as well face it: John Wesley saved England from a revolution by street preaching from a King James 1611 Authorized Version that was, by his time, nearly one hundred and twenty years “out-of-date. ”

This is something for the modern apostate Fundamentalist to consider, for his alibi (Custer, Dobson, Hindson, Carson, Sumner, Price, Martin, Afman, Bob Jones, III, etc.) for tolerating such depraved trash as the ASV (1901) and the New ASV (1960) and the New International Version (1979) is that the AV is so “out-of-date” that there is a pressing need (oh don’t you know, children!) to “update the archaic expressions” so that the “word of God might stand forth in the language of today and no longer be veiled behind the blah, blah, blah.” But the prudent should “prove all things” (1 Thess. 5:21) and “looketh well to his going” (Prov. 14:15). Between 1960-1980 such rascals (and men like them) claimed that the “King’s

English” was still getting out of date once every five years, after claiming that it had been updated a dozen times in the last twenty years. You see, every nineteenth and twentieth century translation of the Bible claimed that the Bible translator just before his work (sometimes it was published only four years before his work) had not yet “updated the archaic language of 1611.” Rotherham (1878) said it needed to be done so he did it. Fenton showed up, however, in 1895 and said that it hadn’t really been done so he must do it. Fenton’s “updating” had not been on the market four years when the twentieth century translation came out claiming that neither Rotherham nor Fenton had yet “updated the archaic King James.” Not to be stymied by three liars, the AS VCommittee did it again in 1901 and then Weymouth did it again two years later (1903), as the English had evidently gotten archaic in three years! Then the American Translation Committee got together in 1927 and updated the “archaic English” again; and just to make sure that it was done properly, Williams, Berkely, Phillips, Moffatt, the Amplified Version, the Living Bible, and the New English Bible (1960) all stepped in to rescue you (for the forty-fifth time since 1884!) from the horrible “archaic” Elizabethan English. If that weren’t enough buffoonery for ten centuries, ads actually appeared in Fundamentalist magazines in 1982 advertising “proof’ that Thomas Nelson had produced a better Bible than the AV of 1611 because of the “updated language.” And this was all done while looking right into the eyes of the body of Christ with an expression just as serious as a heart attack—or an income from royalties.12

John Wesley helped bring revival to a whole nation with a Book whose Greek text had not been altered in 200 years and whose English text hadn’t changed perceptibly in 120 years, and then he preached this same book in America. The modern faculty members of Bob Jones University, Pensacola Christian College, Lynchburg, etc., can’t bring a national revival to their own country where the Book has already been “updated” 36 times in less than 120 years. Someone obviously is trying to palm off the wrong Book on the body of Christ (see The Christian’s Handbook of Manuscript Evidence, 1970) and the Holy Spirit is refusing to pay any attention to them. We don’t have to guess about the results of Wesley’s and Whitefield’s work when we compare it to the work of Humbard, Wuest, Swaggert, Oral Roberts, John R. Rice, Thieme, Custer, Neal, Ed Hindson, and Pat Boone. John Wesley’s audience was composed of thousands of unsaved sinners who believed that the Bible was the word of God; the modern audience in a “greater area crusade” or “Bill Gothard tension lecture” is composed of hundreds

of Christians who don’t believe it. They were taught not to believe it by the faculty members of Christian colleges and universities.

How did these same educated idiots react to John Wesley in the eighteenth century? “Samuel Wesley (John’s father) was a snob.”13 “John’s preaching drew women by its appeal to their maternal instincts...he was an obsessional neurotic.”14 It was said that John’s methods appealed to the emotions but that the “educated membership of today refuses such high-pressure methods.”15 The “educated class” also felt that Whitefield was going too far in his preaching when it caused the theaters in Boston and Philadelphia to shut down.16 The “educated class” seems to have a time of it don’t they (see Vol. I, Chap. 5)? While the “educated class” was applying their own stupid standards of relativity (their own opinions) to the King James Bible and the preaching of Wesley, it was recorded that he was “a preacher of a low and moderate voice, a natural delivery and without any bodily agitations or anything else in his manner to excite attention.”17 Lawson says of Wesley that he “always exercised the greatest care to have everything done decently and in order and to avoid all fleshy excitement, delusions and hallucinations.”18 What the educated class called “high-pressure methods” and “emotionalism” was the work of the Third Person of the Godhead on Wesley’s congregations; people often trembled and shook under his preaching and many were even struck down.19

Wesley’s life and preaching were ruled by one Book, even though he translated some on his own. That one Book was his final authority in all matters of faith, preaching, doctrine and practice. The final authority of his critics was several sets of opinions they learned in school, coupled with several individual preferences based on expediency and their social images. Thus it has been and ever shall be, world without end.20 The thing that the liberals and modernists appreciated the most about Billy Graham (1918- )

was the fact that he didn’t make emotional appeals by dramatic illustrations which might affect an individual’s FEELINGS.21 “Modern man” wants his feelings reserved for TV comedy, movie pornography, hi-fi jungle music, sports programs and individual indulgence in a variety of sins; if he is “of-a-mind” he will consent to loan God his “mind” once or twice a week provided the mind doesn’t have to dwell on the power and authority of the word of God—the Bible. Wesley would skin such empty profession alive: “Art thou fighting daily against all sin? And daily more than conqueror? I acknowledge thee for a child of God. Art thou fighting but not conquering? Then thou art not yet a believer in Christ; but follow on and thou shalt know the Lord. Art thou not fighting at all but

leading an easy, indolent fashionable life? Oh how hast thou dared to name the name of Christ, thou sleeper! Call upon thy God before the deep swallow thee up!!”22

Wesley plainly was an Arminian, but the careful student of the Bible will observe that the format above is what all five-point Calvinists (hyper-Calvinists) use to prove that God has “granted repentance” to a believer in contrast to “simple believingism.” Proof that God has “granted repentance” (and has given the new birth without the active will of the believer) is that there is no smoking, no drinking, no dancing, moderate skirts, decent hair cuts, prayer meeting on Wednesday night, and tithing, etc. A hyper-Calvinist (Shelton, Barnard, Pink, Garrett, Stam, Pyles, etc.) will always wind up preaching a hyper-Arminianism.

The moderate Calvinist at this time23 was George Whitefield, perhaps the greatest orator among the preachers who ever lived. It was said that he could pronounce the word “Mesopotamia” with such pathos it would bring tears to your eyes.24 Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790) paced Whitefield off one night while he was preaching in Boston Common and Ben said that you could clearly hear every word Whitefield spoke from a mile away.25 In his outdoor services the people sang the hymns of Charles Wesley until the music could be heard two miles away on a clear day.26 It is probable, says Newman, “that no evangelist ever surpassed Whitefield in power to draw together and master great mixed assemblies.”27 Naturally the “master of assemblies” (Ecc. 12:11) believed and preached only one Bible: an AV from 1611.

Whitefield came to America in 1738 and moved up the coast of Georgia like a forest fire. The “amen” was heard for the first time in America in the congregation among the laymen.28 The Moravians had done their work well in 1732 and 1734 (see Chap. 2, notes 28-40) and the African slaves on the plantations in Georgia and South Carolina were prepared for the old black-backed-66-caliber English AV, which had been run out of Africa in 250 A.D. under the desultory ministry of Origen29 (see Vol. I, Chap. 5). It was “Amen!” “Preach it white man!” and “Glory!” and “Yes! Yeees! WELL!!” as Whitefield moved northward. When he came into Boston, the local “qualified authority” who believed in the “plenary verbal inspiration of the original African forgeries” told him, “I am sorry to see you here, Mr. Whitefield.” “So is the devil,” said George, and began to preach.30 He preached in Philadelphia until the dancing schools, theaters, and concert rooms were closed as being “inconsistent with the Gospel.”31 Naturally, this was carrying things

a bit too far for the “educated class” of Christians. Whitefield preached to 15,000 people on Boston Common; he had as many as 10,000 people profess faith in Christ at a single meeting.32 That is more than four times as many as professed faith in Christ on the day of Pentecost! No one in Whitefield’s meetings ever spoke in tongues or ever talked to anyone who professed to have ever spoken in tongues.

His main opposition came from the Christian faculty members of Yale, which, as anyone knows, was founded as a “bastion of orthodoxy” or “fortress of faith.” The students at Yale were warned against going to hear George preach because of his CONDUCT and his enthusiasm.33

Evangelism (the Man), Education (the Movement), Culture (the Machine), Apostasy (the Monument). Yale, as Bob Jones University (1983), had become a monument. The dead had buried their dead.

Although Whitefield’s preaching was dramatic in the extreme, he was “simple in nature, perfectly natural in all of his tears, gestures, exclamations and lamentations.”34 Quite naturally, he was a man of one Book. The one Book which George lived by, preached with, counseled with, memorized, recommended and applied to all of his listeners was the one he died by. It was not revised in America and no “good, godly, dedicated man” who had access to “earlier and better manuscripts” had anything to do with it. It was the Bible that Washington, Jefferson, Franklin and Adams heard preached all of their lives. When the time came for the Continental Congress to meet (July 4, 1776) and the Declaration of Independence to be signed (Aug. 2, 1776), there was only one Roman Catholic in the assembly who signed, and every man assembled had been raised to believe the AV 1611 was the word of God, whether he obeyed it or not. Jefferson, Adams, etc., all spoke of “THE BIBLE” they read. None of them were so stupid as to think it was a series of parchments that got lost before they could be collected into a book.35 That contemporary lunacy is the private property of Christian educators, or to be specific, the entire committee of “scholars” that put out Farstad’s New “KJV” (1982).

George Whitefield died as he had lived: preaching full blast. The accounts indicate that while sick and dying he preached to a multitude outside of his bedchamber; and when he had finished, the candle which he had been holding was burnt about halfway down. When he retired to his chamber, it burnt to the socket; and when the last flicker went out, Whitefield’s breath disappeared on the mirror

and his pulse stopped forever.36 His last words were:

“Lord Jesus, 1 am weary in Thy work, but not o/Thy work. If I have not yet finished my course, let me go and speak for Thee once more in the fields, seal the truth, and come home to die.”37

The last words that his Arminian fellow soldier (Wesley) said before he died were, “The best of All, God is with us! I’ll praise! I’ll praise! Farewell!!”38

The work of Wesley and Whitefield cannot be divorced from the movement of the Holy Spirit which historians call “The Great Awakening” (1720-1750). Every preacher and every convert involved in that mighty revival (as Wesley’s revival) believed and preached the King James Bible of 1611. Those who wish to avoid facing this truth have developed the gnat-straining habit (Matt. 23:24) of saying that between 1611 and 1700 (or between 1611 and 1614) there were “so many changes” or “thus-and-thus was changed” in the AV text.39 From this, the ministerial sucker is to presume that it was NOT the same Bible. This Satanic manipulation of the truth goes on quite regularly in the classrooms of Bob Jones University and the classrooms where their graduates are teaching in other schools. Since we have covered these matters in our works on Problem Texts (1980) and The Christian’s Handbook of Manuscript Evidence (1970), there is no point in leaving church history to discuss them at length. The main points which need to be marked and remembered are these:

1. Not once (up to 1980) since the AV was published was its English text altered to match any set of manuscripts but the Textus Receptus which came from Antioch of Syria. The Bible that Whitefield and Wesley preached had the verses in it in Greek and English that are missing from the ASV, NASV, RSV, NRSV, IV, NIV and other African perversions (NEB, TEV, NWT, etc.).

2. Not once (up to 1980) since the AV was published did it ever alter the wording of the verses in the English text to match any of the wording found in the Alexandrian manuscripts, or in any of their translations. One must never forget that there was an official authorized translation of the Alexandrian manuscripts (Vaticanus, Sinaiticus and Alexandrinus) on the table with the AV translators, for it was in circulation eighteen years before they began their work.40

3. Legitimate revisions under God’s providential care up to 1980, such as “soap” for “sope,” “bleed” for “bleede” and “Moses” for “Mofef” (old German “s”), can never be classified—at least by

honest men—with such changes as attacks on the Deity of Christ (Acts 4:27 in the NKJV), the Virgin Birth (Luke 2:33 in the NIV, ASV and NASV) and the Blood Atonement (Col. 1:14 in the NIV, ASV, and NASV) plus the omission of whole verses (1 John 5:7, Acts 9:5, 6, Acts 8:37, etc., in the NIV, ASV and NASV). The “educated class” (Custer, Fink, Hindson, Horton, etc.) is pulling your leg when they whine about Wesley and Whitefield (or YOU for that matter) not having the “original edition from 1611.” “Originals” seem to be a great hang-up to the “educated class.” They are always occupied with nontangibles that cannot be proved or disproved: it is a characteristic of the Adamic nature.41

To understand the setting in which the Great Awakening took place, one would have to imagine Geneva in the days of Calvin filled with Pentecostals, Montanists, Anglicans, Seventh Day Adventists, and Franciscan monks. The lines of practical theology through Calvin and Knox, converging into the Presbyterian groups and Congregational groups, run head-on into the lines from Luther, Schwenckfeldt, Spener and Zinzendorf, which culminated in Quakers, Mennonites, Moravians, Amish and Dunkers. Brewster, Bradford and John Robinson, the well-known Mayflower group (1620), were branded in their days as Separatists or nonconformists. This was the label given to Baptists in England.42 Although techni­cally they were more Puritan than anything else, in the sphere where they moved they were not even as Conservative as the Puritans.43 The dying words of Pastor Robinson are the greatest and most lucid commentary on the religious situation in Europe by 1600.

“I bewail the condition of the Reformed churches...the Lutherans cannot be drawn to go beyond what Luther saw.”44 (The “Fundamentalists” in 1983 cannot be drawn to go beyond what Scofield saw in 1909.) “And the Calvinists as you see, stick where Calvin left them...Luther and Calvin were precious shining lights in their times” (as Scofield and Spurgeon were in theirs). “Yet God did not reveal His whole will to them...I am very confident that the Lord hath more truth and light yet to break forth out of His Holy Word.”45

Robinson’s dying words turn out to be an outrageous heresy called “DOUBLE INSPIRATION” or “PROGRESSIVE REVELATION” by the superstitious fools at Bob Jones University (Bob Jones, Jr., and Truman Dollar: 1979).46 Jones and Dollar would have branded Robinson as a cult leader for implying that future truths will be revealed through a translation instead of the

“divinely inspired, verbal plenary thingamajigs.” All the truths that any Christian learnedfrom the word of God from 300 A.D. to 1990 A.D. were revealed through translations and more souls were saved through the English translation of 1611 than through the teaching and preaching of the R V (1881), the AS V (1901), the N AS V (1960), the RSV (1952), the New RSV (1970), and the original manuscripts themselves combined.

Nearly 20,000 Puritans followed the Mayflower group from 1629 to 1640 in protest against having to use the Anglican P R A YER BOOK.47 Henry Jacob, a Puritan, had founded a Baptist church in London in 1616 and had also founded Congregational churches in American cities. Puritan Bishop Hooper and Robert Browne also founded Congregational churches in America.48 Schaff implies that a similar idea had even occurred to Luther before his death; that is, Luther had come to be strongly suspicious of church-state setups of any kind—even Lutheran.49 The old Krauthead, if he had lived, might yet have made a good Baptist. Baptists believe in congregational autonomy; the local church is the ruling body in all matters and is subject only to “God’s Holy Word,” to quote Pastor Robinson.

The four oldest communities of Puritans in America were in Portsmouth and Newport, founded by William Coddington; Warwick, founded by Samuel Gorton; and Providence, founded by Roger Williams.50 The first Baptist church in America was not planted by Roger Williams but by John Clarke5' in Newport in 1639. This church was organized before Roger Williams was baptized, and the muddled accounts of the pro-Catholic historians in trying to make Roger Williams the first “Baptist” in history is a telltale sign that there is a “pig in the poke” that has not stuck his nose out yet. When we examine the background of John Clarke, we understand why the church historians want to make Roger Williams the first “Baptist.”

John Clarke was baptized in a church in London (the pastor was Rev. Stillwell) that was set up by Dutch Mennonites from Holland (see Vol. I, p. 411), not by English Baptists. The reason why this is significant is that the Dutch Mennonites came from the Waldenses.52 This means that not even the English Baptists came from “John Smith,” as the church historians would have you to believe; they came from the German Baptists, and the old German hymnbook (the Ausbund) was used in England and Germany by both Mennonites and Baptists. And thus it is that three of our old “heretical” friends from Europe (Vol. I) suddenly pop up in Rhode

Island, USA. They have been on a long trip, for the first time we found them they were called “Donatists” and “Novatians” (Vol. I) and later the term Donatist was applied to Anabaptists in Germany and to Mennonites in Holland. Remembering that the Moravians had already been identified with the Waldenses (Chap. 2, note 44) and that back in 1315 the followers of Walter Lollard (a German Waldensian) had been called “Lollards,”53 we have no trouble in guessing who was really behind the first Baptist church in America. It was a man who had been ordained in a European church whose objectives from start to finish had been under the influence of the Donatists (fourth century), the Novatians (the third century), the Montanists (second century), and the followers of John Wycliffe.

This is the group that produced John Clarke who set up the first Baptist church in the United States of America.

These Baptists were called “WALDENSES” by the Roman Catholic church.54 Roger Williams, therefore, got his ideas about separation of church and state from the English Baptists, who got them not from the Anglican church or the Presbyterian church or the Puritans but from the Waldenses.55 There were groups on Long Island and Staten Island in New York who actually called themselves “Waldensians” and “Anabaptists.”56

Mixed in, then, among the Calvinistic Puritans (John Cotton, Thomas Hooker, Cotton Mather and John Winthrop of the Massachusetts Bay Colony) were the adult baptizing Donatists of the fourth and fifth centuries, bringing with them the teachings that the pope was the Antichrist (all Lollards under Wycliffe taught this: Vol. I, Chap. 16) and that no state church had any business telling any local church how to run its business. American Christianity was going to blast off with a big bang.

Strangely enough, it was the Papist Charles I who gave the royal charter for the setting up of Providence, Rhode Island, as a cornerstone for religious liberty. Charles I had to find some way to smuggle Catholics into the United States without them being persecuted, so like all good Catholic kings (and popes) he pleaded for “tolerance” and “religious liberty” and “freedom of worship” long enough to get his totalitarian foot in the door.57

Rome never changes.

Dunkers, Mennonites and Swiss Brethren settled in Pennsylvania. Mixed with them were the Amish, still active today; they were founded by Jacob Amern in Switzerland in the seventeenth century.58 John Woolman, a Quaker in New Jersey, was sending missionaries to east New Jersey (1701) to convert the

young people there.59 Muhlenberg(1742) had organized a Lutheran group in Pennsylvania; as a young man, Muhlenberg had been taught by the German Pietists.60 Scotch and English Presbyterians were on the continent in large numbers by 1700. By 1710 there were twelve Presbyterian churches in America, and they had twenty­seven ministers by 1729. Presbyterians persecuted by Anglicans in England and by Catholics in Ireland were crossing the Atlantic by the hundreds.60-5 The Roman Catholics promptly moved into “Mary” land,61 bringing their beer and whiskey with them: Presbyterians and Puritans are not very good “lushes.”

Of all these groups, the Baptists were immediately singled out as fair game when it came to persecution, even above the Catholics whose historians made much of the fact that America was for a long time “intolerant” of Catholicism because of “deep-seated prejudices” (i.e., past practical experiences: Catholics have a prejudice against the dictionary.) There were three Baptist churches set up in Rhode Island (1638, 1656), two in Massachusetts (1663, 1665), four in New Jersey (1707), nine more in Rhode Island (1750) and seven in Connecticut (1750).62 These Baptists were arrested, jailed, fined and whipped.63 They were cursed, sentenced, banished, and threatened by Congregationalists, Presbyterians, Puritans, and the Reformed churches for one simple (and deadly) teaching: you cannot regenerate any baby by sprinkling him under any formula (see Vol. I, Chap. 6).

Thomas Painter of Hingham was whipped for refusing to have a child baptized; Thomas had said that baby sprinkling was an anti- Christian ordinance.64 Henry Dunster, the President of Harvard University, was compelled to resign for not letting the baby sprinklers dampen the foreheads of four infants.65 Obadiah Holmes and John Clarke were fined twenty pounds and whipped for denying baby sprinkling, and others were imprisoned several times (Boston, 1665) for denying the “efficacy” of throwing water at babies.66 John Cotton and the New England Congregationalists all opposed the work of Roger Williams; and since the Quakers, founded by George Foxe (1624-1691), would not sprinkle their babies, they also incurred the wrath and righteous indignation of these “five-point” Calvinists who thought that Sovereign Grace and Sovereign Election could be conditioned by sprinkling (see Augustine’s mania: Vol. I, p. 104). Cotton Mather, who believed that the first resurrection was spiritual only (see Vol. I, p. 121), was the “unmitred Pope of a Pope hating people.”66-5 Puritan Imperialism was in some ways similar to the Vatican Imperialism.

The AV translators knew this and mentioned it in their Dedicatory; however, the Catholic historians will never allow that the Vatican has ever had any imperialistic tendencies, even though there is a CROWNED RULER living in a PALACE in the Vatican. Strange historians! They only whine about Puritan Imperialism.61 Granted, a Puritan might burn you at the stake or whip you and throw you in jail for preaching on the street, but so will a Catholic: except the Catholic church’s record will outdo the Puritan record about 300,000 to one. Hearing the Catholic historians sniveling about the treatment of the Irish in the days of James I to Charles II is like hearing Jim Jones complaining about Congressional Investigating Committees (1979). The days of James I and Charles II were preceded by the days of Bloody Mary and the murder of 5,000,000 Mennonites, Anabaptists, Waldenses, Bulgarians, Huguenots, Vaudois, Lollards, and “Manicheans”68 (Vol. I, p. 292-295).

The famous “blue laws” of Connecticut accompanied the early American settlements and persecution arose against the Quakers. They were whipped, hanged, jailed and deported upon their arrival from England.69 Their founder, George Fox, was a Premillennialist (like the Montanists, Vol. I, p. 175) and an opponent of infant baptism (like the Donatists, Vol. I, p. 176). Beginning without a single follower, he preached in England, on the Continent and in the United States. When clergymen would tell him that the Book of Revelation was a closed book, he would tell them that Christ would open the seals for them.70 Fox was an extreme literalist. He refused to call the week days “Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday” because they had been named after pagan gods; and he referred to church buildings as “steeple houses” (not wishing to pervert the New Testament teaching about the church being a called-out assembly of people). Thousands were turned to the Lord Jesus under his preaching; and following the true apostolic pattern, Fox was persecuted, beaten, stoned, arrested, and imprisoned.71 Naturally, he was a “one Book man,” and to him the AV of 1611 was the one Book. He called it “THE HOLY BIBLE.”

This was the broken ground into which the seeds of Wesley’s and Whitefield’s preaching fell. It was good ground. True, the signs of religious intolerance were there. You could not expect anything else from adulterous children who had been raised by unholy Mother Whore (Rev. 17:1-6). They were not going to shake off their heritage overnight. But there were present in America with those infants a host of adults whom Rome never raised, and many of them had never been in her house long enough to look at her furniture.

America was a big country; there was room to move around in. If you couldn’t get away from the state church advocates in one place, you could get rid of them in another place. If they didn’t want adult immersion in one community, you could find it in another community; it wasn’t like Europe where everyone was penned into a Roman Catholic corral where a bloody killer at Rome could reach anyone in twenty-four hours through his trained, professional gangsters. The Baptists spread out like melted butter and set up churches in North Carolina (1727), Virginia (1780), and Indiana (1802). By 1790 there were forty-two independent Baptist churches in Georgia, eighteen churches in Tennessee and ten in Kentucky. By 1838 there were independent Baptist churches in Alabama, Iowa, Texas, Arkansas, Louisiana, Wisconsin, Ohio and Missouri.72

When Wesley and Whitefield came to America (1738-1739), they entered what one might call a “fluid situation.” No one was in absolute control. The Catholics were trying to get the pope into Maryland under the charter given to Lord Baltimore (1632); but before they could set up a state church in America (as they had done in Spain, Italy, Austria, Ireland, France, and Mexico), Maryland was made a royal colony (1691) by the Anglicans and that broke up the party.73 Conversely, Anglicanism was established by law in the Southern colonies (1706-1717); but the mixed religious character of their population included Huguenots, Presbyterians, Baptists and Quakers, so the Anglican church-state became only nominal. It had nothing like the control that the Anglican church-state had in England. Again, the Puritans almost had a theocracy set up in New England (1600) to match Calvin’s in Geneva when they had to vacate the Massachusetts Bay Colony Charter (1684) and the Anglican church got a strong foothold in Boston (1687). Pennsylvania actually became the most fluid of the states as German Pietists, Lutherans, Moravians, Dunkers and Amish poured in with Welsh Baptists, Quakers, Swiss Mennonites, and Swedish Lutherans, along with Dutch and German Reformed groups. The Bible-believing Scotchmen from Ireland and Scotland flooded westward across the Atlantic between 1710 and 1750 until their presence was felt in almost every colony. Many of these Bible­believing people got away from the big cities as quickly as they could and pushed into the frontiers of North and South Carolina, West Virginia, Kentucky and Tennessee. Every one of them brought the memory and the hatred of state church religions, particularly the Roman Catholic state-church which would burn anyone at the stake for taking the Biblical viewpoint on Christian doctrines.

When Wesley and Whitefield started up the coast to join forces with Jacob Frelinghuysen (a Moravian),74 Gilbert Tennent (1703- 1764), and Jonathan Edwards (1745-1801), they entered a country where for the first time since the days of Constantine (300 A.D.) no one religion had absolute control over other beliefs. The elements were so dissimilar and “atomized” and diversified that no one could “unite for the good of all” and get “one fold and one flock” so that “unhealthy schisms and divisions in the body would not be a scandal in a pluralistic society where unity was etc., etc.”75 The thing that saved the USA from becoming like Spain or Mexico was its diversified, conflicting, segregated, racially divided, religious disunity.16 Thank God for such providential discord! Until the newspapers molded the USA into a degenerate WHOLE (1860- 1960) there was a great deal offreedom. At this time (1750) the news media was making less than a minor contribution. The day of mass molding, mass propaganda, mass pornography, and mass federal control (1933) was a long way off.

One of the spark plugs of the Great Awakening was Gilbert Tennent, a Presbyterian (1743) who was strongly influenced by Whitefield’s preaching and by the Moravians. He had scores of conversions in 1726 before Jonathan Edwards was even associated with the Awakening. Tennent was an old-fashioned “hell fire and damnation” preacher whose preaching “must either convict or enrage hypocrites.”77 He was persecuted by his Synod.78 Tennent, as Whitefield and Wesley, was a man of one Book: the AV of 1611. However, Jonathan Edwards (1745-1801) is the most famous name usually associated with the Great Awakening largely because one of his sermons ("Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God”) has been reproduced in books on American History (or literature) for nearly a hundred years. But this sermon is only publicized by writers and journalists who do not believe that God gets "angry” with anyone. Many of the publishers of such works are ATHEISTS; the sermon is published to show modern American youth how unreasonable and irrational Bible-believing Americans were if they were Puritans. "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” is not distributed throughout the federal school system on the high school or college level to put the fear of God into any Bible-rejecting sinner. It is circulated to demonstrate what educators believe about the dangers of “negative Christianity” at its worst.

The first stirrings of the revival were said to have occurred in Northampton, Massachusetts, around 1730 when there were several sudden deaths in the town accompanied by heated discussions

about “the dangers of Arminianism.”19 Just before this, around 1720, a pastor named Stoddard pastored the same church where Jonathan Edwards later preached. There can be little doubt about Stoddard’s views, for he influenced Edwards to invite John Wesley (an Arminian) to the pulpit of that church on four occasions.80 Obviously then, the practical theology of a Bible-believing Arminian, who majored in street preaching, was a factor in the Awakening; it was by no means limited to five-point Calvinists giving theological dissertations on the “Decree of Reprobation.”

In the tide of the Awakening came the founding of Sunday schools (1790), the Religious Tract Society (1804), the London Missionary Society (1795), the College of Philadelphia (later Pennsylvania University), Princeton, Columbia University and Dartmouth.*1 Evangelism, Education, etc. “It is paradoxical,” says the historian Drummond, “that the Great Awakening which gave unprecedented scope to the preaching of UNEDUCATED laymen should have stimulated education.”82 Not in the least. It always has. There hasn’t been one educational movement in the history of the world that wasn’t a simple reaction for or against or in line with the public preaching of the Bible (see Vol. I, Chap. 5). Intellectuals are aroused to a fever pitch by preaching on hell, the Second Coming and the depravity of intellectuals.

Nothing, absolutely nothing, on this earth can drive an “intellectual” forwards, backwards or sideways like one good solid doctrinal message from a King James 1611 AV. And nothing can provoke a Christian intellectual to “get a burden” for setting up a Christian school like being constantly confronted with intellectual idiots who think that the sun rose and set on Darwin and Marx. No African native in Uganda or Rhodesia (1980) would be able to read or write Communist literature if Bible-believing missionaries (“imperialists”) had not done their work in those lands before Charlie Darwin and Karl Marx were born.

The man who trained Gilbert Tennent for the ministry was his own father William Tennent (1673-1760). This brave nonconformist decided that no “bastion of orthodoxy” could train his sons properly for the ministry so he raised three of them in his backyard in a log cabin that he built himself. He taught them Greek and Hebrew, evangelism, personal work and the Bible. He believed THE BIBLE was the English Bible of 1611. This nonaccredited “Log College” was the ancestor of Princeton University.83 Fortunately, the news media at this time could not get the HEW and OSH A to shut down his unlicensed school simply because it was not

up to Communist social and racial standards.

With such a background (a pile of logs in a man’s backyard) the Holy Spirit tore the three leading religious organizations in two: the first was the division of the Old Side and the New Side among the Presbyterian Synods. They were headed up by the New York Synod (which leaned toward Puritanism, separation and revival: this was called the “New Side”) and the Philadelphia Synod (which stuck to five-point Calvinism, formal services, dead orthodoxy, and no outward conversions to Christ: this was called the “Old Side”). The second split tore the Congregational churches into the "Old Lights" (those against revivalism and evangelism) and the "New Lights" (those who were for it).84 The third split went through the Baptists and left them in two groups: "Separates" and "Regulars." The “Regulars” stayed in the rut and the “Separates” went along with the Holy Spirit during the Awakening. Since the Baptists had already been divided into Particular Baptists (five-point Calvinists) and General Baptists (one-point Calvinists), they got about twice as many new churches out of the Great Awakening as anyone else. The Awakening did not affect the Methodist or Lutheran bodies to that extent and, of course, it had no positive effects on the Catholic church at all. (There is no record in the history of the Catholic church of God the Holy Spirit sending a revival to ANY segment of it, anywhere, in the annals of church history, with the possible exception of temporary moral reformations under Francis of Assisi and Savanarola.)

At the culmination of the Great Awakening, Jonathan Edwards was condemned by an ecclesiastical council composed of five-point Calvinists and was thrust out of his parish to die of smallpox at the age of forty-seven.85 The Methodists were denounced everywhere as “authors of confusion” and “church splitters” as well as “disrespectors of learning and education.”86 The Baptist historian Newman speaks for the “educated class” when he says that “a great awakening of this kind is sure to be accompanied by...much that is unseemly or at least shocking to men of REFINED SENSIBILITIES.”87 Since no Christian in the Bible was ever bothered with that problem (“refined sensibilities”) and since there is no trace in the scripture of ANY saint who ever had that problem, we must take it to be one of the peculiar viruses that accompany CULTURE (evangelism, education, culture, apostasy). The “educated class” (Custer, Clark, Hindson, Dobson, etc.) seems to be very susceptible to such diseases as “Lutheritess,” “Norrisitess,” “Ruckmanitess” and, in this case, “Tennentitess.” Cry

babies don’t like the Holy Spirit to kick over their playpens.

Tumbling in on top of the work of Wesley, Tennent, Edwards, Whitefield and Frelinghuysen came the perennial “qualified scholars” and “recognized Biblicists” with the Tractarian Controversy, the Gorham Controversy, the Hampden Controversy, the Essays and Reviews Controversy (see Vol. I, Chap. 8) and a revival of ritualism.88 By 1760 the church at Northampton was as quiet as a turkey farm on Thanksgiving afternoon.

But the seeds of apostolic testimony and New Testament church government had been planted during the movement and they could now be transplanted out of every community. David Brainerd (1718-1747), Daniel Marshall, William Carey (1761-1834), Robert Hall (1764-1831), Jacob Knapp (1799), Rowland Hill (1744- 1833), and Charles G. Finney (1792-1875) emerged from the torpid “educated class” who took over following the Awakening. Although the revival had lasted for only about thirty years, its effects went far beyond 1756. Great preachers, teachers and missionaries like William Carey, Henry Dunster, Daniel Taylor and Jacob Knapp were all the fruits of the Awakening. So mighty was this movement that it took several decades for the Christian universities and colleges to seduce the local New Testament churches back into the hogwallows of Rationalism, Deism, Skepticism, and Bible criticism.

America, between 1700 and 1800, received her first real lesson in church history. She learned (or should have learned) that following any sweep of the Holy Spirit, bringing in soul winning, mass evangelism and revival, there follows teaching and education; and once one step is made beyond THAT point (the Bible deadline: Matt. 28:19, 20), you go “down the tube” so to speak. No sooner did the AV of 1611 hit the market than the English Deists in the homeland of that Book began to spring up like popcorn and began to shred its words down to “principles,” “teachings” and “messages” (Edward Lord Herbert: 1583-1648 and Sir Thomas Browne: 1605- 1682). When only the “fundamentals” or “main principles” were left, the source from which those fundamentals were derived was attacked (Thomas Hobbes: 1588-1679 and John Toland: 1670- 1722). Once that source was nullified there was no final authority for any man, woman or child in the land of England but his own brain (Anthony Cooper: 1671-1713, Thomas Woolston: 1669-1731 and David Hume: 1711-1776). All of these English Deists arose for the specific purpose of removing from the British people the memory of the greatest Book ever written and printed on this earth.

Every one of them was a member of the “educated class” and three of them professed to believe in the same “fundamentals of the faith” that Machen, Warfield, Bob Jones, III, and Stewart Custer believed in.

These Englishmen were called “Deists,” which places them outside the realm of church history (Vol. I, Chap. 1) and into the realm of “devils” (see James 2:19) connected with semi-church history. Deism was nothing but the reaction of the educated class to the teaching and preaching of the AV of 1611 and the Heilige Schrift of Martin Luther. Those that fell into its clutches and eventually damned their constituents with them were Dippel, Wolff, Edelman, Jocker, Lemker, Hitler, Steinhart, Maurion, Lessing and Reimarus (German); Bodin, Charron, Tissot De Patot, D’Argens, Jean Martin De Pades, Diderot, Rousseau, Helvetius, Toussaint, and Voltaire (Frenchmen); and Walter Lippmann, John Dewey, Ingersoll, Clarence Darrow, Lyndon Johnson, C.A. Briggs, Washington Gladden, Benjamin Franklin, J.Q. Adams, George Washington, H.L. Menken, Lyman Abbot, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Franklin Delano Roosevelt (American).

English, French and German Deism was being propagated by the “educated class” while the Holy Spirit was using Bible-believing street and field preachers to shake two continents: don’t ever forget that lesson.

Attacks on the Textus Receptus, or any translation from it, were being carried out rigorously between 1574 by the Catholic Andreas Masius and by Father Peverius and by Horne (Intro­duction to the Critical Study and Knowledge of the Holy Scrip­ture: two volumes of 1,149 pages). Such “scientific studies” were the educated man’s answer to the power and authority of the Holy Spirit’s use of the King James Bible. The faculty members at Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Dartmouth and Columbia could not resist investigating such “accredited scholarship” by such “qualified authorities,” as it gave them an alibi to SIN. The faculty members of Westminster (1930) and Bob Jones University (1950) in the next century could no more resist the scholarship of Kenneth Wuest and A. T. Robertson (1920-1970) than they could turn down a sirloin steak. Gravel often tastes like gravy when a sinner is looking for an alibi to sin. Back in England the Wesleyan revival was swallowed up with the English Deists preaching in dead orthodox Episcopal services: Oxford and Cambridge scholarship replaced street preaching and local church planting. On the continent, Melanch- thon’s theology became decidedly Roman Catholic again,89 and since Catholics and Lutherans could at least agree that there

was a God, many Lutherans took to Deism (and later Rational­istic “enlightenment”) as the nearest way back to Rome. Calixtus, Scherzer, Thomasisus, and Calvovius all tolerated Catholicism;90 and they, with the Deist Johann August Ernesti (1701-1781), in­fluenced the philosopher Leibnitz (1646-1716), who made his impact on the dead orthodox Lutherans. Leibnitz was followed by Johan Salomon Semler (1725-1791), who took a radical step further from Ernesti to a completely liberal view of the Bible. Lessing (1729-1781) wrapped it up.91 The outcome of this apostasy was unsaved Liberals (Troeltsch, Ritschl Strauss, Gunkel, Bauer, Wellhausen, Heiler, Schweitzer, Deismann, and Soederbom) arguing with dead orthodox Lutherans and “Evangelische” (Zahn, Ihmels, Seeberg, Kaehler, Schlatter, Schaeder, etc.). Evangelism, the Second Advent, revival, the new birth and soul winning never entered these discussions one time for there is no place in apostasy for Bible doctrines. Culture breeds apostasy.

The Holy Spirit left behind Him in Germany (1850) a spiritually desolate country. Only individual pastors and teachers92 survived the apostasy that followed the educational efforts at Halle; national revivals were out of the question and have been ever since.93 The Holy Spirit then left England in spiritual darkness following the work of Wesley and Whitefield; Wales was not yet due for an awakening and William Booth had not yet been born. The thinkers took over the work of Wesley and Whitefield and the Holy Spirit moved on His usual course (Westward) to America. He struck New England one time and then in the wake of educational endeavors (Harvard, Princeton, Yale, Columbia and Dartmouth) He prepared to resume His standard flight plan—east to west.

CHAPTER FOUR

CONCEIVED IN LIBERTY

“For the kingdom is the Lord’s: and he is the governor among the nations.” (Psalm 22:28)

“Blessed is the nation whose God is the Lord; and the people whom he hath chosen for his own inheritance.” (Psalm 33:12)

Properly speaking, a discussion of the Constitution, the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights would not be in order for a history of the New Testament church. Certainly not one single document recognizes the Bible as the word of God, and none of them exalt Jesus Christ or give Him credit for anything, let alone man’s “liberties” and “rights.”1 In addition to this, the basic premise of the Preamble is a communist premise (see Acts 4:32 and comments in that Commentary) which Abraham Lincoln used to justify the death of over 200,000 Americans. Many of the men who met in Liberty Hall were members of churches that no more resembled a New Testament local church than the Free Masons or the Knights of Columbus. However, there enters into the framing of our Bill of Rights a religious philosophy which certainly did not originate with John Locke (1632-1704), Benjamin Franklin (1706- 1790), John Hancock (\Tyi-V193), Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826) or Alexander Hamilton (1757-1804). The peculiar doctrine that is injected into our Bill of Rights usually escapes the eyes of the historians writing textbooks for the federal school system, and the news media journalists have never been aware of it since the printing press was invented. This chance “injection” actually determined and defined the freedoms of the American people until 1865, when the states lost their rights (Tenth Bill) to independent existence, and until 1933, when the federal government set up “soviets” to curtail the liberties of firms and corporations within the states.2 After exchanging America’s gold for liquor (FDR, 1933-1937), the federal government put through a communist bill (the Civil Rights Act) which did away with the Bill of Rights altogether. In all three cases:

loss of states right, liquor in exchange for gold, and federal seizure of churches and schools, the NEWS MEDIA was the deciding factor.

In the days of the founding fathers the press did not yet have the power to create heroes and villains and then sustain these imaginary characters throughout months and years. It would have been unthinkable in the seventeenth and eighteenth century for any major periodical to glamorize and promote dope-headed fornicators like Elvis Presley or John Lennon2-5 any more than they would attempt to make patriots of their own countries appear as psychiatric cases. In the twentieth century this prostitute press (with no one’s interests at heart but its own) actually created bogeymen (Mayor Daley, Barry Goldwater, the Ku Klux Klan, George Wallace, Ronald Regan, Richard Nixon, General MacArthur, Anita Bryant, Jerry Falwell, etc.) and then created “saviours” to deliver you (Michael Luther King, Jr., Eldridge Cleaver, Jane Fonda, Andy Warhol, Picasso, John Lennon, Elvis Presley, the Kennedy family, Angela Davis, Coretta King, Jimmy Carter, etc.).2-8

The fuel injection that slipped into the stream of “democracy” in 1787 was the teaching that Congress had no right to make or pass laws that affected a religious establishment; that plainly applied to the conduct, beliefs and rights of local churches. This amendment is number one, and although it became invalid in 1964 (the Civil Rights Acts),3 it kept America from a Catholic dictatorship and from a communist police state for nearly 200 years. The local church happened to be the Bible unit. When the framers of the Constitution said “religion,” they had to include the local churches, for, according to all unsaved politicians, churches have to do with “religion.” Thus, America became the first country in the history of the world and the first country in “church history” to grant religious freedom to ANTI-CATHOLICS. The First Amendment meant that anyone in America could abstain from mass, could refuse to support the pope, and could leave their babies unsprinkled (see Vol. I, p. 219). Not only that, they could preach against baby sprinkling. As far as that goes, if the amendment were applied, it meant that a pastor could preach anything in his own church to his congregation. If he wanted to say the pope was the Antichrist, he had a right to do it, if that were his religious conviction. There was no fourth estate (an omnipotent press) around to harass him and deny him freedom of speech. But the Bill of Rights was even more deadly to Rome than that, for it meant that if a Christian wanted to refer to the old Roman Whore (Rev. 17:1-5) as the Bride of Satan—since those

were his religious convictions—he could not be arrested by the Antidefamation League for violating a “genocide pact.” This meant, from the very start, that America was going to have a chance to hear Biblical truth and read Biblical truth (John 17:17) that heretofore had been denied to every nation in the western world.

It is entirely true that later Congress gave favors to the Catholic church (nineteenth century) and began to steal Protestant tax money for Roman Catholic endeavors,4 but at least the father’s “intentions” in setting up the Bill of Rights were honorable. America began as no other nation ever began except Israel (Exodus 19, 20 and comments in that Commentary). She began with God and the word of God, and for nearly 200 years she triumphed over the Dark Age religious monster who had stifled religious freedom for fifteen centuries. (This same hybrid monster is now on a “human rights” and “religious toleration” kick. You can believe her like you can believe Karl Marx.)

Perhaps the most abused words in the English language are Freedom, Peace, Liberty and Unity. The crimes committed in the name of those words, while the motive was actually income, attendance, book sales, political power or sensual gratification, could not be listed in a small volume of 400 pages. Someone is always trying to “liberate” someone (see The Sure Word of Prophecy, 1970) or bring “peace on earth” or “share their love with someone” or “keep the union” by “relating” and “uniting all peoples to the blah, blah, blah.” Sex perverts in San Francisco (1980) managed, with the 24 hour a day help of the press, to get school boards composed of homosexuals. Immediately they set to work firing a teacher who would not PHYSICALLY DEMON­STRATE PERVERTED TECHNIQUES in the grade school classes.4-5

If they had fired every teacher who read the Bible in the classroom, the entire news media from New York to California would have risen up in arms to justify the dismissals as though Bible reading was more destructive than sex perversion. After Black militants in New York (1960-1970) had been organized into armed military units and their associates had assaulted over 17,000 teachers and students causing over 100 deaths in Miami, New York, Memphis, Chicago, Watts, and Washington, D.C., all that AP, UNS and UP could cook up was a feature article on the dangers of the Ku Klux Klan.5 “Freedom” and “liberty” are the words that one uses on such occasions. The American Revolution, the French Revolution, the Austrian Anschluss (1938), the Civil War (1861), the Korean Conflict (1950), the Bolshevist Revolution (1917), and

Castro’s Cuba all used this vocabulary to justify murders and imprisonments.

Patrick Henry in 1776 said, “Give me liberty or give me death.” His progeny between 1800 and 1900 said, “Give me liberty.” Their children (1900-1990) say simply, “Give me.”

Behind the CFR, the Bilderbergers, the Club of Rome, the Illuminati, the Trilateral Commission, the HEW, the NEA and all the “do-gooders” engaged in bringing in “the great new world” there grins the rotten skull of Epicurus: me first, you next. Hedonism disguised as “humanism” is the religion of the twentieth century “educated class.” One of the greatest Hedonists who ever lived (Paul Tillich) said, “All liberators are sent from God,” and these “saviours” are so many that ‘‘everyone has the saving power of mankind in them.”b We are to assume that this includes Himmler, Stalin, Hitler and Goering. When these “saviours” liberated France in 1790 and claimed that “the people” in France had “rights,” they turned completely about with a “Committee of Public SAFETY”— the modern term is OSH A—and abolished all of the freedoms they had just advocated.1 The subsequent history of France was a return to the Roman Catholic church—priests and all—and the reduction of France to a sixth-rate world power. She was “liberated.”

But the great eighteenth century enlightened thinkers and rationalists of England, Germany and France were very late in finding their calling. Centuries ago Old Mother Whore had declared that since the Roman Catholic church was “made free by the blood of Christ”—pious isn’t it?—that it never could become a slave again; therefore, no Catholic bishop or Catholic priest owed allegiance to ANY ruler by taking his hand, for every Catholic priest’s (and bishop’s) hands were “sanctified by the body and blood of the Lord.”8 There is nothing new about the communist teaching in America that if a murderer is a black robber he is innocent but if the trigger is pulled by a white policeman he is guilty. Centuries ago Catholics reserved for themselves certain “civil rights” which other people could not have: they simply based it on religion instead of color. Catholic “freedom” was absolute. It lay behind all of the friction between the church and the kings in Europe for 1500 years.8-5 In the case of Thomas 'a Becket (Vol. I, p. 328-330), it meant that any member of the clergy was exempt from trial by a civil court? that is, he had “civil rights” and absolute “liberty” from obeying the laws of the land in which he lived. Modern Christians need not think for a minute that Rome has ever changed her convictions about these matters, even where she has changed her speech or edited her news releases for the omnipotent press.9-5

Hitler's alibi for occupying the Rhineland was to “liberate” some people there; ditto with the Sudetenland and Austria.10 Castro “liberated” Cuba so well that hundreds who believed in “liberty” had to run for their lives or stay and lose the “liberties” they were liberated from.11 Eventually 100,000 of these “liberated” people escaped Cuba and fled to America for asylum—where the news media was talking about gay LIBERATION and women’s LIBERATION. Out of the frying pan into the fire. When Ho Chi Minh “liberated” Saigon, 460,000 people were suddenly given so many “civil rights” they decided to take a chance on starving at sea with their families rather than stay at home to enjoy their “civil rights” and “liberation” (1978-1980).

Evidently thousands of people would define the word “liberation” and “liberty” as “hell on wheels.”

“Conceived in liberty” is quite a profession of faith.

When the Communists “liberated” the Russian peasants from Czar Nicolas II (1909-1918) they took all the land away from them,12 although they were allowed to own land before the Communists took over. Having killed almost 30,000,000 more of their own people than all the czars (900-1910) together killed,12-5 the “liberators” then decided that their “freedom” could no longer be allowed to leave the country. Before 1921 they could leave it. You see, when you get “liberated” the first thing that happens is you lose your liberties.13 Blacks who left the south for the lure of the dollar in Ohio, New York, Michigan and Pennsylvania suddenly found out that the “rights” they had formerly had—to work only eight months a year, to hunt and fish four months in the year, and to have a white man paying all of their hospital bills and supplying them with room and board—suddenly disappeared. It was such a shock that the communist NAACP formed a racist organization to demand those former rights back, even though they were slave rights that came before the Blacks were “liberated.” The catch phrase for this operation is that “Blacks are still oppressed and in slavery: if you don’t believe it, watch ‘Roots’ on your nearest TV.”13-5

Now all of this is pertinent to any analysis of how America began her political life, for in the present century the terms are gay liberation and women’s liberation, and these terms are used by leaders of local churches. The Palestinian "Liberation" Army (1979) is a guerrilla army for purposes of terrorism and assassination of civilians, as well as armed warfare. It is backed by the Southern “Christian” Leadership Conference, which spends much of its time complaining about the “terroristic tactics” of the KKK. When the USA “liberated the oppressed people of Europe” (1945) from under

the heel of the horrible Nazis, our soon to be president (General Eisenhower) sent Russians back to prison camps in Russia to be killed.14 Thousands of prisoners and allies were “repatriated” against their wishes15—when Eichmann did it for Hitler it was called a “Holocaust”!—and mass suicides took place. Evidently a lot of Russians didn’t think that Stalin and Lenin had “liberated” anyone. The most Satanic use of the word was not made by Karl Marx: it was made by the United Allied High Command in the Army of Occupation after World War II. Here, on the terms of Roosevelt and Stalin (set up in Yalta, Tehran, and Ottowa), 120,000,000 unarmed civilians (Romania, Yugoslavia Hungary, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Poland and Czechoslovakia) were turned over to a Communist dictator without batting an eye, and they were turned over to a dictator who had confessed to killing nearly 10,000,000 of his own people16 and waging aggressive warfare on two passive countries: Finland and Poland. This was done with not so much as an apology to Hitler’s High Command and without apology to even one SS officer in a concentration camp. When the Nuremberg trials took place, the Army personnel in Allied Headquarters were engaged in the business that Himmler and Eichmann had been engaged in: shipping unwilling people back into a system that would torture, imprison and kill them. Several important persons were missing from the docket of prisoners at Nuremberg. The charges against those present in the docket were “waging aggressive warfare” (destroying the peace)17 and “crimes against humanity.” Where was Stalin and his military staff? Didn’t they attack Poland and Finland without warning? Stalin not only had Polish officers butchered but he butchered his own officers. Stalin claimed he was fighting a “WAR OF LIBERATION”18 for all peoples, exactly as Roosevelt and Churchill professed. If Hitler had professed the same thing, who was lying? Where was “Ike”? Why wasn’t Eisenhower charged with violating “civil and human rights” when he had 40,000 defectors forcibly “repatriated”? Isn’t it amazing what a criminal can get away with in the twentieth century if he has “good press”?

No religion but Roman Catholicism is tolerated for public practise in Spain, Italy, or Columbia, and in this century (1979) all religions except Catholicism had to register as “SECTS” in Argentina.19

Sometimes the torch bearers of “liberty” approach the lunatic fringe.

When Franklin Delano Roosevelt got America into World War II, after declaring that “never again” would American boys go overseas to fight another war,20 he decided that LIBERTY was so

common an item that every man, woman and child on the earth “had the RIGHT’ to be set free from fear and want as well as being free to express himself and to worship. Where FDR drummed up this Disneyland philosophy from is hard to say. Since the beginning of time neither man, God, the Devil, nor history has ever exempted ANY man from those fears.21 The whole idea was as cockeyed as a rabid rooster. Strangely enough, the American people examined a series of four paintings by Norman Rockwell on these "Four Freedoms” just like they thought they were looking at profound truths. Freedom from fear is fantasy and freedom from “want” is pure fiction. A man who fears nothing carries no life insurance, fire insurance, or medical insurance, and a man who doesn’t fear for the safety of his family is an idiot. FDR has some idiotic conceptions about freedom (liberty).

One wonders, at times, how the author of “America the Beautiful" would have felt if he had lived to see how his musical prayer was answered: “God shed His grace on thee, and crown they good with brotherhood (fraternity) from sea to shining sea.” What would he think looking now at America’s “alabaster cities” gleaming, “undimmed by human tears.” Philadelphia perhaps? Detroit? Washington, D.C.? Miami? Baltimore? Chicago perhaps? During which riot? Are we wrong in supposing that he might have decided that God’s grace was not always shed on people who believe in freedom and liberty more than they believe in God and the word of God?

Now the Bible states that “where the Spirit of the Lord is, THERE IS LIBERTY” (2 Cor. 3:17). Judging governments by the Bible—and that is the only proper way for a Christian to judge everything—where man grieves and quenches the Spirit of God (Acts 7:51, Eph. 4:30), he loses his liberties (Gal. 5:13-17). Liberty that is genuine liberty has its source in God (John 8:32) and its definition in the revelation which God gave. It is not a term to be tossed about by atheists, Communists and agnostics who profess no higher authority than Pavlovian animal responses and evoluted animal instincts. “Liberty” and “freedom” in the mouth of an agnostic or atheist is nothing but the conditioned response of a crafty animal who has found out that lying pays dividends. The Declaration of Independence states that liberty was an endowment from the Creator; it was not some philosophical concept thought up by a libertine to get around responsibilities or to steal someone else’s money and property.

It is generally agreed that the two men most responsible for the

tone of the Declaration of Independence were Samuel Adams (1722-1803) and John Locke (1632-1704), but both men had to borrow the ideas of John Wycliffe (Vol. I, p. 309-310)—who taught that the pope was the Antichrist—and the ideas of Tyndale (Vol. I, p. 374). Some use also was made of the Puritan’s political philosophies.22 One may say then that a true republican form of government where “equal rights” and liberty exist does not come into the open until after the time of the German and English reformations, where the government of the local New Testament church is used as a model for national politics.2*

Leonard Bacon points out that the New Testament apostles did not establish any national church24 and points out further that the real idea of American government began with Scrooby’s and Cartwright’s emphasis on straightening out local church government in England.25

A democratic, constitutional republic built on “capitalism” and “free enterprise” was not the brainchild of any French atheist or German rationalist any more than it was the product of a Russian Communist or an English Deist. The founding fathers built on Bible-believing Protestantism as opposed to “environmentalists,” “militant ecologists,” “international Socialists,” “Bilderbergers,” “one-worlders,” “Communist internationales,” “activists,” and “new dealers.” Christian principles, for example, always produced local self-government (see Vol. I, Chap. 1), never autocratic monarchies, socialistic new deals, wars on poverty, urban housing renewals, HEW departments, pensions and Social Security, guaranteed wages, Medicare, or any other form of mass “do-good- to-your-fellow-man” welfare state setups. Edwin Hall states that principles of the body of Christians in the Book of Acts were republican principles: voluntary association (not forced busing or race mixing), voluntary assembly, and majority voting (not by an electoral college), and that the leaders were chosen according to their ability to serve the body26 (not by their massive incomes or press reputations). In regards to the moral principles by which such a body was to be governed, John Locke said that the only way to obtain a full knowledge of true morality was by reading the New Testament. The “New Testament,” to John Locke, was a King James 1611 Authorized Version;2'' it was never a reference to any “original autographs” except in the depraved minds of modern apostate Fundamentalists. According to John Locke, no modern philosopher or recognized scientist would have been able to make any contribution to America’s moral principles. They were in print

300 years before the “moderns” showed up. Not thirty years after the publication of that Book of books (June 1628) the House of Commons met to pass a "Petition of Right" which states the principles of the Bill of Rights (trial by jury, due process of law, no army of occupation without consent, and no taxation without representation).28 On December 16, 1689, the right of petition and freedom of speech and private ownership of arms was declared.29 All of this came from Englishmen being forced to deal with two Roman Catholic kings (Charles I and James II) who were trying to drag England back into the Dark Ages with the pope. The English people, even in an Anglican church setup, began to see that state churches were unscriptural and that, therefore, national gov­ernments who denied the republican aspects of those scriptures were not to be accepted or tolerated by real Christians. Reading the King James Bible had done something for England politically in less than eighty years which no Catholic version of the scripture had accomplished in ANY country in 1500 years.

Algernon Sidney was another essayist who stated that the liberty of any people is a gift from God and nature.30 Although John Locke was the authority to whom the patriots paid the greatest deference, neither Locke, Adams nor Sidney believed that “liberty” was a right to be taken for granted by evolutionary anthropoid apes who had been surviving as the “fittest” by killing each other (Darwin and Huxley). Twentieth century writers have often referred to this century as the “violent century.” They are within their rights. Where liberty is taken for granted, without reference to God or righteousness, only one thing can follow: jungle warfare.

Montesquieu’s The Spirit of Laws also had a bearing on the framers of our Constitution. It pointed out that if the executive power of the government (president) and the judicial power (Supreme Court) and the legislative power (Congress) are not separated, you will lose representative government and eventually (as the Catholic countries) lose all your liberties.31 All local Catholic churches are owned by the Vatican: the members do not own the building or the property of ONE church anywhere in the world. Ninety-nine percent of the Catholic church’s members never get to vote on ANY pope. In a fascist dictatorship, “liberty” is out of the question. What is needed is a system of “checks and balances” and this system remained in America until 1933 (FDR); it was based on Montesquieu’s philosophy: he was a Deist.

Welman says that our popular government “lay in embryo on board the Mayflower” and later it “enthroned itself in the national

mind and then embodied itself in our national government.” If this be the truth, then the American concept of liberty and freedom was a Biblical concept of “heretics” for it was the concept of the local Baptist churches in Holland and England.32 The Mayflower compact says nothing about “pluralistic societies,” “social security,” “gay liberation,” “women’s rights,” “civil rights” and “oppressed minorities.” It states that the purpose of the “body politic” is to glorify God and advance the Christian faith—not the Roman Catholic faith.33 If we are to believe the Mayflower group for what they professed to believe, we must also accept another far reaching conviction: the conviction that if a citizen didn’t work he was not to eat. That is a doctrinal statement of the “Christian faith” found in the New Testament (2 Thess. 3:10) which the Pilgrim Fathers brought with them on the ship. Welfare handouts have never had anything to do with the “Christian faith” either before or after World War I. When the Pilgrims stated their faith, they made the statements from the standpoint of Donatist-Waldensen-Separatist- Baptists who were extreme Biblical “literalists.” They came to America to escape ecclesiastical tyranny, and their chief motive for retreating to America was RELIGIOUS.34 They were called “Brownists” (a Baptist) and “Separatists” by the Puritans already in America, and in spite of this odious religious standing, they had a profound effect on the political thinking of the Puritans in Massachusetts and Connecticut.

In 1638, not twenty years after their landing in Plymouth, the first American Constitution was written (this would be more than 100 years before “Independence Hall” became famous):

1. All civil authority is derived from God, not from Washington, D.C.

2. Elected representatives should frame a body of laws for a community, not District Court Judges and the IRS.

3. Election was not a matter of someone’s arbitrary preference but votes should be cast according to the law and the will of God, not for the “candidate of your choice.”

4. All liberties granted to people were so they could seek God, seek God’s guidance, and choose alternatives for God,35 not by a clarification of values in keeping with the “guidelines” of “change agents.”

Submission to any church or church leader as an authority was not even mentioned, and all those who signed this document thought the AV of 1611 was the final authority for everyone in the community. (How the mighty have fallen!) Thus the King James

Authorized Version of 1611 became the POLITICAL charter for the founding fathers of America because the “Fundamental Orders," cited above, preceded the Continental Congress by more than 100 years.

The background for the Connecticut Orders was also plainly the local congregational government of the Puritan-Pilgrim churches: no archbishop, diocese bishop, monks, cardinals, priests, nuns or “nuncios.” Massachusetts followed this with a “Body of Liberties" drawn up by Rev. Nathaniel Ward of Ipswich. William Penn began work drawing up similar laws for the state of Pennsylvania.36 At no time was any Roman Catholic consultedfor political or religious advice on either document. American liberty did not begin with “equal rights,” “civil rights” or “toleration of Catholicism.” It began with the King James New Testament.

The upshot of these early attempts to frame Biblical constitu­tions was the erection of two ideas about government: a voluntary association which had to do wit h the relationship of local churches to individuals and a general assembly which had to do with the passing of laws and the governing of corporations. A state church was never countenanced in any one of these documents. A Roman Catholic Bible (ASV, NASV, RSV, NRSV) was never consulted in drawing them up. No Catholic priest or bishop was invited in to discuss any of the religious or political terminology used or any of the moral principles involved. One might say that every democratic body which met in America was completely BIGOTED and PREJUDICED, for no Catholic form of government (political or religious) was considered to have anything to do with freedom or Christianity. The vestiges of Roman Catholicism remained for a time only in Virginia where many Anglicans still held to a centralized government under a monarchy, which controlled a National Church of Bishops, and a House of “Burgesses,” for controlling the county governments.37 This was an Anglican system after Queen Elizabeth’s charter of 1578. So, as God would have it, this is the very area from which the most rabid and fanatical resistance to church state systems arose (see below). It was the Baptists of Virginia who forced the Bill of Rights to be added to the Constitution.

Now, we have taken time to go into these political matters because for the first time in the history of mankind an entire nation was preparing to set up rules and regulations patterned after the government of the New Testament local church: voting (Acts 6:2,3), voluntary giving (Acts 5:4), prayer and thanksgiving (Acts 4:24),

seeking the will of God (Acts 1:24), voluntary sharing (Acts 4:32), no distinction between “laity” and “clergy” (Acts 4:32, Gal. 3:26) and no allowances made to show favoritism to any Roman Catholic clergyman of any standing in the hierarchy. It is true that the framers of the Constitution failed to come up to these standards in many ways and it is true that later Abraham Lincoln, Franklin Delano Roosevelt and John Kennedy used racial and social issues as levers to pry each plank of the Constitution away38 until little or none of it was left (compulsory income tax, compulsory draft, enforced race mixing, loss of the gold standard, copper half dollars, the Civil Rights Act, etc.), but the original idea was splendid. The intentions were good. The founding fathers just never envisioned the day when a morning newspaper or telecast would carry more weight in America than a King James Bible. Who could suspect in 1700-1800 that a daily piece of commercial trivia would be accepted as “the final authority in all matters of faith and practise”? When the NEWS MEDIA became the substitute for the Bible in America (between 1860-1960), the republic was gradually transformed into a democracy (1860-1900) and then into a federal democracy (1900- 1933) and then into a federal soviet (1933-1980) and it is now in the process of becoming a bankrupt Catholic communist satellite. The road to hell is paved with good intentions.

When John Adams of Massachusetts sat down with Samuel Adams and Patrick Henry in the Continental Congress (September 1774), he brought with him the Puritan form of local church government which had been used for a STATE guide for nearly 100 years. Patrick Henry (1736-1799) had just seen Baptist preachers whipped for committing the unpardonable sin of the Lollards, Albigenses, Waldenses, Bulgarians, Petrobrusians and Henricians (Vol. I, pp. 296-318): preaching on the street.39

Samuel Adams was already way out in left field as far as a monarchy was concerned.39-5 Tom Paine (1737-1809) joined the defection from England (January 1776), but only for reasons of getting attention as a left-wing revolutionary40 (Paine never believed the Bible a day in his life). On July 4th a Declaration was written by Thomas Jefferson of Virginia and was adopted by the Colonists. The idea behind it was stated at the Continental Congress of July 2, and it was simply and exactly a Southern states’ rights declaration as believed by Robert E. Lee, George Wallace, Jefferson Davis, and every Southerner since that time: that the Colonies should be “free and independent states.”41

No state in North America since Abraham Lincoln (1865) has

been free, nor has it been independent. The “United” States since 1865 are like local churches in the Southern Baptist Convention: they are owned and controlled by “headquarters.”

The military action of 1776 was called the “American Revolution” or the “War for Independence,” and yet the military action of 1861 has been called the " War of REBELLION. ” Why this is, no writer has ever explained. It seems to be “hallowed ground” with so many sacred cows on it that “modern, twentieth century, educated man” simply cannot discuss the matter. The Southern states in 1861 did nothing but claim the original rights given to the thirteen colonies in 1776: they just didn’t have enough military power to retain them. So the Constitution failed in 1861 -1865 and it has never been healthy since. Abraham Lincoln actually used the Preamble of the Constitution as an alibi for starting a war in violation of the Constitution itself. To justify his communist approach he used one of those great words (freedom, liberty, peace, etc.) which all killers use before stealing someone’s land or money: “Honest Abe” used the word “UNITY.” He stated as blandly as Jack Benny on an off night that since the colonies were united before they framed the Constitution,*2 that UNITY was more important than the liberties and freedoms outlined in the Bill of Rights and the Constitution.*2 “The preservation of the UNION” became the hackneyed AP gimmick from that day forward for people who read the news media instead of their Bibles. Lincoln’s alibi for betraying the people of the United States of America was the alibi Hitler used for the Austrian Anschluss and the rape of Czechoslovakia. There is nothing new under the sun. If one were to visit the Hall of Presidents (Liberty Hall) at Disneyworld'm Florida, he would see old “Honest Abe”—that incredible hypocrite— standing and speaking (via tape recording!) about the danger of us losing our liberties from within the American government!

College and high school graduates take the tape recording seriously.

Such are the ways of the “educated class” (see p. 26).

When the Constitutional Convention finally assembled in Philadelphia after the war (1787), Franklin, Washington and Hamilton (Deists) were present. They were about to congratulate themselves on a good job well done when up popped an addendum to the Constitution: it was called the Bill of Rights. In spite of the objections of Alexander Hamilton and many Puritans, ten of the bills were ratified in 1791. Of these ten the first is of far more importance to church history than the entire Constitution and the

Declaration of Independence (since those are political documents) for it allows that no law can be made respecting an establishment of religion and no one can prohibit the “FREE EXERCISE” thereof.

If that amendment had been obeyed, or enforced, America would still be a free country in spite of its loss of “states’ rights.” It was not obeyed. From Roosevelt’s time on (1933) federal and state legislatures were continually passing laws to hinder and hamper every form of Biblical Christianity and then in 1964 a communist bill was passed which gave the government unlicensed and unbridled control over every local congregation in America. The alibi for passing this act was Honest Abe’s racial issue. The act was called the “Civil Rights Act” and it allows that any church can be harassed by the federal government if it does not adopt the news media’s view of racial integration and the Catholic church; any church school can be shut down if it does not agree with the news media’s view of child neglect and “child abuse," and any church or church school can lose tax exempt status if it does not comply with state and federal regulations (often arbitrary or even unwritten) in regards to racial imbalances and IRS “guidelines.” Furthermore, any street preacher can be thrown in jail for “disturbing the peace”44 and any Christian witness can be prevented from passing out Bible literature in a public shopping center by pretending that he is “trespassing” on “private property” and not public property: “opened to the PUBLIC,” but not to that part of the PUBLIC that is obeying Acts 1:6-10.

In 1979 Lester Roloffs “establishment of religion” was attacked by the federal and state government and by the bureaucrats of the HEW—a federal soviet organization set up under Eisenhower’s administration—who went about to empty his property of students and church members and then had him thrown into jail. Roloff had no Constitutional rights under the American Constitution: the Constitution had been replaced with a FEDERAL SOVIET COURT.

But all of this was under the table back in 1776 and 1791.

At that time the unsaved Deists (Washington, Franklin, Adams, Jefferson, and Hamilton) were anxious to present a “Christian front” to their nation—98 percent of whom believed the Holy Bible was the word of God from cover to cover.45 The Great Awakening was in the background of the first Continental Congress (see Chap. 3) and the old black-backed 66 caliber AV of 1611 had been preached from Maine to Florida and clear through the West Indies (see Chap. 2). Without mentioning the name of Jesus Christ

or without mentioning the missionary imperative of the Mayflower Compact, the Continentals met and drew up documents which came as close as they could possibly come to New Testament local church government. That meant that they attempted to set up a national government that was anti-Catholic in nature.

The long despised and neglected “Baptists” (Vol. I, p. 104-109) had at last made an impact on a nation, but they had paid the price.46

Twenty-eight Baptists had been arrested in Massachusetts for refusal to pay taxes to the Protestant “pope” (see Chap. 3, note 66.5); since these taxes were to pay pastors hired by the state church (in the times of Cotton Mather), the Baptists refused to pay them. Connecticut, at one time, had laws to keep Baptist evangelists out of its territory under pain of imprisonment or fining. Leaders of Baptist churches were jailed and their property was confiscated (1748) for opposing the state supported church in Connecticut.47 John Weatherford and John Waller from North Carolina were horsewhipped by a sheriff in Virginia. Thomas Waford was attacked by mobs in the same state, and mobs led by Anglican clergymen stoned several Baptists. Scores of Baptist laymen were told to get out of Virginia and to allow the Anglican church to confiscate their property.48 The Baptists stuck to their guns. They kept opposing the taxation of people to pay state church clergy until the Bill of Rights stopped the ungodly mess. In the Continental Congress of 1774, referred to above, Alexander Hamilton, Lyman Beecher and John Adams (Federalists) all fought them; they fought right back.49 No Roman Catholic aided them in their struggles, although Irish Roman Catholics had been whimpering for nearly 100 years about having to pay taxes to support the Anglican clergymen in Ireland.50 Hypocrites always have a double standard.

Thomas Jefferson, James Madison and George Mason all took the Baptist view of “no taxes to support ministers.”51 Together they finally produced “The Act to Establish Religious Freedom” (1785). This Virginia bill became the real and immediate cause for the First Amendment to the Bill of Rights. Thus the First Amendment was not just the work of “anti-Federalists” (see any history book taught in the federal school system).52 It was the work of Baptists who put pressure on the President of the United States right in his home state —Virginia: the state that produced six presidents out of the first ten.

This is how it came to pass that one little bill among nine others became more important to the national security of the United States than the Constitution itself, for national security in every country in

Western civilization up until then (and since then in Germany, France, Spain, Italy, Mexico, South America, Poland and Canada) was dependent upon papal politics operating through Jesuits and "orders" (Catholic Action). The national security of Ireland today will be settled at the Vatican, as will the national security of Spain, Poland, Italy, Austria, France and Russia. A Communist pope (1982) could align every major “Third World” nation in the world except the USA and Great Britain (including Scotland) and use them for any unholy purpose that would expedite the unity and power of the Catholic church.

The first bill in the Bill of Rights prohibited Congress from passing any laws to:

1. Recognize the Catholic church or its teaching as a Christian religion.

2. Force anyone to be baptized or sprinkled by any church.

3. Make people attend mass or recognize the pope as a spiritual leader.

4. Kill or imprison people for ridiculing the mass and the pope.

5. Kill or imprison people for identifying the pope as the Antichrist.

6. Force Protestants to support Catholic schools with tax money.

7. Stop Christians from witnessing to Catholics.

The First Amendment to the Bill of Rights insured that America started its national life as an anti-Catholic nation, for the entire body of papal decrees and Catholic councils (500-1900 A.D.) taught that all seven items listed above were the duties of national governments which they owed the Catholic church.53 National governments, according to Roman Catholic Canon Law, are to enforce the seven items above with policemen or armies.53-5

The Baptists, through their influence, had at last reestablished the original local governing principles that had been practised by the ancient Celts in England54 and the Goths in Central Europe be­fore Mother Rome took them under her bloody skirts (Vol. I, pp. 210-216). These ancient Teutonic tribes had governed themselves by a primary assembly5*-5 where the elders and chiefs met and the fami­lies, or tribes, cast votes on matters of government. This had all end­ed with the Roman law of the Caesars, and then it was perverted further by the so-called “Canon Law” of the carnal fleshpots at Rome (the popes) between 500-1000 A.D., thereby enslaving millions of people. This same Roman law (Canon Law) was enforced in Mexico and South America after 1490 and it succeeded

in enslaving millions more. Now (1779), however, a nation had been “conceived in liberty” in the Baptist sense, not in the communistic sense of Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address—“dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal, etc.”—which they are NOT. The Baptist sense of “conceived in liberty” meant the local self-government of an autonomous church which was subject to no king, archbishop, president, or pope on the face of the earth.

Thomas Cartwright (1535-1603), with his criticisms of the Episcopal church (1570), and Robert Browne (1550-1633) had both contributed to this basic idea of “the people governing the people,” but only within a Biblical and Christian setting. (Once this “we the people” was removed from its original context in the New Testament it became what is known today as communism, based on Acts 4:35. Modern communism isn’t within 4,000,000 miles of this “base.” Modern communism, as Catholicism, is a fascist oligarchy.) The Englishmen who had preceded Browne and Cartwright were the Conservative Anglicans Roger Hutchinson (1560) and Hendrik Tertwoort (1575).55 In 1587 Henry Barrowe and John Greenwood had been imprisoned for teaching this Baptist position on separatism; they were followed by Francis Johnson (1592), John Symth (1593), Thomas Helwys and John Murton.i(>

The Pilgrims had merely followed the steps of these Separa­tists; the rest of the development we have traced. No honest histori­an could avoid the conclusion that Baptist church polity was one of the main factors in the framing of the Bill of Rights. Philosophers like John Locke, statesmen like Samuel Adams and humanists like Tom Paine may have contributed political ideas to these early doc­uments, but the foundation premise of both was that no govern­ment has any business TAXING anyone for religious purposes. “Taxation without representation” entered that equation, but to ex­clude the subject of religion at a Congress where every man in it was a professing Christian, a Bible reader, or at least a Deist is a little too much to swallow at one sitting. To imagine that the trouble was only “taxation” (without any religious issue attached) is to avoid “controversy” for fear of offending those who are at this moment using your tax money to pay nuns and gasoline bills for their church buses J1 If no religious issue was involved in 1776-1790, how does one explain the absence of Roman Catholic priests and bishops in the framing of all of America’s liberty documents? There was no “representative” from the Vatican present at any meeting.

“Conceived in liberty” means the Republic of America (not a

CHAPTER FIVE

THE STORM TROOPERS FROM PHILADELPHIA

“Thou therefore endure hardness, as a good soldier of Jesus Christ. No man that warreth entangleth himself with the affairs of this life; that he may please him who hath chosen him to be a soldier.” (2 Tim. 2:3-4)

The Philadelphia period of church history (Rev. 3:7, 8) designates that “open door” period from 1600-1900 where the church that “kept the word” in its purity (Rev. 3:8) encircled the globe with Biblical truth instead of Catholic corruption. The Reformation texts of Martin Luther and the King James translators, translated into over 800 languages before 1900 A.D., took the earth by storm. The economic and social impact of these Bibles and their foreign translations was so great that the deluded “educated class”1 (primarily philosophers and scientists) actually thought that some kind of a “kingdom” was coming: a golden age of perfect peace where “all human beings could live together in freedom and unity, etc., etc.” When Darwin finally showed them how it was going to be brought in—through organic evolution following spontaneous generation—they went after his theories like a hungry hog going into a slop trough.2

Along with the unsaved philosophers and scientists, a vast number of dead orthodox conservatives and evangelical preachers went into the trough so they could be identified with the “educated class.” These backslidden intellectuals decided that the Millennium was just around the corner because, after all, weren’t the heathen putting on clothes and learning how to read?3 Weren’t the ships traveling faster and further? And what about the marvels of the telegraph and the telephone and the electric light? And what about the advances in music under Bach, Beethoven, Rossini, Brahms and Wagner? And what about the thousands of churches and thousands of Bible readers? Surely God was “tramping out the vintage where the grapes of wrath were stored” (a perversion of Isa. 63, Rev. 14:20

and Rev. 19:15) and “His truth was marching on, etc.” (see The Sure Word of Prophecy, 1969). Wasn’t it time to pretend that all of the Bible doctrines that dealt with apostasy and the coming of the Antichrist should be shelved in favor of a “positive” view that dealt with “progress” and the coming of “God’s kingdom on earth”? It was to this class of people that Satan addressed himself (Gen. 3:1) in the middle and late nineteenth century (1850-1890)—the positive thinkers; and from them came the last church period on this earth— the Laodicean church of “human rights.” Communism without Christ, “equal rights” in concentration camps, civil rights without holiness, minority privileges without responsibilities, moral standards without spirituality, “values” without morals, and, above all, an apostate fundamentalism (Bob Jones University) with no higher authority than the guesswork of its “educated class” of Christian scholars.

For now, though, let us examine what the Holy Spirit did with the Holy Bible from 1700 through 1850, remembering that here we are tracing the history of the New Testament church, not the history of the development of the Harlot Church nor the “progress of man” nor “the ages of man” which are laid out by the historians in a Postmillennial fashion to give the reader the impression that mankind is evolving spiritually and intellectually as well as physically and economically. (The “Age of Reason,” the “Age of Enlightenment,” and the “Atomic Age” are followed by what Ballantine Books calls “THE VIOLENT CENTURY.”4 Evidently enlightenment, reason and religion don’t have much effect on animal tempers.)

The eighteenth century and the nineteenth century sport the greatest host of Bible-believing witnesses the world has ever seen, and it would be absolutely impossible in a small volume of 500 pages to document their lives and their work. These battle-scarred storm troopers crossed mountains, prairies, deserts, lands and seas and cast themselves into martyrs’ graves. They stood on Mt. Pisgah, Hebron, Calvary, Hermon and Moriah and heard and saw things that no pope, emperor, king or president ever saw or heard. They counted their life-styles in terms of the chains they loosed, the souls they liberated, the hungry they fed, and the heathen they transformed. They lived and felt Jesus Christ in every fiber of their being and they measured their journey by golden hours in the temple, shouts of praise around the altar, and puddles of tears where they had knelt in prayer. They believed one Book and they preached and memorized that Book, taught that Book, and lived and died by

that Book; and when they translated it into a foreign language they never wasted five minutes with the corrupt Alexandrian manuscripts of the Roman Catholic church.

Among these will be found Thomas Webb (1724-1796), Samuel Seabury (1729-1796), Christian Schwartz (1726-1798), William Cowper (1731-1800), John Newton (1725-1807), Thomas Rankin (1738-1810), Henry Martyn (1781-1812), Andrew Fuller (1754- 1815), Francis Asbury (1745-1816), Timothy Dwight (1752-1817), Pliny Fiske (1793-1825), Edward Payson (1783-1827), Robert Hall (1764-1831), George Dana Boardman (1801-1831), Adam Clarke (1762-1832), Rowland Hill (1744-1833), William Carey (1761- 1834), Lorenzo Dow (1777-1834), Robert Morrison (1782-1834), Luther Rice (1783-1836), Joshua Marshman (1768-1837), Samuel Marsden (1764-1838), Christmas Evans (1766-1838), Robert Haldane (1764-1842), Robert McCheyne (1813-1834), Adoniram Judson (1788-1850) and scores of others.

By the turn of the century (1800), the Baptist Missionary Society, the London Missionary Society, the Church Missionary Society, the Glascow Missionary Society and the Scottish Missionary Society had been formed.5 By 1824 the work of these missionaries had caused such a stir that the Roman Catholic pope at Rome was warning the world about “Bible societies” translating the scriptures into the vernacular of all nations.6 The old bloody killer had reason to worry. The Bible that was being translated was the one that had come from Erasmus’ Textus Receptus, the only Greek text that no Roman Catholic pope or priest would dare recommend to ANYONE since it came out.1

The first rupture in the American Foreign Bible Society came about in 1837 when some of the “educated class” got disturbed about Adoniram Judson’s Burmese Bible (1832) and they tried to alter the text of the AV to correct a foreign missionary who had lost two wives on the mission field, been confined in leg irons in prison, suffered from fever for months at a time, and had buried some of his children in Burma. The Society had stated in May of 1836 that they would only approve of “such translations as conform to the common English Version”8—that is the AV of 1611. This statement was necessary as there had been a long series of attempts, dating from 1800, by “soul-winning Fundamentalists” to get rid of the AV and to replace it with a “New American Standard Bible.” The educated members of the Society—who had never been in leg irons or had never buried one of their relatives on a foreign field—had tried to get rid of the King James Bible but they were voted down

(May 1850). But, as their successors (the ASV Committee of 1901), they didn’t quit trying to pervert the words of God simply because they were voted down. They immediately tried to smuggle a different English text onto the foreign field,9 exactly as their successors (Westcott and Hort, 1881) attempted to do in the Revision Committee of 1881. A fierce denominational conflict resulted with the “educated class” (the scholars) in favor of a different Bible since the AV was not “close enough to the original autographs” and failed “to bring out the meaning of the Greek words.” Those who wanted to stick with the AV of 1611 were branded as “hell-raising, troublemakers,”10 splitting the Society over “nonessential” matters. At a convention in Saratoga in 1883 (May), the Bible society was forced to disband because of this denominational strife. The “split” was blamed on Bible believers who sided with the “storm troopers.” The storm troopers used and believed a book 250 years “out of date.” The Holy Spirit is evidently a reactionary.

William Carey (1761-1834) is called “the father of modern missions.” He received his inspiration from a booklet entitled Periodical Account of Moravian Missions (see Chap. 1, 2). He taught himself six languages while working at a cobbler’s bench, and then he departed for India where he labored for forty-two years to translate the AV into forty-four languages and dialects.11 Carey’s motto was, “Expect great things from God; attempt great things for God.” Through Carey’s work the Netherlands Missionary Society (1797), the British and Foreign Bible Society (1804), the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (1810), the American Baptist Missionary Union (1814) and the American Bible Society (1816) sprang up. All translations put out by the American and British Bible Societies were from the Receptus of the King James Bible until 1904, at which time England renounced her birth right—in spite of the written warnings about Esau given in the Preface of the 1611 edition of the AV12—and adopted the Roman Catholic African text of Origen and Constantine.13 This officially ended the “Philadelphia” church period.

In 1806 Samuel Mills felt the call to preach the gospel to all nations, and he gathered around him James Richards, Francis Robbins, Harvey Loomis, Gordon Hall and Luther Rice. They were known as the “haystack group” because they met at a haystack to pray for the conversion of the heathen. They were joined later by Adoniram Judson, Samuel Newell and Samuel Nott. Beginning in 1817, and continuing until 1883, various members connected with

this group preached to Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw and Dakota Indians.14 Judson and Newell set sail for India while other missionary families whom they had influenced wound up in Ceylon (1816), China (1830), and Madura (1834). Christ had said “to the ends of the earth,” so to the ends of the earth they went.

Adoniram Judson (1788-1850) wound up in Burma. He set sail from America as a Presbyterian and he landed in Rangoon as a Baptist. He spent the rest of his life laboring for the souls of the Burmese. He buried two wives and a daughter overseas, and he himself was finally buried at sea off the Burma coast. Judson’s time in prison translating the Received text is a classic study in Pauline Christianity; every Christian should be acquainted with it.15 The hardships which his wife Ann endured is a classic study in the conduct of a submissive wife (Eph. 5:22); every Christian should read it.

Individual New Testament witnesses abounded in Scotland and England16 from 1800 to 1859, although there was no great awakening as in the days of Wesley. A host of witnesses pushed out into the frontiers of America from Tennessee, Georgia, North and South Carolina and Kentucky. Since these frontier itinerants were the spearhead of the next movement in America following the Great Awakening they should be examined.17

Ebenezer Loomis preached in Illinois, Ohio and Michigan. James Delaney preached in Wisconsin and Amory Gale in Minnesota. All of these early itinerant “circuit riders” lived by faith, and none of them died a violent death. They carried a hymnbook and a King James Bible in their saddlebags and they led multitudes to Christ. A circuit rider had to be tough in body as well as “fervent in spirit” and he had to be accustomed to dealing with Indians, bullies and drunkards. He had to be capable of converting men more familiar with a “Bowie knife” than a prayer meeting.18 Francis Asbury (1745-1816), the Methodist preacher, is probably responsible for the idea of “circuit riding.”19

The most highly publicized of the frontier preachers was Peter Cartwright, a short, “thickset man” with a fine head and black beady eyes. He said of his preaching (around Logan County, Kentucky): “We murdered the King’s English at almost every lick, but there was a Divine unction.”20 (Compare this with a statement of Billy Sunday some seventy years later: “A preacher complaining about my language asked me, ‘Why don’t you preach like I do?’ I told him if I did I wouldn’t be any better than he was.”21) Much literature is available concerning Peter Cartwright, and his

encounter with General Andrew Jackson is almost canonical. Elmer Towns22 has probably watered down the “original” somewhat which, according to some sources, came out as, “If he don’t repent he’ll go to Hell like any guinea-stealing nigger." Sometimes the “refined sensibilities” (p. 38) of the “educated class” are a hin­drance to finding the truth, especially where the educators have been spending their time with the news media instead of the facts of history. When Peter was put on the spot at a conference of Methodist bishops, a bishop addressed him in Greek—hoping to make a fool out of him. Peter answered in German, which his mother had taught him.23 Since the bishop didn’t know any German he had to save face quickly so he backed out by nodding his head vigorously and saying to those nearby, “He knows it! He knows it!” Cartwright was reputed to have knocked sinners down for less than that. On several occasions he was observed straddling a “prospect” and threatening him with a fist as big as a Virginia ham and yelling, “Don’t you feel the Spirit of the Lord striving with you, brother?”24

Closely associated with the backwoods circuit riders was James McGready (1798), the founder of the American “camp meeting,” who sparked a revival that upset the entire Cumberland Valley (1806-1810).25 George Godwin (speaking for the “educated class” and their “refined sensibilities”) calls him a “Bush Baptist” and his followers a bunch of “ignorant ranters.”26 In the services held by James McGready, three hundred men fell like dead men and sent up loud wailings to heaven for mercy. The same phenomena was found in Wesley’s work and Cartwright’s. There were 20,000 frontiersmen who came to the first “camp meeting” in 1801. From all accounts it set a precedent for American revivalism. Reverend John McGee and Lorenzo Dow assisted in the preaching which was accompanied by the “jerks.” Not only “jerks” accompanied the many conversions but also barking and the “holy laugh.” Sinners fell flat and remained insensible for hours. “They danced, laughed insanely, jumped about, yelled, sobbed and writhed....”27 (One would almost imagine that he was watching the “educated class” at a basketball game or a disco!) “Others rushed violently over the stumps and benches and plunged shrieking ‘Lost! Lost!’ into the forests.” The phenomena of the “jerks” continued to be manifest for fifteen years after the meetings, even seizing unsaved people who came to mock the “carryin’ on.”28

Lorenzo Dow (1777) was the most eccentric of the frontier preachers. He was converted under Hope Hull and became so deeply under conviction that he nearly fell off his seat.29 Dow’s

presiding Presbyterian elders criticized his ignorance, conceit, conduct, manner of preaching, and so forth. He got back at them later when he became a Methodist, for he toured America referring to the Calvinists as “ALL-PART men.” That is, where “all” occurs in the Bible, they read “part.”30 He was called the “devil” by some.31 On at least one occasion he cursed a community that drove him out and that community had so many natural, economic and weather calamities in the next one hundred years that it would be impossible for a citizen of that place not to think seriously about Dow’s anathema.32

The Cumberland Valley Revival brought about the second Great Awakening in America. The Holy Spirit, following His usual custom, had moved west, and this time slightly southwest. A milder reaction from the revival took place in New England at this time but it had “less emotional excitement and less controversy” connected with it than the first awakening.33 That is, it accomplished less.

With the second Great Awakening came the work of Charles G. Finney (1792-1875), who spent the first twenty years of his life in obscurity in the wilderness south of Lake Ontario and in the thinly populated Oneida County of New York. According to Shearer, when Finney arose the New England churches were in a sickly state.34 Hyper-Calvinism and Universalism were the staple food for a Roman and pagan population, for the Catholics had filled in the vacuum in Connecticut and Massachusetts as soon as the Holy Spirit had finished His work (1600-1780) and passed on. The revival of which Finney rode the crest began in the Fulton Street Dutch Reformed Church in New York City—WEST of Massachusetts and Connecticut—and other forces quickly entered in. There were united men’s prayer meetings going on at the same time in Exter Hall, Crosby Hall, and North Barnsbury Hall in London; and, of course, the Cumberland Valley Revival was in full swing.

Finney put the burden of responsibility for his salvation back on the individual (exactly as the Pietists had done) instead of the so- called “sovereign grace” of a fickle Deity and preached that men should repent,35 whether any “sovereign grace” allowed them to repent or not. He preached in Utica, Rome and Troy in New York; and he preached in Wilmington, Delaware; Philadelphia and finally in Rochester, New York. While Weiss, Neander, and Beyschlag were trying to get Luther and Bauer together and while Darwin and Huxley were mediating between man and monkey in England, God kept right on saving thousands of sinners through the preaching and teaching of the King James Authorized Version. Finney, Dow and

McGready only used one book and only believed in one Book: it certainly wasn’t “the originals.” Finney was the originator of the “mourner’s bench” or “anxious seat.”36 He had a lawyer’s ability (see Luther, Chrysostom, Talmage, Tertullian, Scofield, Sam Jones, etc.) to convincingly present a case to men of various occupations and scores of doctors and lawyers were saved under his ministry. Finney was envied and hated by many of his ministerial brethren; Theodore Parker, the Unitarian, did all he could to hinder the revival work in Boston.37 Unitarians and Roman Catholics naturally hated him since they had inherited the “land of the Pilgrim fathers.” Henry Ward Beecher also resisted Finney (1843).38 To mention the name of Finney or Billy Sunday in many religious circles, even today, is like waving an ear of corn in front of a herd of pigs. However, Finney put 100,000 members into the Northern Presbyterian churches in his lifetime, and the revival that took place in connection with his ministry totaled 500,000 converts from Maine to Florida. Lawson states that 85 percent of Finney’s converts remained true to their profession as compared to about 70 percent of Dwight Moody’s.39 Finney had 1,200 conversions in the small town of Bolton, England, when he crossed the Atlantic to preach there, but the ground had been well paved by great individual preachers of the King James Bible: Robert Aitken, John Robertson, Richard Weaver, and Reginald Radcliffe in England, and Robert and James Haldane, Robert M. McCheyne, Horatius and Alexander Bonar in Scotland. Robert Aitken, though an Episcopalian, approached the ministry with about the same gusto as James McGready. None of these men, naturally, believed any Bible was the word of God but the AV of 1611.39-5

The great Philadelphia missionaries to the Indians were John Eliot (1604-1690), David Brainerd (1718-1747), John Sargeant, David Zeisberger, and Henry Barklay. Again, time and space forbid an extensive comment on the lives of these great preachers of the Authorized Version. Every Christian should read the diary of David Brainerd. It is one of the greatest documentaries ever written about the struggles of the two natures in the believer when faced with a cross-bearing task in line with the will of God. Brainerd was expelled from Yale (1740)—as Gary Ferkel (1979) was expelled from Bob Jones University—for saying that one of the faculty members had no more grace than a chair.40 [Many modern Bible­believing students who have had a firsthand opportunity to observe the reactions and retorts of some of the great “Fundamentalists” of this generation—when faced with the King James issue—have

noticed that they don’t even have the grace of an alley cat.] David Brainerd would seal his opinions with his blood. He died at the youthful age of twenty-nine from a life of privation and exposure to the elements while reaching the Indians along the Delaware, Lehigh and Susquehanna rivers. It was Brainerd’s holy life that influenced Henry Martyn to become a missionary, and he was also a prime factor in William Carey’s call to the field.41 David was a contemporary of Rousseau, Voltaire, Hume and Lessing. When one compares the lives of these men (and the fruits of their “ministries”) with a Bible believer like David Brainerd, he can never again face philosophers or scientists with a straight face. David Brainerd would make four Humes, five Voltaires, or six Rousseaus any day of the week, any week of the year, when it came to honest, consistent practising of what he believed and preached. Brainerd was loyal to his convictions and honest in the presence or absence of his hearers, and he produced eternal fruit for the good of mankind and the Glory of God. Voltaire, Rousseau and Hume beside David Brainerd appear as three used Edsels standing beside a new Mercedes Benz. The world has its heroes; David was God’s hero (see Vol. I, p. 303- 306).

• Perhaps the most remarkable of all of the pioneer missionary preachers was Sheldon Jackson (1834-1909), a Princeton graduate. Jackson at his death left behind him 6 synods, 31 presbyteries, and 886 churches, having traveled over a million miles in fifty years.42 He preached through Alaska, Nebraska, Iowa, Montana, Wyoming and Utah before 1860, and he had over 77,100 conversions. In a period of one year (1869-1870) this firebrand for God covered 29,000 miles and organized 23 churches.43 Naturally he was a man of one Book, and it certainly was not a loose collection of “verbally, inspired, original autographs.” A.B. Earle (1810-1890), a traveling evangelist, covered 325,000 miles in the United States and Canada after beginning his ministry around 1830. He had over 150,000 conversions in his lifetime while preaching the AV of 1611 (which by this time was over 210 years “out-of-date”). Earle preached over 19,000 sermons and stated that he had “found by long experience that the severest threatenings of the law of God have a prominent place in leading men to Christ....They must see themselves lost before they will cry for mercy.”43-4

Matthew Henry, Andrew MaClaren and John Henry Jowett worked as pastors and published devotional and inspirational works on the scripture. Pliny Fiske and Levi Parson preached to Jews and Arabs in the near East as early as 1819.43-6 Daniel Bliss did

personal work in Syria. (The storm troopers from Philadelphia had arrived!) The work in Japan was reopened in 1854 by the movement of Perry’s fleet into Nagasaki Bay. Liggins, Williams, Hepburn and Simmons worked there, but the greatest impact was made by a certain James Ballagh (1872), who organized “The Yokohama Band.” They preached throughout the islands of Japan, and the revival in Doshisha University came from this group.43-7 Evan­gelists trained by the group were Kanamori, Yamamuro, Kwabe, and Kimura. Hudson Taylor (1832-1905) set up the China Inland Mission. Pandita Ramabai and others followed up the work of Alexander Duff (1853) in India.

Billy Bray (1794-1868), of Cornwall, England, was a good example of itinerants abroad. He was saved from a life of deep sin, and immediately following his conversion he began to witness to people in the British Isles. Bray never preached any great campaigns, but he was a steady and constant witness to the day of his death and he had many converted to Christ wherever he went.44 Billy Bray said of his critics: “They said I was a mad man, but they meant I was a glad man...as I go along the street I lift up one foot and it says ‘Glory!’ and I lift up the other and it seems to say ‘AMEN’!” Bray’s life and death show an intimate fellowship with God that few theologians have ever been blessed with. When Bray’s wife died, he danced around the living room for joy, shouting, “My dear Joey is gone up with the bright ones. The shining Angels! GLORREEE!”45 If possible, every Christian in the Laodicean church (1900-1990) should read the life of Billy Bray—especially about the time he literally moved a mountain and the time he gave away his last cent (that he was going to hire a doctor with to come and help his daughter) to a poor man; God then healed his daughter without sending for the doctor. Billy Bray’s “bridge crossing episode” is a classic in practical sanctification and theology.46

Claus Harms (1778-1855), in Germany, attacked Rationalism, which at this time was in its most virile state. Neve says that a revival of religion came to Germany in the first half of the nineteenth century47; it came through Claus Harms, not the work of his worldly contemporaries: Lachmann Kierkegaard, Shelling, Gesenius, Gibbon, Kant, Schiller, Paley, Paine, Fichte, Mill, Napoleon (Catholic), Hegel, Schleiermacher, Talleyrand (Catholic), Metternich (Catholic), Pestalozzi and Beethoven. The world has its heroes, and etc.

Thomas Guthrie (1803-1873), Edward Irving (1792-1834), Henry Parry (1829-1890), Rowland Hill (1744-1833) and Daniel

Rowlands (1800) preached salvation by faith in the finished work of Christ; they won souls to Him in England, Scotland and America. Rowlands had gunpowder placed under his pulpit one time with a chain fuse attached, and on another occasion he was fired at with a shotgun at close range.48 Every man listed preached and believed in one Book: it was certainly not a “New” ASV. Christmas Evans (1766-1838) was a Welsh preacher who was preceded in his revival work by John Jones, William Williams, Daniel Rowland and John Elias. In 1742 two great preachers were evangelizing Scotland: William McCulloch and James Glending. McCulloch, near Glasgow, had four hundred men and women profess Christ as Saviour in one year.49 None of these conversions were “mass- factory-assembly-line-Romans-road” type of conversions and none were the modern kiddy-car-flannelgraph-type of conversions so popular in Laodicea. They were grown men and women, adult sinners, weeping and crying out to God for mercy and forgiveness.

Christmas Evans was a remarkable man. His father died when he was nine years old; and before he was converted, Evans was nearly drowned one time, stabbed another time, and then nearly killed by a runaway horse. Throughout his evangelistic ministry he sported one sightless socket where his eye had been beaten out by ungodly companions who resented his conversion.50 He was an awkward preacher and dressed shabbily, but his messages had a powerful impact. Men and women wept and jumped and shouted and the excitement sometimes was almost unbearable. People were often so wrought up by his preaching that they literally danced for joy, and thereby gained the name of “The Welsh Jumpers.”51

Edward Payson preached as a pastor in Portland, Maine, Samuel Buell on Long Island, and Richard Baxter at Kidderminster, along with Bushnell (1802-1876), Beecher (1800- 1887), Phillips Brooks (1835-1892), Frederick Robertson (1816- 1853) and John Newman (1801-1890). Newman later defected to the Roman Catholic church (see p. 164). Bushnell was led off into the bushes of socialism by the German apostate Schleiermacher and wound up teaching that no child should ever be told that he was lost or ever needed to be saved; you were to raise him to think that he had been a Christian since birth.52 Lyman Beecher, though a Trinitarian, was tried for heresy;53 and although he remained sound in his doctrines on the Trinity, he did teach Origen’s and Augustine’s ancient heresy of Postmillennialism54 and talked constantly about a “regenerated humanity” (society, not individuals) so that the “kingdom could come.” Beecher teamed up with Harriet Beecher

Stowe and Julia Ward Howe to promote one of the greatest abuses of the word “TRUTH” that has ever been recorded. They thought that Northern troops killing Southern white people was proof that God’s “TRUTH was marching on.” The gimmick used this time (see p. 44) was “FREEDOM.” The idea was that Yankee sol­diers could make “men free” if they died in a civil war. There are no leaders on the NAACP who think that black people are “free” in 1980. And there are no anti-Communists in Siberia in 1980 who are “free.” “The Battle Hymn of Communism” was a horrible joke.

But Paul had said “to the regions beyond,” and so the storm troopers widened the breach.

Robert Morrison (1782-1834) became the first Protestant missionary to China. On arriving in China, he found two formidable enemies lined up against him to prevent the Chinese from hearing the Gospel of the Grace of God: they were the Roman Catholics (Vol. I, p. 278-279) and the officials of the East India Company. Morrison lived in a cellar and produced a King James Bible in Chinese and Chinese dictionaries and grammars—so that the Chinese people could read the Communist literature of 1945- 1965 put out by Mao Tse-tung (Evangelism, Teaching, Culture, Apostasy). Joshua Marshman (1766-1837) sailed off to India to join William Ward and William Carey in missionary work. Samuel Marsden, the Apostle to the Maoris (New Zealand), set sail for Australia in 1794 and in 1814 he made his first trip to New Zealand. From then until his death, 1838, Marsden made several trips to New Zealand to work among the Maoris. Bishop Selwyn, upon arrival in the colony three years after Marsden’s death, wrote: “We see here a whole nation of pagans converted to the faith.” Every adult Maori on New Zealand was a professing Christian when Marsden died. He never fooled with the critical texts of his day which were the forerunners of Hort’s and Nestle’s texts; these texts were by William Mace (1729), Bengel (1734), Harwood (1776), Birch (1798), Hug (1808) and Alter (1787). Marshman and Marsden would not have touched anyone of those texts with a ten foot Australian bolo. The educated fools who were messing with these corrupt texts were the forerunners of Custer, Wuest, Machen and Robertson at Harvard, Yale, Oxford, Halle, Cambridge, Dartmouth, Princeton, Tubingen and Berlin.

John Peck (1789-1858) extended the home mission work of the Baptist churches into Illinois and Missouri. He assisted Dr. Johnathan Going in establishing the American Baptist Home Missionary Society and later a theological seminary at Covington,

Kentucky. Peter Parker (1804-1888) went to Canton, China, as a medical missionary. Samuel Nott, Jr., (1788-1869) went to India. Paul had said “where Christ is not named” so they took their orders from those words in a 1611 Authorized Version and put them into practise. Wilfred Grenfell (1866-1940) worked as a medical missionary in Labrador and Newfoundland.

Henry Martyn (1781-1812) went into Persia. David Livingstone (1813-1881) went into East Africa. Hans Egede (1686- 1758) got into Greenland. Alexander Duff (1806-1878) went into India. Alfred Saker (1814-1880) went into the Cameroons. Allen Francis Gardiner (1794-1851) sealed his Christian testimony with his blood by starving to death on Picton Island (1851) off the shores of Patagonia in the Tierra Del Fuego. Gardiner (as Nate Saint) never got a chance to evangelize the Indians in the Falkland Islands, but the response of the British people after his sacrificial death was so great that in less than thirty years every adult native in the Falkland Islands was a professing Christian.

Christ had said, “Go ye into ALL the world and preach the Gospel.”

John Geddie (1815-1872) was a Canadian missionary to the New Hebrides. He paved the way for John Paton (1824-1907), whose biography reads like a Tarzan thriller. When Geddie landed on the island of Aneitym “there were no Christians there; and when he left in 1872 there were no heathen.” (Geddie was an outstanding example of “British Imperialism!”) John Paton took on the headhunters and cannibals of Tanna. He took them on with a King James Bible and a hymn book. His wife died, his son died, the mission station was burned to the ground and he lost everything but his Bible and was driven off of Tanna. Instead of quitting, he went to work on the island of Aniwa and lived to see every adult native on the island a professing Christian.55 Paton had his life directly threatened on at least thirty occasions (more occasions than most professional soldiers or street fighters) and on at least twenty of the occasions a weapon was within a foot of his face or body or a weapon was already coming through the air at him.56 Every Christian who can read shou Id read the biography of J ohn Paton. It makes the life stories of men like John Wayne, Abraham Lincoln, MacArthur, Bobbie Kennedy, General Patton, Joe Namath and John Lennon sound like dull stuff.

They told the Prussian George Mueller, “It couldn’t be done”—you couldn’t raise $7,000,000 without “Sword of the Lord Conferences,” women’s auxiliaries, lapel pins, gift orders, prayer

clubs, initialed bricks, settling estates, and “toll free phone numbers”—but he did it.57 George Mueller (1805-1898), a Prussian by birth, came to Bristol, England, after studying at the Pietist school in Halle. He proceeded (without a salary) to raise and care for 10,000 orphans. He then visited forty-two countries, through a period of seventeen years, and traveled over 200,000 miles after he was seventy years old. George read the Bible through (on his knees!) 100 times before he died58 without the benefit of “clearer translations,” “better readings” and “updating the archaic English”; and he contributed over $1,000,000 to foreign missions in a day when an American dollar was worth about ten times what it is now. Mueller, a transplanted German, only believed, preached, read, taught and prayed over one Book. It wasn’t the RV, although the R V was in print during fourteen years of Mueller’s life and was being recommended by every apostate Fundamentalist and every apostate Conservative in England.

While Hegel and Schelling made idiots out of themselves, while the Americans and British fought out the War of 1812, while Napoleon desolated Europe under a Roman Catholic concordant (1810-1814), while the French revolution ravaged Paris (1792- 1793), while Metternich tried to revive the Unholy Roman Empire under the popes (1814-1815), while Hamilton and Burr fired pistols at each other (1804), while Prussia, Russia and Austria divided up Poland (1772, 1793, 1795), while the Light Brigade got its britches shot off in the Crimea, and while the Seven Years War and the French and Indian wars killed young men on two continents, the storm troopers from Philadelphia went right on obeying the Great Commission without regard to race, creed, color, “the spirit of the times,” politics, art, music, philosophy, science, “Greek scholarship,” or “advances in social studies.”

They were “not of this world” (John 17:14) because their Commander had refused to pray for the world they were in (John 17:9). That world had been condemned (Gal. 1:3-8) long before Columbus discovered America and it was “passing away” as quickly in 1800 as it had passed away in 33 A.D. (John 17, 1 John 2:17). Adopting the Biblical view on Rome (negative: Rev. 17:1-7), the Biblical view of human nature (negative: Rom. 1, 2), and the Biblical view of the world (negative: Gal. 1:4), the storm troopers engaged all three in an aggressive, militant warfare that put the “educated class” into intellectual spasms.

Virginia, the state that had tried to maintain an Anglican church-state set up, sported 227 Baptist churches by 1793 with

23,000 members. That is, there were 23,000 people in Virginia before 1880 who no more believed the Roman Catholic church was “holy” or “apostolic” than they believed Benedict Arnold was an evangelist.59

In Connecticut, where Baptist preachers had been whipped through the streets, 124 independent Baptist churches cropped up with 21,660 members. In New York between 1762 and 1794 eighty- four Baptist churches were established with 5,200 members. A Huguenot converted to the Baptist faith (John Gano) pastored for awhile in New York (1787) and then moved to Kentucky. Suddenly that state was running over with Bible-believing Baptists. Jeremiah Vardeman baptized 8000 converts; Gilbert Mason, 4000 converts; James Coleman, 4000; and Daniel Buckner, 2500.60 Not one convert was a baby, not one convert believed in masses or purgatory, not one convert prayed to Mary, not one convert thought that “sacraments” were a part of any Christian religion, and not one convert saw or read any Bible in his lifetime but a King James 1611 Authorized Version.

Baptist preachers decided that Kentucky and Tennessee were not far enough from home base. Rev. J.L. Shuck and I. J. Roberts went to Canton, China. Clopton, Pearcy, Johnson and Whilden went to Shanghai, and John Day and A.L. Jones established local churches in Liberia and Sierra Leone in Africa.61

Quillan, Bagby and Bowen set up mission stations in Rio de Janeiro, Santa Barbara, Bahia and Macio in Brazil; Westrup and Powell went out with twelve missionaries to Mexico and preached to Catholics in Saltillo, Patos, Parras, and other places.62 Dr. W.N. Cote even set up a local independent Baptist church in Rome, and from this work missionary stations were established in Milan, Venice, Bologna, Modena, Capri, Bari, Barletta and on the Island of Sardinia.63 Local Baptist churches popped up in Tasmania (Rev. H. Dowling), New Zealand (Rev. J. Thornton) and Queensland (Steward and Wilson). Not even Roman Catholic Spain escaped the assault of the old King James 1611 AV. W. J. Knapp opened a local church with thirty-three members in Madrid. Churches followed in Alicante, La Scala and Valencia.64

John Mason Peck (1789-1838) organized a church in St. Louis in 1818 and then traversed Missouri, Illinois, and Indiana setting up Sunday schools and Bible societies; all of them were anti-Catholic.65 A society formed by Peck and Johnathan Going (the American Baptist Home Mission Society) sent fifty missionaries into Canada, Ohio, Mexico, Michigan, Central America and the Caribbean.66

One cannot properly evaluate the work of these Bible-believing missionaries if he does not remember that the local churches they set up were INDEPENDENT, BIBLE-BELIEVING Baptist churches. The great branches of the Northern and Southern Baptist Conventions in America in the twentieth century had their taproots in the work of these independent Bible-believing Baptists who would no more brag about “members” like Harry Truman (Baptist), Jimmy Carter (Baptist) and Martin Luther King, Jr., (Baptist) than they would brag about Judas, Nero, Bob Ingersoll or Karl Marx.

German Baptists (1800-1890) migrated eastward into the Russian empire and told every Lutheran and Greek Orthodox member they met (as well as Roman Catholic) that baby sprinkling saved no one and that “sacraments” were no more sacred than sackcloth.67 Friederich Wilhelm Baedecker (1823-1906) was one of the Russian circuit riders who held evangelistic services all over Russia. He encouraged the fiercely persecuted “Stundists"(German and Russian Baptists in Russia) and toured the convict camps in Siberia68 preaching to the prisoners. [At this time (1890-1900) there were less than ten convict camps and there were no “concentration camps” under any czar; there are more than 100 at this present writing and they contain a conservative estimate of 1,000,000 prisoners.69 You guessed it: the Communist party “liberated” Russia.]

With this great wave of aggressive Biblical evangelism and church planting came the inevitable education; but since the founding of colleges and seminaries is outside the scope of this present history (the history of the New Testament church) we shall not go into details. There were 180 denominational “Christian” schools in existence in the USA by 1860; there are now more than twice that number. Following the established law of historical cycles, education must follow evangelism; a burning desire to read and write sprang up all over America as soon as an evangelist passed through an area or as soon as a local church sprang up in an area. American primary, elementary and high schools originally came from the work of these Bible preaching pastors, teachers and evangelists.70 Education and the Bible were so closely associated in America between 1600-1860 that a man was not considered to be educated unless he could make a dozen references to the scriptures. Bibles were as common in the “little red school house” as the apple and the hickory stick. The “McGuffy Readers” still bear witness to the desire of American mothers and fathers to raise children who knew how to read and write, within a CHRISTIAN context.

The history of the individual schools in America, which were founded following the two Great Awakenings, is basically the same history no matter who writes it or who interprets it. Frontier evangelism was followed by the setting up of small schools which grew into large ones. At the beginning they were founded and staffed by members of churches in the area. No teacher would have been called in from another city or state to teach unless they were first examined by Bible-believing parents and teachers in that region. When these schools became big, many joined together for power and authority, better school supplies, teachers’ working conditions, tax exemption, living expenses, etc. The professional educators from the pagan Northeast came in with their backgrounds (after 1850) in Universalism, Unitarianism, Catholicism and Deism. “High” schools and colleges were developed and then universities and “seminaries” followed. (Education is big business; the longer you keep the kid in school the more money mommy and daddy have to pay.) And finally, Horace Afonn (1796-1859), with an apostate Massachusetts crew, stepped in such things as “accreditation” and “standards” and “enriched curriculum” and “values clarifications,” etc., for the purpose of making a multi-million dollar business out of producing educated animals whose relativistic views enabled them to justify ANY set of principles. Later whole communities and school systems were turned over to the federal government to encourage children to believe in evolution11 (anti-Biblical), tolerance of Rome (anti- Biblical), international socialism (anti-Biblical), sexual perversion and immorality12 (anti-Biblical), and no absolute authority revealed from God (anti-Biblical).73 The public school system became the federal school soviet and by 1980 it was costing the taxpayer $40,000,000,000 a year in paying for 8,000 assaults on teachers and 15,000 assaults on pupils (in one year!!) and in order to produce illiterate “jungle bunnies” who had to be backed by a police force in order to hold down a job after they graduated.

But this is another history. It has nothing to do with church history. It is “ANTI-CHURCH HISTORY” (see Vol. I, p. 12-19).

The storm troopers from Philadelphia belong to church history. They charged the ramparts with such vigor and ferocity that in 1864 a papal encyclical with a "Syllabus of Errors” was issued by Pope Pius IX condemning every American who believed in separation of church and state74 and attacking everyone on earth who believed he could choose his own religious beliefs by acts of free will.75 This papal encyclical and syllabus has never been abrogated,

nullified, amended, revised or rescinded by any pope, priest, bishop or archbishop since it was issued. John Paul accepts it as a divine fiat from God76 and he would lie like a dog if he denied any part of its decrees or statements on Catholic convictions. The 100,000,000- 200,000,000 Catholic laymen are the only people who don’t know that such “convictions” are a part of the official religious beliefs of their own superiors; these statements were drawn up by Catholic church leaders to whom allegiance is owned by every member of the church.77

So before taking up a study of the last half of the nineteenth century and the work of those Christians involved in the main assault (Spurgeon, Moody, Torrey, Sunday, Sam Jones, Gen. Booth, C. T. Studd, Talmage and others), it will be in order to backtrack for a moment and pick up the train again of that great Mother of Harlots (Rev. 17) and “abominations of the earth” (Rev. 17); that great religious prostitute who sits on seven mountains (Rev. 17:9), who drinks the blood of saints and martyrs (Rev. 17:6) and who “reigneth over the kings of the earth” (Rev. 17:18). Down, for a while, but “not out,” old “Holy” Mother church was still occupied with her eternal mission: putting out lights as fast as God turns them on (Vol. I, p. 165-178).

CHAPTER SIX

CATHOLIC CONSPIRACIES AND COUNTER OFFENSIVES

“Ye are of your father the devil, and the lusts of your father ye will do. He was a murderer from the beginning, and abode not in the truth, because there is no truth in him. When he speaketh a lie, he speaketh of his own: for he is a liar, and the father of it.” (John 8:44)

On the 28th day of June 1979 (previous to Catholic bishops sending for a Fatima statue of Mary to tour Pensacola) the Catholic Standard of Washington, D.C., reported that Bishop Rene Gracida of the Pensacola-Tallahassee diocese (no such thing as a “diocese” exists anywhere in the New Testament) had purchased five full page ads in five Florida newspapers (Gannett publishers) to advertise his personal opposition to capital punishment. It was printed. The bishop printed statements that went flatly against all established Catholic doctrine and practise as set forth by his own church for fifteen centuries. The archbishop of San Antonio (one rank above Gracida in the hierarchy) did not mince words in dealing with such non-Catholic heresies. He said, “...To say that the U.S. hierarchy as such is opposed to capital punishment is just a PLAIN LIE.” The hierarchy had already outvoted Bishop Gracida on November 19, 1974,2 and even before that date.

But Bishop Gracida in his article had gone far beyond lying about his religion and opposing capital punishment. Pretending that he was an authority on Protestant morals, he stated that it was a SIN for anyone to teach that a government had the right to take the lives of murderers. When the bishop was answered scripturally from the word of God (in an ad paid for by the Pensacola Bible Institute), the following immediately appeared in the national Catholic propaganda sheet Our Sunday Visitor. Headlines! “Fanning the flames of BIGOTRY in Florida! Fundamentalist rakes church bishop over the COALS for opposing death penalty”!3 Monsignor Solana said the advertisement in the News Journal, paid for by Bible believers, was “SLANDEROUS” and “contrary to the FACTS of history and the spirit of Catholicism.”

And there the matter ended.

Was there any lawsuit for “slander”? Of course not. Anyone could prove in court with documented evidence from Roman Catholic books (nihil obstat) that it is Rome who literally raked Christians over literal “coals” and it is Rome who has displayed down through the centuries the greatest examples of BIGOTRY the world has ever known.4 No priest would even think of debating in public the matter of capital punishment with a Bible believer, let alone risking it in a courtroom.4-5

Now, this little incident well illustrates again the way in which Catholic historians handle church history. As we noted earlier (p. 5, 6), the Catholic church’s strong suit is the ignorance of its membership. Jerry Butterfield, a Roman Catholic, commented on the paid ad in the News Journal by saying that it was the rearing up of a “contorted, bigoted face in a very flagrant matter.” You understand that it was all right for some self-righteous idiot of a bishop to contradict Roman Catholic doctrine and practise for fifteen centuries; it was all right for him to accuse Paul of lying (Rom. 13:1-6); it was all right for him to accuse Bible believers of “sin"; and it was all right for him to accuse an honest writer of SLANDER, but it was a “contorted face of a bigot” that was showing itself when he himself was rebuked by the Bible for his hypocrisy and his stupidity. (Typical Catholic “spirit” or the “spirit of Catholicism.”)

The outstanding thing about Our Sunday Visitor’s way of handling the conflicting ads was the fact that Our Sunday Visitor didn’t quote one thing that the bishop had written. Not a word. Though Butterfield and Solana both knew that the Roman church had always believed in killing people and had always practised it,5 neither man would dare correct his own bishop because he was a Catholic bishop. Gracida’s lying simply had to be covered up, or at least an alibi invented for it. The bishop himself declined comment on the ad because it was Biblical and Protestant. (That is, he was not intelligent enough to handle it and neither were Solana or Butterfield.) Although the bishop’s letter was an attack on the New Testament,6 a contradiction of Paul’s teachings, an accusation against Bible believers, and a perversion of the teachings of Jesus Christ, Monsignor Solana insisted that it was not an attack on ANYONE’S belief.

Liars are born as well as made.

Now the lesson that one learns from this little interchange of twentieth century correspondence is that when Catholic historians or writers deal with an issue, they count on the ignorance of their readers to carry them through to a pro-Catholic conclusion. Our

Sunday Visitor didn’t cite one verse of scripture for or against capital punishment; it didn’t cite one Bible verse to justify the lying of a Catholic bishop; it didn’t refer to one verse in either Testament to prove that anyone had been slandered or that any bigots were present—not even a verse from their own Bible. The editors did not even give one citation in the history of their church or any other church where any church believed in or didn’t believe in capital punishment. They mentioned only the “spirit of charity” and “interfaith cooperation”—which had nothing to do with Gracida’s lying or anything to do with the Biblical answer to his lying. Solana made mention of what he called “facts of history” but didn’t give one historical fact from any history book written by anyone. He was counting on the pure ignorance of his readers to get them around the truth.

A “bigot,” to the hypocrites who publish Our Sunday Visitor, is someone who has historical and Biblical facts to back up their opinions.

When the pro-Roman Catholic church historian Latourette wants to prove that a Jesuit cardinal favored the American democracy, he cites Cardinal Bellarmine as saying that “the people” have a right “to change an aristocracy into a democracy.”7 Bellarmine is quoted as saying that government “depends on the consent of THE PEOPLE to decide.”

And there Latourette leaves it.

Why? Why didn’t he cite Bellarmine’s statements on universal subjection (by armed force) to one ruler and death for those who wouldn’t be subject?8 Di d any cardinal in the history of Catholicism ever really believe in any democracy? Is the Catholic church a “democracy”? Was it ever? Of course, the Jesuit Cardinal Bellarmine would like to see a monarchy or an aristocracy overthrown by “the people” if it was an ANTI-CATHOLIC monarchy. (Bellarmine was referring to James I when he said the above!) Turn the coin over. Do you think any Jesuit cardinal would like to see a Roman Catholic monarch (Louis XIV or Franz Joseph for example) run out of office if he was dedicated to tithing to Rome or to killing Huguenots? Hardly.9

Catholic historians all follow one pattern; it is based on “omissions.” A statement is made and then left undocumented, pro or con. It is made to implant a doubt in the mind of the reader and then count on his ignorance to bring him to a papal conclusion.9-5 Thus, the most important thing in a writing of Catholic history is the avoiding of going into detail about what the Catholic church really believes and teaches or what the hierarchy practises or what it would like to practise. These details must be avoided at any cost. Reading

Catholic accounts of “church history” is kind of like shaving with a banana.

When the Japanese got sick and tired of Jesuits trying to take over the Japanese government,10 they took Franciscans and Jesuits to Nagasaki (1586) and crucified them; several churches were destroyed and efforts were made by the Emperor Hieyoshi to deport all Catholic missionaries.11 Why? Is there anyone gullible enough to think this was done just because these “holy, good, godly dedicated men” were “preaching the Gospel” and suffering for “Christ’s sake”? Well, if we are to believe professional liars like Monsignor Solana {Our Sunday Visitor, 1979) it was because someone had “fanned the flames of bigotry” by erecting a “flagrant and contorted face” and “slandering” (that is the old gas) the “spirit of the Catholic Church.”12 Was that really the case? Well, Latourette, the pro­Catholic historian, says that the real trouble was that a merchant marine pilot from a Spanish galleon had made an unpardonable blunder (“incredibly tactless remark” is the way13 the pro-Catholic historian writes it for “refined sensibilities”). He had informed the Japanese authorities that before the king of Spain annexed foreign countries he usually sent in missionaries first to wean the inhabitants from their old religious alliances.14

And there Latourette drops it just like a hot poker.

Obviously the reader is to throw up his hands and cry out, “Oh, the slanderous fool! Who could believe such a terrible lie!”

Latourette didn’t say it was a lie.

He said it was an incredibly TACTLESS remark.

(Shall we try it another way? "It was the God’s honest truth put over the plate waist high.”)

Students of church history might throw up their hands at such a remark, but then they would say, “Well, that has been the standard practise of Rome for 1500 years. So what?”'5 No American student of church history in the United States ever has to worry about some silly, two-faced bishop suing him for “slander” when he states historical facts concerning the bloody killer on seven mountains (Rev. 17). They are documented (Manhattan, Lambert, Blanshard, Chiniquy, etc.) by the ream. Furthermore, the monsignor knows they are documented and he knows they can be produced in a courtroom.16 That is why no Catholic bishop or priest in England or America has ever sued any Protestant in a public court for "slandering the Catholic church” one time since 1700 A.D. They wouldn’t dare.16-5 Catholic silence is consent. It is a matter of lying low till one is able to spring on the prey. The trick is to make the membership think that the church is pious and spiritual and is being

persecuted by unfair “bigots.” Lack of involvement with scripture and scriptural truth is a strong suit since it will prevent the membership from studying the scripture to determine the facts. No Catholic leader gets involved in Bible discussions publicly: Hitler and Mussolini never did.xl

When the last Catholic monarch was dumped from the English throne (James II) and future Catholics were forbidden to occupy that throne, England began to ascend in world power until she “ruled the waves.” Losing the thirteen colonies in 1776 didn’t even slow her down economically or geographically. The German rulers from Hanover (Protestant North Germany) guided England into the greatest worldwide dominion ever seen on this earth. France and Spain, both controlled by Roman Catholic rulers (1400-1789), gradually slipped out of the driver’s seat and fell by the roadside. Except for a short revival of military power and might under the Roman Catholic Napoleon and the Catholic Sun King (Louis XIV),18 France never recovered any of her former glory. In 1870 Bismark (Protestant North Germany) put the French Catholics down after putting Austria (Catholic South Germany) down.19 And if it had not been for the intervention of the United States in 1917, Germany would have taken France over completely, and perhaps shortly thereafter England as well, for by 1917 England had abandoned her anti-Catholic stand (1904) and was publishing the Roman Catholic Greek text of the Jesuits on her foreign mission fields.

Now all of this belongs to the realm of secular history and yet anyone acquainted with international politics, foreign ambassadors and statesmen knows that technically one cannot say that “England took over” or “Spain attacked Holland” or “Prussia attacked Austria.” No piece of dirt, mud, sand or underbrush which sprouted trees, bushes, grass or crops ever attacked another piece of real estate. Wars are started by PEOPLE, as murders are committed by people: guns do not “commit” murder. Nations are led into wars by individuals and it is the counsel and decisions of individuals that bring a war about. Nothing is less enlightening than a college or high school textbook that talks about “Austria and Germany against Russia” or “Russia and Austria against France” or “France against Germany and England” (or later “Japan and Germany against America,” etc.). When you begin to discuss these matters from the standpoint of REALITY you must look behind the map of the world and examine the training, motives, backgrounds, teachings, philosophies and actions of individual men who are involved in

CA THOLIC CONSPIRACIES AND COUNTER OFFENSIVES 83 bringing conflicts or treaties into substance. For example: after a political organization as large and powerful as the Roman Catholic church had been (the Holy Roman Empire) suddenly loses its hold over a whole nation of people (Great Britain) and that nation comes into possession of the largest navy and colonial possessions in the world, are we to think that this organization—composed of individual popes, bishops, cardinals, Jesuit priests, archbishops, nuns, monks and “nuncios”—is going to say, “Well, Romans 8:28! Let’s get back to preaching, prayer and Bible study”?

For example: by 1760 the Roman Catholic church had lost half of Germany, all of England and Scotland, much of Ireland and the vast majority of the populace in the thirteen colonies; also her situation was so shaky in France that in less than twenty years a popular revolution confiscated all of her property. Now, if you and your friends were part and parcel of a fifteen century old political body that had controlled the kings and queens of France, England and Ireland for that long, would you suddenly do an about-face and say, “Help yourself, God bless you, we always did believe in private ownership of property and a people’s democracy?” If you said it, who would believe you that knew anything about your past?

Here in the Philadelphia church period are 10,000 Bible­believing pastors, teachers, missionaries and evangelists tearing all over the globe with King James Bibles in their hands (Chap. 5) and they are getting Catholics, Protestants, Hindus, Buddhists, Taoists, Moslems and even Mongols (James Gilmore, missionary to Mongolia: 1843-1891) converted right and left while Jerome’s poor old New ASV (the Douay Rheims of 1582) is rotting in the Vatican waiting for Tischendorf to come around and look at it and pretend that it is worth “a fiddler’s bitch.” If you were in the shoes of anyone in the Vatican hierarchy at this time (1800-1900) wouldn’t you make some organized effort to reinstate Jerome’s African text from Origen and get rid of the hated Receptus of Erasmus? Don’t be a bigot; be a liberal: put yourself in the other fellow’s shoes and look at it from HIS standpoint!

Now we mention these things so that if any of our readers happen to have “refined sensibilities” they will be prepared for what is to follow. What is to follow goes by two different names: 1.) Historical facts and 2.) Slander. If you are a Bible believer you can check the historical facts and if you are a Roman Catholic you don’t dare. All anti-Catholic “facts” are “SLANDER” in the eyes of the hierarchy.20

General MacArthur said once that since the beginning of time

men have searched for peace but that the problem of peace was basically theological.2' Who then would be more involved in the world’s “peace plans” than a church? In MacArthur’s generation there stood up John Kennedy, who addressed the General Assembly of the United Nations (September 22, 1963) with the shocking statement that “we do not hesitate to condemn RELIGIOUS injustice.”22 What did “we” refer to in Kennedy’s speech? The church of which he and every member of his family was a member? Why that church not only practised killing and cursing Christians but it also stated in its decrees and canon laws that all Bible believers were HERETICS if they were anti-Catholic and should be killed.22 Did Kennedy know anything about the theology of the church he belonged to?24 MacArthur said “peace” was a theological problem.

Did John Kennedy know about the Cathari whom his bishops and popes burned in France in 1002, 1077, 1114 and in 1172? Did he know that one of his “Holy Fathers” (Alexander III) had cursed every Bible-believing Albigensen in France?25 Where was Johnnie educated? Was he “educated”? Where were the “Kennedys” when Gregory IX (April 1233) sent out professional inquisitors into France with power over the police, dukes, nobles, counts and magistrates to make them torture and kill non-Catholics? When 200 Christians were burned on one funeral pyre at Montsegur (1244), what member of the Kennedy clan pleaded their cause with “religious injustice”?26

Now we have marked out how these matters are handled by historians (Vol. I, pp. 301-307), “Back in those days...it was the spirit of the times, etc.” and then the historian tries to summon evidence to show that everyone acted like that. For example, Latourette says that Luther advocated burning Jewish schools.27 How are we to take this? Did he burn any? Did the Lutheran church adopt this as official teaching? In 1554-1555 (contemporaneous with Luther) Pope Pius V ordered enforced baptism of the Jews or else....28 In Rome 2,430 Jews got baptized with the pope baptizing some of them himself. Luther himself didn’t enforce any baptism and didn’t burn down one Jewish school anywhere. Why did Latourette bring the matter up?

Bloody Mary (1555), another contemporary of Luther, burned 250 Protestants at the stake. Quickie quiz: Name any three Protestant rulers anywhere in the history of mankind that ever burned half that many Catholics at the stake. In 1534 Francis /had a banquet with his Catholic bishops and then burned thirty-five Lutherans at the stake.29 What Lutheran ruler in 1534 burned half

CA THOLIC CONSPIRA C1ES AND COUNTER OFFENSIVES 85 that number of Catholics at the stake? Why the difference in attitude, conduct and approach if the “spirit of the times” determined the actions? Simple: the “spirit of Catholicism” (see Our Sunday Visitor, notes 1-5) is SATANIC: it is never “out of date.” When Pope Clement VIII said that “liberty of conscience is the worst thing in the world,”30 no Lutheran, Calvinist, Baptist or Mennonite agreed with him. Why? Was Clement VIII out of whack with the “spirit of the times ’! Well, if he was then why did Pope Pius IX (166 years later!) say that no man could have the liberty to choose his own religion according to the dictates of his conscience?31 Is an honest historian to suppose there had been no change in the “times” from 1598 to 1864?

Could you get an evolutionist to believe that?

What is the spirit of the “times” now? Here are three incredible Catholic bigots talking about “downtrodden masses, economic oppression, social inequalities,” and the duty of the rich to “share” with the “have-nots” while their ruler and head lives in a 1400 room mansion where he has a nineteen room apartment; he drives ten private cars, uses 100 private telephones, owns a water supply company and a gas company in Rome, plus whole blocks of houses.32 Is this good “Christian sharing” with the “downtrodden masses”? Would Marx and Lenin approve? Is this “THE PEOPLE’S POPE”? Pope Paul VI (living in this setup) had the “flagrant, contorted bigotry” (see note 3) to say that “no one is justified in keeping for his exclusive use what he does not need when others lack necessities.”33 Could anything be more hypocritical? Who could get away with such religious rot but a. professional actor whose church members live in total darkness of the truth? The Vatican’s annual payroll is $7,250,000 a year, excluding $800,000,000 income to the church itself.

Now canon law states that separation of church and state is a heresy.34 No pope could have honestly backed up the Bill of Rights or the American Declaration of Independence even if 5,000,000 Catholics in America had been “patriotic Americans.” The one Catholic who signed the Declaration sinned against the religious convictions of his own church.35 According to all papal decrees and canon laws, the pope has the right to regulate the consciences of every Catholic in the USA (or anywhere else) and, if possible, to enforce executions on them as heretics if they teach separation of church and state.36 That is, when you cite Catholic papal decrees and Catholic canon laws37 you “slander the spirit of Catholicism,” if we are to believe professional liars like Gracida, Butterfield and

Solana (notes 1-5). If the reader should ever wonder why certain enlightened readers in nations get upset about the mention of the Jesuits he should study that society for awhile until he is able to form an intelligent opinion.38 Furthermore, an opinion had better be formed immediately (1981) for there are more Jesuits in America than there are in Italy or Spain, and according to Rev. Pedro Arrupe they were invited by the Communist government of Red China to come back into that country (Shanghai) this year (AP, March 1979) after overtures had been made to China from Presidents Nixon and Carter. No Congressman made any comment.

With the rise of the national states and the rise of nationalism and patriotism (1600-1900), the pope’s problem once again became as complicated as it had been in the period following the Crusades (Vol. I, p. 288-290). The problem was how to overthrow these national governments and regain control of them by replacing their leaders with Roman Catholics. To this end all of the efforts of the hierarchy were bent from 1582 to 1990 A.D. In the background, therefore, behind the outworkings of “European diplomacy” from 1582 to the present will be found the Vatican hierarchy; now blaming the “liberals” or the “radical elements” in the church for anything (and everything) that goes wrong in her relationships,39 now ducking issues and claiming immunity from criticism on the grounds that “the majority of Catholics don’t feel that way,” now hollering “persecution” when she is caught red-handed in acts of revolution, fraud or treachery, and, above all, blaming “nationalism” (or “bad rulers”) for all the ills of the world including war and poverty.40

When one considers history seriously and soberly he can see that it is of no advantage to ANY pope for peace to come on this earth between nations unless the pope himself and his church are in the pilot’s cockpit when the “peace” comes. To the contrary, it is to every advantage to the Roman church to keep two major nations always at each other’s throats as long as neither will submit to papal domination. When a pope offers to be a “mediator” between nations at the United Nations it simply means he offers his services as an international dictator—free of charge; a man who wears a gold crown and lives in a fourteen room apartment doesn’t need a salary. After all, Jesuit theology teaches that a bad action is all right as long as a good will is “intended” and that deception can always be practised if it is in a “justifiable cause.”41

Every pope’s confessor is a J ESUIT J2

Now the sum total of all of this is that throughout Europe in the Philadelphia church period the Roman Catholic church had to adopt a different means of keeping rulers at each others throats than by the time-honored methods of threatening them with excommunication and interdiction (Vol. I, p. 249-251). First of all, Catholics simply formed armies to kill Protestants; the Treaty of Augsburg (1555) and the Treaty of Westphalia were signed in order to stop this, but they didn’t stop it for no pope ever recognized the Treaty of Westphalia as valid.^ No pope has to accept ANY treaty between nations as valid if the terms are not dictated by the Roman Catholic hierarchy.

Now comes the $64,000 question: how do you bring in “peace on earth” when you have a religious politician to deal with (who claims to have power over 400,000,000 subjects) who tells you that your treaties are no good? In 1598 the Edict of Nantes given by Henry IV granted religious toleration to the French Bible believers—remember Kennedy’s speech on “religious justice?”— although it was not “the spirit of the times.” Promptly Pope Clement VIII labeled it as the “most cursed edict” that he could imagine.44

Is this a sincere attempt to maintain “domestic tranquility” by a pope who always talks about “peace on earth” at Christmas time? Are we to believe that Pope Clement accidently said this when he knew that seventy-five percent of the nation he was addressing had been confirmed into a church that made them “subject” of a Roman “RULER”? (Speaking of “incredibly TACTLESS remarks”!)

The Thirty Years War (1618-1648), which killed off one-third of the population of Germany, was triggered in a very simple way [riots in Londonderry and Belfast (1970-1982) follow the same pattern],

A Catholic king (Rudolph II, 1576-1612) violated an oath which he had sworn not to molest Protestants.45 It wasn’t considered to be a big thing, for no Catholic is obligated to keep an oath to anyone if it interferes with Catholic “power plays” or political designs.46 So, a Benedictine abbot (Reli) ordered a ceremonial Catholic demonstration through a town near Bavaria that was eighty-five percent Protestant—against the orders of the town magistrates (see Ireland, civil rights marches, Ku Klux Klan, etc.). When the marchers were attacked (1607), Maximilian of Bavaria occupied the town (Donnauworth) for the pope, annexed it to Bavaria, confiscated all of the Protestant churches, installed Jesuits in all of the churches, and compelled the Protestants to

evacuate and take their goods with them. This was a flagrant violation of the Treaty of Augsburgf1 but Pope Innocent X (1644- 1655) had declared that ALL anti-Catholic clauses in ALL treaties between ALL nations are invalid. Whatever was not in the interest of the Catholic hierarchy and its plan for world domination was “illegal” in a treaty.48

The same gang of religious cutthroats stated at the Vatican II council (1967) that “the Church reproves as foreign to the mind of Christ any harassment of men because of their religion.”49 Could anything be more preposterous? This is “the Church” that started a thirty year war (which killed more than 6,000,000 people) for the simple reason that “the Church” could not control ALL of the schools and churches in Germany and Austria.50 No sooner was the Thirty Years War over than Lainez and Salmeron (two Jesuit scholars) began in 1649 to teach at the Bavarian University of Ingolstadt51—whose most outstanding alumnus, Adam Weishaupt (1748-1830), was the founder of the Illuminati, according to the Encyclopedia Brittanica. Weishaupt was a former Jesuit himself. The Jesuit Peter Canis brought Bavaria further back into the Roman zoo by pretending that Rome would no longer kill Christians. He founded colleges and institutions and sprinkled his books with Biblical texts that were “uncontroversial.” It fooled thousands. In a few short years the University at Ingolstadt was able to pass laws forbidding any Bible-believing Protestant from teaching there; this guaranteed that the entire higher educated segment of the Bavarian populace would be raised Roman Catholic: they were.52

In 1570 Graz had been ninety-eight percent Protestant with only twenty Catholic families in it. The Jesuits prevailed upon Archduke Charles (1573) to found a Jesuit college there and then employ only Catholics at the college, as well as in his court. This Jesuit college became a university (like Loyola in New Orleans) in 1586, and when enough Catholics had graduated from it to form a block of the “educated class,” Charles gave them government positions. Immediately they passed laws confining citizenship in Graz to Catholics alone (see Hitler’s Nuremberg Laws).53 In 1599, Ferdinand had closed all Protestant churches and chapels in Graz and exiled 800 educated Protestants from their hometown. The moral of this is: if you tolerate JESUITS, you have given your approval to the overthrowing of the peace of the town, state and nation in which you dwell, unless you are already under a Roman Catholic church-state.

Rene Descartes was educated at the Jesuit college of La Fleche.54 Leibnitz took up Descartes’ “two substance” theory (mechanical and spiritual) and David Hume followed with the mechanical function only.55 The Jesuits approved of Descartes because he theorized against Luther and Calvin.56 The fact that he was a Bible-rejecting, Christ-denying philosopher meant nothing to the Jesuits. Double standards can allow for anything.

The great political victories for Roman Catholicism between 1550-1890 were plainly in Latin and South America. These countries were so subjugated to Rome’s ecclesiastical fascism that Bible believers have never constituted five percent of their population. While the United States passed through Puritan forms of local church government, evangelistic awakenings, missionary successes with the Indians, and the conversions of thousands of immigrants and pioneers to Biblical Christianity, the masses of Mexico, Central America and South America remained in absolute spiritual darkness—Catholic darkness: Catholic crosses mixed with Voodoo crosses, prayers to dead saints mixed with prayers to dead giants, and Catholic beads and rosaries added to beads and rosaries they had been using 200 years before the Santa Maria docked in San Salvador.57 Catholic dollies had been added to the shelf of images given them by the Mayas, Incas and Aztecs, and such a dearth of knowledge of either Testament remained there that, to this day, there are not ten orthodox Catholics in South America who know who the Antichrist is, where he will come from, what he does when he comes, or how long he does it.58 There are grade school children in Hyles-Anderson Schools (1980) who know more about the Second Coming of Christ than the entire body of Catholic bishops and archbishops in Mexico.

Columbus named his first two discoveries "Saint Saviour”(for Jesus) and "Saint Mary of the Conception” (for Mary).59 He did this because as a Catholic he was interested in the spread of “our holy faith.” To prove his devotion he took Franciscans to the West Indies with him.60

Now here the reader must understand what “OUR HOLY FAITH” means (see Our Sunday Visitor, notes 1-4) because the “holy faith” that Columbus and his Franciscans spread is the “faith” of 500-1500 A.D.—the Dark Ages (see Vol. I, pp. 398-400). Having already given North, South and Central America to the Catholic king of Spain as his own personal possession—thereby excluding Holland, England, Germany, France, Scotland, Norway, Sweden, Russia and Ireland from having any colonies—the pope also

proceeded to give his loyal Catholic subject (Ferdinand) the West Indies, Hawaii, and Greenland.61 The Vicar of Christ (it was held) had “authority over ALL men”;62 therefore, he could give away anybody’s country or any continent (with their populations) to anyone he pleased. Those who think that this was just “the spirit of the times” (1492) should read about the Vatican Council that was held under Pope Pius IX and also the Great Encyclical Letters of Leo XIII (1878-1903). These two gentlemen state that the Roman Catholic church has the power and authority to enforce her own laws so as to control the art, music, and education of all statesmen and rulers, plus the power to guide their thoughts, words and actions.63 Further, that no government (the USA included) has the right to try or sentence any monk, nun, priest, or bishop for ANY crime.64 “The spirit of the times” (Pope Alexander V, 1492 and Pope Clement X, 1676) evidently has very little to do with the megalomania of the popes. The Papal Decree of Infallibility (1870) was dictated by the pope himself65 for his own benefit. Psychotic egomaniacs are not all confined to mental institutions.

Now this was the nature of Columbus’ “holy faith.” It was the nature of Xavier’s “missionary excursions.” The “holy faith” to the hierarchy is not just a reference to the fundamental truths of the New Testament where they deal with Christ’s person and work; it is the entire body of Catholic teaching,66 including perversions of the New Testament from the church fathers,67 forged documents by Catholics,68 papal decrees and encyclicals, church councils,69 and anti-Biblical traditions, plus the teaching that salvation depends upon obeying the Church (i.e., the hierarchy headed up by the pope).70 Such statements in America are called “slander” by the gullible and naive laymen in the church whose piety and devotional lives are related to the Bible and Christ. They all continually make the mistake of reading their own private spiritual lives and attitudes into the convictions and goals of the hierarchy. The hierarchy is a Fascist totalitarian state set on absolute domination of the entire world. You can only call that “slander” if you reject what the Church has written about itself and published with the imprimatur of her own bishops (nihil obstat).70-5

The Indian converts from the Spaniards did not join any local New Testament assemblies; they submitted to the domination of a foreign state. In spite of the fact that every truly converted Indian was a “PRIEST’ (1 Pet. 2:3-8), they were excluded from “the priesthood.”71 They were granted communion, confession and “extreme unction,”72 but no Indian could hold offices in the church

until after 1590. The Catholic missionaries who spread this “gospel” (not Gal. 1:8-10 or 1 Cor. 15:1-6) and the “Christian message” (not Eph. 3, Gal. 4, 1 Tim. 2 and Rev. 17) were Bartholomew de Las Casas (1474-1566), who constantly had to deal with Indian revolutions against Spanish Catholics; Cabeza De Vaca, who was imprisoned by Catholics and sent back to Catholic Spain for being too liberal with the Indians;73 Bernal Boil; Pedro De Cordoba; Marques De Villalobos; Marin De Valencia; Tomas Ortiz and others. The Jesuits showed up in the new world in 1550 and immediately moved into Mexico City (1572) and set up schools to guarantee that the capital would be solidly Roman Catholic with all “religious rights” of all other religious groups curtailed or destroyed altogether.74 Cortez declared that the Franciscans had baptized more than a million persons. By 1586 one Catholic bragged that nearly nine million had been baptized,75 and Bishop Julian Garces of Tlaxcala claimed to have baptized 15,000 Mexicans a year.76 Peter of Ghent boasted about baptizing 14,000 in one day; Pope Paul III naturally (1537) declared all of these baptisms to be “valid.”

Only a “bigot” would have thought otherwise!

And here the reader again should take stock from his library shelf of church history books. What is “baptism” according to the popes, the Franciscans, the missal, the Dominicans, the Jesuits, Catholic Action, the Brothers Minor, the Augustinians, Discalced Carmelites and the “Order of St. John of God”? Simple: It is water sprinkling to every Catholic on the face of this earth, and in the official creeds and doctrinal statements of all Catholic writings (nihil obstat) it is synonymous with regeneration by the Holy Spirit.11 From the missionary work above you are to gather that 9,000,000 Bible-rejecting pagans were “born again” by the “Holy Spirit” of God even though they (and the church that sprinkled them) have been attacking and slandering Bible-believing Christians ever since that day.78 (Credulity is a wonderful thing; some people almost rank it with “faith.”)

Latourette, the apostate Baptist, states that the reason why Catholic missionaries were not as successful in Georgia and Florida was because “the English MENACE proved disconcerting.”79 What on earth was “the English MENACE”?

He didn’t say.

They never do (see notes 6-13).

The “menace” was a King James Bible and the preaching of Wesley and Whitefield (two Englishmen) with Moravian and Pietist missionaries; that was the “menace.” If anyone wants to see what

happens where “the English menace” (the flagrant “contorted face of a bigot, etc.”) prevents Jesuits from setting up mission stations, let him sit in any one of 100 congregations in Florida (St. Pete, Miami, Jacksonville, Panama City, Tampa, Fort Myers, Dade City, Fort Walton, Lake City, Sarasota, Haines City, Orlando, Pensacola, Tallahassee, etc.) and hear the Premillennial Coming of Jesus Christ preached while adult believers follow the Lord in baptism by immersion. Then let him go to any one of a hundred churches in San Paulo, Mexico City, Durango, Managua, Guadalahara, Tampico, Caracas, Bogota, Lima and Oaxaca and see the black-robed hoods of 1000 A.D. still drinking unbloody blood80 and sprinkling heathen babies in the hopes that John 3:5 is a reference to baptism when the word “baptism" doesn’t occur within ten verses of the passage in either direction (Vol. I, p. 91-100).

The “conversion” of Nicaragua, Guatemala, Costa Rica, Honduras, Venezuela, Spanish Guiana, New Granada, Cartagena, Chile, etc., is the typical 500-1000 A.D. European story repeated with very few appendages. The Catholics helped educate people— by teaching them to read Catholic breviaries, missals and catechisms, not the Bible. The Catholics did charitable works of the ministry—to get more families to submit to the Catholic pope. The Catholics kept out revolutionaries and trouble makers—by sending Catholic inquisitors from Spain. The Catholics raised the moral and spiritual tone of the heathen tribes—by teaching them they would go to hell if they didn’t do good works. The Catholics promoted charitable institutions and established schools and hospitals—by taxing everyone to build a Catholic church-state.

There are two sides to every coin.

The “holy faith” which Columbus brought to the Americas was the faith of Simon De Montfort,81 Clement VIII, Ignatius Loyola, Torquemada and Bloody Mary; none of whom were excommunicated any more than were Franco, Mussolini, Castro or HITLER. You see, it is the documented evidence of history, which can be produced in a court of law, that at the very time that Spanish and Portuguese “missionaries” were “converting” all of the Mexicans and Indians to “the faith,” their church (“the faith”) was murdering Bible believers right and left (1500-1800). In 1560 twelve hundred Huguenots were hanged at Aboise, France. Fifty more were massacred at Vasy (March 1, 1562) because they tried to hold worship services inside the cities where they lived.82 In 1582 a Catholic Bible in English was published in Catholic France to offset the work of Coverdale, Tyndale, the Bishop’s Bible (1568) and the

Geneva Bible (1560) (see Vol. I, p. 369-373). In 1588 (July 21-19) 180 monks and friars (“missionaries”—see above) set sail on the armed galleons of the Spanish Armada to stop “the English menace.” Seven hundred English Catholics joined them in Holland as they crossed the channel to plant the Jesuit Rheims Bible (1582) back in the English Isles.83 This Roman Catholic navy lost 32 ships and 10,185 Catholic soldiers and sailors.84 The Catholic New ASV (Jesuit Bible of 1582) never established its beachhead.

To stop “the English menace,” Roman Catholics in England, led by two Jesuit priests, attempted to kill King James85 and to bomb the English Parliament (1605), as both were “slandering the Catholic spirit, etc.” As we have already noted, the Thirty Years War (1618-1648) began by Catholic rulers violating oaths, violating the terms of the Augsburg Treaty and then by using armed forced against unarmed civilians (notes 45-47). In 1642 the English king (Charles I) attempted to murder his subjects by hiring Catholic armies from overseas.86 Fortunately he failed and had his head cut off (January 30, 1649). In 1660 Charles II denied freedom of worship to Bible-believing dissenters and had Cromwell’s body dug up and decapitated; he also killed a number of Christians who were “anti-Catholic BIGOTS.”87 French Catholics in Canada joined up with the Indians and tried their best to get the Englishmen out of Canada, Nova Scotia and New England.88 You see, “the English menace” was the anti-Catholic English Bible of King James: The 1611 Authorized Version. Even before the French and Indian wars broke out (1756), “freedom of the press” was announced in New York (1735). It was promptly denounced by Pope Gregory X VI and Pope Pius IX" as “heresy."The French and Indian wars terminated in 1763 with the Catholics losing much of Canada and all of the American midwest. This saved Michigan, North and South Dakota, Iowa, Illinois, Wisconsin, and Minnesota from becoming papal possessions. France at this time was ninety-five percent Catholic and under the dominion of Louis XV (1715-1774), who also succeeded in losing Louisiana and India as colonial pos­sessions89-5 During his reign, the territory of Lorraine (between Germany and France) was taken from Austria (a Germanic people) and given to France (a Latin people) at the Treaty of Vienna in 1735.

In 1789 the French Revolution began (June 20) with the mobs of Paris storming the Bastille on July 14th. The Catholic king (Louis XVI) and his family were arrested (June 21, 1791) and were beheaded in 1793. The French Revolution used three hack words as gimmicks for killing: liberty, equality and fraternity. No one got any

liberty, no one came out equal and the “fraternal” aspects of the leaders (Danton, Robespierre, Marat, Voltaire, Rousseau, etc.) resembled a pack of wolves fighting over a dead carcass. The French Revolution set a pace for Europe which continued until the Bolshevist revolution of 1914. In both cases the revolt was against a monarchy under the control of a state church: in France’s case, Roman Catholic and in Russia’s case, Greek Orthodox. To eliminate a discussion of popes, bishops, cardinals and patriarchs and their goals from such operations is the height of madness; it is to slander the name of history. Voltaire (1694-1778) and Moliere (1622-1673) were educated by Catholics. Danton (1759-1794) and Marat (1744-1793) were raised and confirmed as Catholics. Every king in France from 1610 to 1789 was a confirmed Roman Catholic and in submission to the authority of the Roman hierarchy under pain of excommunication or interdict if he didn’t obey.90 There isn’t any question about “the reasons” for the revolution; a corrupt clergy and a corrupt church allied with a corrupt king and a corrupt government couldn’t call for anything else.

The French Revolution was accompanied by the worldwide preaching of the AV in scores of languages. The truth of the matter was that the unsaved humanitarians in America and England wanted to substitute liberalism (humanism) for Biblical Christianity: Quenay in France, Adam Smith in England, plus “scientists” such as Gemlin, Steller, Pallas, Linnaeus, Euler, and philosophers such as Descartes, Leibnitz, Kant and Spinoza. Voltaire, Montesquieu and Rousseau were “socialistic humanitarians” (“do gooders”). Like all Catholics they believed in salvation by works.91 Writers like DeFoe, Pope, Sterne, Goldsmith, Lessing and Klopstock all leaned in this direction. (All unsaved people think alike when looking for answers and solutions to mankind’s problems [see Exodus 20:2, 3 and comments in that Commentary].) But when the Estates General met on August 4, 1789, and gave their Declaration of the Rights of Man (August 26), they came about it with no such Biblical and Baptistic backgrounds as the American Bill of Rights had come from, for the French background was ninety percent Roman Catholic. The French reaction against that Roman Catholicism was an ATHEISTIC declaration that man was his own god and was able to set up his own laws without reference to God or to the Bible.92 Atheism is the logical Communist reaction to Catholicism. French “liberties” were not God-given: they were animal freedoms to be taken for granted on the basis of “dog-eat-dog,” me-first and you-next. And since ninety-eight percent of the active revolutionary leaders were Roman

Catholic, they drafted a limited monarchy in 1790 and then insisted that everyone who was “liberated” still had to pay the salaries of Roman Catholic clerics,93 although the lands and monasteries of the church were confiscated by the state. Thus the French Revolution never came anywhere near the American Bill of Rights or Constitution in its “revolting” (see Chap. 4).

Seeing that all was not yet lost in “La Bella France,” by 1790 the pope got his mafia in Austria to go to work immediately. They began to intervene with the Frenchmen on behalf of the pope’s right to “investiture”94 so that the subversive agents from the Vatican state could continue to operate and work for the overthrow of the new government.95 This Catholic political movement was the real occasion for the Girondist reaction which executed the king, eliminated the birth of Christ as an historical date on the calendar, and began what is called the “Reign of Terror.” Harassed by Roman Catholic politics and politicians from France, Italy and Austria, the Committee of Public Safety (OSH A and HEW) abolished ALL the freedoms they had just advocated in the Declaration.96 Marat was murdered by Danton, and the Roman Catholic Robespierre took over (1794). The Reign of Terror was called the “Brotherhood of Man”97 (see any modern Roman Catholic confession of faith); and although it temporarily killed the power of Roman Catholic imperialism in France, it failed to restore the Bible or belief in the Bible as the cure for France’s troubles. (The Bible is just as anti- Catholic as the “Directory.”)

Now all of this belongs in the realm of anti-church history for it deals with Catholic conspiracies and Catholic counter offensives against the worldwide teaching and preaching of the AV 1611. When Napoleon (a baptized and confirmed Roman Catholic) rose to power, he immediately made a concordant with the pope (as did Adolph Hitler and Benito Mussolini) and then set out, as Charlemagne (baptized and confirmed Roman Catholic) had set out, to “bring in the kingdom” by armed force.9* When Napoleon crowned himself—he didn’t repeat Charlemagne’s Merry Christmas mistake (see Vol. I, p. 222-223)—he was reputed to have put an end to the Holy Roman Empire (December 2, 1805), for if the Holy Papa didn’t get to do the crowning he would claim that the empire was no longer "holy." This is exactly what happened, and in blind, irrational obedience to the dictates of this Roman egomaniac, all of the historians decided that 1805 does mark the end of the “Holy Roman Empire.” There is no need to end it there. It was never holy to start with and it never was an empire to start with. It is in just as good a condition today as it was in 800 A.D. When Napoleon annexed the papal states (1808), he embittered Catholics so that

many of them joined the humanists and atheists to get rid of him." Fortunately, these atheists had a friend in Napoleon’s court who also was a baptized, confirmed Roman Catholic: Talleyrand (1754- 1838). This worthy gentleman—following the Jesuit teaching that the end justifies the means, that oaths are not binding if, etc.— advised revolutionaries against each other and advised Prussia against Napoleon, while serving under Napoleon as his foreign minister.100 It turned out that Protestant Prussian armies at Leipzig (1813) along with Catholic Austrian armies helped put Napoleon on ice for awhile. Moral: If any pope really gets hard pressed he will make ecumenical overtures to Protestants so that he can use their military forces. (That’s a good one!)

It is well known that when the Catholic emperor Napoleon returned from Elba (March 1, 1815) he was defeated by the predominately Protestant Englishmen and Protestant Prussians at Waterloo (June 18, 1815), so immediately a Catholic “holy alliance” was set up under Pope Alexander Ito reinstate the Catholic pope as ruler of a revived “Holy Roman Empire.” He couldn’t get back in, but at least Vienna (in Catholic Austria) was chosen as the center of the alliance which took in Prussia and Russia (and Napoleon had been the originator of this “Holy Alliance”101). (Vienna was chosen again in the 1960’s to be the center for the Nuclear Power Commission of the United Nations. It is in a country where the Catholics outnumber all other religious beliefs by better than 100 to one. You must take off your hat to the Vatican; if their popes are not honest they are certainly industrious.) Napoleon had to set up the “Holy Alliance” for he was the protector of the Catholic church under the terms of the papal concordant which he had signed, exactly as Hitler and Mussolini found it to be. What Napoleon was after was a United States of European Catholics (as Hitler and Charlemagne) with Paris as the capital; the pope quite naturally had Rome in mind.102

Now what rational man would think that ANY pope would want “peace” in Europe during Napoleon’s time, or any other time, when neither England, France, Prussia, Germany nor France would want ROME as the capital of Europe? Wouldn’t it be far better (if you were pope: take the charitable view—put yourself in his shoes for a change!) if Prussia, England, France and Russia were all so depleted of their populations and their resources that they had to come to YOU for help? “Nationalism” was not the dominating factor in “France attacking Austria” or in “England attacking France” (see notes, 19, 20). No, what we have here are individuals: Catholic prime ministers, Catholic bishops, Catholic clerics,

Catholic rulers, and Catholic popes keeping the waters stirred and muddy so that no nation could keep its own peace or keep peace with its neighbors.103 If anyone doubts this let him read the documented evidence given in the works of Avro Manhattan.104 Restoration of the Holy Roman Empire has not only been the goal of all popes since 1805, it is a goal that will be accomplished in the next twenty years by Satan,104-5 since the Bible has already prophesied concerning these matters (2 Thess. 2, Rev. 13, 17). And the capital of this empire will be ROME (Rev. 17) and then Jerusalem, not Berlin, Peking, Moscow, Paris or London.

According to the sprinkled and confirmed Catholic Metternich (1773-1859), the security of Europe lay in keeping peace between Russia and England—nothing else.105 Metternich, therefore, would cooperate with British Protestants and Russian Greek Orthodox Catholics if they would keep away from each other’s throats and let the Catholic pope regain control over Central Europe: Austria, Italy, France, Germany, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Yugoslavia, etc. Hitler’s thinking was exactly the same way when formulating foreign policies that dealt with England.106 Two Catholics (Metternich and Talleyrand) played puss-in-the-corner with Vatican politics for years while the First and Second Great Awakenings were shaking the American continent for God. While Pascal, Boyle, Halley, Leeuwehoek, etc., Racine, Moliere, Dryden, Corneille, etc., and Murillo, Vermeer, Hals, Rembrandt, etc., were helping man to “help man” so that man could be more human to men and bring in a kingdom “where all men, etc., etc.” (see The Sure Word of Prophecy, 1970), the storm troopers of Philadelphia got sinners saved, saints sanctified, men and women interested in the Bible and brought honor and glory to God and His Son the Lord Jesus Christ. In short, they obeyed the Scriptures (Acts 1, Matt. 28) while the unsaved “do-gooders” were lying about religion, forging false papers, breaking treaties, stealing property, killing troops, compromising convictions, hating each other’s guts, planning assassinations, envying each other, and practising fraud and deception to attain their goals. That is, they acted then exactly like they acted from 1940 to 1990. Human nature never changes.

And here we leave temporarily the bloody Prostitute of Revelation 17 in order to study the main assault of the Bible­believing troops that came from the Philadelphia period of church history. They had an open door which the “keeper of the keys” (Rev. 3:7, 8, not Simon Peter) had opened for them, and they “followed in his train.” We shall examine more Catholic conspiracies in a later chapter when we begin to deal with the origins of World War I and

CHAPTER SEVEN

THE MAIN ASSAULT

“For though we walk in the flesh, we do not war after the flesh: (For the weapons of our warfare are not carnal, but mighty through God to the pulling down of strong holds;)” 2 Corinthians 10:3, 4

Karl Marx’s Communist Manifesto, based on Darwin’s hallucination (the theory of evolution), came out in 18481 right in the midst of the assault troops who were “fighting the good fight” (2 Tim. 4). The Manifesto was a typical reaction by a typical Bible­rejecting fool in the “educated class” since Karl Marx never did a lick of work a day in his life, and actually he represented the two great branches of Communists which were to follow him: the journalists (the news media) and the "students” (pseudo scholarship. Marx as Lenin was both student and journalist; not once was he ever caught in a pair of overalls wearing a “helmet” nor was he ever caught handling a hoe or a rake. “Workers and farmers UNITE” (see p. 54 on gimmicks) is not a slogan of Karl Marx, at least not a slogan “honestly come by,” to use the vernacular. Karl blows the heraldic trumpet to announce that the Laodicean church is about to set up its lukewarm operations (Rev. 3). The “evolutionary” events that took place after that publication were the Taiping Rebellion (1850), the Crimean War (1853), the Civil War in America (1861-1865), the Sepoy Mutiny in India (1857), the purchase of Alaska (1867), the Franco-Prussian War (1870), the capture of Rome by Victor Emmanuel II (1870), the Civil Rights Acts of 1875, the assassination of President Garfield (1881), the last battle between “cowboys and Indians” (1890), the Chinese- Japanese War (1894), the Spanish American War (1898), the Boxer Uprising (1899), the assassination of McKinley (1901), the first airplane flight (1903), the Russo-Japanese War (1904), the Russian Revolution (1905), the Mexican Revolution (1911) and the war in the Balkans (1912), followed by two WORLD WARS.

In Marx’s thinking this represents evolutionary progress. The less said about the accumulated debt, the displacement of over 15,000,000 people, the destruction of family life, the brutal deaths of over 50,000,000 people, and the abandonment of moral principles and practises “the better” in Marx’s thinking.

But these were also the times of the greatest missionary and evangelistic movements the world ever witnessed. Following the combat patrols of 1600-1700 and the storm troopers of 1700-1840, the main body of Bible-believing Christians now are mustered, equipped, briefed and sent forward to the “line of departure.” This mighty host of Bible-believing Christians now presses forward armed with the old black-backed, 66 caliber King James 1611 —the Book of books—and their assault is so successful that they carry atheists, agnostics, scientists, educators, Catholics and liberals away with them, rushing and hustling these poor naive souls off their feet with such force that they mistake a worldwide Bible revival for the evolution of human nature! The “great men” of this era (Darwin, Huxley, Marx, Einstein, Russell, Dewey, Hegel, etc.) were actually nothing but poor, stupid, self-righteous sinners reacting to a wave of Bible preaching that disturbed them to the point of mental imbalance. In the background of all of these agnostic, atheistic and evolutionary anthropoid apes in the nineteenth and twentieth century lay somewhere that terrible BOOK: that horrible “archaic Elizabethan” King James translation. It had prospered so terribly under Queen Victoria that “Mid-Victorian morality” and “Mid­Victorian ethics” and “Mid-Victorian values” became the greatest curse words in the vocabulary of the journalists and college professors since “Puritanical bigots” and “Puritanical mentality” and “Puritanic morality” were used by the “educated class” as alibis for sinning.

The Catholic church was so snowed under with this “English menace” (see note 79) that her pope finally had to isolate himself from the nation in which he lived.2 In his lonely dementia he decided to declare that he himself was infallible, and this might—speaking “ex cathedra” of course—hold together what could not be held together with interdicts, excommunications, prayers, novenas, Hail Marys, tithing, torture, inquisition, Jesuit intrigues, wars, appeals and theological sophistry.3

Such a snowfall should be examined.

According to George Godwin, “revivalism” is the “mobilization of the emotions to excite religious fervor...ages of religious revival are ages of intolerance and cruelty. "4 If this is true,

then 1840-1933 is the high-water mark of intolerance, cruelty, and jagged emotionalism in church history. The years from 300-1500 could not compare with it because the Dark Ages were times of apostasy. If we take Godwin to mean “religion” in the sense of Catholic, Protestant, Jewish or Buddhist, we could give him some credibility; but Godwin was speaking of the works of Wesley, Whitefield, Dwight L. Moody and Charles G. Finney.

The Philadelphia church period is marked near its ending by Darwin’s Origin of the Species and Marx’s Das Kapital and the steady flow of our four historical movements: 1.) The continued preaching of the Gospel to the ends of the earth. 2.) Followed closely by persecution from educators and “intelligentsia.” 3.) Followed closely by heavy ecclesiastical pressure and dictatorial policies. 4.) Followed immediately by Roman Catholic politicians, priests and Jesuits who are about their divine calling: putting out lights as fast as they are turned on and hollering “bigotry” anytime anyone shines a light on Rome.

The latter part of the nineteenth century is marked out for the secular historians by such names as Mark Twain (who said he would rather go to Bunyon’s hell than have to read the Bible),5 Jay Coke, Cyrus McCormick, General Custer, Lee and Grant, Pierpont Morgan, J.J. Astor, Rockefeller, Freud, Vanderbilt, Haeckel, Lincoln, Roosevelt and Bismark. The topics of interest in America were slavery, tobacco and liquor, the Union Pacific Railroad, the Tweed Ring, Tammany Hall, elevated trains, Bob Ingersoll, the Civil War, Fifth Avenue and Darwin’s theories. A large polyglot population (mainly Catholic) swarmed into the former strongholds of the Puritans. As the Roman church had laid its “rock” on the bones of the martyrs of Rome and on the Shamrock where Patricius had preached (Vol. I, p. 203-204) and on German soil after Germans had believed the word of God from Irish missionaries,6 so Rome now occupied Connecticut and Massachusetts with a counterfeit of Biblical Christianity; and, thereby, New England, in the nineteenth century, became a fruitful seedbed for humanism, socialism, communism, unitarianism, and witchcraft under a predominantly Roman Catholic population.

Charles Haddon Spurgeon (1834-1892) was converted in a Methodist church on a night when only fifteen people were in the audience.7 He began his ministry by distributing tracts and visiting the poor while working with the St. Andrews Baptist Lay Preachers Association.8 In 1854 he became pastor of a chapel in New Park Street, London and later preached the remainder of his life in the

Metropolitan Tabernacle, which seated about 6000 people. (Today that tabernacle is deader than a hammer in high weeds: preaching, teaching, culture, apostasy). George Lorimer says that Spurgeon’s voice was “sweet, resonant and tuneful and of great carrying quality...persuasive and sincere.”9 Spurgeon despised the word “Reverend” and crossed it off all of his proof sheets. Of his doctrine, Spurgeon said that he was a Calvinist and a Baptist.10 Vedder says that Spurgeon was a “MODERATE Calvinist as to theology.11 He preached an atonement for the whole world and salvation through Christ’s blood to EVERYONE who will believe.”12 Spurgeon established an orphanage (as George Mueller had done), a pastor’s college, a colportage association and a book fund for distributing gospel literature.13 The AV was used in all of this literature and until 1884 only the AV was used in his pulpit. The influence of Spurgeon’s sermons which were printed is almost immeasurable; half of them by count come from texts in the Old Testament.14 Although a Calvinist, unlike John Calvin, Spurgeon was a Premillennialist.'5 An excellent idea of Spurgeon’s method in homiletics may be obtained by studying Otis Fuller’s C.H. Spurgeon’s Sermon Notes. For complete familiarity with his style see The Treasury of David (Funk and Wagnals, 1889, 8 Volumes). Sam Jones and Billy Sunday both liked to read Charles Haddon Spurgeon,16 and Wilbur Chapman went to Spurgeon personally to obtain ministerial advice; Moody also was strongly influenced by him.17

Spurgeon, who led thousands of Englishmen to Christ with a King James Bible, was responsible for one of the legendary “church splits” among the Baptists of England. Spurgeon was for open communion but not for open membership among Baptists. The Baptist Union and the Evangelical Alliance both opposed him and this friction gave rise to a dispute called “The Downgrade Movement” among the Baptists of England.18 R.E. Day says that the most significant (if tragic) figure is the heroic statue of Spurgeon standing in the narthex of the London building of the British Baptist Union; is was erected by the men who hated him andfought him'9 (see Matt. 23: 29, 30).

A. J. Gordon, a Baptist pastor near Boston, ministered the gospel from 1860-1890. He was a Premillennialist as Spurgeon20 (Premillennialist means the man is a “chiliast”—see Vol. I, p. 118- 120). They were called “Montanists" by the Roman Catholic heretics of the first four centuries (see Vol. I, pp. 119, 175, 58, 60).

An obscure ex-Romanist named Edward Cronin began to meet with Christians on a small scale; these groups later developed into a

larger group known as the Plymouth Brethren (1827). The Scofield Reference Bible (old edition, via C. I. Scofield [1843-1921]) came from the teachings of this group. Newman says that the large class of evangelists, of whom Dwight Moody was the most eminent, have drawn their inspiration and their scriptural interpretations largely from the teachings and personal influence of the Brethren.21 The founder of the group was an ex-Catholic (see above) so naturally “the large class of evangelists” (see above) for 100 years were anti— Catholic. It is interesting to note that the word “Plymouth” was attached to this group in view of the fact that the Plymouth group who left Holland in 1620 had been told by their pastor (pp. 30, 51) that God had yet “more light to show from His HOLY WORD.”22 Some of the Scofield notes show that light, although not all of them.23

Neeisma (1843-1890) was a remarkable Japanese national who took his first names (Joseph Hardy) from a ship’s captain (Joe) and the owner of the ship (Alphaeus Hardy). Neeisma was converted in Andover in America24 and returned to Japan to found a Christian college (Doshisha in Kyoto) where hundreds of native Japanese were led to the Lord and trained for ministries to their own people.25

The intrepid David Livingstone moved up through Africa from Capetown. He was the first white man to look at Victoria Falls and Lake Nyassa. He traveled 9000 miles in 16 years, most of it by foot, and at the time of his death he had traversed more than 28,000 miles. He was alone in the jungles without his family for four and a half years at a time.26 (C. T. Studd’s wife saw him for two weeks in a stretch of thirteen years.27)

Studd’s missionary zeal comes ringing down into the twentieth century to the weak hearted and the “flowery-beds-of-ease- Charismatics”: “We should go crusading for Christ. We pray and preach. We administer the holy communion. We recite the creed, we are optimists every one. We shout: ‘Onward Christian Soldiers marching as to war!’ and then? Then we whisper, ‘I pray thee have me excused.’ What humbugs we are!”

C. T. Studd worked in China in 1885 and in India and Africa from 1908-1910. While Westcott and Hort were at home (England) perverting the Bible that Studd was saved by and the Bible which he preached and while Green and Schaff were perverting the same Bible in America, Studd took it with him and hollered, “Nail the colors to the mast! Is there a wall in our path? By our God we will leap over it! Are there lions and scorpions in our way? We will

trample them under our feet! Soldiers of Jesus never surrender! NAIL THE COLORS TO THE MAST!!”28

The proverbial “old Gospel Ship” sailed on.

All of the converts of Studd, Moody, Finney and Spurgeon (and their students) had been told that they were on their way to hell, that without Christ they were alone in the world “having no hope, and without God” (Eph. 2:12) and that after the judgment they would wind up in a “lake of fire” (Rev. 20). All of them were anti-Catholic; none of them believed in purgatory or limbo. All four men believed (as the Puritans, Moravians, Pietists and Quakers believed) that the fear of the Lord was the “beginning of wisdom” (Prov. 1:7, Job 28:28) and they didn’t hesitate to let any unsaved sinner know that education without salvation was damnation. Godwin says that “Hell fire and damnation formed the prime mover in many a so-called conversion”29 under Wesley. Godwin told the truth; it was “grace that taught their hearts to FEAR” and although Godwin meant it sarcastically (note “so-called” conversions), it didn’t make any difference. A man who isn’t saved from hell isn’t saved from anything. To learn the difference between real Baptists and just “Baptists” one should compare Spurgeon’s preaching on hell with the famous “Baptist” Shailer Matthews (1863-1941), who was president of the Federal Council of Churches between 1912- 1916. This unholy apostate said, “The appeal to postmortem rewards and punishments is distinctly out of fashion...the postmortem life has no bearing on conduct.”30 (Shailer Matthews has altered his theology considerably since he said that!)

Not even the word “Baptist” means the same thing in different circles. A Bible-believing Baptist is quite different than a Southern Baptist and a Bible-believing Baptist is often in a different stall than a “Fundamentalist.” Fundamentalists, as Catholics, believe a number of things extracted from the Bible. A Bible-believing Baptist believes the Bible no matter what you extract from it or no matter what you leave in it.

It was Dwight L. Moody (1837-1899) who said, “I do not know of anything that America needs more today than men and women on fire with the fire of heaven.”31 The official evangelist for the National Council of Churches (1955) Charles Templeton disagreed. He said, “We do not need anymore Dwight Moodys today; what we need are twentieth century believers who will study the needs of twentieth century people.”32 Moody was a Bible believer; Templeton was an international socialist.

Moody was converted to Christ in Boston (1854) by a certain

Mr. Kimball of the Mt. Vernon Congregational Sunday School.33 By 1857 Moody was holding street meetings in the roughest part of Chicago; they terminated in a small mission work with thirteen “street Arabs” whose names were “Red Eye,” “Madden the Butcher,” “Darby the Cobbler,” “Black Stovepipe,” “Rag Breeches Cadet” and so forth.34 There were a thousand members in this mission six years later.

Because of his zeal for personal work and his steadfastness to small and insignificant tasks, he was called “Crazy Moody.”35 Although a Congregational minister, he was (like Beauchamp Vick) unordained. Moody witnessed to everyone, at all times, and aimed squarely for a decision to receive Jesus as Lord and Saviour. He would familiarly inquire of a dignified Doctor of Divinity, “How does your soul prosper today, brother?”36 He was persecuted by Catholics in Chicago and one papist made an attempt on his life with a butcher knife.37

Moody met Ira Sankey (1840-1908) in 1870 and began to make the first real major use of solo singing in revival campaigns. (Finney was rather averse to music and Spurgeon didn’t care for it at all.38) Dr. Orson Parker, who held more than 400 series of meetings in his lifetime, said, “I believe there is as much conviction lodged in the mind by singing as by preaching.”39 [Hymnology is an associated study with church history but there would not be time or space here to discuss it.39-5 Two excellent books have been written (Historical Sketches of Hymns by Joseph Belcher and Stories of the Great Hymns of the Church by Silas Paine) which could be used as outlines.] The ministry of Moody and Sankey is well-known. They held meetings in Glasgow, Scotland, London, Boston, Baltimore, Cincinnati, Chicago, St. Louis, Philadelphia and New York, and revival burned in their tracks. Thirty-thousand attended the first meeting in Scotland (1872) and when Moody returned there the second time, 40,000 were waiting to hear him.40 He received his standard ration from the “educated class” whose “refined sensibilities” (see above) are always on edge about something. A pamphlet issued during his ministry had the following original observations to make about the work of the Holy Spirit in his meetings: 1.) Man-made shocks. 2.) Spasmodic convulsions. 3.) Plymouthism. 4.) Arminianism, and so forth.41 Godwin’s comment (always timely!) was perhaps more comprehensive: “Moody was a religious fanatic.”*2

Rev. William Philpot looked at Moody’s work through a different set of glasses. He said that while “mighty masters of music

and poetry were studying the laws of art and threading the myriad mazes of harmony, behold as a common, UNCULTURED kindly nasal man with a single singer steps on our shores and becomes the channel of infusing into our English society...a new flood of spiritual life, of which princesses and legislators and ministers, both of church and state press to drink.”43

Sinners were converted listening to Sankey sing before Moody could preach a word.44 The “inquiry room” came into style. Charles R. Erdman says that Moody’s delivery was peculiarly natural and conversational: “He seemed to be talking to the persons on the third or fourth row of seats.” Though his voice was “not rich or well modulated” yet it had such carrying power that with no amplifier he could easily hold the attention of a crowd of 20,000 people.45 Moody was a Premillennialist, as were most of the church fathers before the time of ORIGEN(2N) A. D.). He said, “Some people say I believe Christ will come on the other side of the Millennium. Where do they get it? I can’t find it. The word of God nowhere tells me to watch and wait for the signs of the coming of the Millennium, but for the coming of the Lord.”46 (When Moody said “the word of God” he was always making reference to the one Book that he read, believed and preached till the day he died—the King James Authorized Version. He, as Wesley and Whitefield, never appealed in his preaching to the “verbally inspired originals” as a “final court of appeal” to prove ANYTHING.) While Moody was alive the Roman Catholic Revised Version of Westcott and Hort was published (1884) and it was pushed and promoted by every dead orthodox Conservative in America, plus ninety percent of the faculty members of the Christian colleges and universities. Dwight L. Moody never recommended it to anyone as a “reliable translation.”

Concerning the Liberalism and Modernism that was already rampant in his day among the educated and ministerial classes47 Moody said simply: “I want to say very emphatically that I have no sympathy with the doctrine of a Universal Brotherhood of man ora Universal Fatherhood of God. 1 don’t believe a word of it.”48 This statement put Moody into the anti-Catholic bracket as a “vicious BIGOT” for it was a bigoted attack on Pope Paul VI (1977), Pope John XXIII (1962) and Pope John Paul 11(1979), who all accepted the Vatican II doctrinal statement that “all men were brothers” and God was “their father.”49 Since Moody’s time the Roman Catholic church had suddenly gone completely liberal (while attacking liberals49-3) and had adopted the most liberal and modernistic nest

egg that any theistic evolutionist ever hatched.49-6 Moody stuck with the Book.

Concerning “the monkey man” (Charles Darwin) Moody said, “What we need today is men who believe in the Bible from the crown of their heads to the soles of their feet; who believe in the WHOLE OF IT, the things they understand and the things they don’t understand.”50 “Archaic Elizabethan words” evidently didn’t bother Dwight Moody very much: they bothered the rascals who took over his institute after he was dead. When Moody said “The Bible” he was never referring to anything but the Book he had in his hand.

Educational works naturally followed Moody’s ministry: Mount Hermon school for young men (1881), Northfield Seminary for women (1879), and the Chicago Bible Institute. When Moody died he cried, “No pain, no valley! If this is death it’s not bad at all; it’s sweet! This is my coronation. It’s glorious!”51

Few men ever marked the world for God like Dwight L. Moody. He greatly impressed the rescue mission worker Ernest "Pappy” Reveal(1880-1959) when the latter was a young man.52 He stirred up R. A. Torrey (1856-1928) to do the job, and he was undoubtedly the vital force in keeping Torrey from sinking under the waves of German Rationalism that swept across American schools between 1880 and 1920. He also influenced Gypsy Smith (1860-1947). There is no way to count Moody’s conversions because he did not record them; he stated on more than one occasion that he “didn’t keep the Lamb’s Book of Life.”53

There appeared in 1960, or thereabouts, a political cartoon in the Chicago Daily Sun. It was a silhouette of Chicago’s skyline with smoke and ashes pouring upward. Such names as “crime,” “greed,” “lust” and “strife” marked the border of the smoky silhouette. The center pile of smoke formed the outline of a large fat man with a beard and the title of the cartoon said simply: “CHICAGO NEEDS ANOTHER DWIGHT L. MOODY.” (Unfortunately they won’t get him; Moody Bible Institute does not teach its students to believe what Moody believed about the King James Bible: they train destructive critics exactly as Bob Jones University and Pensacola Christian College train them.) When the World’s Fair took place in Chicago in 1893, Moody rented the largest tent on the circus grounds and packed it out three times a day with twice the crowd the circus could draw.53-2 He assigned forty street corners in Chicago to young men in his schools and they conducted daily street meetings there throughout the fair.53-6 Moody was a “fanatic.”

Reuben Archer Torrey (1856-1928), with his song leader Charles Alexander, preached in Australia, England, Wales, China, India, Ireland and the United States; his work came on the eve of, and simultaneous with, the Welsh revival of 1904-1905. Torrey had 4000 conversions in Liverpool, 7500 in Birmingham, 1000 in Belfast and 4500 in Manchester.54 And the student of church history should make no mistake about it; these converts were not “thousands of do- gooders” being sprinkled after hearing messages on “sharing your faith” and “letting Christ come into your life, etc.” These were adult sinners repenting of their sins and turning in faith to trust the finished Blood Atonement of Jesus Christ to save them from hell. There is no “finding the church that Christ founded” going on here, nor is there any of this claptrap about “having the initial evidence of the baptism IN the Holy Ghost, etc.” Torrey and Moody preached “repentance toward God and faith towards our Lord Jesus Christ.”55 One of Torrey’s converts was Oswald J. Smith, who was to preach in over forty foreign countries56 before apostatizing and recommending Roman Catholic Bibles as superior Bibles to the AV.56-5 Bob Jones, Sr., found some work from Torrey’s campaigns still going on in Australia in 1952.57 Among other fruits was the Bible Institute of Los Angeles where personal workers led thousands to Christ before 1960. (Today BIOLA is like any other dead orthodox apostate school in America: it trains Bible critics.)

Samuel Porter Jones (1847-1906) was a contemporary of Charles Darwin, Karl Marx, Richard Wagner, Johannes Brahms, Bismark, General Grant, Dwight Moody, General Lee and R. A. Torrey. Both the RV of 1884 and the grossly corrupt ASV of 1901 came out while Sam Jones was preaching. Having more intelligence than all of the scholars on both committees, Sam Jones never bothered to read either one of them or use either one of them in preaching (sometimes he preached four times a day) while he was averaging 400 sermons a year through thirty-six years. Sam could shut down liquor stores, close up theaters, stop cursing and gambling in a town, and convert sinners without referring to the R V or the ASV or any Greek text for ANYTHING. He carried an AV 1611 on him; he memorized it, studied it, prayed over it, wept over it, preached it, practised it, and died with it in his pocket.

Sam Jones was born in Oak Bowery, Alabama (Frank Norris and Bob Jones, Sr., were also born in Alabama), and he preached a circuit in the Southern Methodist Conference in Cartersville, Georgia. He was paid $65.00 a year and was nearly unheard of before he suddenly appeared on the platforms of the largest cities in

the United States.58 He had been a drunken profligate as a young man and was led to Christ by his grandfather after a very impressive deathbed scene in his family.59

Sam Jones then picked up the old 66-caliber, black-backed Book with the seven seals on the back and began to call sinners to repentance. He had his audiences passing through all sorts of experiences: they wept, laughed, cursed, screamed, disapproved, approved, criticized and repented. In St. Louis the social life of the city was broken up by his preaching: the card parties stopped, the theater attendance was reduced and other worldly amusements suffered.59-5 The scribes and Pharisees began to attack him in the customary fashion. W. L. Stidger of Boston University School of Theology—destructive criticism—said Jones was “spectacular.”60 One mayor of a town hit him with a cane and another one hit him with an umbrella.61 A group of men dynamited his barn.62 The newspapers began to attack him viciously because he was hurting their income: all of them carried paid liquor ads. The “Karl Marx” journalists misquoted him, distorted his sentences and took accusations out of context with all the gusto of the news media in 1929-1932 trying to get their liquor ads back in the papers during Prohibition. The attacks on Sam Jones were carried out with the same fanaticism that the Black International (the Roman Catholic hierarchy) carries on with in Our Sunday Visitor (Chap. 6, notes 2- 6). The circuit rider stood unperturbed on his platform in whiskey- soaked St. Louis and said, “Well sir, if I say anything...that hurts a man who prays night and day in his family and pays his just debts and hasn’t but one wife, lives right before good men, if I hurt that sort of man I will apologize every time. But I will die before I will apologize to YOU uncircumcised Philistines: I won’t do it.”63 To the educated class of his day, who were wallowing in Darwin, Marx, Huxley, Maurice, Hort, and the RV, Sam said, “You little stingy, narrow-hided rascals: a fly could sit on the bridge of your nose and paw you in one eye and kick you in the other.”64

Jones’ doctrine on the five-point Calvinists was clear: “God can’t elect any man unless he is a candidate.”65 He was clear on his relation to the educated class—saved or otherwise—,“I would rather be in Heaven learning my ABC’s than sitting in Hell reading Greek.”66 Sam was intensely practical: “God never does anything for a man that he can do for himself.”67 He was full of surprises. At one meeting in West Virginia he said, “All those women who have never spoken a cross word to their husbands stand up.” At the back of the hall three women stood up. Jones proceeded: “Now all the

rest of you look around and see the three biggest liars in West Virginia.”68

Sam Jones, as Billy Sunday, never corrected the AV for any reason. Neither man would do what the modern Laodicean Fundamentalist often does: alter the text because a modern version is “clearer” or says “a better translation should be” to “help folks understand the word of God better, etc.” Billy Sunday said, “When the Bible says one thing and scholarship says another, scholarship can go plumb to the Devil.”69 Neither Billy nor Sam made any distinction between the saved Conservatives who professed to believe in “infallible, verbally inspired originals” and the unsaved Liberals who never believed in anything infallible. “Scholarship” to Billy Sunday and Sam Jones was something that had to take a back seat to the AV 1611 Bible, no matter whose scholarship it was. This is very instructive when we remember that the lives of the two evangelists overlap the lives of J. Gresham Machen, Benjamin Warfield, A. T. Robertson, Vincent, Thayer, Robert Dick Wilson, Green, Philip Schaff, Westcott, Hort, and the ASV committee as well as Briggs, Driver, Delitszch, Lightfoot, Ellicott, Cardinal Newman, Karl Marx, Lenin and Charles Darwin. As we have noted before, when one reads the biographies of men like John Paton, Henry Martyn, David Brainerd and Sam Jones, the heroes of this world “grow strangely dim” in the light of their power and grace.

Edwin Hughes, a retired Methodist bishop, said that Sam Jones was able to deliver as dignified and elegant an address as the best theologians of his day.70 But when his audiences expected him to demonstrate his intellect and learning (he was a practising lawyer before his conversion), Sam came out with something like this: “You political bosses and your henchmen, the damnable record that you are writing is enough to make every decent citizen in the city rise up and say, ‘By the Grace of God the thing has gone far enough.’ Your major hasn’t any backbone; just a cotton string up his back with a few ribs hitched onto it.”71

When the crowd came expecting to hear a rough, crude, unlettered Georgia red-neck, he expostulated: “Judgment is a forensic term, and means simply the equitable adjustment of an issue, but in an ecclesiastical sense it means the final adjudication in heaven’s chancery where God shall summon men and angels alike around His great White Throne and there sift the issues between Himself and all created intelligences.”72 Charles Darwin, Huxley and Haeckel couldn’t have caught up with Sam Jones’ insight and wit if they had flown a DC-10. His answer to Bob Ingersoll (1833-

1899) and German Rationalism (Strauss, Graf, De Wette, Wellhausen) was as plain as his background and as profound as anything ever spoken on this planet: “If I understood all about the Bible I’d know somebody wrote it who didn’t have any more sense than I have. ”73

Jones’ eternal theme song was “Quit Your Meanness." Holcomb says that “cease to do evil; learn to do well” might have been the text for every message he ever preached. There were 2500 adult sinners converted to Christ in Baltimore; 6000 adult sinners in Toronto; 1000 in Los Angeles and uncounted thousands in Nashville, Tennessee.74 Reform, Alabama, is named after a meeting that Sam had there. No more fitting epitaph ever graced the tomb of a preacher of the Gospel than the testimony of one of Sam’s converts who was saved in his meeting in Thomason, Georgia (1879):

“There he was clad in a little jump-tail coat. He was not in the pulpit; he was right next to his crowd, standing almost in touch of his victims. His head was down as if he was holding onto his chain of thought by the teeth, but his right hand was going energetically up and down with all the grace of a pump handle. How he peeled the amen corner! How he did smash their solemn self-conceit, their profound self-satisfaction! With groans and sobs and tears these old bellwethers of the flock fell on their knees and cried aloud in their distress. Then he turned his guns on us sinners.” (“Guns”! These are the soldiers from Philadelphia in the main assault!) “He raked us fore and aft. He abused us, and ridiculed us; he stormed at us and laughed at us; he called us flop-eared hounds, beer kegs, and whiskey soaks. He plainly said that we were all hypocrites and liars and he intimated somewhat broadly that most of us would steal.” (Talk about “fanning the flames of BIGOTRY!” Chap. 6, notes 2-6.) “It has never been the same community. Gambling disappeared, loud profanity on the streets was heard no more, and the barrooms were run out of the country.”15

That is, Sam Jones, with a King James Bible and no “verbal, plenary inspired autographs,” could accomplish in seven weeks what his contemporaries (Darwin, Huxley, Haeckel, Hort, Marx, Hegel, Mary Baker Eddy, Brigham Young, Judge Rutherford, Pastor Russell, Renan, Nietzsche, Schaff, Joseph Smith, Schleiermacher and Philip Schaff) could not accomplish in seventy years. Their combined degrees, years of study, theories on humanity, theological and philosophical excursions, documented evidence, and lives were absolutely powerless compared to Sam

Jones when it came to the propagation of spiritual truth and permanent individual reformation.

When John Fiske (1842-1901) introduced Darwin’s puddle-to- paradise theories in America, he was opposed by Charles Hodge (1797-1873), a theologian at Princeton; Theodore Cuyler; and a preacher named Thomas DeWitt Talmage. Of the three men, Talmage was by far the most effective preacher and the most Biblical. Talmage (1832-1902) was going to be a lawyer (as Luther, Tertullian, Chrysostom, Sam Jones and Torrey) but he was called to preach. He studied at New Brunswick Theological Seminary and was preaching by the time he was twenty years old.76 As a pastor in Brooklyn, he edited the Christian Herald, and his sermons appeared printed regularly in over 600 newspapers reaching 25,000,000 readers at home and abroad.77 Talmage believed in a literal heaven and a literal hell and that baby sprinkling never saved anyone. He taught that a man must repent, clean up his life, trust Jesus Christ and believe the Book. His power to keep the attention of an audience without using notes was without equal in his day. The sermons of Talmage range from short, clipped deliveries, cutting like razors, to sentences running fifty or sixty seconds in speaking and filled with words the average college graduate today would have a hard time understanding. Talmage represents the literary style of dramatic preaching (Whitefield, Beecher, R. G. Lee, etc.) at its best. He published thirty volumes of sermons which are in print from Baker Book House, and his biography is well written by Van Norstand in a work called Social Dynamite (Chicago, Standard Publishing Co., 1887).

William Booth (1820-1912) used nothing but an AV 1611 all the days of his life, although both the “darlings” of the apostate Conservatives were well-known in his day (the RV of 1885 and the ASV of 1901). He was responsible for the salvation of over 2,000,000 down-and-outers.78 He left the Methodist church when they tried to saddle and bridle him for one type of evangelism; they had tried to make an evangelist out of him because they didn’t like the kind of people he was gathering into their church as its pastor. The “membership” had too many ex-pimps, ex-cons, ex-prostitutes, and ex-drunkards in it.79 Catherine Booth slammed down her parasol at a Methodist conference where Booth was propositioned by the political hierarchy and said, “Nevah!” so Willy was out of a pastorate. He went down to Hell’s Kitchen in London and preached on the streets. His followers preached with him; they were stoned and had eggs thrown at them. They were told that when hit to bow and say, “Thank you,” to their assailants80 (or “Cheerio, old top!” or something akin to that).

Booth came downtown with a big bass drum and a red and yellow banner (blood and fire!) and he won them by the thousands. Years later when his “army” had reached across the continents, he sent the units a one-word telegram (actually a cablegram across the Atlantic) for a Christmas greeting. It said simply, “OTHERS.”

By the time he visited India he was considered to be a great man (1900), so when he came down the gangplank the bands were there to greet him along with the dukes, duchesses, maharajas and pundits. Booth wasn’t expecting them. He stopped on the gangplank and cried, “Where are my poor people of India?”80-5 He had come to look for the lepers and the pariahs.

When Booth lay dying, they brought him poached eggs for breakfast and he cried. When they asked him why he said, “Hundreds of people in London have nothing to eat this morning and do you bring ME poached eggs?”81

Vachel Lindsay wrote the best epitaph ever written for the old King James soldier of the cross when he wrote: “Booth led boldly with his big bass drum, are you washed in the blood of the Lamb? The saints smiled gravely and they said, ‘He’s come!’ Are you washed in the blood of the Lamb? Walking lepers followed rank on rank, lurching drunks from the ditches dark: drabs from the alley­way, drunk fiends pale—minds still passion ridden, soul powers frail: vermin eaten saints with mouldy breath, unwashed legions with the ways of death. Are you washed in the blood of the Lamb? And when Booth halted by the curb for prayer, are you washed in the blood of the Lamb? He saw his master through the flag filled air. Are you washed in the blood of the Lamb? Christ came gently with a robe and a crown, for Booth the soldier while the throng knelt down. He saw King Jesus, they were face to face, and he knelt a-weepin in that Holy Place! Are you washed in the blood of the Lamb!?”

Booth never touched an RV or ASV once in his ministry. Being a real “soul winner,” he had better sense than the faculty members at Bob Jones, Oxford, Cambridge, Pensacola Christian College, Colgate, Rochester, Tennessee Temple and the University of Chicago.

C. I. Scofield (1843-1921) was born in Michigan and his family moved to Tennessee when he was a boy. He fought for the South during the Civil War (1861-1865) and was awarded the Confederate Cross of Honor. After the war he moved to St. Louis and then to Kansas, where he served as United States District Attorney. Although brave and brilliant, Scofield became a hopeless drunkard.82 He was finally led to Christ by Thomas S. McPheeters,

a YMCA worker, and became a Congregationalist (as Dwight Moody and Billy Sunday). He established the Central American Mission in 1890 and published a reference Bible in 1909 which contained the King James text. Scofield had decided, after reading the RV of Westcott and Hort and the ASV of Schaff and Green (both were in circulation), that neither Bible would make a decent text to print: so he printed the A V of 1611. This “Scofield Reference Bible” became the means of keeping nearly half the Baptist ministers in America teaching Premillennialism when the schools they attended and graduated from were teaching Amillennialism. A. T. Robertson was the apostate Fundamentalist at Louisville who taught Calvin’s heresy, and other apostate Fundamentalists at Judson, Mercer, Stetson, Clarke College, and Baylor had revived the ancient heresy of Augustine and Jerome and were teaching Postmillennialism. J. Frank Norris kept the Baptists straight on modernism and separation and Scofield kept them straight on the Second Coming. If any Southern Baptists showed up between 1910 and 1970 that were soul-winning, orthodox men (Billy Graham, J. Harold Smith, Criswell, R. G. Lee, etc.), somewhere on them (or under their books in their offices) would be found TWO BOOKS: Clarence Larkin’s Dispensational Truth and the Old Scofield Reference Bible of 1909. Before the Russian Revolution (1917), the Scofield Board of Editors had identified Russia (under Ezekiel 38, 39) as the rising world power.83 This was done from the English text of the AV, without any reference to the ASV or RV. Pettingill (1886-1950) and Gray (1851-1935) were active on this board.

The notes in the Old Scofield Bible teach that the Antichrist is a MAN, that hell is literal burning fire, that the security of the believer is eternal, that the Rapture is before the Tribulation, that the Millennial reign of Christ is a literal, bodily reign at the literal city of Jerusalem, and that the key to understanding the Bible is God’s dealing with the Jews—the nation of Israel. With the King James text, the Scofield Bible was ANTI-CATHOLIC. No Catholic laymen, bishop, cardinal, priest, monk, nun or pope will recommend ANY translations that come from Erasmus’ Greek text.™ However, they will, and have, recommend translations from the Greek texts of Aland, Metzger, Nestle and Westcott and Hort.85 This means that if a Catholic wanted to he could recommend the ASV or NASV or the NIV as good Roman Catholic literature,/or those are translations of the Greek texts of the Roman Catholic church.

Henry Clay Morrison (1857-1942), from Kentucky, was one of the great old-time Methodist circuit riders, like Sam Jones and

Francis Asbury. He helped found Asbury Theological Seminary (now liberal: evangelism, education, etc.). Morrison’s main work was in “camp meetings” (see p. 65) and William Jennings Bryan (1860-1925) considered him to be the greatest pulpit orator on the American continent.

Bob Shuler (1880-1965) was another great old-time Methodist barnstormer. He pastored the Trinity Methodist Church in downtown Los Angeles for years (1920-1960) and right there in the middle of America’s Sodom, “Fighting Bob” attacked sin in high and low places and gave the Methodist “ecclesiastical bosses” of his day a fit.86 Shuler raised five boys, and three of them became ministers. Shuler lived and died a Bible-believing, old-time Methodist preacher and was replaced in Los Angeles by one of the most deluded and worldly amateur psychologists who ever lived— Robert Shuler, to whom the old Virginia preacher was no kin at all. The two Shulers who ministered to Los Angeles stood in relation to each other about as Martin Luther would stand to Michael Luther King, Jr.

John Wilbur Chapman (1859-1918) was not a flaming type of evangelist or a prominent pastor, but he preached in Canada, Hawaii, Australia, New Zealand, Scotland, Japan, England, Tasmania and the Philippine Islands with telling results, and he helped Billy Sunday get started in the ministry.87 Chapman was responsible for about 500 young men being called into full-time ministries.

Jonathan Goforth (1859-1936) was inspired to go to China after reading a book by Hudson Taylor (1832-1905). The Goforths were caught in the Boxer Rebellion of 1900 and were severely wounded but got out alive. The diary of their work (written by Mrs. Goforth) constitutes one of the greatest books on missions ever written; every Christian should read it. Revival followed Goforth in Korea (1907) and again in Manchuria in 1925. Among many interesting anecdotes in the lives of the Goforths is an account where they were being threatened by a mob of armed Chinese who were crying out, “Kill the foreign devils! Kill, kill!!” and their ten year old boy hollered out, “Don’t kill us! We are not CATHOLICS!” Whereupon the leader of the mob—having more sense than the edi­tors of the ten largest daily newspapers in America (and the State Department, 1982)—stopped the violence with: “Don’t kill. These not bad foreign devils. These good foreign devils.”88

(Unsaved Chinese farmers are often smarter than American congressmen and senators.)

"Uncle Bud Robinson" (1860-1942) went from Tennessee to Texas (as did Sam Houston, Col. Bowie, Davie Crockett and Travis) and the night he was converted he was twenty years old and unable to read or write; he was barely able to speak intelligible English. The next forty-seven years of his life were given to evangelism, without the benefit of a grade school education. He used nothing but a King James 1611 AV all the days of his life and with it he preached over 33,000 sermons, covering 1,000,000 miles of territory, and leading over 100,000 sinners to Christ.89 A lack of grade school education was no more a hindrance to Bud in understanding the “fundamentals” of a Book 300 years “out of date” than it was to John Wesley, who could read Greek. Both of them took the same position doctrinally, although Bud was responsible for the defection of the Nazarenes from the cold Methodist churches of his day. Although Bud was an Arminian (hang on, hold out, etc.), he was a sweet soul with a sweet spirit and was responsible for tens of thousands of people cleaning up their lives and their communities. Bud said that when he was young they were so poor that they only ate one meal a day. When asked about the other two he said: “Well, for breakfast we ate prunes and for dinner we drank water, and for supper we just let ’em swell.” When he was preaching for his Methodist buddy (“Fighting” Bob Shuler, see above) at the Trinity Methodist Church in Los Angeles, Bud expostulated, “Now don’t get me wrong; I didn’t thay that you had to go to hell if you chawed tobacca. That’s not what I thed. That’s not what I thed. Don’t thay I thed somethin 1 didn’t thay. What I thed was, ‘I don’t see how any Methodist theward could chaw thumpin that he wath afraid to thwallow’.”90

Rodney “Gypsy" Smith (1860-1947), a genuine gypsy, was born in a tent near Leytonstone, England. He had no formal education. He was led to Christ by his father after his mother had died.91 Rodney Smith never held a meeting without a conversion. While the RV (1885) and the ASV (1901) were both in circulation and were being recommended by every deluded Conservative and Fundamentalist in England and America, the Gypsy never used either of them. (Quite naturally he led more souls to Christ than Bob Jones, Jr., Bob Jones, HI, Arlin Horton, Fred Afman, Robert Sumner, John R. Rice, A. T. Robertson, J. Gresham Machen, or Ed Hindson.) Gypsy Smith worked with General Booth for awhile in England and then traveled to America where he subsequently came five times before his death.92 In his early years with General William Booth of the Salvation Army, he preached on the streets and once

was mobbed by Catholics during open air meetings in England.92-1 Gypsy’s early preaching was potent: “Your drinking and your gambling must go, your pride, your selfishness, your meanness, your bad temper, your unChristlikeness must go. Slay to the death your love of pleasure, your love of show, your love of appearing more than you are. God wants you to be as sweet and as lovely and as transparent as the breath of heaven’s own morning. That is God’s purpose. Slay utterly.”92-2

Gypsy Smith preached in Australia, Denver, London, Edinburgh and Manchester, England, and he made visits to America (1889, 1892 and 1906). His comment on American life between 1905 and 1915 is an indicator of the presence of the apostate Laodicean church, headed up by the ASV of 1901. Gypsy said: “I carried with me the impression that the American people were growing INTELLECTUALLY, socially and numerically and financially, but were not keeping apace with this growth in their spiritual and religious life.”92-3

Smith was persecuted by Catholic brewers in St. Louis, Missouri, and was opposed while preaching in the low sections of Chicago where Moody had worked.

In Paris in 1918 he had 150 people receive Christ as their Saviour in the Opera House; most of them were from the cream of Parisian society. In the States he was aided by ministers from the Congregational churches (in England, he was affiliated with the National Free Church of England), and he preached in Peoria, Illinois; Brooklyn; Atlanta and Philadelphia. Gypsy Smith was not the rugged Bible expositor that Torrey was, and especially in his latter years his messages became very soft in tone; however, they remained perfectly orthodox and evangelical. Gypsy, at his best, was hard and straight-shooting:

“Listen! In Bible language repentance is turning from sin to God. That is repentance—‘from,’ ‘to.’ It is putting your hand on your heart and getting ahold of the thing that has been your curse and dragging it out, and saying, ‘There, Lord Jesus, it is...that is it! And I will die before I will commit it again. I will turn from it now, and forever! That is repentance!”’92-4

During Gypsy Smith’s lifetime he met Fanny Crosby, then seventy years of age; he heard Andrew Murray preach, and he counseled with Lee Broughton in Atlanta. He was a contemporary of G. Campbell Morgan. To really appreciate the life and ministry of a King James Bible believer like Rodney Smith, one must realize that Hitler’s Holocaust—backed up by a concordant with the

pope—was going on during the Gypsy’s life, plus the ridiculous council on the “infallibility” of Pope Pius IX. This council’s absurd decision was adopted by Roman Catholics with full knowledge that a dozen popes had contradicted each other when making official proclamations on “morals” and “faith.”91-6 It is still believed to be the truth today in the face of Paul VI, John XXIII and John Paul II (all aliases) going around the world “preaching” on “peace missions” (1960-1981) and not even mentioning the Second Coming of Christ—THE PRINCE OF PEACE. Gypsy Smith and W. B. Riley preached the Second Coming of Christ while the popes were rigging up the connections that led to World War I and World War II.93

W. B. Riley (1861-1947) was born in Indiana and raised in Kentucky. In 1897 he began his ministry at the First Baptist Church of Minneapolis, Minnesota, as a “Southern” Baptist.93-5 He stayed there for fifty years, building the membership to about 2,500 in a city that was solidly German Lutheran and German Catholic. He founded Northwestern Schools in 1902 on the premise that the King James Bible was the word of God and that the ASV of 1901 and the RV of 1884 were the apostate products of German Rationalism.94 W. B. Riley laid the blame for the apostasy among American educators and preachers to German scholarship (see p. 40, 41). Riley was anti-Catholic and anti-Socialist, exactly as the “found­ing fathers” who drew up the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights. He believed in absolute separation of church and state in defiance of the papal decrees of Pope Pius IX (1846- 1878), and he believed in freedom of conscience, ownership of private property (in spite of the Marxism that was rampant in Europe all of his lifetime), and free enterprise; he also believed in individual initiative and character building (in spite of the behavioristic and Gestalt psychology being taught by ninety percent of the educators of his day). In short, Riley was a trouble-making, hell-raising, reactionary “misfit.” Being a Bible-believing Baptist, Riley believed in the autonomy of the local church, the immersion of the adult believer in water, and the eternal security of the believer. The next national evangelist was connected with W. B. Riley (see p. 187) and took this Baptist position before God gave him a world­wide ministry. This also is the position of Jerry Falwell, who spon­sored the “Moral Majority” of the 70’s. The Montanists, “Ma- nicheans,” Cathari, Albigenses, Paulicians, Novatians and Dona- tists (see Vol. I, Chap. 9) were still in business!

Evidently the black-backed, 66 caliber King James Authorized

Version was turning out to be more of a Baptist publication than an Anglican publication. Also, the Lord evidently had a sense of humor (Luke 10:21) and nothing delights Him more (1 Cor. 1:28) than to make “foolish” the wisdom of the “learned” (1 Cor. 3:18). Billy Graham, the Baptist, was connected with Riley, the Baptist, not Bob Jones, Jr.; and Jerry Falwell, the Baptist, was connected with J. Frank Norris, the Baptist, not Bob Jones, III, the interde­nominational compromiser.

CHAPTER EIGHT

THE MAIN ASSAULT

(Continued)

“Fight the good fight of faith, lay hold on eternal life, whereunto thou art also called, and hast professed a good profession before many witnesses.” 1 Timothy 6:12

The aversion of historians and theologians to catalogue men like W.B. Riley, Sam Jones, Dwight Moody and Billy Sunday with men like Paul and Luther is due to two sets of “bugged circuits” that jam the airwaves. The first of these is the constant “re-examination of ‘Pauline theology’ and ‘Luther’s theology’,” independent of the fiery personalities of the men themselves. This tends to confirm in the inquirer’s mind their theoretical knowledge rather than their MINISTRIES (see remarks in Vol. I, p. xvi-xviii). Theologians are forever trying to “get back to the Bible” or to “get back to the Refor­mation” when they need to get back to the God who used Luther and Calvin to bring about the Reformation. They also need to re­member that “the Bible” that God used at that time was not like any English Bible or German Bible printed since 1880. You can always spot these apostate fundamental theologians by their constant ref­erences to what they call “the historic Fundamentalist position.” They are not interested in believing the Bible or in causing the tu­mult that Luther and Paul caused. They are only interested in justi­fying STAGNATION on the grounds that they believe what a real Bible believer professed to believe two or three centuries ago or ten to fifteen centuries back. ‘‘Historic Fundamentalist positions” are often adopted as alibis for remaining stuck in the mud (see Vol. I, p. xv-xix). There was no “Fundamentalist” position taken on authority or evangelism or missions or the local church in the first seven councils in church history, and the “Fundamentalist” position on water baptism and election in Luther’s day and Calvin’s day was wrong. Paul, Luther, Moody and Sunday did not adopt “historic positions.” They believed the Book and preached it. The second reason why historians fail to tie the loose ends of history together is that if the historian is not an evangelistic street preacher himself (as

Moody, Paul, Luther and Sunday) he feels an increasing discomfiture as he pursues research material and approaches his own era (in this case around 1900).* He has forgotten that half of Paul’s and Luther’s preaching was against personal and religious sins in which the writer himself may be involved; hence, he fails to appreciate in a man like Moody, Sunday or, say, Mordecai Ham a genuine counterpart of what he is trying to document: the history of true New Testament orthodox practise.

William Ward Ayer at one time made a prophecy which the generation of the 1950’s saw fulfilled. He said, “New York is essentially a Pagan city...the moral and religious needs of the people are pathetic. We must either Americanize and Christianize New York or New York will soon EUROPEANIZE and PAGANIZE us.”2 Observe that the Baptist “heretic” (all Baptists are heretics according to the canon law of the Roman Catholic church)2-5 has mentioned EUROPE and paganism—the people who paganized New York were from Africa.

Hard on the heels of the revivals of Moody and Sam Jones, the Roman Catholic church set up educational institutions and hospitals (at the taxpayers’ expense) followed by small parishes.3 Moving just ahead of the Roman machine was a large educational movement, marked particularly by the building of the University of Chicago by the Baptists ($400,000) with Rockefeller helping out on the ante ($600,000); this building program began in 1890 and culminated in the construction of one of the greatest hotbeds of socialism, communism and atheism in the western hemisphere. The history of the University of Chicago is one of the greatest demonstrations in Christendom of what can happen to Baptists who believe in the “historic fundamentals of the faith” and begin, at the same time, to mess with the English Bible of the Protestant Reformation. The liberals and infidels who took over Chicago University in the 1930’s and 1940’s took over a school that hadbeen correcting the A V Bible for nearly half a century.

The topics of conversation in America during the latter half of the nineteenth century and the early part of the twentieth century were the Pacific cable, the San Francisco earthquake, labor riots, prohibition, the Brooklyn Bridge, Indians and land settlements, the Chicago exposition, the Filipino Insurrection, and the coming World War. Two minor items showed up and quietly slipped in under the counter while Americans were taken up with “news.” One of these was the open armed reception of “higher criticism” (destructive guesswork) and the other was compulsory education laws. This deadly combination led to a federal school system controlled by the NEA4 where the Bible was “out” on the grounds of “separation of state and church.” At the same time, state moneys

were confiscated by the Roman church to further their own educational systems.45 Eventually the public schools were destroyed altogether (1954-1974) and replaced with an enforced federalized system backed up by the National Guard and the Justice Department. This federal system cost $2,800,000,000 a year to operate, while it bled the taxpayers with 70,000 assaults on teachers and 250,000 assaults on pupils annually and wasted over $4,000,000 a day on gasoline for enforced busing, when gasoline was going up from 26 cents a gallon to $2.00 a gallon.5 With this monstrous conversion of public education to federal bankruptcy, even Bible reading and public prayer were banned, plus the printing or posting of the Ten Commandments on school property. Thus, the children of the founding fathers (1776) were forced by armed troops to submit to a non-Christian style of education in a jungle environment. Karl Marx’s press finished off any American who opposed this system (Goldwater, Wallace, Rafferty, Anderson, Reese, Barnett, Faubus, etc.); and since by 1950 the news media had replaced the Bible in family reading, it was not hard to accomplish. God is no respecter of nations (see p. 41) and where His word is altered or neglected He allows governments to form that can supply all of your needs; consequently, they can control all of your actions (Prov. 28:2).

Although Gypsy Smith, John McNeill and Billy Sunday are the outstanding witnesses of this transition period, other assault troops moved along with the flanks of the main body. William Elbert Munsey, a Methodist, preached for a brief period in the South. His preaching shows vast learning and also a genius for organizing scientific data.6 Munsey preached sermons on hell that would almost cause one to smell the smoke and see the flames. His vocabulary was far superior to the vocabulary of his contemporary Bob Ingersoll.1

General Howard, though a layman, was a great witness for Jesus Christ. At Tampa hesaid to three thousand soldiers: “Boys, 41 years ago, two miles from this Tabernacle I surrendered to the Lord Jesus Christ; and He has been my Commander ever since. I want to tell you that He is the best General that ever led an army.”8 Baxter F. McClendon (“Cyclone Mac”) and Henry C. Morrison preached in the South. Bob Jones, Sr., said of Morrison that when he was at his best he doubted if a greater pulpiteer ever lived.9 H. C. Morrison (as Wycliffe and Savonarola had also judged their day and times) cried out: “The remedy for the evil of our time is to be found in PREACHING!”10

F. B. Meyer, G. Campbell Morgan, Andrew Murray, L. W. Munhall, and John B. Culpepper applied theology on a large scale.

The first two were primarily Bible teachers and polemic ministers.11 Murray (along with Ruth Paxon and Amy Carmichael) is responsible for a great deal of literature on sanctification and devotional pieces for Christians; their literature, as a whole, is scriptural. Munhall and Culpepper were more evangelistic in nature.12

Not to be overlooked is the work done in rescue missions during this period. The idea had begun as far back as 1830 when the Presbyterian Synod of Ohio began a mission among sailors. They met in an Episcopal church and their first and most active local organizer was a Baptist. The first president of the organization was a Congregationalists Jerry McAuley (a converted Catholic, according to his testimony) organized his mission in 1872. Mel Trotter was shoved into a mission by Tom Mackey, an ex-jockey and cardsharp, (January 19, 1897) and was gloriously saved. Mel’s friend Pat Withrow of Charleston, West Virginia, was the one who put Earnest Reveal into his work.14 There were fifty-eight missions in the states by 1921 which went under the motto: “No Creed but Christ: no Law but Love.” An editor’s note in the Grand Rapids Morning Herald (September 12, 1940) is a comment that applies to all the mission workers in the period who stuck to the job of winning men to Christ. “How many men and women Mel Trotter brought to repentance no one can ever know. They numbered many thousands without a doubt. How many lives he had saved, how many hungry stomachs he had appeased, how many bodies he had clothed, how many souls he had brought to God is a secret of God alone.”15

John McNeill (1854-1933), the Scotch evangelist, was one of the most humorous and spiritual evangelists whose works have ever been printed. In some ways his style is similar to that of Sam Jones, although his sermons are somewhat longer and usually centered more around church life and church doctrines than social or individual reformation. Several excerpts follow which indicate McNeill’s style: “Someone will say, ‘What about election?’ Man, I am strong on election. But what is the mark of election? The mark of election is to put your hand in Jesus Christ’s and then He will tell you whether you are elected or not.”16

John McNeill could call “mourners.”

“Is there any poor sinner here tonight unsaved? Oh, Spirit of God, reveal to us our Saviour and may we meet, a blood sprinkled band upon that eternal shore!”17 McNeill derided the gullible theologians of the Federal Council of Churches (Ward, Pike, Sockman, Oxnam, Rauschenbusch, etc.) who had swallowed down the Roman Catholic theory on the “Fatherhood of God and the

Brotherhood of Man.”18 He preached, “A God who does not smite, I would despise Him, and so would you. This modern God for some people is nothing but love, as Joseph Parker said, ‘This great new, modern love, and He is nothing but a great big kiss’.”19 This turned out to be the “god” that was preached in the 1960s and 1970s by Katherine Kuhlman, PTL, Oral Roberts, Jimmy Swaggert and Jimmy Carter’s sister. He had made his “advent” in the 1920s.

McNeill’s theology on salvation was as simple as that of Sam Jones. (Jones had explained it this way: “What is Salvation? I would say that it is loving everything that God loves and hating everything that God hates.”)20 McNeill said that salvation was “a crisis with a view to a process.”21 Neither McNeill nor Sam Jones taught that “sacraments” could save anyone. McNeill was hard on hypocrites among the Charismatics: “When you get hot about some­thing...God seems to have opened the door, and you go up, and just as you go up to the stairs God slams the door in your face...do you say ‘Hallelujah’ as you go down the steps? That is the thing to test some hallelujah gentry! Ha, ha! There is a lot of‘hallelujah’ and I tell you it is a windy affair. How do you feel over it when God slams the door in your face, and He seemed to open it and you went up the steps to go in and there it is SHUT. Do you go down the steps singing ‘I worship thee, sweet law of God, and all thy ways adore’?”22 Again, the Laodicean apostates, raised on the “Living” Bible and the Logos Publishing Co. (in the 1960s and 1970s), found themselves unable to praise God for disease, poverty, or even minor sicknesses. Under the ministry of carnal charlatans like Copeland, Goreman, Terrel, Osborne, Ewing, Coe, Allen and Kapp (1960- 1980), the “positive thinkers” in the body of Christ were led to believe that Paul was backslidden and unfaithful his entire lifetime, for it is evident that he lived a SICK man and died a POVERTY- STRICKEN man (2 Cor. 11-12, 2 Tim. 4, Col. 4, Acts 20-28). Sickness and poverty were not things to say “hallelujah” about on programs like “PTL” (a series of Charismatic fiascoes that took place in America in the 1970s and 1980s).

Rolan Leavell, a writer for the Southern Baptist Convention, perhaps best expresses the attitude of the typical scholar or historian to the work of William Ashley Sunday. He says that Billy Sunday’s type of meeting was “hyper-emotional and ultra­commercial” and that it “died at his death.”23 Billy “appealed to the prejudices of plain people against churches and deacons.” (Or, m the language of Biblical evangelism, he preached against the SINS of church leaders: Matt. 23, Jer. 23). One cannot properly

appreciate this evaluation unless one remembers that at the time Leavell is writing, the news media and the press had attained such a power status that Leavell was brainwashed with anti-Biblical secularism; he could no longer think or write from a Biblical standpoint. Leavell’s religious contemporaries in the Convention were shouting themselves hoarse at basketball and football games, weeping copious tears over Ma Perkins, Backstage Wife, Vic and Sade and thrilling and chilling to Gang Busters, The Shadow, and Dracula, and then getting upset over dramatic preaching! By 1940 Marx’s fourth estate (the news media), backed up by the liquor industry and Hollywood, had gained such a control over the minds of preachers, pastors and seminary professors that they had separated their emotions from their religion (see p. 26). It was becoming more and more evident that a man who would enjoy Johnny Carson would not enjoy David, and a man who was excited by Raquel Welch or Farrah Fawcett would not get into rapturous spasms over the revival at Ephesus (Acts 19:19, 20) and the appeal of Dean Martin and Phil Donahue wasn’t going to go to heaven hand-in-hand with Job and Moses. Although the contemporary idols of the TV media had not yet showed up (1920- 1950), they were well heralded by Jack Benny, Edward G. Robinson, Red Skelton, Ed Wynn, Eddie Cantor, Paul Whiteman, Fred Allen, Jimmy Cagney, Orson Wells, Bela Lugosi, Boris Karloff, Clark Gable, Jean Harlow, Rudolph Valentino, Greta Garbo, Bing Crosby and Cary Grant.

Billy Sunday preached right through this carnal mess and he stirred his audiences so deeply that those who had reserved their laughter for Fibber McGee and their tears for “Marsha and John” found themselves out in the cold. Their alibi for apostasy was that Billy was “too emotional.” Too emotional for a dead fish.

Leavell speaks of Dwight Moody as a “genius of evangelistic organization” but of Sunday as “ultra-commercial.”24 Billy Sunday (1862-1935) is one of the strongest arguments in the world today for the utter incompetency of historians and writers to write an objective modern church history. Homer Rodeheaver, who knew him best, flatly contradicts the opinions of nearly every writer who spoke of him. For example, Rodeheaver says that Sunday paid one- third of the salaries of his associates out of his own offering and left only a $50,000 estate at his death.25 Of Sunday’s “borrowing of sermon outlines,” Homer Rodeheaver intimates that he did not copy sermons anymore than any pastor in the United States. (Rodeheaver bases this statement on information from the men who

loaned him the outlines.) Drummond says of Sunday that he was an example of “EVANGELISM at its worst.”26 Rodeheaver says, “I believe that Mr. Sunday was the greatest evangelist since the apostle Paul.”27 Again, Drummond describes Billy’s efforts to win grown men to Christ as “prancing about the platform in his shirt sleeves, hurling furniture about.”28 A. T. Robertson, the Alexandrian Greek grammarian said, “I honour the man who can preach the Gospel as he did for three months in Pittsburgh where the Gospel was talked even on the street cars, and some eighteen thousand people were brought to Christ.”29 [Robertson had at least the grace to admit that Billy could do more with a King James Bible in three months than he (Robertson) could do with the Alexandrian Greek “original” (Westcott and Hort, Aland and Nestle) in forty years.] And it must be emphasized most strongly that of “18,000” sinners who got saved in Pittsburgh, certainly at least seventy-five percent of them were men between the ages of eighteen and eighty. Kiddy-car flannelgraphs had not yet come into vogue: men were getting saved.

The controversy over Billy Sunday has continued until today. The book Elmer Gantry, written by a chronic alcoholic, was made into a movie and produced by several other chronic alcoholics so that chronic alcoholics in the next decade could have an alibi to reject Billy Sunday’s preaching against liquor. The author of the eighteenth amendment (prohibition) gave Billy Sunday the credit for putting liquor off the menu in the northern states (see pp. 178, 179). Alcoholics don’t appreciate that kind of “ministry.”

If we are to take the accounts of Homer Rodeheaver (who knew Billy as few men ever did) as reliable, Billy Sunday was an apostle in the Biblical sense of the word and a King James Bible believer from the top of his head to the soles of his feet. Billy was the foe of “modernism” and “liberalism” (i.e., the Federal Council of Churches and the faculty members of Colgate-Rochester Divinity School and Union Theological Seminary). He ridiculed the credulous scientists and scholars of his day by comparing their impotency with the power of the “old-time religion.” In speaking of administering comfort to a widow Sunday said: “And when you have gotten through with your scientific, philosophical, psychological, eugenic, social service, evolution, protoplasm, and fortuitous concurrency of atoms, if she is not crazed by it, I will go to her and after one half hour of prayer and reading of the Scripture promises the tears will be wiped away and the house from cellar to garret will be filled with a calmness like a California sunset.”30 “Scripture promises” (see above), in Billy’s thinking, never had any

reference to “plenary, verbally inspired original autographs.” That con man’s pitch was being drummed up behind closed doors by “leading evangelical Fundamentalists” while Billy was getting the job done out on the streets in full view of “principalities and powers” (Eph. 6). (The fainthearted [see pp. 241-243] have all kinds of gimmicks to make Christians think they are “soldiers of the cross” [see Chap. 11, Problem Texts} or “giant defenders of the faith.”)

Attacks were made on Billy Sunday from many quarters and in many ways. Early in his career he challenged booze and fought open and underhanded attacks by the liquor interests of his day.31 Rodeheaver says that Billy Sunday “preached like no man I’ve ever heard...he used modern-up-to-date slang, preferring expressions which he knew ninety-nine percent of his hearers understood.”32 Sometimes this became pretty “negative,” as in the case when he referred to Dr. Gladden, the leading official in the Federal Council of Churches, as “an old bald mutt” (CF Luther, Vol. I, pp. 3, 5, 8, Mordecai Ham, Vol. II, p. 180 and J. Frank Norris, Vol. II, p. 176). Billy referred to the highly educated liberals of his day (all of them Fabians or Marxists) as a lot of “pussyfooted, white-livered, yellow softies.” This was interpreted by church historians to mean that Billy “had no sense of reverence,” no sense of courtesy, no “conception of the church” and that his preaching was “distorted and vulgarized.”33 Rodeheaver said that Sunday was clean in his thinking and that he had never heard Sunday tell a vulgar story on or off the platform and, further, that in one meeting he had put 600 members into one church, which isn’t bad for a man who has no “proper conception of the church.”

In one series of meetings in Philadelphia that lasted eight weeks, 2,300,000 people heard Billy Sunday.34 One of Billy’s converts (led to Christ in a theater in Syracuse during a campaign), Lucius Eddy, won 4000 men to Christ after he himself was seventy- five years old.35 Rodeheaver notes that the meetings were called “big business” because private individuals guaranteed the payment of the meetings independently of the churches. This is extremely important to note, for it meant that hireling prophets and ecclesiastical bosses in the American religious machine (see Chap, pp. 192, 193) could not have any hold to dictate policies or publicity for their own apostate organizations. Billy Sunday (1862-1935) had a ministry which checked apostasy in the Northern Baptist Convention and the Methodist church while the Scofield Reference Bible was being produced, and he continued to preach while J. Frank Norris began to straighten out the Southern Baptist Convention.

Sunday’s sermons had snap and fire and spectacular appeal. He threw aside all accepted forms and made a pattern of evangelism distinctively his own. From the moment he stepped on the platform he was like “a violin string tuned to the highest pitch. He was peculiarly sensitive...his humour was infectious and he could bring tears at will....”36 “I know as much about theology as a jack rabbit knows about ping pong...I’m trying to make America so dry that a man must be primed before he can spit...If I can’t interest people in my Christ and in the Gospel; and if I can’t interest you more in trying to get you to heaven and trying to keep out of hell than other things, I will consider that there is something wrong with me.”37

Toward the latter years of his ministry Billy Sunday retained his power, character, and zeal for the Lord, and Rodeheaver testifies that “throughout his career he remained an evangelist with fiery zeal and passionate soul...he never lost his effectiveness. He preached the gospel with the same faithfulness. He expected decisions for Christ. He gave the invitation; the converts came.”38

Dr. Chadwick told Dr. Jones, Sr., that Billy Sunday was one of the greatest preachers he had ever heard.39

While Sunday was preaching in the United States, Vavassor Powell and John Elias were laying the groundwork for a mighty revival that broke out in Wales (1904-1905). Evans Roberts (converted in a Calvinistic-Methodist “forward movement” under Seth Joshua) was the preacher used by God.40 Dance halls in many places were closed or completely deserted; the new converts held street meetings as soon as they were saved, and theater going in Aberdare, Wales, dropped considerably.41 There were 20,000 souls saved in a period of five weeks where Roberts preached, and down in the ground coal miners not only discussed the services but sang boisterously the old hymns that they had been taught in childhood. The “Ninety and Nine” was a favorite. David Matthew, an eyewitness, gives a description of a scene in one church: “Big men unblushingly cried aloud in public for salvation. ‘Lord save, or I perish!’ A distracted soul cried ‘God be merciful to me a sinner.’...Tears and laughter were intermingled...songs and sobs filled the air....One section of the congregation was singing ‘O the Lamb, the Bleeding Lamb!’ Another part was engaged in simultaneous prayer....One soul exclaimed in stentorian tones that vibrated ‘The flowers appear on the earth..,lo, the winter is past, the rain is over and gone’; a Presbyterian minister, his countenance as pale as death, stood on his feet and recited: Who is this that cometh from Edom, with dyed garments from Bozrah?!”42

F. B. Meyer (1847-1929) and A. T. Pierson (1837-1911) helped conserve the results of the meeting, which began to slacken in power as Evans Roberts moved northward through the country. Numbers of men were converted and called to preach, among them Stephen Jeffried, John Thomas and Pastor Jenkins.

Now although many of the Christian soldiers who took part in this great assault on the forces of communism, socialism, Catholicism, rationalism, liberalism, and atheism began their ministries in the late 1800s, their main contributions were not until after World War I, and it is impossible to understand the ministries of these “old guardsmen” (Norris, Fuller, Ham, Jones, Rice, Lakin, Billington, De Haan and Truett) without understanding also the remarkable apostasy which set in before and during Billy Sunday’s ministry. Since we have learned by experience (Vol. I, Chap. 5) that all apostasy is hatched in Christian colleges, universities and seminaries (exactly as all communistic and socialistic movements hatch in secular ones), it is time to return briefly to Alexandria, Egypt, and see what the Alexandrian Cult has been doing while Moody, Sunday and Gypsy Smith were turning whole nations back to the Bible.43 This time our Alexandrian cowbirds pop up in England and Germany.

CHAPTER NINE

THE BACKGROUNDS OF THE GREAT APOSTASY

“Let no man deceive you by any means: for that day shall not come, except there come a falling away first, and that man of sin be revealed, the son of perdition;” (2 Thessalonians 2:3)

Believing the Bible to be the word of God, a church historian has a meter or gauge by which to judge spiritual movements in history. This gauge is the sevenfold “church period” layout found in Revelation 2 and 3. Any reader of these chapters can see that there is a calamitous drop-off between the sixth and the seventh church which is unmatched in any other set of church comparisons. The best church of the seven listed is the sixth one and the worst one is the seventh one. In view of the fact that these seven churches bracket twenty centuries of history (70 A. D.-1980 A.D.), it is remarkable that the greatest apostasy should take place in a period of 100 years: 1 /20th of the total time. This great “falling away” was predicted in the Bible in numerous places (2 Tim. 3, 1 Tim. 4, Jude, Gen. 49, Deut. 32, 2 Thess. 2, etc.) and, of course, its prediction nullifies the entire body of teachings and teachers that are connected with the philosophies of Marx and Darwin. These philosophies assumed a POSITIVE stance for the twentieth century; the Bible takes a NEG A TIVE stance.

Even while Dwight L. Moody and Billy Sunday were reaching the heights of their ministries and local Bible-believing churches were springing up all over America like dandelions, there were thunderheads on the horizon that guaranteed a washout presently. These thunderheads did not come up overnight and they were perfectly predictable for they had appeared several times on the horizons of church history (325 A.D., 580 A.D., 1000 A.D., 1580 A.D., etc.) before the gully washers came. To be caught “out in the rain” under such circumstances—as the faculty members of

Louisville Theological Seminary, Pensacola Christian College, Colgate-Rochester Divinity School, Wheaton College, Bob Jones University, Tennessee Temple School, Fuller Seminary, BIOLA and Lynchburg Schools were caught—would be a testimony to someone’s stupidity and lack of spiritual insight.

Following the fixed cycle (Evangelism, Education, Culture, Apostasy), CULTURE appears in the wake of every educational institution founded either during or shortly after a revival. Culture (see Vol. I, pp. 86-88) brings with it art, music, the sciences, philosophy and what is called “social studies.” Culture is nearly always Postmillennial;1 that is, most cultures in the world hope to bring in some sort of an ideal society (“kingdom builders”) by the efforts of man without Jesus Christ showing up to interfere with things (see The Sure Word of Prophecy, 1970). This hallucination is so fixed in the minds of unregenerate people that nearly every president, pope, and psychiatrist who ever lived at one time or another committed himself to some statement that should have earned him Max Rafferty’s “Jackass of the Year Award.” Samples are things like these: “I say it again and again, your sons will never have to go overseas again!!”2 “We are on the threshold of the greatest era of peace the world has ever known!”3 “I BELIEVE that there will be peace in our times!”4 “The UN is our last and BEST hope in an age where instruments of war have far outpassed the instruments of peace!”5 A visitor from outer space, upon examining our history and then hearing these men, would assume that our greatest leaders were demented IDIOTS (see the Preface to The Sure Word of Prophecy, Pensacola Bible Press, 1970).

One cannot explain this lunatic fringe madness on the part of the political and religious leaders unless he takes into account the fact that nearly all social, religious, and educational leaders have to prophesy POSITIVELY in order to get a following. They have to hold out some earthly “hope for mankind” in order to get into positions of leadership; after all, the world system is controlled (Luke 4:6) by a POSITIVE thinker (Gen. 3:1). People want to be fooled. In a back alley in Shanghai in the 1950s an American tourist saw an old Chinese woman stamping Chinese oranges with a rubber stamp that said “Sunkist.” “Why those aren’t Sunkist oranges!” the tourist exclaimed. Through an interpreter the old woman replied, “That’s what they want; that’s what they get" (2 Thess. 2, Ezek. 14). Unsaved mankind as such—the unregenerate mass of “do-gooders” in any country—want to be told that they are good enough to save themselves or their country or their churches or their schools by self-

effort (Isa. 64:6, Ps. 39:5). The present “National Council of Christian Churches” follows that line, not only teaching that all men are automatically saved and that none of them are going to hell6 but that by self-effort they can bring in a utopia on earth through political legislation and revolutionary agitation.6-5 These incredible hypocrites have been talking about “separation of church and state” for 100 years and at the same time taking positions on (and promoting publicly and privately) guaranteed incomes, the antipoverty program, the support of Communist guerrillas in Africa, the civil rights bill, the Selma-Montgomery march, street demonstrations, importation of Mexican labor, nonsegregated housing, abandonment of loyalty oaths in national defense, a federally-controlled housing program, and the boycotting of the wrong kind of head lettuce at the grocery store!7 When Jerry Falwell (1980) attempted to appeal to the “Moral Majority” for involvement in political and social issues, a roar went up from these preposterous hypocrites to the effect that preachers had no business “interfering” with politics! This was done after the bishops and rectors of the NCC had publicly promoted the basic tenets of Karl Marx through a period of fifty years and had given out political press releases which were published in every major newspaper in America.7-1 These press releases, plus a score of books written by their leaders, show the political position of the NCC exactly: they were for confiscation of firearms, hiring sex perverts to teach in public schools, abolishing private property and producing a class­less society under a one-world government with a one-world police force.1-3 Any means to that end—demonstrations, revolution, confusion, federal control, anarchy, or producing a “sexless Bible”7-5 was legitimate. The NCC is still engaged in giving people “what they want” in the same sense that Marx and Lenin approached the problem. Political and religious leaders are continually raised up by Satan for this purpose. Rare exceptions like Queen Victoria, Thomas Jefferson, Oliver Cromwell, Bismark and William of Orange do not slacken the pace (Luke 4:6). It was during Victoria’s reign (1837-1901) that England turned to Charles Darwin for relief and aid against the negative preaching of 20,000 preachers who insisted that “every man at his best state” was “altogether vanity” (Ps. 39:5). Darwin and Marx were welcome reliefs for “the educated class” who wanted an opium pipe dream for reality.

The way to get popular support (Marx, Darwin, Lenin, Jack Kennedy, Stalin, Roosevelt, Lincoln, Ted Kennedy, Pope Paul VI,

Einstein, Pope John Paul II, etc.) is to He about the future* “Give ’em what they want.”

Surrounding the work of Torrey, Moody, Sunday and Gypsy Smith is a bank of cumulonimbus clouds about 50,000 feet high. They have been gathering over the landscape since about 1800, and what began as a low, light, fluffy stratocumulus now (1880-1930) towers over the countryside. What brought about this low pressure area? Three major factors appear at once.

I. The substitution of the newspaper (and magazines) for the Bible in the daily reading habits of the populaces of Europe, England and the USA. The popes’ reasons for objecting to this “freedom of the press” was that they saw in it a threat to their own political organization. An informed public would not remain “Catholic” very long. Catholicism’s strong suit has always been the ignorance of their church members in regards to the IMPERIALISTIC and POLITICAL designs of the hierarchy and how these designs are carried out. What could be more horrible than 100 “dailies” printing “canon law” or the “Decrees of the Council of Trent” or the “history of the St. Bartholomew Massacre”? This is why the popes violently opposed “freedom of the press.”8-2 However, the news media was not going to be any kind of a threat to Roman Catholicism, for the Marxist news media was a worldly institution set up on the same principles as Rome: financial and political expediency. The Bible continued to be the real danger to Catholicism, and as long as the BIBLE was not printed weekly in all of the newspapers, Rome could “adjust.” There isn’t one major newspaper or TV station or radio station in North America that is “anti-Catholic." They are all pro-Catholic. However, there are hundreds of these outlets that are against the Bible, against freedom of speech, against the local church, against law enforcement, against capital punishment, against ownership of guns, against nationalism, against patriotism, and against moral standards. In short, they are COMMUNIST oriented; they are designed to produce a slave population which a CATHOLIC dictator could take over. Since “modern man” now gets his ideas about life, science, death, religion, morals, politics, international affairs and education largely from the Marxist news media (TV, newspapers and magazines), it is not surprising to find that Stalin, Lenin, Engels and Marx were all members of the FOURTH estate—not the “proletariat”; they were journalists, not workers or farmers.9 When the background of the Russian revolution is studied (as the background of the French revolution), it is quickly seen that the real

men behind it are not workers. “Workers of the world unite!” has nothing to do with Marx or Lenin, who never did an honest days work a day in their life.9-4 If there was anything outstanding about Trotsky and Karl Marx it was the fact that neither of them were born as peasants or workers, neither did any factory or farm work, and neither of them had enough callouses on his hands to chafe a baby’s cheek.9-6 Robertson calls such men “Gracchites," 9-s although the original word was “political opportunist.”

Lenin was a “truckler”—a journalist who goes along with international socialism so as to guarantee his own security and preeminence. Lenin did not create a Communist Russia; he created a machine for military imperialism and it was designed so that he might be its dictator. He died too quickly and Stalin got the honored place.9-9 Russia today has nothing to do with the proletariat or “downtrodden working classes.” It is an imperialistic military society controlled by the middle class (bourgeois) police (NKVD).

Lenin, Trotsky and Marx were “students” before they became journalists, and this explains why all twentieth century Communist movements begin with students or professors in colleges and then get publicity from the press. Kent State (1970), Berkeley (1960), Columbia (1930), and the NEA10 are not engaged in promoting democracy or republics; like Lenin, Trotsky and Marx, they are student movements aimed at the overthrowing of capitalistic or democratic institutions. The terminology of the press is the terminology of the classroom and vice versa (meaningful, relevant, meaningful values, community involvement, in depth, the “thrust,” racial discrimination, focuses on reality, definitive content, institutionalized structures, oppressed minorities, ultimate validation, supportive and verifiable facts, feedbacks, simplistic mentality, proper perspectives, pluralistic society, profiles and proliferation, criteria of values clarification, transferable concepts, moratoriums, significant “thrusts,” major “breakthroughs,” pluralistic cells, summit conferences, dialogues, detente, etc., etc.). It is almost as though the newspaper reporters were trying to pass off as college graduates or as though all of them were college graduates and had dragged the students’ jargon over onto the printing presses. Since none of this has anything to do with historical facts, real people or the working public—let alone the New Testament local church—it belongs in the realm of fantasy. “The proliferation of simplistic mentalities may be contemporarily relationable to the erosion of religiosity,” but talking like a jackass never made a sheep out of a wolf.

Rihle reading in the home was replaced with the reading of

newspapers and magazines; these were supplemented with radio (1920) and TV (1950). Thus the populaces of America (1920-1980) were raised on Marxist FANTASY instead of reality, lies instead of the truth, nonmoral paganism instead of Biblical morality, pornographic excesses instead of decent literature, racial mongrelization instead of cultural distinctions, pseudo-scholarship, pseudo-religion, pseudo-science, and above all, an addiction to anything “new” that could be called “news.” The coming one-world, communistic Catholic church had to condition its members before opening its doors.

II. The baleful influence of Christian colleges, universities and seminaries (Halle, Tubingen, Chicago, Harvard, Yale, Colgate, Oxford, Cambridge, etc.) once the evangelists and Bible believers had left them and passed on westward. (Observe that Dwight Moody was from Illinois while Billy Sunday was from Iowa.) Since the final goal of all higher education (Christian or atheistic) is to destroy belief in one final and absolute authority—no major Christian college, seminary or university in America operates in any other fashion—it was only a matter of time before the authority of the Bible was replaced with the opinions and philosophies of the faculty members who may have been, or may not have been, saved sinners. (With the passage of time they will all be replaced by unsaved sinners and the Bible will not only be slighted, but it will also be attacked and denied.)10;5 No major church historian has been able to write a church history yet that doesn’t trace the sources of rationalism, liberalism, socialism and modernism to educated Christians'1 whose roots and backgrounds are connected with orthodox seminaries and universities. Students and professors then have the honor of originating both communism and liberalism. Both movements began in the schools. From the standpoint of the history of the New Testament church, neither religion is worth the time it would take to discuss it. There has never been on this earth one publisher of a major daily newspaper who was a member of a New Testament local church; there has never been one liberal college professor who was ever a member of a New Testament local church; and there has never been a Marxist student on any campus in the world who was a member of a New Testament local church (see Vol. I, Chap. 2) and there never will be. Real New Testament local churches are never found “involved” one time in any SOCIAL or POLITICAL issues of their day and time other than in preaching against specific sins and praying that God would overthrow the designs (Acts 12) of those opposed to the truth (1 Cor. 5, 6). No New Testament church was a member of any “association” or “council” and there isn’t one New Testament church in the Bible that

concerned itself over the liberation of slaves (1 Cor. 7:17-21, 1 Tim. 5:1-4), let alone “the just economic distribution” of “welfare sharing” with the “underprivileged minorities” (see Vol. II, p. ix-xii).

III. Old Mother Rome. She never cashed in her chips or racked out of the pool hall simply because she lost England, Scotland, and the United States. Using the unsaved philosophers whom she had condemned12 as levers to destroy the faith of Protestant Christians in their Bible,13 Rome went about her work inside the Christian schools to run faculty members back to a Dark Age Bible and the sacramental ritualism of Catholic “Christianity.”14 Once a Westerner has abandoned the Bible as the final authority there is only one place to go, for, after all, newspapers and magazines can never be the final authority. All roads lead to Rome. The Catholic pope is the only authority on this earth, apart from the Bible itself, who professes to be infallible. Small wonder that the president of the Philippine Islands (Marcos, February, 1981) begged his forgiveness and called him “Holy Fa­ther” (see John 17:11) when the old bloody rascal showed up in Ma­nila to encourage Communist revolutionaries in the Philippines.14-5

It is the combination of these three high-pressure areas or cold fronts (condensation or whatever) that builds up the thunderhead about to shower on the Philadelphia church (Rev. 3:6-10). Why would any American think that America would escape religious apostasy when apostasy followed the New Testament church into the Balkans (400-800 A.D.), after establishing itself at J?ome(300- 400 A.D.); and then it progressed up through England (500-800 A.D.)(Vol. I, Chap. 16), Germany (800-1000 A.D.)(Vol. I, pp. 358- 360), and France (1000-1400 A.D.) and was so successful in obliter­ating English Christianity (1900-1980 A.D.) that by 1960 Spurg­eon’s tabernacle was a museum. How many people have been saved in “Westminster Abbey” or “St. Paul’s” since 1900? Why, they buried David Livingstone in Westminster Abbey!

Rene Descartes (1561-1650) and/I Jam Weishaupt( 1748-1830) were both Bavarian Catholics raised by Jesuit priests J5 (Although the Roman Catholic Hitler was not raised by Jesuits, he was raised by Benedictine monks.) To Descarte, the final authority on earth was not the Bible; it was the physical senses coupled with the imagination. Descartes believed (just as sincerely as any lunatic in the booby hatch) that seventy pages of his own rules for the “direction of the mind” could make all men’s minds capable of giving correct judgment in all matters,16 thus producing infallible minds—“as gods, knowing good and evil” (Gen. 3). Being a good Catholic, Descarte taught that mankind should obey the Roman

Catholic priests and popes but that they should reject the Bible as an authoritative revelation. Although Descarte was not considered to be a “good” Catholic by the pope, the Jesuits did not hesitate to take sides against the pope and point out that they had trained Descartes as well as they trained Weishaupt and Moliere (1622-1673).17 In Jesuit history, for example, Shakespeare was a genius not because he believed the Bible and read it but rather because he was a son of a Roman Catholic.18 Again, Lessing (1729-1781) was good because he would rather be subject to the pope than to the teachings of Martin Luther.19 Byron, Shelly and Heine are “passable” because, after all, they were “nourished by Catholic influences.” No man listed yet, after Shakespeare, was a Bible believer, but Victor Hugo (1802- 1885) with his work on The Hunchback of Notre Dame made the Index, the papal list of forbidden books.20 The adventures of Quasimodo and Esmerelda (Notre Dame) suggest that good, pious holy “fathers” can not only burn with lust but are capable of using blackmail and extortion to satisfy their flesh. This is a “no-no” in the Associated Press and on the “late newscast” for it “fans the flames of bigotry, etc.” (see p. 78).

The period from 1715 to 1774 is sometimes called the “Age of Enlightenment,” not because of the worldwide missionary efforts of Pietists and Moravians, using Luther’s Textus Receptus in German (Vol. I, pp. 370, 390), but because men like John Locke (1632- 1704), Pascal (1623-1662), Boyle, Halley, Racine and Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) were making the most of the fact that the Roman Catholic church had lost its hold on suppressing individual initiative. Kant was about as “enlightened” as a blind mouse in a coal cellar. Beginning with the false assumption that faith in the word of God was something that had to be attempted without proof of any kind, Kant wound up with a philosophical system where provable facts (real knowledge) fell into the bracket of “science” (Col. 2:8, 1 Tim. 6:20) while unprovable beliefs (not real knowledge) fell into a bracket called “religion” (Gal. 1:8-15). This neat maneuver left every university professor in Germany (who believed and followed Kant) with the illimitable and unmitigated conceit that what was proved on a university campus through a test tube or a telescope or under a microscope was real knowledge, whereas what Solomon, Moses, David and Paul wrote was not real knowledge. Thus the physical phenomena observed in a college laboratory became a body of absolute truths while heaven, hell, the Virgin Birth, the bodily Resurrection, the New Birth and the Second Advent of Christ became “unreal.” After all, no one could prove them in a college laboratory. Lyell, Paley, and Darwin all took their

cues from Kant: they were about as “enlightened” as Pharoah or Nimrod.

Herder’s History of Mankind was published around 1780 and it slowly became a sort of fairyland textbook for this educated class; it was Postmillennial exactly as Augustine’s City of God and Hitler’s Mein Kampf and the speeches of Pope John Paul II on his tour of 1982 (February).

In science the “observation of physical phenomena” became the big thing. Priestly, Cavendish, Von Haller, LaMarck, Herschel, Laplace, Jenner, Folta and Wincklemann messed around and failed to solve one human problem that had been in existence since 4000 B.C. None of them got anyone saved; none of them solved their own country’s problems of hunger, strife, sin, revolution or unemployment; none of them found a remedy for sin or for death; and none of them solved the problems of international strife, war or disease. (But as far as that goes, “science” has never solved one of the seven major problems of mankind since the word was coined by unsaved Greek philosophers. “Science,” at its best, is a very poor substitute for believing and obeying the word of God.)

While Zinzendorf, Wesley, Bunyon, Whitefield, Edwards, Tennant, Finney, Jones, Cartwright, Moody and Sunday “went at it,” the musicians were going full blast (Bach, Gounod, Mozart, Handel, Haydn, Beethoven, Schubert, Schumann, Chopin, Brahms, Wagner, Liszt, Verdi, Bizet, etc.) and the artists were reaping the benefits of worldwide evangelism (Rembrandt, Vermeer, Goya, Turner, Hogarth, Manet, Monet, Matisse, Courbet, Cezanne, Renoir, Van Gogh, Degas, etc.). As the Holy Spirit blasted through the strongholds of Roman Catholicism, Buddhism, Taoism, Mohammedanism, Confucionism, “free love,” evolution, atheism, anarchy and nihilism, industrial revolutions sprang up, inventions multiplied by the hundreds, agricultural and social revolutions occurred, and “science” began to cash in on every kind of gimmick. The upsurge in “progress” and “evolution” was so great that every unsaved man on earth who was exposed to the Bible thought the “kingdom was a-coming” and every backslidden Christian who spent his time with science (1 Tim. 6:20) and philosophy (Col. 2:8) thought the “kingdom was coming.”

One cannot appreciate the extent of this mass delusion till one observes that Adolph Hitler as late as 1933 referred to the Nazi movement as “POSITIVE CHRISTIANITY” (see Gen. 3:1).21 He wisely labeled his government after the millennial reign of Christ (Rev. 20:1-2) since he had a concordant with the “head of the Christian church” before he began the slaughter. The “thousand

year reich" is the terminus of believing that man can bring in “the kingdom” (Rev. 20:1-3) by self-effort: ALL HUMANISTS BELIEVE THIS.

Historians like LaTourette (who professes to be a “Baptist”) write church history from the standpoint of the pope.22 That is, they write from the standpoint of religious evolution. The term “the Christian impulse” occurs so many times in LaTourette’s writing that one would think it would have some relevance to the Bible. It doesn’t. There are no Christian “impulses” in the Bible in either Testament for individuals, races, nations or churches. LaTourette (as Westcott and Hort) was raised up as a “non-Catholic” to bolster and support and give credence to the teaching that the Roman Catholic church was a “Christian” organization. In the seventeenth­twentieth centuries what was going on was a worldwide anti­Catholic movement geared to a Protestant Bible that no Catholic was allowed to read if he obeyed the decrees of the popes.22-5 Further, no Catholic in the seventeenth-twentieth centuries was allowed to believe that salvation was apart from water baptism,23 and those who were teaching and preaching the King James Bible all over the world were teaching that Jesus Christ saved sinners apart from ANY church: no church controlled anyone’s salvation. The Roman Catholic “fount” for sprinkling babies was getting distinctively out of style. Wesley and Whitefield never mentioned it in their preaching nor did any of their converts; Finney and Spurgeon never mentioned it in their preaching nor did any of their converts. And if you had told any convert of Moody’s or Sunday’s that their salvation was conditioned on a Baalite hood holding up a piece of bread they would have either laughed or cried; feeblemindedness usually evokes one of those responses. “Christian impulses” were about as “Catholic” as General William Booth or Peter Cartwright. What LaTourette means is that the worldwide preaching and distribution (and translations into 400 languages) of the English Bible of the Protestant Reformation was accomplishing in three centuries what fifteen centuries of Roman Catholicism had failed to accomplish.

This mighty sweep of the Holy Spirit (through the Authorized Version and its final translation into 800 major languages and dialects) was naturally opposed by Satan; and as we noted in our first volume (Vol. I, p. 390-391), the Devil is as active in church his­tory as the church itself. A church history written without reference to Satan’s work, purpose, plans and devices (2 Cor. 2:11) is not a church history at all; it is a secular history. In the Book of the Acts the local New Testament church and its members are attacked every

single time the Holy Spirit works in their midst (Acts 2, 3 with 4:3 Acts 4:31 with 5:1-6, Acts 8 with 9:1-4, Acts 13:44-45, Acts 14:3, 4, etc.). To think that the worldwide evangelistic and missionary movements of the sixteenth, seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries would be met with approval only would be a disasterous expectation. The greatest apostasy in the history of the church followed this movement. It blossomed and bloomed in the home base of the Authorized Version, England, and spread as quickly from that island nation as the truth had spread in the sixteenth, seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The apostasy sprouted in Germany and France and proceeded on the standard western course (Vol. II, pp. 40,94). It was connected with the philos­ophy (Col. 2:8) and writing of a student journalist (an apostate Jew) who never did an honest day’s work in his life and with Roman Catholic Bible revisers who never did an honest day’s work in their lives. Its backgrounds were the French revolution, the restoration of the Jesuits in France to their “former estate,” and the espousement of French revolutionary ideas by a German Jew whose parents be­came converts to the Lutheran church in Germany. The Catholic side of this apostasy converted the leadership of Oxford and Cam­bridge (England) into an anti-Protestant, anti-Authorized Version, anti-Textus Receptus coalition, and the Jewish part of the apostasy —the term “Jewish” is used loosely because Karl Marx was an athe­ist and no real J ew is an atheist—was the popularizing of the ideas of Thomas Muenzer (1770), Babeuf (1796), the Egaliteurs (France, 1838), Heine, Mund, Gutzkow (Germany), Weitling (1842), Ferdinand LaSalle (German Jew, 1842), Fourier (France, 1836), Lawyer Cabet (1856) and Proudhon (1865).23-3 These Germans and Frenchmen, in one form or another, advocated a radical socialism or a radical communism. Marx had nothing new. Plato (427-347 B.C.), the Greek, is the ancient source as it is well-known that he originated the modern HEW platform for government controlled families, selective breeding, etc. Marx simply had the news media to work with; and since he was a journalist himself (as Lenin and Trotsky), he could affect the lives of thousands whom Plato, Muenzer, Babeuf, etc., could not touch. Marx had nothing new to contribute. His ideas were simple. Since he was too lazy to work, he aspired to a “Doctor’s Degree” in philosophy. He decided that all the trouble in the world was caused by people who hired people to work for them. The source of the world’s ills was not sin (James 4:1); it was “THE LOVE OF MONEY” (1 Tim. 6:10). (The AV had beaten him to the punch by about 200 years!) Marx decided that

“wars” (James 4:1) based on lust were the “scientific” way to obtain what you didn’t have; revolution was the solution to your “lack of money.” Why work for a living when you can murder your employer and steal his property?

Communism reduced to its simplest elements is so “simplistic” that anyone can understand it: steal what you want. The Marxism of Lenin and Stalin produced the modern Poltiburo (which controls the party) consisting of nineteen men who control 17,000,000 party members and 650,000,000 people. This shows exactly what commu­nism is: it is a military dictatorship controlled by a religious hier­archy. The religious hierarchy is composed of little “do-gooders” who worship the evolutionary process as the “final authority in all matters of faith and practise” and they promote little pilgrimages to the tomb of their dead saint (Lenin). To protect the religious hierarchy, the Cheka (GPU) was established and was later changed to the NKVD, which is broken up ito the MVD and the KGB: the Catholic version is cardinals and Jesuits (see Vol. I, pp. 292-301).

Today the showcase of Karl Marx is a huge concentration camp where unions cannot strike, farmers cannot pray, workers cannot unite, everyone has to obey the centralized government or else go to a concentration camp, and regular aggressive warfare is carried on against “peaceful nations” without any regard to their rights or beliefs.23-5 Marx was a deceived idiot. His only other showcase would be Red China, where no revolutionary (as Marx or Lenin) would be tolerated for twenty-four hours, where no Negro could hold a government position in any capacity, and where over 4,000,000 of “the people” had to be murdered before “the people” could set up a government of “the people” (see the comments on Acts 21:28 in that Commentary). Reading Mao Tse-tung is kind of like reading Marx, minus the vocabulary and the enthusiasm. If we are to know a thing by its fruits or a man by his fruits (Matt. 7:20), an honest student of history would have to confess that Karl Marx was a deluded fool.

In England (1750-1890), where tempers are somewhat cooled by fog and rain and metabolism is mellowed by tannic acid (tea) instead of beer, atheism and revolution were cooled to evolution (Darwin) and socialism (the Fabian Society).

Karl Marx knew who his buddies in England were. This explains why he wanted to dedicate Das Kapital to Charles Darwin (1809-1882). If Charlie couldn’t read the handwriting on the wall, Karl baby could. Marx knew that if the English speaking people ever accepted Darwin’s fantastic biological hallucinations as

“scientific,” they would go right on into Disneyland and accept Marx’s economic theories as “scientific.” The graded income tax, compulsory education, abolition of inheritances and private property, gun confiscation, classless societies, the welfare state and the mongrelization of the races is one package. You cannot separate animal origins from animal conduct and animal conduct must be controlled by a zoo. The only question is the question of final au­thority (see Vol. I, pp. 280,332,337). Which animal will run the zoo.

Darwin and Marx are birds of the same feather and this explains why all Communists are nonscientific. The theory of evolution blatantly contradicts the first two basic fundamental laws of thermodynamics and, therefore, is properly not even a theory; it is a religious “faith,” and therefore, completely “unscientific.” If “science” (1 Tim. 6:20) is a “correlated body of knowledge” which can be demonstrated to be fact by “observation,” then the theory of evolution and the theory of a classless society are sheer FANTASY. Neither of them have anything in common with any branch of “science.” There is no science of “origins” and never will be unless a man accepts the scientific statement of Genesis 1:1 as found in a King James Bible. The “geologic ages, eons and eras” are the products of depraved imagination.24 They represent the wishful thinking of the religious fanatic who believes in his own goodness and the goodness and ability of his fellow man (animal) to go from “puddle to paradise” via killing: killing is the major part of Darwin’s system and Marx’s system. A religious zealot will kill to propagate his religion (Vol. I, pp. 400-404).

The apostasy then begins where all apostasy begins: with culture (Evangelism, Education, Culture, Apostasy, etc.).

Marx, Darwin and company set up the dual authorities of the Alexandrian Cult (200-300 A.D.) and take on the Bible with the intent of blotting it out of existence. In the Bible the ownership of private property is honored (Matt. 20:15, Acts 5:4), the rights of the employer are sustained (Matt. 20:15), Marx’s “life-style” is condemned (2 Thess. 3:10), his religious beliefs are nullified (Ps. 19:2; 119:89, 160), Darwin’s scholarship is classified as a dunce’s cap (Rom. 1:22), and his theory on “origins” is rammed down his throat by Jesus Christ Himself (Mark 10:6, Matt. 24:37, John 5:46, 47). One can only come to the conclusion that Marxism and Darwinism were two parlor games for spoiled brats who resented Biblical preaching. Neither man was a worker; neither man was a peasant; neither man was one of the “downtrodden masses”; neither man was a farmer; and neither man had the sense that God gave to a brass

monkey when it came to objective analysis of mankind’s problems.

Now it was this deadly combination—nothing is more deadly than a zealous fanatic who doesn’t have the sense that God gave a brass monkey—that drifted across England (and her colonies) in the nineteenth century. Of course there were variations. Lyell (1797- 1875) and Paley (1743-1805) tried to hang on to some vestiges of Deism (Hobbes, Lord Herbert, John Locke, Thomas Browne, Toland, Cooper, Whitson, Wollaston, Woolston, Bolingbroke, etc.) and Darwin tried desperately to at least maintain a “first cause.” Huxley (1825-1895) just about talked him out of it; and when the Fabian Society got into full swing, the “deity,” for all practical purposes, became SOCIAL PERFECTION.24-5 The men who influenced Westcott and Hort (Pusey and Maurice) were, to all practical purposes, Roman Catholic socialists.24-8

Darwin, Abraham Lincoln, and Hort all had something in common.25 When it came to “bringing in the perfect society” they all looked through the eyes of the gradually evolving “monkey man” who was “every day in every way getting better and better” and with a few more “battle hymns” (i.e., survival of the fittest) would establish the perfect society: minus Jesus Christ. Lincoln’s “of the people, by the people and for the people” is the American statement of the French revolution. Practically it means violence: steal what you want (see The Sure Word of Prophecy, 1969). “Liberty” (see Chap. 4) and “freedom” (ibid.) are the cliches used for stealing and killing. They are no more different coming out of the mouth of Lincoln, Churchill, Roosevelt and the popes than they are coming out of the mouths of Lenin, Marx, Hitler, or Castro. All “kingdom builders” use the same vocabulary: it works.

Now this is the stage setting for the great apostasy in the drama of church history, for the next cast that comes on stage is a cast of “Fundamentalists" who profess to believe in the Virgin Birth, the bodily Resurrection, the Blood Atonement and the Deity of Christ. They are orthodox English churchmen. Further, they are “good, godly, dedicated scholars ’ whose sincerity and dedication is “above reproach.” They come on the stage in 1881-1885 with a supporting cast of:

1. Brainwashed Marxists and Fabians who believe that unfair distribution of money is the root of all evil and that a “just and equal” economic system where all “share” their goods will solve all of man’s problems.

2. Brainwashed evolutionists and deists who think that the Bible is full of contradictions and “unscientific errors” and that man

by “survival of the fittest” can alter his environment and thereby alter his NATURE.

3. Brainwashed Puseyites in the Oxford Movement who had decided that the Authorized Version of 1611 must be replaced with the Jesuit Version of 1582, thereby opening a way for the English Protestants to return to the Vatican State at Rome.

This combination was a socialistic-Catholic-Roman- Communist-animal movement. It could properly be called the “Humanistic Society for Dark Age Degeneration” (in the name of “The Progressive Society for the Betterment of Mankind”). The program was a news media masterpiece. It was brought about by believing what journalists and scholars wrote instead of believing what the Book said.

It not only created artificial issues and diversions for the “ear ticklers” (2 Tim. 4:1-6) and the Athenians (Acts 17:21), but it sustained these issues interminably so that ramifications of them and “offshoots” of them could be nurtured and developed through the twentieth century in one continual bombardment of nonessential, left-wing, impractical, communistic, confusing, and vicious reactions which would occupy the entire time of any fool who was stupid enough to think they were vital issues to start with. The Watergate scandal of 1972 and the Iranian hostage fiasco of 1980 were two prime examples of this journalism gone to seed. Communism, socialism, fascism, Catholicism, Fabianism, and “one world government” are the same system. None of them have any relevance to anything except killing to get control or killing to stay in control or killing to get out from under control or causing someone else to get killed without doing the killing yourself (see The Sure Word of Prophecy, 1969). All totalitarian systems are the same system. None of them have anything to do with church history (see Vol. I, pp. 307-322). They only touch the body of Christ where they cause apostasy in the lives and beliefs of Christians who are supposed to be going by THE BOOK instead of by magazines, newspapers, radio and television.

A. Darwin’s system produces sex education (SIECUS) in the schools (the animal is growing), the use of drugs in the schools (unruly animals have to be controlled), armament races (might is right, the fittest survive, etc.), the abolition of prayer and Bible reading in the schools (you evolve without either), the abolition of moral standards (animals are amoral), the constant use of dope and alcohol (they have “values”), suicide (man had no purpose in “evolving” and therefore has no certain goal) and government

■ >

control of all industries, businesses and farms (man is the product of his “environment”).

B. Marx’s system produces concentration camps bigger than any that Hitler built, enforced slave labor and removal of populaces, assassinations and terrorism (any revolutionary movement is a forward movement, as long as it is not in YOUR country), loss of incentive to work, a welfare state, disintegration of family life, and a philosophy that can find no reason to live other than to fit in as a cog in a wheel that started automatically (Darwin) and is destined to burn out (second law of thermodynamics) into a black void.

C. The Jesuit Bible accompanies the Inquisition, the St. Bartholomew Massacre (1572), the Irish Massacre (1640-1642), Bloody Mary’s reign (1555), the Italian Revolution (1848), the papal crusades to exterminate Bible-believing Christians (1236-1380), World War I (see pp. 219-221), World War II (see pp. 226-228), the social and economic conditions of Mexico, Spain and South Amer­ica, forty-five modern “English” versions that deny the Virgin Birth of Christ (Luke 2:33), the Deity of Christ (1 Tim. 3:16), the Blood Atonement (Col. 1:14) and the Ascension of Christ (Luke 24:51, 52) and the subsequent destruction of their American and British Bible Societies (see p. 166) as desired and recommended by Pope Leo XII and Pope Pius VII.25-2

The roots, then, of science, politics and scholarship in the twentieth century and of “modern man” are not to be found in truth, holiness, righteousness or even in facts. They are to be found in the irrational fiction of demented fools (Rom. 1:22, 23). Small wonder that the twentieth century man sees Rudolph Hoess—who never killed anyone—in solitary confinement for forty years in a jail where he is the only inmate (Spandau) while a dozen convicted murderers walk the streets daily in Miami, Detroit and New York; sees Christians paying the government to feed, cloth, shelter and entertain (TV in the cells) Charles Manson; sees a whole continent exulting and raving over the release of fifty-two Civil Service employees (Iran) while obliterating from their memory the capture and disappearance of over 1500 of their best young men (Korea and Vietnam) who were laying down their lives for half the salary of the Civil Service workers; sees Generals Keitel and Jodi sentenced to death for “starting aggressive warfare” (Nuremberg Trials) while Stalin (who invaded Poland and Finland) was toasted by the leaders of England and the USA; sees Christians complaining about Jerry Falwell’s “majority” taking a stand on political issues after the

NCCC had been operating on ten political platforms for more than seventy years; sees people in America in a sweat about “starting an armaments race” with Russia if they made any attempt to catch up with a race that had been going on since 1945; sees federal regulations forbidding anyone to advertise for help in a newspaper for “white” people or “Christian” people while sending out a census where the people could be fined for not saying whether they were Catholic, Protestant or Jew or whether they were “white” or “black”; sees the entire monetary and economic destiny of a nation placed in the hands of a private bank called a “Federal Bank”;256 and sees men being refused jobs because they are “white” because if they got the job it would be discriminating against “blacks.”

Perhaps no more profound statement has ever been made regarding the fruits of Darwinism, Marxism and Jesuitism than the one made by a Bible-believing, Premillennial Baptist in the twentieth century (Lester Roloff). He said simply, “America is an insane asylum run by the inmates.”

Now all of this is a long way from a discussion of the history of the New Testament local church, but when one remembers that the policies established by the government between 1933-1980 against the local church (OSHA, HEW, IRS, TLC, CFR and the NEA) in the USA were governed by the news media,26 one can see the expediency in taking a close look at the men who taught the journalists, senators, representatives, presidents, bureaucrats and scholars what they profess to “know.” These men were Darwin (for scientists and biologists), Marx (for philosophers, journalists and socialists), and the Jesuit priests of Rheims, France (Bible revisors and translators). While the economic conspirators (J.P. Morgan, Rockefeller, Ford, Warberg, Schiff, Colonel House, Aldrich, Baruch, Morgenthau, Eaton, etc.) were manipulating the currency, these men were manipulating the minds of college graduates. This explains why today the most powerful force for communism in America is the college campus. It was thus in Russia and thus in China; student movements are behind every Communist uprising in the world today26-8 (Iran, the Philippines, San Salvador, Zambia, Rhodesia, etc.). Lenin, Marx and Trotsky (as well as Engels) were students first and journalists next: they never “worked."

Any man who followed Darwin a hundred years ago or any man who follows him today subscribes to a religious cult. The cult believes that man came from animal roots, whose roots were vegetable, whose roots were mineral.22 No amount of sophistry can cover up the grinning head of spontaneous generation and

“acquired characteristics” no matter how many revisions of Darwin’s original position are made. Darwin taught exactly what all evolutionists and humanists teach: that progress is inevitable because it always has been. This may be revised by sophistry to mean that “if it is pushed” (Marx) it will be inevitable or if it is “controlled” (Heisenberg, Plank, Einstein, HEW, OSHA) it will be inevitable or that it is “relatively” progressive (positivism, existentialism, etc.), but you can only go so far in justifying a man’s depraved nature. The truth is that the word “progress” is as relative as evolution or the dialectict, for as sure as all the boobies are not in the hatch, if you don’t know where you camefrom, or where you are going, you certainly don’t know where you are at NOW. You could have degenerated and deteriorated backward a thousand times and you still could call it “progress” depending upon where you thought you were going or where you thought you had been. Einstein’s relativism does away with origins and goals.

Descarte lost his soul but found his mind. Kant lost his mind but found his conscience. Bertrand Russell lost his conscience but found his animal reflexes. Einstein lost his reflexes and found a vacuum in a black hole.

Darwin believed simply (in layman’s language) that no one had to be born again because everyone was born right the first time. On this matter he and the Lord Jesus Christ could come to no agreement (John 3). John 3:3 was based on Genesis 1-3 and Christ insisted that what Moses wrote in Genesis 2 (Mark 10:6) was fact, not “science.” Obviously either Jesus Christ or Charles Darwin didn’t know what they were talking about. One confirmed an account that said that “man” started at the top and fell to the bottom (Jesus Christ’s confirmation) and that without the intervention of his Maker he could not even see that he was at the bottom. Further, without a miracle from his Maker he could not get back to the top. The other (Darwin) adopted a fictitious theory at the bottom and worked himself up, dragging himself up by his own bootstraps from a dead lift at each drag.28 No technical knowledge or skills are needed to understand Darwin’s position. No experiments are necessary to be carried out to prove him or disprove him. No man needs a high school education to understand the theory of evolution perfectly. It is the self-righteous alibi of a lost sinner trying to kid himself into thinking that he is not in the condition the Bible says he is in (Eph. 2, 4, Rom. 3, Isa. 65, Ps. 14, Matt. 23, Jer. 23, etc.).

Darwin’s “scientific” researches were based on emotional panic, and his followers have been in such a religious panic to prove

him right since he died that they have been known to waste $25,000,000,000 in taxpayers’ money to bring back volcanic ash from the moon.

Now the same may be said of Karl Marx. Both men were deeply disturbed in their emotional lives29 and their philosophies were based mainly on hysteria. In Marx’s case he wanted to be classified as an intellectual, which he wasn’t. He wanted to be anything but a Jew, which he was by birth; he was too lazy to get work anywhere and, as a consequence, two of his children starved to death. In his more lucid moments of rabid fanaticism he would scream out that everyone’s family should be destroyed, that no one had a right to own anything, and that people believed30 and preached the Bible because of either economic coercion or economic ambitions. (Exactly how Jesus Christ and Paul fit into this scheme is a little hard to say!) Marx is careful to let us know that he is a Messiah who will show the world how the “millennial reign” will be brought in. He professes to have revelations of TRUTH that are superior to Moses, Peter, James, John, Paul and Christ, and he states these revelations in terms of the deepest religious convictions. He will die for his beliefs: he is a religious fanatic/*1 Marx simply set up his own brain for God, instead of the God of Biblical revelation, and he came to the conclusion that the highest authority in the universe was his own opinion. He had so much religious faith regarding this “fundamental” that he gladly would have sacrificed any nation, government or people on its altar. Lenin simply applied what Marx taught: he sacrificed them.*1 Marx had no problems that are not common to the depraved nature of Adam. He blamed others (Gen. 3:12, 13); he found fault with God’s providence and dealings (Gen. 4:13); he called Jesus Christ a liar (John 8:43-47); he rejected what the Bible said about human nature (Eph. 2:1-4); he professed agnosticism (2 Thess. 1:8) and then atheism (Ps. 14:1); he thought he was smart enough to overthrow “the powers that be” (Rom. 13), although the Apostle Paul submitted to them (Acts 19:11); and, above all, he, as Trotsky, professed full faith in “mankind” after rejecting what God said about mankind (Isa. 65:8, Isa. 40:15, 17, John 2:25, Luke 11:13, Gal. 1:4).

In short, Karl Marx was a Bible-rejecting dunce.

With the words of Jerry McAuley (rescue mission worker), Horatius Bonar (Bible-believing Scotchman), Keil and Ritschl (Hebrew etymologist and modernist), Henry Ward Beecher, DeWitt Talmage, Dwight L. Moody, Sam Jones, General William Booth, Charles Spurgeon, James Gilmour (missionary to Tibet),

Joseph Neesima (missionary to Japan), Phillips Brooks, Henry Jowette, Tennyson, Longfellow, James Chalmers, Bishop Ryle and Father Chiniquy ringing in his ears and street preachers all over England and Wales “socking it to him” (every man listed above was a contemporary of Karl Marx), Karl Marx went his own way just as blithely and as blindly as a bat in a coal bin.33 You could not follow him thirty feet down the path if you believed one thing the Bible said about “the masses” or “the morals” or the “minds” of men. Darwin and Marx were incurable optimists; the disease is terminal.

The first law of thermodynamics does away with Darwin’s theory of origins34 and the second one does away with his theory of the evolution of species. Both of these two laws are “demonstrable” and “provable” facts which can be tested by anyone, anywhere. Nonetheless, Engels, Marx, Lenin and Trotsky took the trotline and swallowed it, raw chicken, hooks, plastic bottles and all. Assuming that all progress and “evolution” could be “helped on” with a little “shove,” these incredible boobs developed a system where no one under them could revolt or give things a “shove” and where all attempts to “help evolution” on were turned over to the secret police. No czar in Russia, nor any combination of czars, ever killed, tortured or imprisoned as many Russians as the Communist party killed, tortured and imprisoned in the twentieth century.35 If all of the African slaves that Lincoln “emancipated” (1700-1853 A.D.) were to stand face to face with the Russian slaves of ONE CENTURY who have not been “emancipated,” the Russian slaves would outnumber them twenty to one. This would mean (if we are to judge statistics by the philosophy of the modern humanist or evolutionist) that the more slaves there are the further man has progressed. After all, “progress is inevitable” in the evolutionary menagerie. There are more concentration camps now than in 1944; there are more slaves now than in 1863; and there have been more wars started and fought since 1945 than were fought in the entire century preceding the Communist uprising in Russia. This has to be PROGRESS if you are an evolutionist. Hegel’s dialectic and Marx’s dialectic define this as progress.

CHAPTER TEN

THE GREAT APOSTASY

“For the time will come when they will not endure sound doctrine; but after their own lusts shall they heap to themselves teachers, having itching ears; And they shall turn away their ears from the truth, and shall be turned unto fables.” (2 Timothy 4:3-4)

No one will ever know till the day of judgment how much STREET PREACHERS had to do with the personal reactions of Darwin, Marx and the Jesuits at Rheims, France (see Vol. I, p. 355). Street preaching is the most uncontrollable thing that a Communist, evolutionist or Catholic ever had to deal with, for some of the preachers’ messages get to the “wrong ears” in spite of the totalitarian efforts of the “liberating” reprobates to “free” the thinking of “the masses.”' The radio can be turned off as the TV, the newspaper can lie unread and the tract can be folded, crumpled and thrown away, but the preacher on the street must be removed from the street or be shot. '-5 He will be heard if he says anything (see Vol. I, pp. 319, 355). Real freedom of speech—no longer available in America—implies that any man can stand up anywhere and open his mouth and say what he wants to say. This cannot be done on radio or TV. He can do it if he limits his “fanaticism” to pornography, lesbianism, racism, abortions, sex perversion, or violence but once he begins to quote the SCRIPTURES that speak critically of communism, evolution, Catholicism, socialism, race mixing or scholarship, he is off the air. The FCC law on “equal time” guarantees this, for the station is threatened with loss of license if the offending “fanatic” is not shut up.2 The fact that he may pay cash (on time, when due) for his program is immaterial. He is an offense to the Marxist news media. Their program is pro-Catholic, pro-Communist, anti-Biblical, pro-Socialist, anti-separation, pro­integration, and anti-nationalistic. It is part and parcel of the “Humanistic Society for Dark Age Degeneration.”

Now there are further complications if one assumes Darwin’s evolutionary stance of the anthropoid ape man. One cannot rationally be an integrationist and an evolutionist at the same time, for integration is the way to produce inferior stock or sterile stock. Furthermore, the teachings of evolution force its adherents to believe that primitive man (Java, Piltdown, Neanderthal, etc.) look like NEGROES in their facial characteristics. All textbooks have Cro-Magnon man (“late man”) turning suddenly white and assuming the Japhetic characteristics of the Caucasian! Further, one cannot rationally be an evolutionist and a deist at the same time; this would entail a universe that is as old (or older!) as the “Deity” and it would make a Deity who condoned survival of the fittest by tooth, gun, claw, knife, spear, bow, bomb and “nukes” at the expense of the weakest. (Some have tried to fashion the God of the “Old Testament” in this fashion, forgetting that God destroyed the very nation that He sided with because of their IMMORAL conduct. Evolutionists have no moral code; jungle “law” is eat or be eaten; me first, you next.) The final blow to Marx’s madness is demonstrated by the fact that one cannot believe in real “human rights” and espouse ninety percent of what Karl Marx ever said or wrote.2-5 The first move of all Socialists, humanists and Communists is to take individual rights away from people they don’t like. A real “humanist” would not invade Afghanistan, Hungary, Romania or Austria for ANY reason. It is only a perverted imagination that makes educated people think that Marxism has any thing to do with “human rights.” It has to do with human bondage.

“Scientific Marxism” is quite similar to “scientific fiction.”3

For example: if progress is to be obtained only by revolutions and overthrowing the “establishment,” then why are no revolutions allowed in Poland, Hungary, Russia and Red China? Wouldn’t this mean that those countries have not progressed since 1945? Why would the Communists there prevent “progress” after teaching that it is only accomplished by “revolution”? According to real Marxism, South America has to be the most advanced civilization in the world, for it has averaged one revolution every ten years for nearly 200 years.4 On the other hand, why is any revolution necessary to obtain any degree of progress? Why revolt if progress is “inevitable”? This is a most interesting question. Why kill thousands of people who believe in “human rights,” go into debt so badly that you must borrow from capitalistic nations, and then destroy property and create widows and orphans if evolution is going to

work out anyway? Didn’t evolution produce MAN without any help from MAN? What about those 2,000,000,000 years (give or take a few hundred million; “science” is very exact!) where evolution took lava and turned it into liquid pools and then got amoebae and paramecia out of them gradually turning them into jellyfish, tribolitium, and eventually mammals? Evidently you don’t have to even have common sense or horse sense to progress. All you have to do is just yield to ANIMAL instinct and everything will progress. If you profess to believe in revolutions and then try to stop them, or if you profess to believe that they are unnecessary and then try to create them, what are you anyway but a cheap whitewashed hypocrite? That isn’t science; that is fraud. Again, what would you call any man (Communist, Catholic, Socialist or humanist) who professes to be looking for the truth but will not believe the truth from an adversary until he tortures the critter into telling a lie and then he believes him? Is that “progress”?

There are no real scientific dissertations on evolution or communism.5

These two religions (with humanism) must be accepted by blind faith; all three are irrational and none of them have produced any fruit but war, slavery, misery and misunderstanding on a scale almost equal to that produced by Roman Catholicism (see Vol. I, Chaps. 14, 17).

The Humanist Manifesto (1933, May-June issue of The New Humanist)'\s based on Engels, Marx and Lenin, and this philosophy states simply6—in blatant violation of the first basic scientific law of thermodynamics—that the universe is self-existing and is eternal; it never was created at anytime. Since this first basic premise of humanism is not only nonscientific but is also a preposterous lie, then all that follows has to be composed of lies. The foundation is rotten. What follows (see The New Humanist Manifesto, Sept.-Oct. 1973) is the statement to the effect that the work and ministries of Dwight Moody, R.A. Torrey, Gypsy Smith, Billy Sunday, Bob Jones, Sr., Sam Jones and Charles G. Finney were HARMFUL and ILLUSORY. After adopting a nonscientific illusion concerning matter and energy which violated the second law of thermodynamics, these preposterous nonscientific idiots stated that ethics are always “situational,” that there are no fixed moral laws, that the final authority on this earth is man’s intelligence, and that a perfect millennium of peace and joy can be brought about by technology, communications and transportation, while following the “classical vision” that is atheistic and recognizing no revelation

of God to man in any language that is written. Worship and prayer are to be replaced with “cooperative efforts” for “social well-being.”

That is the atheism taught by Thomas and Aldous Huxley,6-5 and within its format any Communist NKVD or Fascist gestapo can work in the name of “social well-being” to “replace” the Bible, worship and prayer. “Social well-being” in such a context simply means jails, genocide and concentration camps for anyone who doesn’t agree with the atheist’s definition of “social well-being.” If you were a real humanist you would call torturing your opponents "behavior modification for social well-being.” (Hypocrites have always “had a word for it.”) Behavior modification means starving, beating, electrical shocks and brainwashing of anyone who is not a “humanist” so that they will support “equal rights” or “human rights.” You see, if anyone’s ideas about “social well-being” disagree with the monkey man, then the problem of FINAL AUTHORITY immediately rears its eternal head.

The final authority is Premillennial: man will degenerate till God stops him.

All Communists, Socialists, humanists, and International Socialists are POSTMILLENNIAL.7 That is, they believe what we just quoted above from “The New Humanism.”

To these deluded frauds, man is now his own goal and end, although it is admitted that he had no purpose when he began* Since “man” is now “the measure of all things,” the Second Coming of Christ must be “reinterpreted” or “reevaluated” as Augustine’s “evolutionary ubiquity” (Vol. I, p. 124). The Second Advent in such a system turns out not to be Jesus Christ keeping His word by coming back according to His promise (John 14, Acts 1, 1 Thess. 4), but rather an evolving spirit of humanism that works through religious politicians and economic institutions for social justice and the “liberation” of oppressed minorities who need “class equalization.”9

It is apparent then that communism, humanism and socialism have religious aspects to them whether they are courted by atheists or deists. You cannot be a “kingdom builder” without deciding for or against Revelation 20:1-10, for the Bible deals with a kingdom and a king (see The Sure Word of Prophecy, 1970). Any dispute over authority—all supporters of communism and socialism challenge the Bible’s authority—must wind up attacking the final authority, which the Bible itself professes to be. The fact that those who are engaged in these disputes may not believe a word of it in any translation doesn’t affect the issue of final authority at all, nor does

it affect the outcome of history at all. The Book stated 1900 years ago that man would not bring in a perfect society (2 Tim. 3, Jer. 23, Matt. 23, 1 Tim. 4, Rev. 13) apart from the divine intervention of his Creator (Ps. 2, Matt. 5, Joel 2, Isa. 66) and that the King of kings (Rev. 20) will turn out to be the most vicious anti-Communist, bigoted anti-Catholic, nonhumanitarian ruler and “antisocial” dictator who ever lived on this earth (see Vol. I, pp. 118-129, 189- 200).

Now whether or not any historian believes any of this, all of it is involved in the attempts of the English Revision Committee of 1881 to get rid of the authority of the King James Bible. When Westcott and Hort10 sat down, firmly dedicated to the proposition of getting rid of this terrible Book, they sat down in bleachers that were put together by the Jesuit priests in France, the apostate German Lutherans who had become rationalists11 and the accumulated followers of Charles Darwin and Karl Marx. A more motley crew of garbage-headed Bible perverters has never been assembled on this earth. The German apostates were Farrar, Semler, Strauss, Astruc, Vater, Hupfeld, Kuenen, Herder, Reuss, Vatke, Ewald, Eichhorn, etc. Seeds, Kenyon, Lavoisey and others followed Darwin, and Pusey and Maurice were so steeped in Marx’s international socialism they would have joined Mao Tse-tung’s regime. There is no doubt about the “stand” of Westcott and Hort for Darwin against Genesis 1-3.12 There is no doubt about Hort’s partiality to international socialism.13 He idolized the unsaved Unitarian J.F.D. Maurice (1805-1872) and praised his political treatise on the “Kingdom of Christ” as the greatest piece of writing in the English language. Darwin and Marx had already left their imprints (monkey tracks) on a body of “Orthodox Conservatives” (that is what the faculty at Bob Jones University in 1982 called them!!)13-5 who were about to replace the Protestant text of the Reformation with the Vatican text of the Roman Catholic church.14 There was in that committee a hidden spirit whose intent was to return to Egypt in Africa (Vol. I, Chap. 5) not only for a religion and a “Bible” but for a POPE (Vol. I, pp. 70, 111).

Now this African “pope,” if he were hitched up to Darwin’s jungle and Marx’s economic system, would have to be a “scientific evolutionist,” so no one should be surprised to learn that those are the exact words that historians use when describing the first full­blown, 100 percent “Catholic” in history: Aurelius Augustine (see Vol. I, p. 104-106). Such a pope would reign over a mongrelized group of animals under himself; they would constitute a

“CLASSLESS SOCIETY,” that is, a jungle. Such a religious zoo would actually be humanistic atheism which tolerated an African Bible and an African pope on the grounds that since no one really believed in either that the main thing was “getting along” to “end man’s inhumanity to man,” etc., except, of course, where the zoo keepers had to deal with anyone who believed the Bible was the final authority for “all matters of faith and practice.” The trick would be to set up a “pope” as a final authority who would do what he was told to do by the zoo keepers who actually manipulated the strings. In the end this produces exactly what the Bible predicts 2000 years before it takes place: an Antichrist (Rev. 13:1-8) controlled and manipulated by Satan (2 Thess. 2).

The Revision Committee of 1881 lays the groundwork for this operation. It is solidly pro-Roman Catholic.15 It takes the Vatican’s stance right in the face of the rise of Germany (1870-1880)16 knowing that Bismark had expelled the Jesuits from that country, and it takes this stance knowing that Austria had just gone down the tube permanently upon welcoming the Jesuits into its borders [they had just reinstated the Jesuits (1860-1870)]. The RV Committee was one of the fruits of the Oxford Movement (1830-1850) and the “conversion” of John Cardinal Newman to the Roman Catholic church, thereby opening the English ministerial schools and church facilities to the Roman Catholic hierarchy.17 Maurice (1805-1872) and Pusey (1800-1882) had done their work well in the Anglican church while Darwin and Marx had been preparing the secular colleges and universities to reject the Bible. (Once the Bible is cast aside, a substitute authority would have to be accepted; Rome was never bashful about volunteering.) The Westcott and Hort trick was to get rid of the Christian’s authority: the Protestant Bible of the English Reformation. This would be replaced with a competing authority: the Catholic Bible of the Dark Ages and the Roman Catholic killers (Vol. I, pp. 276-323) of those times. Then when humanism became a worldwide religion (1970-1990), the pope could stand up as the final authority. This is the Biblical format of Zephaniah 1, Revelation Band Matthew 12 for the deification of a human being (2 Thess 2, Dan. 7, 8, 9) during the Laodicean church period (Chap. 16). It is a negative format. It predicts the de­struction of all civil and human rights (in the name of “human rights”) and it forecasts the most terrible period of depravity (Matt. 24, Rev. 13) the world has ever seen (in the name of “equality, peace, unity, and liberty”). The fact that no Papist, Marxist or Darwinian believes any of this is immaterial; they work out their own

damnation (in the name of peace, liberty, unity, equality, etc.) according to the divine, prearranged plan. Unbelief doesn’t affect the history of mankind one way or another. God has written out the history of mankind ahead of time in a Book; history will work out that way whether any of “mankind” believes it or not.

To sum the matters up: When Westcott and Hort sat down to fire the opening guns for the church of the “people’s rights” (Laodicea), their rucksack contained three items which one cannot ignore in properly evaluating their grossly subjective production.

1. The Civil War in America hadjust been over for a few years. At that time John Brown had been trying to get “civil rights” for “oppressed minorities” and his efforts wound up with the federal government confiscating the private property of a supposedly free state (Fort Sumter, South Carolina), thereby igniting a holocaust that deprived 600,000 young men of their rights to live and ended the “civil rights” of every state in the Union (see p. 54). Westcott and Hort knew all about “government of the people, by the people and for the people” when they sat down. Governments by God were never brought up by Lincoln or anyone else. When Abraham Lincoln decided to overthrow the Constitution of the United States of America and then send armed troops on a disguised gunboat down Chesapeake Bay to attack one of those states, his reasoning would have given Adolph Hitler or Fidel Castro a run for their money. Old “Honest Abe” (with all of the news media since 1866 backing him up!) reasoned that since the ob­ject of writing the Constitution (see p. 54) was NOT primarily for liberty or freedom but was essentially for the “forming of a more perfect UNION,” that the “Union” existed before the Constitution and therefore took precedence over it.18

(At least that is how Stalin figured it out for Latvia, Esthonia, Finland, Lithuania, Romania and Poland, and that is how Adolph Hitler figured it for Austria and Czechoslovakia. “Honest Abe” was in good company!)

The use of armed force for compulsory subjection to a foreign government (the Southern states had seceded from the union) was what Abe meant when he said “OF the people, BY the people, and FOR the people.” Mao Tse and Lenin never stated it any better (see the comments under Acts 21 in the Bible Believer’s Commentary on Acts, 1974, pp. 622-624). But when old Honest Abe the rail-splitter got his dictatorship firmly established with military supremacy, he suddenly encountered what Adolph Hitler encountered: a Roman Catholic assassination plot (Stauffenberg, 1944, was a Roman

Catholic); he had forgotten that any government “of the people,” etc., to any totalitarian system means “me first, you next.” Lincoln read the handwriting on the wall; and although he might not have forseen Booth’s bullet, he certainly saw the totalitarian system that produced Mary Surratt, Booth and all of their fellow conspirators. They were all Roman Catholics, including the doctor who treated Booth’s leg (Dr. Mudd) and the family (Lloyds) who sheltered the assassin in their barn.19

2. Westcott and Hort had also before them a shining example of Catholic ecumenical “one fold” propaganda in their own country. Knowing that the Catholics had attempted to bomb the Parliament (November 1605) and murder the king, and that they had designed to wipe out the entire Protestant population of England with Spanish armies (1588) and set up a defiled sinner as an infallible authority for all Christians (a sinner who declared that Mary was born sinless and was resurrected ahead of Peter, James, John and Paul), Hort and company went to work with the zeal of a Jesuit priest to restore that Roman Catholic Dark Age authority to the English speaking people.19 5 Not only this but they went to work after 100 years of tampering with the AV text by their “kith and kin.”20 They inherited over 200 years of scholastic rubbish and intellectual trash from Mill, Fell, Walton, Griesbach and others and with it set about to fashion a religious garbage can for future generations: the Revised Version of 1881-1884.

3. Finally, the manuscripts that Westcott and Hort chose with which to destroy the Reformation text were two “Septuagint manuscripts” (they contained both Testaments in Greek) written more than 200 years after the New Testament was completed. Both of these vile and gross corruptions contained along with the “essential fundamental doctrines” (that is the propaganda used at Tennessee Temple, Hyles-Anderson and Bob Jones University) Apocryphal books in both the Old and New Testaments, and the Old Testament Apocryphal books were not between the Testaments but dispersed throughout the canon as part of the so-called “verbal, plenary, inspired, originals, etc.”20-5

Now this is the truth about what lies behind the so-called “scientific Greek texts” of Nestle, Aland, Metzger and Nida which were sold to the Bible societies of the Laodicean church (twentieth century) and the faculty members of Bob Jones University (1940- 1980).

a. DARWINISM: producing a religious evolutionarianism that denies the Second Coming of Christ.

b. MARXISM: that produces a revolutionary humanism designed to jail, torture and kill more people in one century than capitalists or “czars” killed in ten centuries.

c. ROMANISM: which had already burned and killed more Christians in one century than Bible-believing Christians had killed in eighteen centuries.

d. SOCIALISM: which is destined to bring in the kingdom of death and hell (Isa. 28, Rev. 6) under the Antichrist before the Second Advent.

Such was the “all-star team” (1881-1884) which finished the “play-offs” of the Philadelphia Church period (Rev. 3:8-10).

This combination of delusion (socialism), sadism (Marxism), insanity (Darwinism) and Satanism (Catholicism) was hailed by leading conservative scholars in Europe and America (Green, Machen, Robertson, Schaff, etc.) as one of the greatest revision committees that ever met. Though Nestle denied (1980) that he stuck with their text—he smuggled a handful of Receptus readings back into his Greek text in 1981 that he had left out from 1890 to 1976,—he still uses both of their Catholic (Alexandrian) manuscripts as the main authorities for every edition he puts out. Nestle’s text today is basically the Westcott and Hort text of 1884.21 It certainly is not the basic text of the German and English Protestant Reformation Bibles.

The combinations identified (1 to 3) above could only produce one thing: the greatest apostasy that ever took place in the body of Christ. Its detrimental effect on Christian education was almost incalculable, and its demoniac influence on the minds of young preachers in Christian universities will only be known at the Judgment Seat of Christ. One could not possibly speak too harshly of the vicious degeneracy and arrogant ignorance of Westcott and Hort’s revision work no matter what language they used. (Dean Burgon’s language was mild when one really considers the total effect of the stupid and blatant incompetency of these apostates.)21-1 It is only to be equaled by those who have defended them and their work in this century (see the “Professor of Ancient Languages” at BJU for example; Stewart Custer, 1982).

The monstrous perversions produced by this committee (J?T and then the ASVand then the New International Version and the New ASV) were taken by the Third Person of the Godhead to be exactly what they were: Dark Age perversions of the living words of the living God. There is no evidence on record anywhere by anyone that either Hort or Schaff (ASV 1901) knew enough about the

English Bible to teach eighty percent of it to anyone, nor is there any evidence that either man was able to intelligently discuss any of the rational arguments aimed against his work.22 There is no record in 100 years of Hort or Westcott even attempting to answer the mass of documented evidence summoned against their revision by Dean Burgon, Scrivener, Hoskier and others,23 and to this day (1983) there is not one book in print by any man on the ASV committee (any edition) that even attempts to defend his depraved text against those charges. Furthermore, not one man has ever been able to defend their false theories on text transmission, corrupt readings, attacks on the Deity of Christ, and their blindness in dealing with manuscript evidence.24

The entire bungling, clandestine operation was promoted by the news media (pp. 113, 144). The Athenians (Acts 17:21) who wanted to be “big shots” went with the tide. They played the part of the Judas goat leading the flock up into the slaughterhouse. They came out of the bloody line smelling like a rose and went right on down in the history books as “defenders of the faith,” “defenders of the historic fundamental position,” “giants whose loyalty to the word was unquestioned,” “bold advocates of the plenary, verbally inspired original autographs,” etc. And one might add “deluded apostates of the most dangerous sort.” If they had been “liberals” or “modernists” they could not have done half the damage they did. As it was, they all professed to believe in the Deity of Christ—exactly as every demon-possessed man in the New Testament did (Mark 1, Mark 5, Acts 16, Acts 19). Of course they didn’t believe what the Book SAID25 if it said something that didn’t agree with Darwin’s theory of evolution, the Vatican’s theory of an ecumenical church, the Fabian Society’s plan of socializing England, or the opinions of unsaved German and Greek grammarians. No member of the Alexandrian Cult (Vol. I, Chap. 5) ever believed what the Bible said (any Bible in any version of any translation from any set of manuscripts) if it said something that he didn’t believe it should have said.

Whether this came to “Easter should have been the Passover” (Acts 12) or the “Commandments” (Rev. 22) should have been “washed their robes” or “Lovest thou me” (John 21) should have been “kindly disposed towards me,” etc., it is the same cult. Same jackasses. They feed at the same trough.

The Jesuits had two staunch allies in Westcott and Hort since they both were sympathetic with Mariolatry.26

Darwin could count on them; both men read him, enjoyed him

and never spoke derogatorily of him in public or private.

Finally, both men could be counted on to take the standard Origenistic-Constantinian-Eusebian-Augustinian stand against the hated Donatists, Novatians, Montanists, and “Manicheans” (see Vol. I, pp. 178-189). Both men were rabid sacramentalists27 and thought that Baptismal regeneration was a New Testament doctrine. Neither of them believed that Adam or Eve actually “fell” or that they ever lived in a real garden.28 But further than this, the theories which they propagated in the Revision Committee were of such a nature that they bordered on the lunatic fringe.29 Their theories on “longer and shorter readings” were false; their theories about a “Lucian Recension” were false; their theories on “intrinsic probability” were false; their theories about “family texts” were nonsense;30 and their theories about “Western readings” were a hoax. With such “qualifications” they needed a brainwashed clientele to pull off their acts. They got one. In America and England the “vast majority of conservative apostates” in the Christian seminaries and colleges went after their Disneyworld theories like a cow licking up blackstrap molasses. Without the slightest consideration for the historical facts involved (see Acts 11, 13) in the sources, progress and results of Bible preaching and teaching; without the slightest examination of the unholy company that had attended their “authoritative Greek text” for 1200 years (the popes, the inquisitors, the cardinals, Jesuits and Catholic kings and princes); without any investigation at all into the origins and preservation of the Vatican manuscripts; without any regard for the witness of the Holy Spirit to the Protestant text of the Reformation; and without one passing nod at the martyrs who had shed their blood while preserving and reading this text, Westcott and Hort produced a fairy-tale “Bible” for a Disneyland church. It was a “Bible” which only Mickey Mouse or Donald Duck could really appreciate (Vol. I, pp. 198-200). Its proper title was “The Laodicean Standard Version” since it set the standard for every English Bible since that time (ASV, NASV, RSV, NRS V, NIV, NEB, NWT, TLB, TEV, etc.). It was the “Authorized Version” of the Laodicean church, a monument to the depravity of Christian scholars and a landmark in the history of bungling stupidity.31

Its Greek text is the basic Greek text for the NASV recommended throughout 1970-1982 at Bob Jones University and Pensacola Christian College.32

That is the Greek text of the Roman Catholic Jerusalem Bible (1972), the Roman Catholic “American” Bible (1970) and the

Roman Catholic Jesuit Bible of the Dark Ages (1582). If “modern times” begin with the Peace of Westphalia (1648) then no modern times ever began for Roman Catholic Bibles, for no Roman Catholic pope since 1648 recognized the Treaty of Westphalia as a valid treaty.33

Thus the supporters of this text (all modern fundamentalists and conservatives) found themselves unwittingly in collusion with a Bloody Whore (see Vol. I, Chap. 17). This standard authorized Laodicean version just happened to be the version adopted and promoted by the church that sprinkled and raised Adolph Hitler, Joseph Goebbels, Bloody Mary, Herman Goering, Fidel Castro, Benito Mussolini and the head of the Gestapo, Heinrich Himmler.34

“By their fruits ye shall know them.”

The magnitude of the Laodicean apostasy then is beyond comprehension. Who would have thought that conservatives and “evangelicals” like Machen, Zahn, Keil, Winkler, Sayce, Orr, Bissell, Allis, Warfield, Robertson, Schaff, Green, Wilson and even R.A. Torrey (at times) would wind up correcting the Protestant Bibles of the English and German Reformations with the Greek text of a Roman Catholic Jesuit priest? And who could have forseen the fellowship of such men as Ian Paisley, the northern Irish Protestant fire-eater, and Bob Jones, III, (producing Flame in the Wind, 1978) while the school where they preached (and the faculty members that they paid) was promoting the official Roman Catholic Jesuit Greek text of the Vatican State!

“Now the Serpent was more subtle than any beast of the field.. 55

The great “falling away” came to pass exactly as predicted in the scriptures (2 Thess. 2); its effect on the local New Testament churches was kept to a minimum only by faithful pastors who stuck to the English text of the Reformation (AV 1611) in spite of their brethren who were teaching in church supported schools. The local Presbyterian and Episcopal churches (who were never set up on an autonomous New Testament basis to start with) fell right and left and the Methodists followed them (1880-1940).35 The Southern Baptist Convention did not escape the plague of the “New American Standard Laodicean Booby Trap” and pressure mounted in every Southern Baptist college in the Convention to replace the AV with the ASV (1901).36 A handful of “first” churches resisted, but if it had not been for the work of J. Frank Norris (pp. 172-176) every church in the Convention would have succumbed to “scientific exegesis,” “critical evaluation,” “intrinsic probabilities,” and

“advanced archaeological discoveries.” As it was, the Convention first printed the AS V in their Sunday School literature and then the RS V: since both “Bibles” were from the same Greek text (also used for the NIV and the NASV) it didn’t make any difference. By 1970 the Southern Baptist Convention looked like a social gathering of hippies and country women with a sprinkling of drunken lawyers and Charismatic businessmen.

It was the King James Bible that stirred up all of these modern apostates (1900-1990) and brought about this violent reaction to the truth. Not one man who made a major contribution to the apostasy in America or Europe showed up until AFTER the AV of 1611 was “on its way.”37 Semler (1725-1791) is the father of German Rationalism. Eichhorn (1752-1826) is the father of higher criticism.38 Paulus (1761-1851) decided that all twelve apostles were suffering from hallucinations—imagine that coming from a man who believed that the theory of evolution was a “scientific fact”! De Wette (1780-1849) decided that all twelve apostles could not have been lunatics; therefore, they were simply liars; they invented a myth about the death, burial and resurrection of Christ.39 Jean Astruc (1684-1766), a Roman Catholic,40 decided that two different men wrote the Pentateuch, and before Graf (1815-1869), Wellhausen (1844-1918), Strauss (1808-1874) and Kuenen (1828- 1891) got through with this novel nonsense41 they had five different men writing the Pentateuch with a “redactor” (reviser and collator) “smoothing out” the text.42 The actual evidence for all of this high sounding brass and intellectual tomfoolery was an absolute zero (see comments on Gen. 16:11 in that Commentary, 1970).

The year 1611 had marked the date out for the greatest religious, social, industrial, scientific, artistic, musical and political upheaval in the entire recorded history of man. Every man in the list above, every musician from Vivaldi to Copeland, every artist from Breugel to Picasso makes his debut after the publication of that terrible “archaic, Elizabethan, hard-to-understand translation.” The credit for this mighty upheaval is given by the writers of history to the “environment” and the “times,” and the mighty monarch of the books (AV 1611) is disconnected from its effects on both so that the glory can be given to unsaved Bible-rejecting sinners who hated and resented every word in it that crossed their own conceited opinions. To read the modern church historians one would think that the AV was just one more in a series of so-called “authorized translations that came and went in less than 100 years after having affected no one but a handful of common ignorant folk who

believed it. To the contrary, it stimulated every kind of religious antagonism, every type of intellectual exercise, and every kind of philosophical system for over 380 years. It is the preaching of that Book in every major language in the world that is still causing an uproar in 1983. Men had to accept it or run from it or else they had to ridicule and attack it; if not, they had to at least counterfeit it or “use” it when they didn’t believe it. The uproar caused by the so- called “verbal, plenary inspired original autographs” (no such expression is found in ANY Bible from ANY set of manuscripts) never caused one fifth of the chaos caused by the old black-backed, 66 caliber AV of 1611.

The Jesuits hated it; many of the high churchmen of England hated it, although they had to use it; the common ordinary fornicators, liars, thieves and drunkards hated it; sex perverts like Oscar Wilde and Tschaikovsky hated it; and the Deists who retained enough religion to make themselves miserable (but not enough to do any good) despised it even when they quoted it. In the late twentieth century apostates like Bob Jones, III, Fink, Afman, Price, Martin, Hindson, Clark, Custer, Faulkner, MacRae, and others were forced to “use” it and have a “preference” for it even though they didn’t believe it.43

Such a bomb of a book had to be done away with, so the Revision Committee of 1881 was the most important gathering of Christian scholars that ever assembled on this earth since Origen, Plato, Pantaneus, Clement and Philo sat down to rid the world of absolute authority. The Revision Committee was the accumulated might of Bible-rejecting Christianity and apostate scholarship gone to seed.44 It was the old Alexandrian Cult back in business.45 This time they were reinforced with Darwin’s monkey men, Jesuit casuistry and Marxian socialism,46 and 100 years after that committee finished their work, the Sword of the Lord (John R. Rice and Curtis Hutson) was still promoting their godless depravity.

The real Bible believer in the New Testament local church will not fail to see the guiding hand of the great “Mother” in all of this. In Matthew 13:33 the Lord Jesus identifies this great spreader of “intellectual progress” and “scientific knowledge.” He said, “Till the whole was leavened,” and then told his disciples what the “leaven” was (Matt. 13:33). The leaven had nothing to do with science, learning, evolution, progress, development, enlightenment or “liberation.” It had to do withSOURDOUG//(Matt. 16:12). When a positive construction was placed on this parable (see Vol. I, pp. 75, 177), a positive construction had to be placed on church history.

The man who established this monstrous heresy as “Christian” doctrine was the Roman Catholic Aurelius Augustine (Vol. I, pp. 104-120, 134-139). In his work The City of God Rome was destined to conquer the whole earth through RELIGIOUS LYING (Vol. I, pp. 176, 177). Westcott and Hort (1881) were chosen by God to complete Augustine’s architectural layout for this “City of God.” When they sat down (1881) they saw an historical handwriting on the wall which no one but a demented Greek scholar could have misread.

1. The Congress of Vienna (1814-1815) had just restored to the Catholic pope all of his power in central Europe, whereas this power had been taken away from him in 1803.47

2. Rationalism and liberalism had completed their work in France, Prussia, Austria and Ireland, so that by 1869 Ireland was “LIBERATED” from Bible-believing Protestants, France was “liberated” in 1850, Prussia in 1850, and Austria in 1855.48 Having learned that popes are infallible (Pius IX, July 13, 1870), Leo XIII (1878-1903) promptly stated publicly that all republics and all democratic institutions in the world were antiscriptural and antichristianA9

3. Over the objections of twenty-one archbishops and sixty- five bishops, the Roman Catholic pope (Pius IX) had just declared that when he spoke “ex cathedra” on matters of “faith” that he was infallible.50 Promptly he blasphemed the HOLY Spirit on two matters of faith by declaring that MARY had been born sinless (contrary to the clear statement of Scripture: Luke 1:47) and that she beat Peter, James and John to heaven by going up bodily ahead of the first resurrection (Rev. 20:1-14). In plainer words, Mary had TWO attributes of Christ’s deity: sinlessness and a preresurrection ascension. These “infallible” Roman heresies were so “infallible” that every member of the church in both hemispheres was required to believe them on pain of excommunication or damnation.51

No one but a Bible-rejecting fool would have believed either “ex cathedra” blasphemy.

With this tremendous religious pressure on them, the RV Committee of 1881 was as thoroughly brainwashed as any student at Pensacola Christian College (1983). Cardinal Newman had already told the Catholics in England that the only way they could reach the English people would be by getting into the Anglican church and working through it.52 Newman’s friends in the Oxford Movement had already labeled the Bible preaching and teaching ministries of Luther, Calvin, Wesley, Whitefield, Boehler,

Spangenberg, Zwingli, Zinzendorf and Jonathan Edwards as a “DETESTABLE AND DIABOLICAL HERESY.”53 Consequently, no one should have been surprised to find Jesuits posing as English clergymen at the time the committee was drawn together. Dr. Desanctis, a former priest, stated that the Jesuits used 1 Corinthians 9:19-22 as a scriptural alibi for swearing false oaths in the Anglican priesthood and infiltrating it and pretending to be Protestants when they were not.54

This means that no one should be surprised either to learn that the immediate authors of destructive Bible criticism (“higher criticism”), corrupt revisions (“eclectic texts”), and Biblical infidelity (“scientific exegesis”) in the post-AV period were educated French Roman Catholics. These men were Richard Simon and Pierre Sabatie, a priest and a Benedictine monk.55 As early as 1689 (following the King James Bible, 1611) and 1695 (following the King James Bible, 1611) these men worked on four editions of destructive criticism and they were published by Richard Simon, thus laying the foundations for all modern Protestant critical inquiring into the authority of the Textus Receptus of the Protestant Reformation. The student should notice that this coordinated underground movement to destroy the English Bible and turn the entire nation of England (with its colonies) back to the Dark Ages could only be accomplished in CHRISTIAN COLLEGES or CHRISTIAN UNIVERSITIES. “Higher education” is (and always has been) the medium of spiritual apostasy in every generation for over 1800 years (see Vol. I, Chap. 5). There are no exceptions in any country among any group of people who professed ANY religion. HIGHER EDUCATION, per se, produces humanism and materialism, whether it is “Christian” or not.

Old Mother Whore (Vol. I, pp. 292-302) always has on hand an abundance of sourdough for “spreading the kingdom.”

As we have said before, with the pope on their right and Darwin on their left, the committee of 1881 also sat down with Karl Marx in front of them in the person of John Maurice (1805-1872). It was common knowledge that Maurice taught that form of socialism which later was called the “Fabian Society.”56 This society was named after the famous Roman senator who advocated the gradual overthrow of a government instead of the violent overthrow of a government. A “Fabian” is a Communist who lacks convictions. One might say he is a subtle Communist who has more tact than guts. The Fabian Society was the English organ for the destruction

of the British economy under Keynesian economics (1946-1976) and its eventual bankruptcy. George Bernard Shaw, one of its leading lights, said frankly that he was a COMMUNIST (see footnote above).

The “standard Greek text” then which became the darling of twentieth century Bible societies was the joint product of the Fabian Socialists, two apostate Episcopalians, two Bible-rejecting Conservatives (Origen and Augustine), the Jesuit priesthood (Rheims, France), Charles Darwin the monkey man, Karl Marx the frustrated loafer57 and an “infallible” pope who had no more gifts of spiritual discernment than a stuffed billy goat.

The “scholarly” backing behind the whole clandestine operation was Fell, Mill, Griesbach, Lachmann, Scholtz, Tregelles and Tischendorf,58 without one man in any of the groups mentioned having had any experience in a New Testament local church as a preacher or a teacher or an evangelist or a missionary or even as a “soul winner.” No man connected with the committee either directly or indirectly (before or after its inception) had anything to do with New Testament church history as the word “church" is defined in the Book that originated the expression and defined that institution.

The ASV and NASV which came from this gross monstrosity were pushed onto young ministers in America with all the zeal of a whirling dervish by the faculty members of Bob Jones University, Dallas Theological Seminary, Fuller Seminary, Wheaton College, Pensacola Christian College, Moody Bible Institute, Piedmont, Pillsbury and BIOLA (1900-1970).59 The only real dissenters, as usual, were the Independent Baptists—those ancient “Manicheans” and “Donatists” and “Montanists” and “Novatians” from way back around 100-500 A.D. These “hell-raising, trouble-making CULTS” tore two Bible societies all to pieces when some educated idiot tried to run the Westcott and Hort readings in on them ahead of time (1837-1865). A fierce denominational conflict resulted from the work of these “heretical cultists who were following a man, etc.,” because they wouldn’t bow down to the apostate scholars of their day. Finally, in a convention held in Saratoga on May 1883 (in the middle of the RV Committee’s work in England!) the Baptists voted to abandon two Bible societies who wanted to go along with the Dark Age Roman Catholic Greek text (Jesuit Rheims, 1582).60 In spite of a valiant stand by a handful of “ignorant ranters” (to quote the leading, dedicated “qualified Biblicists” of that day!), the Southern Baptists and Northern Baptists surrendered their birthright for a mess of pottage; they accepted the ASV of 1901,

produced by one of the greatest pro-Roman, anti-Baptist ecumenicists who ever lived: Philip Schaff.

In one majestic sweep of phenomenal stupidity, the leading scholars of conservative, fundamental, evangelical and orthodox Christianity (1880-1980) hugged to their bosom once again the Biblical text that had ushered in the Dark Ages.61 No apologies were made to the body of Christ, to the students or scholars of history, or to the Holy Spirit who was supposed to have “verbally inspired the original plenary, etc.” As blandly and as sanctimoniously as a Benedictine monk pouring himself a “hot toddy” before retiring, they dropped the Protestant Bible into the wastebasket and wrote a new creed. It went like this:

“Finally, my brethren, be strong in Hebrew and Greek scholarship and in the power of Alexandrian philosophy. Put on the lexicons and grammars that ye may be able to stand against the truth of the Holy Spirit. For we wrestle not against Biblical perversion and Catholic apostasy, but against born-again, soul-winning, Bible-believing pastors and evangelists. Wherefore take unto you the whole library of infidelity that ye may be able to exert a teacher’s authority; and having done so, continue to do so. Have your loins girt about with Nestle and Machen, having on the breastplate of Origen and Eusebius, your feet shod with the preparation of destructive criticism, and, above all, taking the shield of Robertson and Wuest wherewith you will be able to pervert every verse in the New Testament. And take the helmet of Rendall and Hort and the sword of the Spirit which is the Vatican manuscript, etc.”

Paul, in Liberty “Bible” College at Lynchburg, Virginia (1982), would never have recognized his first century Roman Christian “infantryman” (see comments under Eph. 6:10-17 in that Commentary). Nor could he possibly have recognized his “original, verbal, plenary inspired autograph”—whatever that might have been.

The great apostasy in England had produced in America a parade of wooden marionettes: sanctified sissies who could no more “fight the good fight of faith” than they could whistle and swallow at the same time.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

THE OLD GUARD

“Forty years old was I when Moses the servant of the LORD sent me from Kadesh-barnea to espy out the land; and I brought him word again as it was in mine heart. Nevertheless my brethren that went up with me made the heart of the people melt: but I wholly followed the LORD my God.... And now, behold, the LORD hath kept me alive, as he said, these forty and five years, even since the LORD spake this word unto Moses, while the children of Israel wandered in the wilderness: and now, lo, I am this day forscore and five years old. As yet I am as strong this day as I was in the day that Moses sent me: as my strength was then, even so is my strength now, for war, both to go out, and to come in.” (Joshua 14:7, 8, 10, 11)

The eternal and fixed cycle of church history (Evangelism, Education, Culture and Apostasy) will not be set aside simply because several hundred scholars and writers think that God’s way of doing things is wrong. As the power of the Holy Spirit swept across America, the ecclesiastical-political bosses with their bureaucrats followed. New England quickly became the stronghold of Roman Catholicism and Unitarianism. Quite naturally the Unitarians sprang up after the AV of 1611 was printed. They showed up with Theophilus Lindsey (1723-1820), Joseph Priestley (1733-1804) and William Hazlitt (1737-1820). James Freeman (1759-1835) was the first Unitarian pastor in New England; and Hosea Ballou (1771-1852) was the unsaved sinner in Boston who taught that hell was not eternal, that everyone gets “saved” sooner or later and that Jesus Christ was no more “God manifest in the flesh” than Peter, James or John. These Bible-rejecting “Christians” installed Henry Ware (1780-1842) into the Divinity School at Harvard and installed Jared Sparks (1789-1866) into a church in Baltimore.1 The sideshow was headed up by two Christian freaks,

Horace Bushnell (1802-1876) and William Ellery Channing (1780- 1842), who both taught simply that Moses was a liar, Paul was a liar, John was a liar and Jesus Christ was a liar. (If you had called either of them [Bushnell and Channing] a “liar” you would have brought down the wrath of Christendom on your head for using “bad language” and “name calling.” Apostate Christians have always been anxious to defend PROFESSIONAL LIARS.13)

By the time Dwight L. Moody and Billy Sunday showed up New England was shot through with these Bible-rejecting apostates from one end to the other. The Lord used Moody (who was from Illinois—not New England) and when He placed His hand on the next national evangelist He pursued His usual westward course; Billy Sunday came from Iowa. After Billy Sunday’s ministry it was time to go west again (Vol. I, pp. 187, 405) so the Lord didn’t pick any evangelist from the North, South, or East; instead, he picked out a Southern Baptist pastor in the WEST: J. Frank Norris of Texas. As Bob Jones, Sr., (1883-1968) and John R. Rice (1896- 1982) stood patiently in line waiting for the call to “fill Billy Sunday’s shoes,” the Holy Spirit passed them by. The Lord, by 1935, was interested again in the “original position” (Vol. I, Chap. 1). The emphasis was going to go back to the local New Testament church (Vol. I, pp. 16-30). It was as though the hands of the clock had swept the “full circle.” John Rice was also a Texas Southern Baptist but the Lord was not particularly interested in a Southern Baptist preacher who would go to a Southern Baptist school for “standing” after he had knowledge that the Convention and school were filled with corruption.1-5 If anyone knew the Convention was corrupt by 1930 when he went to Baylor, John R. Rice did. He was president of the student body and in charge of raising $75,000,000 for that institution'-* while J. Frank Norris (less than ninety miles away) was exposing the teaching of evolutionists in the classrooms of Baylor. Later John Rice passed himself off as a “Fundamentalist”—after the smoke cleared; he certainly didn’t dare do it while attending the University of Chicago!

What God the Holy Spirit now sought out was a Bible­believing pastor who took the Premillennial position of the Ante- Nicene and Apostolic Fathers.2 Bob Jones, Sr., being a Methodist, had never considered this issue to be one of the “fundamentals” of the faith so it was omitted from the official creed of Bob Jones University from 1929 to 1983. Neither had Bob Jones, Sr., (being an evangelist) ever considered other issues that had to do with the local New Testament church, and these issues were vital to a declaration

of fundamentals; eternal security and the immersion in water of the believer are not mentioned in the creed of BJU from 1929 to 1983. However, there was a man WEST of Bob Jones (Jones had come from Brannon’s Stand near Skipperville, Alabama) who thought that eternal security and the immersion of the believer were nearly as important as belief in the bodily resurrection and the reality of heaven and hell. This man was at Fort Worth, Texas.

It should be kept in mind that the Scofield Reference Bible had been printed by this time (1909-1917) and by 1930 it had become an issue in religious circles, though officially it received very little recognition.3 This King James Bible text printed by Scofield (with its notes) had “three strikes against it” from the start, and time has not remedied the handicaps. One handicap was so great that it was irremediable, so the New Scofield Board in the late 1960s finally decided to get rid of the entire King James text and replace it with an “eclectic” English text that would contain hundreds of readings from the Dark Age ASV of 1901, which you will remember came from the Roman Catholic Jesuit Greek text of 1582(pp. 150, 165). Promptly the Board of Editors, headed up by E. Schuyler English, reinserted the ASV readings back into the text at Genesis 49:6; 24:47; 17:27; 22:50; 3:5; 4:12, Judges 10:16, Daniel 3:25, Isaiah 14:1, Proverbs 2:11; 16:30; 21:3, Acts 4:27, Romans 8:20, Romans 8:33 and many other places.

The other two strikes which the original edition (1909) had against it were as follows. 1. The 1917 notes were anti-Roman Catholic and adopted the traditional Reformation interpretation that Rome was the seat of apostasy and corruption. This set the pope and his hierarchy against it from the day of its publication. To placate them, the New Scofield Board of Editors, headed by Dr. English, inserted the word “SACRAMENT” into the notes on Acts 8 (p. 1174) to show the Catholics that they too believed that water baptism was a Roman Catholic ritual or “means of grace.” 2. The notes from 1917 (specifically on pages 85, 181, 182 and 1342) tell only too plainly that the men who busily engaged in “spreading the kingdom” with ironclad ecclesiastical systems are headed for apostasy and the wrath of God. This put against the 1917 Reference Bible, instinctively, the men who were leaders in the ecumenical movements and the men who were supported by religious politicians in their denominations.4 This explains why R. G. Lee, George Truett and Wallie Criswell (all Baptist pastors) never said much about the Old Scofield Reference Bible in public or private.

Now these three factors determine the doctrinal position of the

practical theologians in the New Testament local churches in the twentieth century. Real Bible believers are, for the most part, opposed by the three classes listed above: Conservative scholars who “prefer” and “use” the AV without believing it, Roman Catholics, and denominational politicians.

As the hosts of hell mustered their forces (see the preceding chapter) to destroy American Christianity as they destroyed European Christianity (1700-1900), they found themselves suddenly confronted with the “old guard.” The “old guard” who “stays by the stuff’ (1 Sam. 30:24) are John Roach Stratton (1874-1929), T T. Shields (1873-1955), W. B. Riley (1861-1947), Mordecai Ham (1877-1961), M. R. De Haan (1891-1965), Charles Fuller (1887- 1968), Bob Jones, Sr. (1883-1968), and Z Frank Norris (1877-1952).

Every fighter in the list was born at the end of the Philadelphia period of church history and was raised up into the Laodicean period of church history. Every man listed had one great common bond of affinity with every other man, and five of the eight men were Baptist pastors of local Baptist churches. The bond of affinity that bound these soldiers of the cross together was their lifelong preaching and teaching of a Book that was 160 years out of date according to Jerry Falwell (see publicity dossiers put out on “THE NEW King James Version” in 1982 from Lynchburg, Virginia). Although on rare occasions (when the old carnal nature in these men rose up to magnify human intelligence) these men referred to Greek or Hebrew for a “better reading,” the fact remains that they taught, read, memorized and preached one Book all of their lives and seemed to have no trouble in understanding its “archaic Elizabethan English” at all.

The three men who were not Baptists were Bob Jones, Sr., Charles Fuller and Dr. DeHaan; yet even two of these (Fuller and DeHaan) took the Baptist position on water baptism and the eternal security of the believer, and Bob Jones, Sr., himself had been IMMERSED in water after his conversion. As an old-time Methodist, Jones had every right to stand in John Wesley’s shoes on matters of eternal security; and as a full-time evangelist, he had never been forced to baptize a convert once in sixty years of the ministry. Fuller and De Haan wore out the airways (1920-1960), B. R. Lakin and Bob Jones, Sr., wore out the sawdust trail (1930- 1970), T. T. Shields gave the Canadians a taste of Bible-believing Fundamentalism (1880-1940) and J. Frank Norris, the “Texas Tornado,” kept the Northern and Southern Baptist Conventions in

alternate states of panic or suspended paralysis for more than thirty years.

J. Frank Norris (1877-1952) lived one of the most turbulent and uproarious lives that has been lived on this planet. In his defense before his critics he answered: “If I had been willing to bow down to the unscriptural demands of the denominational Hamans, there would have never been any trouble. If I had never exposed evolution in Baylor University that forced seven evolution professors to resign there would have been no trouble. Oh if I had been some little Lord Fauntelroy to be bandied around, booted from pillar to post, like so many preachers...there would not have been carloads of malicious slanders sent broadcast about me. I fought back with everything at my command and 1 have no apology to make for it.”5

The ministry of J. Frank Norris, from the historical side, resembles that of Billy Sunday. The greatest firsthand course of information we have is disqualified by many as being unreliable; but if he was reliable then Norris made an impact on the United States that would equal anything that Moody and Sunday did in a lifetime of interdenominational evangelism.

The sun was about to set (John 9:4); the Great Tribulation was looming on the horizon; church history by 1930 had made the complete circle and as the wars moved east to west with the Holy Spirit (Japan, 1941; Korea, 1951; Vietnam, 1961; Cambodia, 1971; Pakistan; Iran, 1981; Iraq, etc.) the revivals moved with Him. No longer would God send national revival to America through any major evangelistic spokesman like Finney, Moody, Sunday or Sam Jones. In vain did John R. Rice attempt to force his feet into the shoes of the great national evangelists of the past; the next movement was to be a “pastors and teachers” movement. Only Billy Graham would survive the selection and with an audience of drunken (prohibition was repealed in 1933), sex crazy (Time, Life and Look were all published after 1920), money-mad, professional Bible critics (the Conservatives and Fundamentalists), national revival was out of the question. The nearest thing to a national “cleaning up” was attempted by a pastor of a local New Testament Baptist church (Jerry Falwell) in the 1980s, but he was not able to close one liquor store in America or put one pornographic magazine out of business. God had plainly written “ICHABOD” over the doorposts of the halls of America’s congressmen, and Korea and Vietnam left their bloody souvenirs on the doorsteps to let the senators and representatives know that when an English speaking nation abandons the King James Authorized Version of 1611 it is all

over but the shame of bankruptcy and servitude to Soviet Catholicism.

Norris was a country-bred, Bible-believing Baptist who had no more respect for Marx, Darwin and the Jesuits (see previous chapter) than for rattlesnakes, scorpions or armadillos. He proceeded to produce the two largest churches on the North American continent (at Fort Worth and Detroit) and these churches raised more than $5,000,000 during the depression (when any dollar was worth ten you have in your pocket now) and saw more than 40,000 people saved, baptized and joined to the church in less than fifteen years.6

Norris was saved in Alabama when he was young and was baptized in a creek near Dixon’s Mills, Alabama. He graduated from the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville and began preaching near Dallas, Texas; his first charge had thirteen members, the identical number of Moody’s first mission class (see p. 105). In 1909 he was called to the First Baptist Church of Fort Worth and immediately he offended nearly all of the wealthy deacons in the church as well as the “educated class.” Norris was blunt and to the point in his speech; he would name names and give telephone numbers. He had a keen and prolific mind and very few men could come up to his standard of mentality; he could talk to anyone on almost any given subject at length.7 Pastor I. E. Gates said that Norris at one time preached on hell every night for a solid week and that one could hear the wails of the damned and the “smell of the smoke of their torment.”8

The chairman of the board of deacons at Fort Worth tried to fire Frank. Frank promptly fired him and the whole board with him.9 The row started. In 1913 Norris exposed what he called the “top ten devils” in Fort Worth; all of them were rich people who were prominent leaders in society.10 The news media boycotted him and the Convention “excommunicated him” when various men were unsuccessful in wresting the First Baptist Church from his leadership. Ninety percent of the members in the church stood behind him throughout the entire squabble. Later 165 men gathered together and swore that they would kill Norris; attempts were made on his life twice in secret and once in the open. A mayor of one Texas city cut down the ropes of his gospel tent while he was preaching in it.11 The record of Norris’ life reads at times like The Journal of John Wesley. He was opposed by the prostitute press, the Jewish rabbis, the Knights of Columbus, Catholic Action, Southern Baptist College teachers and the liquor organizations.12 He was mobbed in

Decatur, Texas, and in Waco. In one town he walked boldly down into a mob that was gathered to lynch him, mounted a truck and preached them a sermon on the Prodigal Son; conversions resulted.13

J. B. Leavell, pastor of the First Baptist Church in Houston, said: “Few if any living preachers have so mastered the Book. Although hundreds were converted under his preaching, the meetings were said to lack ‘emotional excess’ in the sense that there was no ‘stump jumping,’ ‘jerks,’ or ‘howlings’ going on.”14 Norris removed both of his pastoral charges from their respective Conventions. The apostate leadership in those Conventions was the constant theme of his messages. “Yes, Dr. A. W. Beaven runs and controls Dr. George Truett, who is sound in the faith personally but he runs with modernists...Do you know who Dr. GeorgeTruett has as a pulpit supply? Dean Shailer Matthews of Chicago University...he (Dr. A. W. Beaven) is president of the modernistic World Baptist Alliance, which is no more and no less than a small self-appointed group of modernists, pussyfooting so-called Fundamentalists down South to do their bidding.”15

Norris had found the “pig in the poke.” The real church splitting was the work of faculty members of Christian schools trying to obtain pulpits for their own crowd by controlling the pastors of local churches so that they could get into those pulpits to preach and restore the congregations’ faith in CHRISTIAN SCHOLARSHIP as the final authority instead of the Bible. This was done by coercion and blackmail. Pacific Coast Bible College (1981-1982) did it by refusing to enroll any student that camefroma local Baptist church that believed the King James Bible was the final authority in all matters of faith and practise, and many of the graduates of BJU did it by refusing to supply teachers to Christian ACE schools if that school was connected with a local church where the pastor believed the King James Bible was the final authority.

Dr. B. H. Caroll met Norris in a private room and spoke of founding the Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary to fight the oncoming German Rationalism (pp. 140, 162). Norris started his own seminary instead (the Bible Baptist Seminary) in 1939; he began with sixteen students. Neither Greek nor Hebrew was taught in that school and it was taken for granted that the “whole English Bible” meant only one book; never two. (By now no one would have to guess what that one Book was.) No man who used an RV or an ASV or a NASV ever built any large, Biblical, soul-winning local church for God and never will. The First Baptist

Church at Fort Worth was then excluded from its association (Tarrant County) for the following “crimes”: exposing evolution at Baylor University, refusing to subscribe $200,000 to the $75,000,000 campaign, and putting the Sunday school literature out of the church and replacing it with the archaic King James Authorized Version (which was 300 years out of style according to Jerry Falwell!). Tracts were circulated against Norris. He said of his adversaries, “They attacked my methods, they objected to my sermons, they accused me of being sensational. They said I was a disturber of the peace, an agitator. Oh! the high falutin lorgnette sisters were terribly shocked! They threw up their hands in holy terror!”16

Norris lived what he preached. He went into saloons to talk to the drunks and the bartenders. He went into gambling dens and pool halls to talk and pray with the sinners. He preached on the street.17 Norris said that if a preacher was not stirring up the devil he was already dead. “Do you want to get out of your own troubles? Are you seeking comfort in sorrow? There is only one way out. Quit nursing your troubles. Quit brooding over your losses. Get up and go and witness to a lost soul about Jesus Christ, and then you will have power and peace.”18

In regards to this advice, Nestle’s with his Catholic Greek text, Darwin with his psychotic zoo, Marx with his bloody revolutions, Hort with his silly Greek lexicons, A. T. Robertson with his gross Greek grammar and the Jesuits with “fatty Fatima” were not even in the running. Not once in a lifetime did they have any grasp of what Norris was talking about. None of them knew what soul winning was or how to do it. A. T. Robertson preaching on the “circumflex accent over the ultima” would go just about as well on a street corner or in a pool room as the Mad Hatter’s discourse at Alice’s tea party.

Norris’ sermons show a remarkable degree both of fervor and scholarship. He was master of a vocabulary at least five times as large as the one he used in his sermons. He abounded in touching illustrations, real life incidents and facts and figures, with names, dates and places involved. It is no wonder that he was hated, envied and opposed by Christian teachers on the faculties of colleges, seminaries and universities. He declared, “It is unscriptural to tack on all of these machines and cogs, that is why the church is broken down today; because it has too many unscriptural programs on the inside.” Norris, as Sam Jones and Billy Sunday, was openly frank and at times he was uncouth and crude (2 Cor. 10:10; 11:6). He

referred to a famous Texas pastor as a “flop-eared, suck-egg hound.”19 He attacked Catholicism and communism with equal vigor, and during his entire life he was the unrelenting foe of socialism and liberalism both in politics and religion.

In spite of numerous attempts to assassinate him, Norris died a natural death (Keystone Heights, Florida, 1952) after setting up the two largest churches in the northern hemisphere; churches that were destined through their ministerial students and schools to train more than 3000 soul-winning, Bible-believing, Baptist pastors. It is the preachers connected with this movement who put Louis Entzminger’s Sunday school plan into effect and produced ‘‘the world’s ten largest Sunday schools, etc.” between 1960 and 1984. In the background of the local church work done by Rodney Bell, Jack Hudson, Curtis Hutson, Jack Hyles, Bob Gray, Jerry Falwell and others will be found not the cultural and educational systems of Bob Jones University but the VISITATION AND SOUL WINNING plans of the First Baptist Church of Fort Worth, Texas, under the “Texas Tornado.” Fierce and antagonistic, sometimes cruel and vindictive, but always outspoken, plainspoken and to the point, J. Frank Norris was the man that God laid his hand on, after Billy Sunday, to begin to undo the mess that had been made by Christian educators and the “vast majority of Conservative scholars.” Norris’ ethics (as Martin Luther’s) were open to question at times and his dealings with the “brethren” were not always as “above board” as his preaching and teaching,19-5 but no man could contest his calling or his effectiveness. He turned out more real Bible-believing preachers and more soul-winning New Testament churches in twenty years than Tennessee Temple, Moody Bible Institute, Bob Jones University and Pensacola Christian College turned out in forty years with their combined strengths. Whatever Norris’ personality problems were, the fact remains that Wendell Zimmerman, Harold Henniger, John Rawlings, Claude Bonam, and scores of others received their training at his hands while Dallas Billington (1903-1972), Harvey Springer, and Jack Hyles all borrowed his Sunday school methods, preaching methods, organizational methods, soul winning methods and many of his “battle tactics.” The “original” may have been disowned on the grounds that some of the brethren fancied themselves to be more holy or more ethical; but, after all, it is GOD (2 Cor. 10:18) who commends, not MAN (2 Cor. 10:12). WhatGod needed for a nation of Bible-denying, Bible-correcting, Bible-hating “Fundamentalists and “Conservatives” was a jet-propelled sledgehammer; He found

one in J. Frank Norris. Norris, from start to finish, had the stamp of the Trinity on his New Testament local church.

Along with Frank Norris and two other men, Mordecai Ham was voted by Roman Catholics as being one of the “four horsemen of the devil.”20 Bishop Canon (Methodist) and Stratton (Baptist) were the other two. This meant that when Unholy Mother Whore and her sons (Vol. I, pp. 311-316) wanted to identify the “gates of hell” that were trying to “overthrow her,” she picked three Premillennial, Bible-believing Baptists out of four prospects: we may commend her for her choice. If any two people ever stood at “polarities” with each other it would be a Postmillennial, sacramental Catholic and a Premillennial, Bible-believing Baptist (pp. vii, ix). No two human beings could be further apart even if they were both of the same age, sex, height, nationality and weight.

Mordecai Ham (1888-1961) was not only an evangelist and Bible teacher but also what he called a “prophet.”21 Ham used the term in the sense that the writers against the Illuminati and the "Club of Rome” use the term; a prophet is a man who forecasts political events and social trends and names the men and parties that Satan will use to bring them about. Ham was converted in his teens and began preaching in Kentucky (1903) until he was called as pastor of a First Baptist Church in Oklahoma (1927-1929). He started off preaching the gospel with the same tumult and uproar that accompanied the work of the early apostolic church. In one of his first meetings many were saved; the moonshiners opposed the meeting and they stoned the building during the services. Ham relates, “Finally I went out and spoke to the ringleader who immediately threatened me with a long knife. I said ‘Put up that knife you coward; if you weren’t a coward you wouldn’t pull a knife on an unarmed man. Now I’m going to ask the Lord either to convert you and your crowd or to kill you.’ ‘Do as you damn please,’ snarled the leader as he stalked off. Four of them died within twenty-four hours.”22

Mordecai Ham, as Moody, Sunday and Sam Jones, preached on the street. His ministry made a powerful impact wherever he moved. The late Senator Shepherd, who was the author of the Eighteenth Amendment (Prohibition), confessed that the Billy Sunday campaigns were the cause of the closing of the saloons in the North while the Ham-Ramsey meetings accompanied the same thing in the South.23 Mr. Rawley Tredway of Shreveport, Louisiana, who was with Mordecai Ham for eleven years, speaks of

him in the glowing terms that most biographers speak of Billy Sunday. “The desire to win lost souls is uppermost in his mind and heart. He exalts Christ and fights sins with all his might. There is no middle nor half ground in his campaigns. It is impossible by human standards to evaluate his ministry.”24 In the first twenty-four years of his ministry 33,000 sinners professed faith in Jesus Christ. Murderers got saved, drunkards were converted, homes were reunited and thousands of men and women gave their entire lives to Christ for Christian service. In the cities where he preached, restitution of stolen goods was made, whiskey stills were smashed, obscene literature was burned and in some cities the jails emptied and stayed empty during the entire time of his work in that area.25 By 1940 Mordecai Ham had succeeded in placing 300,000 saved sinners into local churches following their public profession of faith by baptism. It would appear from the records of baptisms in the Southern Baptist Convention between 1930 and 1940 (the time that Ham was a full-time evangelist) that he alone was responsible for over one third of all the conversions that went into the building of the Southern Baptist Convention.

He was persecuted mercilessly, as should be expected. In 1918 a mob of drunken soldiers hauled him three miles down a railroad track to tar and feather him; he was mobbed in Salisbury, North Carolina, and needed an armed guard in order to get to the services. He was hit one time by an automobile, on purpose, and was dragged three blocks through the traffic. Once he was attacked with a whip, and on another occasion liquor men threatened to kidnap his little girl. He was libeled and slandered by the news media and the liquor interests, since both of those institutions had operated hand in hand since 1918. Once he was hit on the head while coming out of services and another time he was gashed on the face by a metal weapon.26

Ham held a meeting for J. Frank Norris in 1911 and his preaching then against the ecclesiastical “bosses” bears a marked resemblance to Norris’ antagonism. Catholics burned several thousand copies of the Gospel of John during a Ham-Ramsey meeting in New Orleans (see p. 202). Ham preached in Nash­ville, Tennessee; Macon, Georgia; Shreveport, Louisiana; Shaw­nee, Oklahoma; San Benito, Texas; Durham, North Carolina and in many other cities. He gave the local churches credit for con­serving whatever might have been permanent in his meetings.27 The news media went after him like they went after any man who wouldn’t subscribe to the newspaperman’s creed of international socialism and Darwinian morality. Typical write-ups went like this:

“Ham is an insolent mountebank, a ruthless demagogue, a preacher of HATE. He is a joy killer and a tyrant playing upon the fears and PREJUDICES and weaknesses of unthoughtful humans.”28

Such reporting should be carefully studied by the student of church history. It shows that the news media as far back as the 1920s and 1930s was just like the news media of the 1970s and 1980s.

1. Any negative preaching against mankind is “HATE.”

2. Any absolute Biblical truths are to be ignored.

3. If a man preaches them dogmatically he is a TYRANT and a DEMAGOGUE.

4. Biblical salvation stops “joy” because it interferes with the hedonistic orgies and “life-styles” of sinners who live by “situation ethics.”

5. The only people fooled by Biblical preaching from the Bible are IGNORANT people or people who have a PREJUDICE against Darwin, Marx and the Roman Catholic popes.

This then was the same twentieth century press that later made gods out of Elvis Presley, John Lennon, Abbie Hoffman, M. L. King, Jr., Pope John Paul II and John Belushi while it made devils out of Senator McCarthy, Senator Goldwater, President Reagan, General MacArthur, Jerry Falwell and Jack Chick. The press never changes; at least not once since World War I. Since that time it has remained consistently anti-Biblical, pro-Roman, pro-socialist, pro­integration, pro-Darwin, anti-patriotic, and Postmillennial; it has specialized in creating and sustaining issues and developing crisis by aggravating and stimulating the basest impulses in human nature. The most inflammatory “hate” material in the twentieth century was not produced by Jim Jones or Jerry Falwell; it was produced by the United States TV news media. Holocaust and Roots, the encouragement of sex perversion and the nationwide use of drugs by anyone, the promotion of moral degenerates to the place of “stardom,” and a never ending barrage of self-pity propaganda aimed at minority groups to make them feel that armed murder was their God given “civil right” (and that majority groups owed them money, property, free handouts and even their DAUGHTERS) were the fruits of “freedom of speech” as interpreted by the prostitute press of the twentieth century.

Mordecai Ham delighted in jarring crowds with the unexpected gesture or word; he believed in doubling a man over with laughter so that he could quickly knock him out for the Lord. He was “tried” by the liquor interests of his day; and when he was hauled into court, he proceeded to address the foreman of the grand

jury as an “old hog-jowled liquor head.”29 His statements on the growing Communist power of the FCC (now the NCC) and their crusade to cut off Biblical preaching from the radio stations were classics from the standpoint of church history. He said, “The cry that evangelists fight churches and fight preachers is as old as the Bible and has continued through the history of the present day. The attitude assumed by some ecclesiastical leaders among evangelicals does not in essential principle differ from ROME’S AGE LONG PRACTISE.”30 (The reader should compare this with the three points we have just listed in regards to the Old Scofield Reference Bible, above, and the comments on those points.)

While in the pastorate, Ham’s pulpit was open to W. B. Riley of Minnesota and Gaebelin, the Bible teacher. Ham, like Norris, continued on up into old age and died a natural death. His most famous convert, Billy Graham, was converted (with Grady Wilson and T. W. Wilson) in a meeting which Mordecai held in Charlotte, North Carolina, in 1934.

The Methodist preacher who was a contemporary of Ham, Norris, Shields, Riley, Stratton, Fuller, DeHaan and Gaebelin was Bob Jones, Sr., the founder of Bob Jones College (1927).

Bob Jones, Sr., (1882-1968) was born in Skipperville, Alabama, and grew up at a settlement twenty miles south of Ozark called "Brannon’s Stand.” He was converted at eleven years of age and licensed to preach at seventeen, although he had been preaching two or three years before this time.31 Jones says that the greatest influence on his early ministry was the ministry of an obscure Free Will Baptist preacher named Simon Peter Richardson, in 1927 Bob Jones founded a college for Christian young people at College Point, Florida, a few miles north of Panama City. The work began with less than one hundred students. Jones required his ministerial students to keep records on personal work (compare this with Francke’s ministry, p. 17) and by 1955 his ministerial students had spread out into every state in the Union winning people to Christ. The impact of the early college (later in Cleveland, Tennessee) resembled the work of the Moravians and Zinzendorf, at least until Bob Jones, Sr., died. The work today (1983) in no way resembles the original work except in “profession.” There are fewer ministerial students in the university today per enrollment than there were in 1950. The apostasy in the school was a gradual thing (as in all schools) coming through faculty members like Afman, Panosian, Wood, Wisdom, Neal, Custer and others; their influence converte the school from a soul-winning institution for training evangelists

(Monk Parker, Don Wilson, Cotton Mercer, Fred Brown, Clifford Lewis, Glenn Schunk, etc.) into a cultural educational center for training “kiddy teachers.” In the 1970s BJU became what Pensacola Christian College had always been: “a multimillion dollar launching pad for lady fingers.’’32

The head of the Bible Department in 1982 was so deficient in sound doctrine that he was unable to refute what he called a “cult” leader when he wrote a booklet against that leader, and he was so deficient in basic scholarship that he took the stand of an unsaved liberal on manuscript evidence and the stand of an unsaved liberal on HOW the Bible was written.33

G. Campbell Morgan had a strong influence on Bob Jones when it came to his views on eschatology, and in spite of his Methodist background, Jones came out with Norris, Shields, Ham and Riley on the Premillennial issue. He adopted this view personally, although he did not incorporate it as one of the fundamentals of the faith. This chance decision produced two brands of “Fundamentalism” for America. One bore the earmarks of J. Frank Norris; it was basically Baptist and produced works like those of Jack Hyles, John R. Rice, Harold Henniger, John Rawlings, Beauchamp Vick and Jerry Falwell. The other was the interdenominational brand; it catered to Methodists, Presbyterians and Pentecostal groups as well as the Baptist. Doctrinal differences in this group were avoided rather than faced. Eventually this compromise produced a smooth, slick, cultured educator who could change colors to fit any group by avoiding doctrinal controversies and calling them “HOBBY HORSES” when they showed up.33-8 Typical of this brand of half-baked apostates was a man named Stewart Custer at Bob Jones University (1982) who undertook to answer FIVE Bible doctrines which he called “peculiar.” When he wrote his tractus against them he was not only unable to cite the verses given FOR them, but he was also unable to cite one verse A GAINST them! He had no knowledge of the Bible at all, though he professed to be a “professor of ancient languages” (1982). This apostasy among Fundamentalists was not discernable until around 1960, but then when the issue of FINAL AUTHORITY raised its head for the last time (1950-1980) the Fundamentalists found themselves split into two camps: those who believed THE BOOK and those who didn’t. The ones who didn’t were mainly interdenominational groups that clustered around J. Gresham Machen, A. T. Robertson, Kenneth Wuest, Bill Gothard, Pat Boone, Bob Jones, III, Bernard Ramm, Benjamin Warfield,

Anita Bryant, Dave Wilkerson, Oral Roberts, Bill Bright and the Christian educators who took no stand on the local church or the immersion of the adult believers (Vol. I, pp. 103-110).

Jones was called to be an evangelist, not a pastor. He had union campaigns in many cities of America before he was thirty years old. Typical of the impact of his ministry is the meeting in 1921 in Montgomery, Alabama, where a thousand people stood nightly outside a tabernacle seating 6000 more to hear the word. Over a thousand men and women responded to a single invitation to receive Christ as Saviour.34 Following the meeting over 3000 voters demanded the closing down of movies and swimming pools on Sunday.35 Bob Jones stood against modernism and the “educated class” represented by the apostate university professors in the United States. He said he would rather be a thief and steal money than to take boys and girls from the homes of America and steal their faith in God and send them back to their mothers and fathers with modernistic, behavioristic ideas that they got in some institutions of learning.36 By “modernists” Jones meant the combination of Charles Darwin (evolution) and German Rationalism (p. 162) already mentioned. By “behavioristic ideas” he meant Charles Darwin (animal morals) and Sigmund Freud (sex psychology), the combination that produced the modern blackboard jungle, now being defended in the press (1983), and the animals who hunt in it.36-5 The major propagators of modern­ism and behaviorism were (as one would expect) the newspapers and magazines: the news media.

Bob Jones, Sr., as a preacher, represents in its most favorable light the culmination of the techniques of Billy Sunday, Sam Jones, Gypsy Smith and J. Frank Norris. His sermons show a homey simplicity that deals with dynamic statements on universal truths; they contain illustrations which cut to the bone and stir the heartstrings: “Sinner, if you are here tonight and are able to run to Jesus, run; but if you are too weak and sick to run, then walk up to Calvary. If you are too weak, just stand up and look in that direction; if you are so far gone that you cannot stand up, just turn your face that way. But if you are too weak for that, just open your eyes and look for there is life for a look at the Crucified One. But if you are so far gone and so weak and so sick that you cannot even open your eyes, then when your heart beats, let the grace of God slip in. You may have come in here tonight a hopeless lost man or woman but you can walk out of the door tonight good enough to live in heaven forever! What a wonderful Saviour is Jesus!”37

(The reader will observe that the language above and the approach is not the language of Westcott and Hort, Aland Metzger, Nestle, Warfield, Robertson, Barth, Brunner, or any of their/rzends or associates in public or in private. Custer, Neal, MacRae, Newman, Wuest and their crowd were never caught talking in that manner. The “generation gap” between a Bible-believing Christian like Bob Jones, Sr.’s, mother, for example, and a “conservative Christian scholar” like Bob Jones, III or IV, is a VAST CHASM.)

Jones said that if he wanted “exhortation” he would like to hear George Stuart; if he wanted to hear good expository preaching it would be R. A. Torrey; for real refinement in preaching Wilbur Chapman: but for a real stirring up, Billy Sunday. Jones’ technique shows the influence of all four men and several more.38 As his contemporary “old guardsmen,” Jones was fought and opposed by the ecclesiastical leaders of the 1930s and 1940s. By this time they had gained control over the press so that their religious fiats (from the NCC, formerly the FCCC) were part of the Associated Press’ releases given to every major daily newspaper in the country; they were printed right alongside liquor ads and movie ads.38-5

In the days of prohibition, 200-300 men laid a plot to throw a light switch and rush the platform to kill Bob Jones with knives. He faced them anyway and preached; the plot fell through and half of them responded to the invitation to accept Christ. In Alabama during a revival a man approached Bob Jones and threatened to beat him up but a crippled newsman coming down the street heard it and drew out a switchblade and asked Bob Jones for permission “to cut him up for ya,” and the first man took off down the street.39 Among other persecutions, anonymous letters were sent to him threatening his life, and the Methodist denominational leaders disowned him and de-ordained him after a falling out over modernists in the Methodist church.40

Between World War I and World War II Charles Fuller (1887- 1968) showed American evangelicals how to broadcast the gospel and for nearly twenty years every major Christian radio program that broadcast a “service” followed Fuller’s format. Charles Fuller began his ministry as a Baptist pastor of a New Testament local church (1925-1932). His first broadcast was called ‘‘The Pilgrim Hour” and it began on one station (KG ER) and was broadcast from the church auditorium. Two more stations were added (KFI and KNX) and then he took a step of faith to get on a network; it meant that his former bill ($1441 a week) would be raised to $4500.40 2 God answered prayer and Fuller wound up with a worldwide broadcast

coming out of the Andes Mountains over shortwave; eventually he made 33 RPM transcriptions for the Armed Forces overseas and these were broadcast in the Southwest Pacific and the European theater during World War II. The correspondence of the “Old Fashioned Revival Hour" justifies itself:

“Three weeks ago I wrote you that I had listened to your program and had become a Christian. Liquor had ruined my life and brought me to the gutter. I was known to the police and nothing else but the Gospel could have saved me. I have returned to the church and attended both services today. My wife is so happy.”40.-’

“I was saved under your ministry one year ago...this has been the greatest year of my life. Before 1 was saved, I was a terrible sinner but the Lord Jesus Christ has made me a new creation. I am the happiest man in the world. I never dreamed that there was such peace and happiness to be had; signed, a sinner saved by Grace.”

“My past is black with sin. I have been drinking, and as a whole I have been a very great sinner...since I’ve listened to your message I have thought it all over and would like to become a Christian. Will you please pray for me? You don’t think it’s too late for me to come to Christ, do you?”40-6

(One can see immediately the difference between the fruits of real Biblical preaching [above] and the ghastly rot produced by the “gospel” of the NAACP, CORE, the HEW and the National Educators’ Association. There is no proper comparison.) Seven people were saved from committing suicide while they were listening to Fuller’s broadcasts.40-8

T. T. Shields (1873-1955), the Canadian, stood with the “old guard.” He had no formal college or seminary training so he was well equipped to straighten out the bungling stupidity of the college professors in McMaster’s University in Hamilton, Ontario, which was the training school for preachers in Ontario and the Quebec Convention.41 Shields pastored the Jarvis Street Baptist Church in Toronto and carried on a lifelong war against the heresies of the Roman Catholic church and the intrusion of Catholics into politics to obtain Protestant tax money for their own religious ends. The prime minister of Canada (W. L. McKenzie King) was just as good a target for Shields’ “abusive language” as any prostitute in Canada. Shields, like his friends (Walter Wilson, R. E. Neighbors, J. Frank Norris, W. L. Pettingill and Carl McIntire), was often “rude in speech though not in knowledge” (2 Cor. 11). His modest profession was that he was a soldier; a soldier in the field.41-3

JF. B. Riley (1861 -1947) believed the AV of 1611 was infallible

and “handed down from heaven,” and except for one or two occasions where his old nature got the upper hand and he tried to impress someone with his knowledge (R. A. Torrey and Spurgeon both did this a few times), Riley stuck with the Book. As Norris, he studied at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville.41-6 Riley blamed Charles Darwin and German Rationalism for the apostasy taking place in the Baptist Conventions.418 He said the problem should be laid at the feet of CULTURE (Vol. I, pp. 4, 5): this time, German culture. Riley was called by his friends a “second Martin Luther”; and, like Luther, he was succeeded in his work at Northwestern school by a “Melanchthon” named Moyer. Moyer was followed by a soft- spoken blank who couldn’t break a butterfly’s wing with three strokes of a sledgehammer (Clearwaters; Central Baptist Seminary of Minneapolis), and neither man could get the mush out of his mouth long enough to attack the enemies of the AV 1611: not even those nesting in their own schools which they headed up.

The Bible school had first a seminary and then a liberal arts curriculum, and...but it is an old, old story (Evangelism, Education, Culture, Apostasy). The “original” had been the Northwestern Bible and MISSIONARY Training School (1943).42 This became three schools (1943): a Bible school for poor ignorant Christians who believed the AV was the word of God, a seminary for the advanced intellectuals who could decipher “the plenary, verbally inspired originals,” and then a liberal arts college for those interdenominational “Fundamentalists” who wanted to hide out for the duration and stay out of combat while professing to be attending a “MILITANT” Christian school. The format is standard.

Oswald J. Smith (1889-1980) was converted to Christ in 1906 in a meeting conducted by Charles Alexander and R. A. Torrey. The influences of his early ministry came from John R. Mott, Sherwood Eddy, Robert Speer and Wilbur Chapman. (The last named man has quite a record of influence; Chapman was the one who started Billy Sunday on his evangelistic career with a few sermon outlines,42-5 and he helped dozens of other young preachers “get started.”) Smith was ordained as a Presbyterian minister in South Chicago on April 30, 1915, after being “greatly humbled” in one of Chapman’s campaigns. A. B. Simpson, the founder of the Christian Missionary Alliance, was also used of God to speak to Smith about work in supporting missions. Before 1950 Smith had preached in England, France, Holland, Lithuania, Ethiopia, Germany,

Bulgaria, Turkey, Spain, Greece, Scotland, Australia, Ceylon, Italy, Belgium and Egypt.

Smith was exerting a tremendous influence in the 1930s and 1940s as a hymn writer and author in the field of practical theology.43 Today, of course, his work has gone the way of all flesh. This began when Smith was drawn off into the pseudointellectual pursuits of the Neoevangelicals who followed Billy Graham. He began not only to correct the AV but to substitute the Roman Catholic Bible as a more reliable translation than the AV.43-3 Scholarship continued to do its deadly work in the life of Paul Smith (his son) and others, killing the evangelistic and missionary zeal of thousands and, above all, covering up the rotting humus of human nature (intellectual humus) with “good words and fair speeches” (Rom. 16:18). Canadian Christianity has been marked with this Romans 16 stamp for nearly eighty years; and although there are a few bold and brave and daring souls who say what they mean and mean what they say, Perry Rockwood(1917- ) is about

as close as anyone in Canada will come to a direct assault on sin, infidelity and the world system, and even his oral delivery is about eighty percent cooler than his writings. Plain talkers from the hill country of North Carolina are not appreciated by Canadian Christians any more than they are appreciated by Austrian and Spanish Catholics. People who have their “business tied up” and “something to hide under the rug” have to have their religion “cooled.”

Still, Oswald Smith did a vast amount of good in his time. As far back as 1963 the People’s Church was supporting 325 missionaries, after raising more than $3,300,000 for their support.44 Many Jews were converted under Smith’s early ministry, and the record of his meetings in Poland, Russia, Australia and other countries, before World War II, reads like the accounts of revival in America under Bob Jones, Sr., and Billy Sunday.

Sam Morris (1900- ) was still “standing by the stuff’

(K.DRY, San Antonio, Texas) in 1982. Sam calls himself “the voice of temperance” and not once since the communistic leader FDR put America back into the federal liquor business (while stealing America’s gold!) has Sam Morris ceased to raise his voice for total abstinence; Morris, as Norris, is a Premillennial Baptist.

John R. Rice( 1896-1981) was a Southern Baptist who attended Baylor when it was going into apostasy at full steam, and then he went to the worst liberal hellhole the Baptists had at that time—the University of Chicago. Fortunately, in the mercy of God, the Lord

showed Rice that he did not have the brains or the intellect to be a teacher or a scholar. One night, while dealing with a transient at a rescue mission. Rice decided to drop the “culture kick” and become an evangelist. His early union meetings were not Baptist meetings: they were interdenominational; and he did not join the “Fundamentalists” during the lifetime of J. Frank Norris, although Norris was the acknowledged leader of ALL Fundamentalists from Texas. Later Rice pulled alongside Bob Jones, Sr., (another interdenominational evangelist); and then still later—when he saw “how the deck was stacked”—he “boldly” came out in his papers and books as a “FUNDAMENTALIST” and took Norris’ position (that of a Texas Independent Baptist) as though he had been raised on it. He wasn’t. (The Lord had played a dirty trick on Bob Jones, Sr., and John R. Rice. Instead of picking another national evangelist after Billy Sunday on a “union meeting-conservative- cooperating-interdenominational-effort for all good Christians, etc.” basis, the Lord had slammed the door and called on a Baptist pastor of a local church; it was this man's converts who trained Jerry Falwell.)

When Billy Graham left Bob Jones College44-1 he did not join a Christian Missionary Alliance church as Bob Jones, Jr., had or a Methodist church as Bob Jones, Sr., had; Billy Graham joined a Baptist church, and it was a Baptist church on a piece of ground (Texas) that had been plowed, dynamited, stumped and tilled by J. Frank Norris until it looked like Flander’s Field.

John Rice, however, had learned something about the power of the press (news media) so he set about through The Sword of the Lord not only to print sermons and give out the plan of salvation but also to promote among Christians the idea that it was he himself who was behind the next wave of anything that looked like a revival in America (1940-1970). Actually, it amounted to little more than getting into large churches by giving them publicity and then having them and their congregations promote his newspaper when he got into them. It was a kind of “you help me and I’ll help you” situation, which was all right for an evangelist who was promoting his own ministry. Such things are perfectly legitimate. The illegitimate part had nothing to do with so-called “secondary separation” (the straw dummy Bob Jones University puts up to hide their rejection of the Holy Bible)44-3 or any of the cute little jazzy items invented by the Jones boys (II, III, IV, IVJ4 etc.). It had to do with taking credit for bringing revival to America when all Rice and Jones, Jr., did was

ride the work of PASTORS AND BUS WORKERS IN THE LOCAL CHURCHES.

Still, one may classify John Rice as one of the “old guard.” Whatever illusions he may have had about himself (from believing what he wrote about himself or encouraged others to write), he still used the right Book and preached the right Book whether he believed it or not.44-6 He did win some souls and he did promote soul winning. Actually, his tract evangelism was an excellent ministry; it was simple and direct and God used it. Unlike Bob Jones, Jr., he did not go so far in compromising as to take the Lord’s money and waste it on unsaved opera singers, lost political speakers, and millions of dollars worth of Roman Catholic paintings by unsaved painters. There is “separation” and then there is “separation.”

There were others who “stuck by their guns” even though they sometimes wasted time correcting the God-given Book that informed them of the “fundamentals” they were supposed to believe in. In the main, the old guard can be spotted by the fact that they were all born before 1900 and by the fact that they continued to teach and preach a Book that was reportedly 300 years out of date. They had pressure on all sides—from corrupt faculty members of corrupt Christian schools—to adopt or at least recommend the ASV of 1901. Occasionally they succumbed to this temptation (note Torrey’s references to the R V of 1884) and thus accelerated the pace of the Antichrist’s church and the final worldwide apostasy (see Chap. 10).

Scores of New Testament churches sprang up in America between 1900 and 1950. In spite of the later inroads of socialism and communism, the Negro Baptist Churches for years were engaged in nothing but preaching the Bible, singing the truth, praying down the power of God, and baptizing converts in the streams, ponds and lakes of Alabama, Georgia, Mississippi, Tennessee, Carolina, Arkansas, and Louisiana. W. W. Colley, a missionary to Africa, organized the Foreign Missionary Conventions (1880) and William Simmons set up the National Baptist Convention for all Negroes (1886). Roland Hayes (1887-1976) was a great Baptist singer and musician and he sang before King George V and Queen Mary.44-7

Where the Negroes stuck to the conversion of their own people at home and abroad they prospered economically and spiritually and produced hundreds of thousands of well-mannered, well- behaved, well-educated, well-fed, respectable men and women, these converts were excellent American citizens (American Baptist Theological Seminary, Nashville, the National Baptist Convention,

Roger Williams University, National Theological Institute, etc.). The outstanding Communists in the Baptist groups (Michael Luther King, Jr., Coretta King, Andy Young, Ralph Abernathy, Eldridge Cleaver, Jesse Jackson, Senator Powell, etc.) were all trained by apostate liberal schools; King, Jr., himself was trained in the Monteagle Training School for Communists in Tennessee. He attended classes with the head of the Communist party in the United States.44-8

The new guard, at least the black variety of Baptist new guard, was clearly Leninist-Marxists to the core and believed that the welfare state was the fourth member of the Trinity. That philosophy, of course, was European, not African (see pp. 141-148), and yet it was not the philosophy of the European immigrants who came to America in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. These people made their own way, fought their own battles and never asked the government to “subsidize” anything or “hand out” anything.44-9

Strangely enough, the blacks in America in the twentieth century who were equipped with food stamps, government housing, Cadillacs, cigars, mink coats, jewelry, free hospital care, social promotions in grade school (when they had actually flunked the courses), exemption from serving sentences, exemption from military duty (Cassius Clay), and press promotion in a favorable light twenty-four hours a day in over 500 newspapers (plus AP and INS teletype lines and all three major television networks) were the ones who were still hollering about “slavery” in 1980. Their European counterparts who came over from Europe never considered it the duty of ANY government to give them ten times as much money as they had because it “owed” it to them. The Irish and German immigrants of 1800-1940 would have had a hard time understanding exactly what kind of philosophy or religion it was that made a whole race feel like the world owed them a living after the country where they were in had already elevated them so far above their native habitat that not one of them would return to it if you paid him $10,000.

Not even the migratory Mexican workers in Texas, Arizona and New Mexico looked at “slavery” in that light. It seems to be the unique “lifestyle” of Africans.

When we take a look into the twentieth century, we see New Testament Christianity in the twilight of western civilization. This is the bloody century—the century of calculated and planned violence on a scale unparalleled in the history of man with more than forty-

five wars going on in less than fifty years. The warmongering instrument behind this outbreak of violence and death was the United Nations: an establishment supposedly for “peace on earth good will to men.”45 Since the UN has nothing to do with real church history we shall dispense with it.

CHAPTER TWELVE

THE NEW TESTAMENT CHURCH IN THE TWILIGHT OF WESTERN CIVILIZATION

“I must work the works of him that sent me, while it is day: the night cometh, when no man can work.” (John 9:4)

The history of “modernism” and its associations with the work of New Testament Bible believers would make several volumes in itself and most of them have already been written. T. J. McCrossan, John Stormer, Captain (Major) Bundy, Billy James Hargis, Carl McIntire, George Dollar and others have written some excellent ones. McCrossan, contrary to the taboos on “castigating and vilifying,” does not hesitate to call the major leaders in the National Council of Churches (and the men who taught them) “intellectual fools.”1 Actually, men like Pike, Oxnam, Sockman, Ferre, Peale, Weigle, Albright, Goodspeed, Bewer, Ward, Dahlberg, and Blake should have the name “intellectual” removed from such a description; there is certainly nothing intellectually honest about any man who has faith in socialism or evolution (see pp. 131,145) as solutions for anything. The best one may say of such deluded souls is that they are “crippled too high for crutches.”

The period between 1901-1960, with its religious and scientific appendages, is like watching a man running through a fog and boasting about how fast he is going. Although he professes to be running uphill, there is considerable doubt in the mind of any sane person (see above) who has watched him run for any length of time. The so-called “Protestant dilemma" (1900-1960) came about exactly as the Roman Catholic dilemma (300-600 A.D.) came about; that is, the Protestants dumped their final authority and picked up the religious traditions of ecclesiastical scallywags. Carl McIntire (1951) offered the following solution to the “dilemma.” He said that “the bottles which are labeled Fundamentalist and Bible believers must have stamped on them in the largest letters

‘Christians’.”2 Carl was wrong. The greatest representative of “Christians” with the word “Christian” stamped all over him (“many shall come in My Name...etc.”) is the CATHOLIC POPE Further, with the word “Christian” stamped on radical communists like Michael Luther King, Jr., (his name was not “Martin”) and stamped on fornicating degenerates like John Lennon and Elvis Presley and stamped on Hitler’s Third Reich (Chap. 9, note 21) and on the forehead of brutal sadists like the Catholic Archbishop Stepinac, who needs such a word stamped on him if he is a real Bible believer?

In 1890 the liberal was debating whether or not there were two Isaiahs; in the 1920s modernists were debating whether or not there was a personal God; in the 1940s Fundamentalists were debating the Second Coming of Christ and the Rapture but by 1970 they were saying that there wasn’t one Book on this planet that was the final authority for ANYTHING. Fundamentalists in the 1970s and 1980s beat a hasty retreat to cover up their dirty apostate tricks when the infighting began in earnest in the early 1970s. They covered them so well that there are deluded young men in Christian colleges today who think that their teachers never did recommend the ASV or the NASV as superior translations to the AV, although they certainly did for nearly seventy years and some of them still are. But all of this was the work of professional liars who were paid to keep the Christian institutions operating.2-5

The Methodist church, as an ecclesiastical organization, went into apostasy between 1900-1920. The American World Evangelical Alliance went the same way in 1908.3 Henry says that the Northern Baptist Convention had a “flux” which he attributes to their lack of “credal documentation” which was “no creed but the New Testament.” This meant simply: no Bible. The Northern Baptist Convention went into apostasy exactly as the Southern Baptist Convention did (1940-1980). The teachers in those colleges, universities and seminaries simply drew the line between the New Testament local church and the educated “intelligentsia” in the school whose job was to control the local churches. (This is done by simply saying that the vital questions of Christian doctrine and the Bible are settled behind closed doors in a classroom and pastors have no business questioning what is done there, although the school produces Bible-rejecting apostates who feel equipped to challenge and correct any Bible-believing pastor, in or out of the pulpit.3-5)

This standard “church-school” situation is foolproof in

operation. Since the pattern is always “evangelism-education-etc.,” one can count on every school in America going into total apostasy with the passing of time if it goes one step beyond teaching the Bible itself as the standard by which all scholarship is to be judged. If it fails to inform the student that the Holy Bible is the final standard for judging art, music, segregation, the UN, Greek, Spanish, German and Hebrew, manuscript evidence, psychology, philosophy, sports, Biblical introduction, biology, chemistry, intrinsic evidence, textual criticism, Chinese, English, Italian and Aramaic, theology, physics, literature, history and “probable readings” it will apostatize: they all do.

1. First the churches multiply and decide to set up a training ceriter for young men as MINISTERS or MISSIONARIES.

2. A school is set up and is supported by local churches that have a common doctrinal basis for their works (a group, association, fellowship, convention, etc.).

3. Summer camps are set up to boost fall enrollment in this school.

4. Into this school come teachers (or sometimes even pastors) who desire to strut their knowledge or demonstrate their superior power and authority over the Bible so that they will be “recognized” as leaders for the body of Christ.

5. This is done best by “going to the original Greek” and correcting the authority by which the local pastors built their local churches and by which they are ministering to their congregations.

6. Through the years this transfers the final authority from THE BIBLE in the local New Testament church (composed of Bible-believing Christians) to a SCHOOL—there are no Christian schools set up in the New Testament (see Vol. I, pp. 75-77)— composed of Bible-correcting egotists. Eventually they all become Bible-rejecting apostates.

The pattern is absolutely fixed and predictable and it will affect the Bible Baptist Fellowship, the World Baptist Fellowship, the Southwide Baptist Fellowship, Lynchburg Schools or BJU exactly in the same fashion as it has affected the United Methodist church or the Northern Baptist Convention.3-8 No amount of PROFES­SION of any set of “fundamentals” has ever nullified the pattern one way or another. “PROFESSION” is not necessarily the truth.

Between 1920 and 1940 evangelism and evangelical causes suffered serious setbacks because of scandals in the lives of the leaders, extravagances among the Charismatic preachers, liberalism in the churches and a general “drift from God”; but they

suffered ten times more than that from the same old plague that infested Eden (Gen. 3:1). The real damage was done by top-heavy pseudo-intellectuals convincing believers that the King James Bible (1611) was not really the word of God or the words of God. A disaster followed. The Roman church had so great a grip on the Northern cities by 1950 that in the Statler Hotel in Cleveland (1942) Protestants were actually offering prayers for the dead and reverencing Mary as “the Mother of God.”4

The Fundamentalist George Dollar (a church historian) has no idea about how this came to pass. He doesn’t even attempt to explain how the outstanding infidel Shailer Matthews was able to get into Chicago University or how John R. Mott got into the driver’s seat of the FCC.4-5 Dollar, as nearly all modern church historians, can only deal with diagnosis and symptoms; he knows nothing about causes or roots. And this monstrous silence on the part of all fundamental historians and conservative historians in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries is due to a simple and deadly fact: they are in collusion with the liberals and modernists on the issue of FINAL AUTHORITY. They have none other than their own opinions or the opinions of their friends (see the Bible Believers’ Bulletin: 1979-1982).

When A. C. Dixon began to scream about the ravages of German culture and Nietzsche’s philosophy and began to cry out for a university where “THE BIBLE WOULD BE ITS CENTER,”4-7 he was just “pulling your leg.” Universities (any major Christian university) have never even handled THE BIBLE. Christian universities only handle “reliable and unreliable translations.” Dixon was just kidding, like Courtland Myers used to kid them.4-8 There is not one major Christian university in America that does not challenge and correct God’s word ten times a week, but they would ship a student who challenged the authority of the school to correct it. This is called “idolatry” if we are to believe George Dollar’s History of Fundamentalism.^ Dollar says that when an organization is more important than the BOOK, those in it are guilty of idolatry. He uses the Southern Baptist Convention and the Cooperative Program as a sample test case; he could just as well have used Pensacola Christian College or Liberty “Bible” College as examples. They correct the word of God regularly, yet when anyone dares to correct their own political, educational, or spiritual setups one time watch how they react to such “sacrilege!” (We have seen saved ministerial students collared and ordered off their campuses for merely parking their car outside of a bookstore “on campus” to

buy a book. The cars have had SCRIPTURE VERSES on signs atop the car. Christian educators are SC A RED or REVOLTED by a public display of the Holy Bible.JThe Bible is not the Holy Bible at these schools; it is not a Holy Book at any major Christian college or university; it is only a textbook that is USED to maintain the enrollment.

In the midst of this confusion, apostasy, bossiness and sanctified stupidity, some Biblical voices could still be found crying, “All flesh is grass...prepare ye the way of the Lord!”

By 1954 the Gideons (founded in 1908) had distributed approximately 366,000 Bibles in foreign lands and over 3,700,000 King James 1611 Bibles in the United States. In addition to this, they had put out 13,000,000 King James Bibles into the Armed Services. That is, one Bible group in one country put out more King James Bibles in fifty years than the combined sales of the RV (1884), ASV (1901) and NASV (1969), which were promoted for eighty years by every major group of fundamental scholars in the United States and Great Britain. Counting the King James Bibles that were put out in England (and through their societies) from 1880 to 1980, the total amount would come to more than twice as many copies as any other three English translations combined.

The Pocket Testament League, the Bible Meditation League and Bible Memory Association sprang up, and groups like the Trinitarian Bible Society of London continued to sow the pure words of the Living God.5 The Trinitarian Bible Society had Thomas Erskine (1788-1864) as its first president and Ethelbert Bullinger was its secretary from 1867-1913. Article III of the inaugural meeting (December 7, 1831) stated that the Society would circulate no English translations but the Authorized Version5-1 and the Society has stuck to that original purpose right up into 1983. The Society has also from time to time published some of the most valuable information available today in the fields of manuscript evidence and translations; these were in the form of small paperback pamphlets called The Quarterly Record.

The outstanding preachers of the period were Bob Shuler, William Ward Ayer, Charles Fuller, Hyman Appleman, John R. Rice, Harry Ironsides, Oliver Green, Billy Graham, Dr. DeHaan, R. G. Lee, Beauchamp Vick, John Rawlings, and Walter Maier (a Lutheran).

Several groups should be noted to obtain the complete picture of Biblical soul winning during this time.

I. A group representing the body of evangelists of the “old

school. ” Typical of their constituents were Hyman Appleman, Jesse Hendley, E. J. Daniels, Joe Henry Hankins, Monroe Parker and B. R. Lakin.

II. A body of “new school evangelists” well represented by Fred Brown, Cotton Mercer, Hugh Pyle, Del Fehsenfeld, Eddie Martin, Glenn Schunk, Jimmie Johnson, James Threfall, Douglas Wynn, Bob, Phil and Jack Shuler, Don Chennewoth, Clifford Lewis, Elmer and Bill Piper, Don Wilson and the Sutera twins. B. B. Crimm, a very unique Texas evangelist, barnstormed up and down the southwest taking his “foxhounds” with him.

III. A group of evangelical leaders doing various independent works along Biblical lines: Marvin Lewis, Horace Dean, Jack Wyrtzen (youth work), Percy Crawford, Halver Webb, James Bennett (a lawyer), Jock Troup, Ian Thomas, Harry Rimmer (apologist), Wilbur Smith (apologist), Timothy Pietsch (missionary), Sidlow Baxter, Overholtzer (founder of Child Evangelism), R. G. LaTourneau (businessman) and Dawson Troutman (evangelism), etc.

IV. A large group of Christian leaders who were found in the field of education and radio whose burden for the souls of men was occasionally manifest: M. R. DeHaan, Chester Tulga, J. Vernon McGee, Charles Fuller, Theodore Epp, Clearwaters, Tollett, etc., and others are representative.

V. A continual flow of pastors with the militant temperment of Norris and Riley. These men showed the “iron backbone” of the New Testament Christians so it is not surprising to find that most of them took the old Donatist-Montanist-Novatian position (Vol. I, pp. 152-176): anti-Catholic, separation of church and state, a regenerated church membership, immersion of believers only (no infant baptism), and the Premillennial position.

In short, they were what the twentieth century called “Baptists.” Lee Roberson, James McGinlay, Wendell Zimmerman, J. Harold Smith, Lee Scarborough, Art Wilson, Harvey Springer, Lester Roloff, Claude Bonam, Bob Ingle, John Rawlings and many others come under this heading.

In vain did the Presbyterians between 1950 and 1980 sidle up to the Baptists in order to try to appear “evangelistic” when they were not. The days of Machen, Warfield, Chafer, A. T. Pierson, Louis Talbot, Dwight Pentecost, Donald Barnhouse and Harold Ockenga were over. Almost too late (1953) did Bob Jones, Sr., realize this; but when he did, he quickly shipped out of BJU the Calvinistic Presbyterians (Whitte, Payne, etc.) and filled their boots with

Premillennial Baptists; without becoming a Baptist!

In vain did the interdenominational experts pull up alongside the Baptists to pose as “heroes of the faith.” (Bob Jones, Jr., for example, showed such great sympathy and interest in Lester Roloffs problems in the 1980s. Roloff abandoned his ‘‘People’s Church” and made it into a ZL4P77STchurch. When “push came to shove” [1979-1981], Roloff saw that the local BAPTIST church— not an interdenominational university—was the New Testament standard for a Biblical institution and it was the last-ditch stand left in America for the original Bill of Rights [Chap. 4].)

The Lord simply sidestepped the Northern Baptist Convention and the Southern Baptist Convention and then He bypassed the Presbyterians and interdenominationalists. The lineup of leaders in the twilight of western civilization, after church history had moved in a full circle, shows exactly where the Lord had aimed His intentions; His aim was not at the Southern Baptists or Northern Baptists or even “Fundamental” Baptists: it was at BIBLE­BELIEVING BAPTISTS. It is true that some of those men occasionally denied their birthright by adopting the pottage line of the Alexandrian Cult (Vol. I, Chap. 5) when trying to drive home a point, but this may be attributed to their old natures and not to the work of the Holy Spirit in them.

There suddenly sprung a raft of leaders who were all Baptists. Clarence Larkin (1850-1929) was the man who taught every prophetic teacher in America from 1930-1983 everything they knew about the basics of prophecy and “rightly dividing the words of truth.” Larkin was a Baptist pastor. Dallas Billington (1903-1912), who built the largest church in Ohio (1960), was a Baptist pastor. John Birch (1918-1945) was one of Norris’ students in the First Baptist Church of Fort Worth, Texas. Robert Ketcham (1889- )

was a Baptist pastor. Harold Henniger (1924- ), who has the

second largest church in Ohio (1970), is a Baptist pastor. He was trained by J. Frank Norris, a Baptist pastor. Louis Entzminger (1878-1956) set up the standard Sunday school promotion and organizational format used by Jack Hyles and Jerry Falwell (as well as Curtis Hutson, Tom Wallace, Bob Gray and Tom Malone). He was J. Frank Norris’ Sunday school superintendent. John R. Rice had nothing to do with the setting up of ANY of these Sunday schools. In vain did John R. Rice (with Bob Jones, Sr., and Jack Van Impe) try to get great “city wide campaigns” back into style. Billy Graham was able to do it but only with the help of modernists and “neoevangelicals.” Something had gone wrong with

conservatism and fundamentalism since 1940. It was of so serious and grave a nature that the Lord had quietly removed them as organs of national revival, at least in the sense that He had sent national revivals through Sunday and Moody or Sam Jones and Gypsy Smith. No church historian in this century could tell you why this was done. The terrible truth of the matter was that by the time of the end of Billy Sunday’s ministry (1936) the news media was controlling the thinking processes in the minds of American Christians instead of the Bible, and the conservatives themselves (through 50-100 years of brainwashing) had destroyed the faith of American Christians in the Holy Bible. The vast American congregations to whom Billy Graham preached were composed of thousands of real Christians, but they were, for all practical purposes, nothing but PRAGMATIC OPPORTUNISTS; they had no final authority for anything. When Graham finally replaced Billy Sunday (1945), he could not say what Sunday had said about the NCCC or the Bible; he could not preach what Sunday had preached, and the plain talk that Billy Sunday had talked was out of the question. What one needed between 1945 and 1985 was a gallon of shellac, a gallon of varnish and a ton of soft soap and perfume. Still, Billy Graham himself was a member of a Baptist church. It was not a real New Testament local congregation for it was not independent; it was tied hand and foot to a mammoth political system that held government bonds and stocks in manufacturing companies.5-2

During this time up popped Scotty Alexander (1915- ), a

Baptist preacher; William Ward Ayer (1891- ), a Baptist pastor;

Robert Bevington (1927- ), a Baptist pastor; Mark Cambron

(1911- ), a Baptist pastor; Myron Cedarhold (1915- ), a

Baptist pastor; Richard Clearwaters (1900- ), a Baptist pastor;

Russell Conwell (1843-1925), a Baptist pastor; George Crittenden (1924- ); Bruce Cummons (1924- ); Gerald Fleming (1927-

); Oliver Greene (1915-1978); Vance Havner (1901- );

Herschel Hobbs (1907- ); Ford Porter (1893- ); Ed Nelson

(1923- ); Otis Fuller (1903- ) and many others. We cannot

examine a single really Biblical movement from 1940 on in the United States that does not have behind it somewhere the ominous shadow of the “Texas Tornado” (Frank Norris) or one of his students or friends. Campus Crusade and Intervarsity Fellowship cleaned up the bottom of the barrel (1960-1980) where a few Methodists and Presbyterians were left, mixed in with a group of Pentecostals, Catholics and Charismatics. But without a vast

network of millions of Baptists to proselyte from, the Charismatic heresies of the 1960s and 1970s never would have gotten off the ground: the same may be said of 90 percent of the work of the Russellites, Mormonsand Seventh Day Adventists from 1940 to the present.

(As local Baptist churches sprouted up all over America they had taken advantage of the “freedom of the press” which Americans enjoyed. The oldest Baptist paper was the Christian Watchman founded in 1819 by James Loring.5-5 This was followed by the Christian Era from Boston [1850] and the Christian Index [out of Atlanta]. Soon there appeared the Christian Secretary [1922] and the Gospel Witness and The Examiner [New York], The Register and Recorder followed in 1855 and then there are too many to list [the New York Chronicle, the Examiner, the Religious Herald, Zion's Advocate, the Journal and Messenger, the Standard, the Baptist Weekly, the Tennessee Baptist, the National Baptist (1865), the Alabama Baptist, the Baptist Sun, the Baptist Record(\87T), the Kansas Baptist (1822)] etc.)6

The next movement that resembles a national revival in any way (see Chap. 5) comes from three Baptists: Jerry Falwell, Billy Graham and Jack Hyles. Two of them were Baptist pastors and all three of them were the despised “Southerners” of whom the Associated Press has so much to say. All three were raised by Bible­believing mothers and all three took J. Frank Norris’ position on water baptism, eternal security, soul winning, the Second Coming of Christ, and separation of church and state. None of them learned anything about the New Testament local church at Bob Jones University or copies of it (Pensacola Christian College, Virginia Beach, etc.). Where any of them failed to “follow through” they failed by getting so tangled up with the news media or so tangled up with scholars on their school faculties that they no longer dared state certain Biblical truths publicly and no longer dared to ignore the “fellowship” of those who hated Norris and everything he stood for. (The stouthearted are not always as courageous as they look when faced with the charge of RIDICULE. Many of the great Baptist celebrities of the 1980s are as afraid [or more afraid] of RIDICULE than they are of bullets or imprisonment.)

Lee Roberson (1909- ) is pastor of the Highland Park

Baptist Church in Chattanooga, Tennessee, and president of the Tennessee Temple Schools (this includes a grammar school, high school, college and seminary). Most of his faculty members are graduates of Bob Jones,6-5 including his vice-president (J. R.

Faulkner), which guarantees that with the passing of the years (1950-1980) the school will eventually attack the AV (carefully, of course!) and begin to produce Bible-rejecting critics. In 1954 the church supported 106 missionaries and had a membership of around 10,562. This number includes dozens of chapels spread out over the city. By 1978 the count that Roberson was turning in to reporters was around 33,000 members. This number was arrived at by counting up the attendance of forty other branch chapels who were NOT “independent” Baptist churches. This would come to around an average of 500 per chapel if all the people who joined were still on the roll, which, frankly, is hard to grasp when one sees the size of most of the “chapels”!

J. Harold Smith (1910- ) was pastor of the First Baptist

Church of Fort Smith, Arkansas, for many years before his retirement to Orlando (1979). Smith had a ministry earlier in Greenville, South Carolina, and was fought by the liquor interests in that city. The impact of his testimony was so great that twelve men finally ambushed him one night in a downtown pool hall; each man was armed with a knife or a gun. (They had asked Smith to come downtown to “pray for the owner of the pool hall about his soul.”) Smith was tied up and punched and cursed and spat upon for nearly three and a half hours until a policeman broke into the proceedings.7 Modernists associated with the Federal Council of Churches (now the Communist Council of Churches) ran him out of Knoxville, Tennessee, and caused him to lose a Christian radio station there; Smith had made the mistake of exercising his constitutional rights of freedom of speech as defined by the news media. He forgot that since the news media took control of ninety percent of the politicians, artists, musicians, writers, teachers, preachers and scientists in America that “freedom of speech” was now the exclusive property of the prostitute press alone; individuals no longer had the right to express their opinions publicly.7-5 Smith was unfortunate to have quoted the writings and speeches of certain leaders in the NCC over the air where the listeners could actually obtain documented evidence on what these men really believed about the Virgin Birth and the Deity of Christ: this is a “no no.” You must not tell the TRUTH about what a religious Communist believes (even when he has put it in writing and signed his name!) when he is posing as a “Christian.” If you do you lose your radio time or your radio station.

Smith continued to attack the liquor traffic when he moved to Arkansas, and he says that the boozers were responsible for beer

and whiskey bottles thrown all over his lawn at the pastorium there. Smith says, “When I come out of the house in the morning I don’t know whether I’m going to step on a beer bottle or a bear trap.”8 J. Harold Smith is a Premillennialist and he arrived at that position without the aid of a Scofield Bible or any other help. He says that the Holy Spirit showed it to him as he studied.9 The educated class (pp. 27, 38) and the hireling prophets in the NCCC do not take to J. Harold Smith any better in 1980 than they did in 1950.

Harry Ironsides (1876-1953) took over some of the work left by R. A. Torry. He began preaching on the street and doing personal work with the Salvation Army (1915-1916).10 In 1912 he preached to Roman Catholics in a Catholic church. He did evangelistic work of a teaching nature and in his earlier years was quite outspoken in his preaching: “There will be lost souls in Hell fire who will wail forever; Jesus became poor that I might be rich, Jesus died that I might be saved, and I knew all about it; but I loved my sins more than Christ!”11 Most of Ironsides’ work (as John R. Rice’s work) was done through literature; he died in New Zealand while traveling in the work of the ministry. Ironsides wrote about sixty volumes during his lifetime; and although they are “skim milk” doctrinally (like ninety percent of Rice’s material), they are Premillennial and teach the Baptist position. Ironsides himself was a “Brethren” and in practise he was interdenominational.

R. G. Lee (1886-1979) was the pastor of the Bellevue Baptist Church in Memphis, Tennessee, for many years. The church had nearly 8000 members back in 1953 and was reported to have had about 400 conversions a year during the 1930s and 1940s. Robert Lee lived and died a Southern Baptist and was elected as president of the Convention three times. His sermons were famous for their use of alliteration. For example: "Up and Down a Tree”—a sermon on Zachaeus—is outlined as a man “despised, described, desirous, determined, descried, descending, denounced, dining, etc.12 While R. G. Lee pastored and guided the Convention it was paying unsaved liberals to lecture to its young men and women, and it was investing hundreds and thousands of Christian dollars in government bonds and financial ventures. (It also hosted “panty raids” at Wake Forrest and Blue Baron’s dance band at Stetson.) Less than four percent of the income in the SBC went overseas to support missionaries.12-5

Bob Shuler (1880-1966) was one of the old-time Methodist soldiers of the old guard. He was born in Southwest Virginia and pastored the Trinity Methodist Church in Los Angeles from 1920 to

1953. Shuler fought the liquor traffic, the pornographic movies Hollywood corruption, and the apostasy going on among the United Methodists. He left three sons in the ministry (Jack, Phil and Bob, Jr.) and retired after a life that ran alongside the lives of Bob Jones, Sr., and J. Frank Norris.

Louis Talbot (1889- ), Paul Rees (1900- ), Donald

Grey Barnhouse (1895-1960), E. L. Maxwell (1895- ), Keith

Brooks (1887-1954), Harry Rimmer (1890-1952) and R. R. Brown (1885-1964) taught and preached the fundamentals of the faith. Jim Mercer, T. W. Wilson, Jack Shuler, Merv Rosell and Monroe (“Monk”) Parker engaged in evangelistic work. All of them (as well as Appleman, Hendly, Daniels and Martin) were Premillennial in eschatology; that is, they were anti-Catholic (Vol. I, Chap. 3 and 4).

William Ward Ayer (1891- ) was saved from sin during a

Billy Sunday revival, following a “men only meeting.” He was ordained as a Baptist minister and began his ministry by preaching in jails and on the street corners. He entered Calvary Baptist Church in downtown New York in 1936. He had a tremendous radio ministry there for years; his radio voice was clear and very near to his auditorium voice—personal and friendly. “He is a dyed in the wool evangelist and his voice is dyed in the wool for our Lord Jesus Christ.”13 Ayer pitched into his pastoral calling at Calvary with such gusto that by 1947 he was the third most popular man in the New York area, outrating Mayor LaGuardia, O’Dwyer, Rockefeller, Fosdick and Babe Ruth.14 William Ward Ayer, as J. Frank Norris, was a Premillennial Baptist who believed in the immersion in water of the adult believer. He led over 500 Catholics to the Lord and baptized them; Anthony Zachello (a Roman Catholic priest) was led to the Lord by Ayer. He also led Glenn Miller’s wife to the Lord. The Calvary Baptist Church where he pastored raised over a million dollars for missions between 1936 and 1950.15

The Baptist William Ward Ayer received threatening letters from his news media work, as his preaching naturally was flavored with the old Manichean-Arian-Cathari heresies (Vol. I, Chap. 9) which Rome would never forgive. He said, “Today in America the Roman Catholic church, that old enemy of religious freedom, has become strong and active...I have tried to stand as a prophet crying against national sins and folly, and have endeavored to show a way of escape in Christ. I heretofore have been accused of POLITICAL PREACH ING...but I have no sympathy with preachers who do not recognize the problems of our days...we have the answer in Christ.”16

The student of church history must observe that wherever Bible-believing Baptists begin to expose the POLITICAL DESIGNS and POLITICAL GOALS of the Vatican hierarchy, there suddenly arises from both Roman and Protestant (NCC) circles a howling protest about “interference in POLITICS” (see Jerry Falwell’s famous “Moral Majority,” 1980). The reason for this is very simple: the Vatican state and the NCC have engaged in nothing but POLITICS since the beginning of the twentieth century. There is not on record one case of one pope since 1800 telling anyone how to be saved or telling anyone about the Second Coming of Christ, although these two items take up more than one- fourth of the entire Bible where it deals with doctrinal matters. Rome has no message in the twentieth century but “wealth sharing” and “human rights” for oppressed minorities so that the kingdom can be brought in for the “downtrodden masses.” The entire message is POLITICAL from start to finish (pp. 3-9).16 5 The NCC has no message but “bringing in the kingdom,” which to them is involvement in voting and passage of bills (see Vol. I, pp. 337- 400). All of these little “kingdom builders” are up to their necks in urban housing renewal, oppressed minorities, social equality, the rights of women and sex perverts, graded income taxes, Medicare, unilateral disarmament, anti-nuke demonstrations, free rat poison and CARE packages, Social Security, guaranteed life incomes, and food stamps. When these incredible Catholic and Protestant hypocrites criticize Bible-believing preachers for “POLITICAL” PREACHING, it simply means they hate the truth with a purple passion. Men like William Ward Ayer, J. Frank Norris and Mordecai Ham did not hesitate to preach against the deceit, treason, treachery and fraud that originated in the Vatican and in the National Council of “Christian” Churches. They named the names of these bishops, archbishops, cardinals, preachers and scholars who were engaged in embezzlement and extortion “in the name of Christ.” That is what hypocrites call “POLITICAL PREACHING.”

One must never forget that the present NCC is not only composed of preachers with long Communist and Communist front affiliations17 (Francis McConnell, 27 organizations; Bishop Oxnam, 12; George But trick, 4, etc.) but is presently actively engaged in the overthrowing of legitimate governments by armed force (revolution) and sedition.18 The leaders of this Communist religious organization (Pike, Weigle, Albright, Blake, Dahlberg, Sockman, Kagawa, Parlin, Ward, Bennet Ramsay, etc.) make no

profession of being Bible believers at all. However, they do profess to be “Christians.” Members of the NKVD (Russian secret police) PROFESS EXACTLY THE SAME THING'9 as did Ralph Abernathy and Michael Luther King, Jr., who frankly stated that he was not interested in anything about the future life of the Christian in heaven with Christ.20 The present platform of the NCC, as its previous platform, is nothing but a series of political statements that deal with economic and social issues; the complete record will be found in The Record of the National Council of Churches, printed by the Church League of America (1972).20-5 All leaders oftheNCC spend their time in nothing but POLITICAL PREACHING, for that is the only kind of preaching they can do, outside of a little amateur psychological counseling on “positive thinking.” Biblical preaching or spiritual preaching is absolutely out of their ball park altogether. They may use men (Billy Graham, for example)20-9 who know something about those matters, but no president of the NCC ever had the spiritual discernment of a blind mosquito. “Kingdom builders” are called to deal with revolutions, tax exemptions, strikes, armed sedition, a world bank, civil disobedience, women’s lib, chlorinated water supplies, immigration quotas, guaranteed wages, safety belts and one world government, with a one world police force for imprisoning revolutionaries who revolt after the “revolting revolution” is supposed to have already taken place.21 Or to put it bluntly: The National Council of “Christian” Churches (as the Federal Council of “Christian” Churches) has never had anything to do with “the history of the New Testament church” since the day it was organized to this present time (1984).

The FCC and the NCC are subjects of ANTI-church history (Vol. I, p. 324-340).

Now as the shades of night (1900-1940) begin to fall on America and England (the way they fell on Spain and Germany) the “fireflies” come out once again (Vol. I, Chap. 11). These “lights shining in a dark place” fill the gaping holes in the ranks of Christian soldiery between 1960 and 1990. They enter the “theater of operations” for the last battle of the church age. With the reinstatement of the Jesuit Dark Age New Testament of 1582 (AS V, NASV, NIV, RSV, NRSV, etc.) by fundamentalists and conservatives, the Lord deposits America in the junkyard of the nations and allows their dry bones to rot with the bones of His “chosen people” (Eze. 37) who also once enjoyed the privileges of being entrusted with “the oracles of God” (Rom. 3:1-3). The main leaders in this apostasy in America were the faculty members of

Princeton, Wheaton, Fuller Seminary, Bob Jones University, Moody Bible Institute, Tennessee Temple Schools, and Dallas Theological Seminary. Bob Jones University (in 1979) made areal effort to hide its guilt and slyly aligned itself with eleven BAPTIST schools as being “militant,” while carefully avoiding making any profession of having any real distinctive Baptist beliefs.22 BJU has never put any real emphasis on the local church (1928-1970), and the church polity taught there today (1982) does not emphasize the Baptist distinctives. In short, BJU tried to “slip in under the tent” late in the act without paying the price of admission. God’s answer to this double dealing was to raise up Baptist colleges and Bible institutes all over America, and one of them went by BJU’s first year enrollment like it was standing still.23 This led a “good, godly, bold, brave, militant defender of the faith” in a “bastion of orthodoxy” to label the president of that Baptist school as “the most dangerous man in America.” Spoiled brats have their problems.

Before looking at this last parade of New Testament churches and witnesses we need to “backtrack” for a moment and see two operations being carried out. The first of these will concern the old sister who inserted the “leaven” into the original loaf (Matt. 13:33) to start with, and the second will point out what might best be called spiritual land mines or religious booby traps for boobies.

We can be sure that the Roman Catholic church had not been idle in the twentieth century. Say what you will about Catholicism, the hierarchy has always been busier than a mosquito in a nudist colony. Power and unity (Vol. I, p. 404) were her major considerations in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, exactly as they had been throughout the Dark Ages and throughout the Crusades, the Inquisition, the Renaissance and the Reformation. Mother Whore (Rev. 17) was not about to be “overtaken by the gates of hell” (the Biblical preaching of Norris, Torrey, Sunday, Jones, Sr., Ham, Riley, Shields, Fuller and DeHaan). No, she claimed immunity from apostasy as the “one true holy and apostolic church,” for had not her “founder” promised HER that “the gates of hell” should not prevail against her (Vol. I, Chap. 14)?

Therefore, if interdicts and excommunications were out of style (1900-1970) and one could no longer openly torture women (Vol. I, pp. 393, 402) or burn little children (Vol. I, pp. 294-301), the obvious thing to do was to change the colors. Rome has always adapted herself to the “environment.” If it was a cruel age she was a cruel church; if it was a military age she was a crusading church; if it was a superstitious age she was a superstitious church; that is, the

thing that really marks the Roman Catholic church out from all other churches and sets her apart as a distinctive church is her outstanding talent and ability to CONFORM TO THE WORLD SYSTEM IN ANY AGE (Rom. 12:1-5). Worldly conformity (1 John 2:15) is the true Catholic creed of the Catholic hierarchy: apostolic, holiness, etc., have nothing to do with it at all.

When Hitler was in power (1938) they had a Vatican-Rer/^ axis. When the USA won the war (1945) this was converted into a Vatican- Washington axis. But when Russia and China bluffed the USA out of being dealt a hand at the table (1950, Korea; 1970, Vietnam), Rome adopted a Vatican-Moscow axis. In preparation for the installation of a Negro pope to represent the “oppressed minorities” and “downtrodden masses,” Rome in the twentieth century suddenly dropped her tiara,24 moved to Communist Poland25 and then paraded before the world, on TV, the greatest Madison Avenue extravaganza put on since Barnum and Bailey went out of business; it was a worldwide political tour of a professional politician26 performing a Baalite ritual to pass off as a RELIGIOUS leader.27

We need to take a closer look at the roots of this Catholic communism in the latter half of the twentieth century to understand the “ministry” of three “Baptists”: Harry S. Truman, Billy Graham and Jimmy Carter. As the wheel spun in a full circle the Baptists rose to such heights of prominence that national political leaders began to be chosen from their ranks; and although neither Carter nor Truman ever belonged to a New Testament local assembly (all New Testament churches are entirely independent), both were “Baptists”—as were the Rockefellers and Michael Luther King, Jr. This put the ancient Manicheans, Donatists, Novatians and Montanists (Vol. I, pp. 132, 176) in a peculiar position. Among their ranks were now found Illuminati (Rockefeller), International Socialists (Carter), anti-American “patriots” (Truman), Bible­preaching evangelists (Graham) and confirmed Marxist-Leninist Communists (Michael Luther King, Jr.). This is why the Holy Spirit has labeled the twentieth century church the Church of Laodicea (“people’s rights”). It was an apostate church; and even in that Biblical branch of it which professed to believe in the eternal security of the believer, the separation of church and state, the immersion in water of the adult believer, and the autonomy of the local church, there NOW appear “professors” who don’t believe one article of the Baptist “distinctives” and very few of the fundamentals. Thev had “entered the flock” (Acts 20) undetecte

Catholic-communism will explain how these “Baptists” attained their peculiar positions, for all Catholic preaching in the twentieth century is POLITICAL preaching pure and simple; references to the “sacraments” or “virtues” are just the “sucker’s pitch” for the South American masses and Mexico to keep them in subjection to the political hierarchy at Rome.28

The last time we saw Rome she was busy gobbling up what was left of New England, New York, New Jersey, Maryland and Pennsylvania; and she had just declared that her ruler was infallible when he lied about Bible doctrines. At that time he confirmed his blasphemy twice: once in dealing with the birth of Mary and again in dealing with her postresurrection rapture.29 Promptly all Catholics were told to believe these two lies because they were “infallible truths.” The dirty Bible-rejecting bum had spoken “ex cathedra’’ in a matter of “Christian faith.”

Now these crowning insults to the Holy Bible and the Holy Spirit should have been a siren in the ears of sleeping American Christians to warn them that the great LIAR was about to show up (2 Thess. 2, John 8). “Believing the lie” (2 Thess. 2) was to be the characteristic of the end time; and what better herald could such times have than a man who called himself “Holy Father” (the title of God the Father in John 17) and allowed himself to bespoken of as God and to be treated as God30 and then to stand up and proclaim two out-and-out lies in the name of all that he professed to hold “sacred”?

As the night fighters come out to take on the enemy, old mother Rome girds her bloody loins; and availing herself of every member at her disposal, she launches the entire world into two world wars in an attempt to obliterate “nationalism.” The operation needs some monitoring.

THE THREE CATHOLIC CONCORDANTS WITH THE POPES

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

CATHOLIC COMMUNISM IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY

“Behold, I am against thee, saith the Lord of hosts; and I will discover thy skirts upon thy face, and I will shew the nations thy nakedness, and the kingdoms thy shame.” (Nahum 3:5)

Bible-believing Christians who read the Bible are quite familiar with the “handwriting on the wall” in regards to the future of mankind on this earth. If the scientists, educators, politicians and religious leaders, or the UN, the Bilderbergers, the CFR, the Illuminati, and the reporters of the news media are not familiar with it, it is only due to stupidity and laziness on their parts. These isolated mentalities can be found in any age and they are the product of a constant exposure to philosophical rubbish. In the twentieth century this isolated mentality is produced by involvement with the Associated Press, the United Press International, the International News Service, Time, Look, Life, TV newscasts and “enriched curriculums” in schools. Since all of these sources are divorced from prophetic truth, real scientific teachings on man’s origins, historical facts dealing with human nature, and the religious issues behind international politics, they cannot fail to produce a superstitious agnosticism that majors in fantasy and confusion. Anyone in America or Europe with a grade school education can obtain a King James Bible (TRANSLATED into their language) and read 2 Timothy 3, 4; Revelation 13, 17; Daniel 7, 9, 11; and Matthew 24. There isn’t any doubt about the future where it deals with the full maturity of Darwin’s “scientific” monkey-man. The final government on this earth will be a religious dictatorship (Rev. 13) with a Roman Antichrist (2 Thess.) controlling the world’s masses through a one-world computerized government (Rev. 13). The masses will be reduced to blind obedience under pain of starvation or execution (Rev. 13). Jews will be sacrificed at Sunday morning “mass” (Rev. 6, 20; Isa. 6; Ps. 16) in literal, bloody sacrifices; and the great “kingdom” which comes by “Glory, glory Alleluia, His truth is marching on, etc!” (p. 156) will be the KINGDOM O

DEA TH AND HELL (Isa. 28:15-17). The future is negative as far as the population of the earth is concerned; therefore, the outstanding way to spot a professional liar in this age is by his POSITIVE approach to the future of mankind in general.1 Since mankind in the aggregate must be reduced to a class level of passive automatons (“equal rights”) before the Son of Perdition (2 Thess. 2) can be manifest in the flesh (Gen. 3:15) and take over the United Nations, the leveling process of “getting rid of POLARITIES by SHARING” will be the big kick that newspapers, magazines, radio and TV (and the federal bureaucrats and the UN) will be occupied with in the next twenty years. This means that in secular history a drastic reduction of the “middle class” must take place so that there can be one mongrel mass of 5,000,000,000 people run by about 500- 1000 “elite.” In the Comintern of the Son of Perdition the ruling class will be ten HUMANOIDS (Dan. 2, Rev. 17). From the standpoint of the history of racial and social degeneration this means the following processes have to take place.

1. Equalization of men and women by making the women masculine and the men feminine; this carries with it the promotion of sex perversion and the endorsement of hermaphrodites. [To say that men and women are “equal” (Gen. 3, Esther 1) when no women on earth even has her own name (all single women have their father’s name and all married women have their husband’s name) is simply to deny your senses; but then, again, no one can have common sense and fit into the “Third World” that is coming up.] The first requirement for a “world citizen” worshipping humanism would be to be MENTALLY SICK.

2. Equalization of Orientals and Occidentals by involving the Occidentals in Samadhi, Nirvana, Ohm, Yoga, Karate, robes, shaved heads and transcendental meditation, while involving the Orientals with Ping-Pong, basketball, baseball, radio sets, video games, motorcycles and cars.

3. Equalization of blacks and whites by giving the blacks social promotions when they flunk reading and writing tests, thereby allowing them to obtain “high school diplomas” and to “graduate” from a high school or college when they never even studied in it.1-5 This way they can keep up with the whites in employment opportunities since the diploma makes them EQUAL OPPORTUNITY candidates. All the news media, for example, says that a “quality education” cannot be obtained in an ALL BLACK SCHOOL!2 While insisting that blacks and whites are equal, the candid admission is made that whites produce such a higher quality of education than blacks do that you must put blacks

into WHITE SCHOOLS. You have to be mentally sick to even think that way. Dozens of studies on a PhD level have demonstrated scientifically that the quality of education in ANY school in America lowers according to the number of BLA CKS taken into the school.3 To bridge this gap the white man must be given African music and a set of African jungle morals and then encouraged to take welfare handouts instead of supporting himself; he must be encouraged (IRS, OSHA and HEW) not to use initiative.3-5 You cannot have a real welfare state of passive automatons if anyone is ambitious!

4. Equalization of old and young by teaching Time, Life and Newsweek in grade schools and then encouraging the children to discuss the Far East question, the Shah of Iran, the Berlin Wall, the Gaza Strip, the bombing of Lebanon, the Polish strikes, etc., because since “all men are equal,” children have RIGHTS and their opinions must be just as authoritative as a fifty year old ambassador’s opinion: at least if they will ape the opinions given in Life, Time, Look, Newsweek, TV Guide, etc. Besides, you can control the child and you might not be able to control the ambassador. By the same token you encourage older folks to dress like collegiates, play silly games for TV prizes and allow their teenage kids to run the house.

5. But by far the greatest leveling factor has to take place in the religious realm, for there the Roman Catholic church has been the undisputed ruler of the world for nearly 1500 years claiming that she is the one true church and that all Baptists, Buddhists, Presbyterians, Taoists, Methodists, Lutherans, Mohammedans, Episcopalians and Congregationalists were ANATHEMA (cursed).4 On the other hand, you have scores of New Testament LOCAL churches saying that when the Catholic pope stated that Mary was conceived sinless and was “assumpted” up to heaven that he was only lying like any pagan blasphemer. How then can one reconcile THOSE groups?

a. Have the Catholics start teaching “Sunday schools” and holding DVBS in Catholic churches4-3 using flannelgraphs and buses (for “mass” transportation we assume!) and then have them infiltrate Pentecostal churches as “Charismatics.” Then hold a Vatican II council and pretend that the Catholic church always tolerated everyone’s religion and just wouldn’t think of “damning anyone” (let alone burning them at the stake!).4-5

b. Give all of the Baptists a Catholic Bible (AS V, NASV, RS V, NIV) which came from Jerome’s and Origen’s Dark Age text (Vol. 1, pp. 199, 200) and then hang little crucifixes around their necks; put

candles into their churches; robe their choirs (Mark 12:38); and teach them that it is a “no no” to “speak against anyone else’s FAITH.” Teach them that any criticism of the Catholic church or any exposure of her sins is a manifestation of “BIGOTRY.”

When it comes to class leveling, leaving only two “estates” (the top dogs and the bottom dogs, Vol. I, pp. 257, 258), Rome has always been in a class by herself. The land masses of Mexico and South America today and the land masses of Russia before 1918 bear eloquent testimony to the true purposes and intents of the Catholic hierarchy when they go around the world mouthing about “human rights” and “oppressed minorities” and a “just distribution of wealth” and other little Communist “do-hickeys.” As a conse­quence, the most fertile fields for Communism on the earth today are the land masses of Canada, South America, Central Amer­ica and Mexico; all they need is a COMMUNIST POPE.4-8 The land masses of Asia were fair game, for long ago they experienced the debilitating influence of Catholic “missionaries” trying to “bring in the kingdom.”5 No nation that ever “went down the Communist tube” in the Western world was a Bible-believing or Bible-reading nation when it went under. Every nation in the Western world that went “communist” was ROMAN CATHOLIC or GREEK ORTHODOX CATHOLIC before it went under. The strikers in Poland (1981) could not “strike” till their hometown boy (Stefan Wyzsynaski) put them into the news media. The strikers who profess any religion in Poland are all Catholics and their sudden upsurge of morale (1981) was due to a simple formula: ifyouelect a Communist pope from a Communist country you have intentions of getting along with the Communists, BUT! only if the Communist country makes concessions to ONE CHURCH above all other churches. John Paul II is now using his native land as a lever to get a concordant signed with Russia before the third world war begins. It remains to be seen if he can “swing the deal.” The popes did with Charlemagne, Napoleon, Hitler, Castro, Mussolini and Franco.

In one visit to Poland in 1979 John Paul II proved that his church could get along fine in a Communist country and not open her sanctified yap about 100 concentration camps holding thousands of Christians—including nuns and priests from his own church!6 In one visit to Latin America Pope Paul VI encouraged revolutionaries to take any property that rich folks had which they wouldn’t “share.”7 Of course all of this was given in double talk but the popes are masters of the veiled threat, the hidden meaning, the ambiguous statement and the pious cover up.8 There hasn’t been a pope in Rome since 1918 that wasn’t as smooth and as slick as a

greased pig on ice. No man can be elected as “pope” until he has mastered all four of the verbal operations listed above or is willing to read publicly material written by Jesuits, who are experts on them.

Fidel Castro stated it honestly when he said that “the U.S. shouldn’t worry about the Soviets in Latin America because they are no longer revolutionaries. They should worry about the CA THOLIC PRIESTS who ARE.”9 Pope Paul VI did not land at Bogota (August 1968) until he had issued his famous Communist manifesto (called an “encyclical’')titled “Progressio Popularum.”9-* When this came out, the Venezuela paper “Venezuela Urgente”said that the people of South America were being trampled underfoot by the “Pharaoh of the North” (the USA)10 and they needed a “liberator” to “liberate them” (see pp. 44, 45). On August 11, 1968, Catholic clergymen and laity occupied the Cathedral of Santiago, Chile, and “celebrated a mass” (there is no such thing found in any Bible on earth) where they prayed for “all those who died for the liberation of Latin America and for “all our exploited workers and political prisoners.” Then they raised a banner saying, “Towards a CHURCH which is one with the struggle of the people” (see comments on Acts 22:28 in The Bible Believer’s Commentary on Acts, 1972). And there with one foot on Karl Marx and the other on the Vatican state stood old Mao Tse-tung and Abraham Lincoln lined up with the Declaration of Independence just as neatly as Lenin and Trotsky could have done it themselves; this time the “pope” was to be the “liberator”...i.e. “THE FATHER OF HIS PEOPLE.”

When Fidel Castro read the Roman Catholic message to the Catholics at the Cultural Congress of Havana (Jan. 1968), the resolution that the Catholic masses passed on had been drawn up by Roman Catholic priests. It was a duplicate copy of Das Kapital by Karl Marx (a German “Jew”!).11 “We Catholic priests...are con­vinced that IMPERIALISM is today a dehumanizing factor...that although Marxism and Christianity differ, it is MARXISM which provides the most “scientific analysis” of imperialism. We commit ourselves to the ANTI-IMPERIALISTIC struggle” (i.e., the overthrowing of any regime backed by the USA and eventually an attack on the USA). To confer this Catholic-Communist declaration the priests closed with these ominous words: “THE ROMAN CATHOLIC CHURCH must act as a revolutionary force.”11

The Catholic document slyly omitted telling its signers that POX4AM CATWOUC IMPERIALISM has always been the

dominate imperialism in any century since Constantine the Great. “Exploitation” is a manifestation of the operation of the Vatican hierarchy in any century in any country. Cuba is the result of Vatican imperialism: the USA was never involved once. It was the Roman Catholic hierarchy that subjugated Latin America, Austria, Italy, South America, Central America, France and Spain and attempted on at least 200 occasions to subjugate Japan, China (Vol. I, pp. 278-279), Great Britain and Germany (Vol. I, pp. 212-200). If a church historian is not “anti-Catholic” he is mentally unbalanced. The stupid peons in Cuba (Communist Conference, Havana, September 1979) and South America actually thought their enemy was the country that had sent down Bible-believing Baptist preachers to set up local New Testament churches; churches that believed in separation of church and state! Whereas the real enemy that had kept them under foot for 1000 years was a church that professed to be against “imperialism” while it kept the state tied hand and foot to a fascist dictatorship whose imperialistic designs were aimed at the “exploitation” of every human being on earth.

At present the Catholic plan for Rhodesia (1979-1981) is simple: get rid of the white population (including your own nuns and priests), withdraw from any Protestant groups (black or white!)—after beating the press drum for “ecumenicism and outreach and one fold, etc.” for 100 years!—set up black bishops and black cardinals who will support a Communist regime (see Poland for example) and then create an African continent which is no longer under the guidance of white Bible-believing missionaries, or even under the guidance of white Bible-rejecting Communists, but a black African population in total submission to a Black Internationale (the Catholic party was called “Black” in Germany and Austria from 1600 to 1980), which will be bound hand and foot in its obligations to a Roman Catholic pope in Italy.13

The trick will be to organize all of the “oppressed minorities” in the “third world” into a Roman Catholic block to drain America of food, money, clothing, machinery and nuclear weapons and then to convince the “oppressed minorities” that the big boogie man was not the pope but that it was the United States. Avro Manhattan rightly calls these matters “Vatican Imperialism in the Twentieth Century.” Imperialism is now the property of only two groups: Communists who invaded Poland, Afghanistan and Finland while oppressing Bulgaria, Roumania, Yugoslavia, Lithuania and East Germany and Roman Catholics who invaded the Falkland Islands while oppressing Ireland, Israel, and all Bible-believing Christians in Latin America alone with all Buddhists in Vietnam. When

America released the Philippine Islands and England released India and France released Vietnam, imperialistic Russia and imperialistic Rome released NOTHING. The news media (in either hemisphere) omitted any comments. Marxism and Catholicism have a common ground of exploitation and imperialism that CBS, NBC, Mutual, the AP, INS, UPI, the “Gannet string” and the “Hearst syndicate” do not dare investigate.

To the average Catholic in America or Europe (1980) these matters are not to be discussed; they are not even to come up as subjects of conversation, let alone public examination. The average Catholic could not imagine the extent that his church goes to (and has gone through in fifteen centuries of anti-church history) to overthrow governments and to bring their people into the bondage of a foreign fascist state church. Furthermore, there is a superstition abroad today quite common among the “educated class” (see p. 38) that fascism and communism are polarities; after all didn’t Hitler “fight Communism”? Therefore, if Roman Catholicism is the fascist army of professing Christendom (and she certainly is), what concord would the popes have with Engels and Marx and what communion would there be between St. Francis and Lenin or the Kennedy clan and Red China? Plenty. Both groups are “kingdom builders” that profess to have the “answer” to the problems of war and peace. All kingdom builders are thieves and murderers; they are bloody killers (see Vol. I, Chaps. 13, 14).

This Biblical premise (see “The Sure Word of Prophecy,” 1970) will guarantee that no news reporting on Catholicism or communism will ever assume an objective nature. From the days of John Foster Dulles (1944) and the Kennedys (1960) it was assumed that the rider on the white horse (Rev. 6)—the Saint George who would “slay the dragon”—was the Roman Catholic pope; he would “put down” communism. Twenty years of terrible experiences (1959-1979) showed that nothing of the kind was about to happen. If any cardinal was too anti-Communist (Wyszynski from Poland or Biayenda in the Congo or Mindzenty in Hungary)14 he was either blackballed or assaulted or shuttled out of sight. Hitler, one must remember, was not excommunicated for being a Nazi and Mussolini was never excommunicated for being a fascist. Castro was not excommunicated for being a COMMUNIST, nor was Msgr. German Guzman Campos (August 19, 1968). The man who was “excommunicated” was an American capitalist: Henry Ford.1

Long ago Sir Francis Bacon observed that “great hypocrites are the real atheists; profession of believing in a Deity somewhere is —* is if “npvpr made a fvrant or a slave 17

then He is the author of the “middle class.” Catholicism and communism major in tyrants (Lenin, Stalin, Mao, etc.) and SLAVES. Since both profess to be the source of man’s real “freedom” then both of them are blasphemous usurpers of Deity; for the source of any man’s freedom is GOD,18 and only when a man is “in Christ” (John 8) and rightly related to God (Gal. 4, 5) does he have “freedom.” Popes, premiers, chairmen, cardinals, and archbishops are little more than public displays of veneer and whitewash that cover the grinning skulls of professional killers. “The nearer the church, the farther from God”19 was the proverb used by those who took time out to check the actual religious practises of the Roman Catholic Curia. The Catholic church has never resembled (nor has been in any relationship with) the New Testament local churches one time since either were founded. Where the treacherous and deceitful ‘‘nihil obstat" publications (with the imprimatur of the bishop on them) state that Catholics are not “forbidden to read the Bible” and are even “encouraged to read it,” no mention is made of the official proclamations of popes that no Catholic is permitted to read the King James Bible or any Receptus edition in Spanish, Italian, Swedish, Portuguese, Roumanian, Bulgarian, English, French, German or Russian.20 No Catholic is allowed to read any Bible but those Bibles recommended by the hierarchy,21 and less than 100 years ago a Catholic had to have permission from his priest or bishop to read even THAT one.22 Less than 400 years ago DEATH was the penalty for any Christian caught reading any edition of any translation from the Old Latin of the Waldenses or the Textus Receptus of Beza and Erasmus.23 The twentieth century “laxity” in regards to tolerance of Protestants and Bible reading has nothing to do with Catholic religious convictions, as one can easily see when passing out Bibles in MEXICO and SOUTH AMERICA. No, “Catholic” convictions have not changed; Catholics merely adjust themselves to the “situation and the terrain” until they are in control. Their conviction is POLITICAL EXPEDIENCY in every case (Vol. I, Chaps. 9-12), and the briefest study of Pope Pius XI and Pope Pius XII in the twentieth century will show what the Catholic church is capable of when unity and power are her prime considerations; but one must be diligent in studying the material as the events take place, for Hellish Mother Church has always covered up her tracks as quickly as she makes them.23-5

The two twentieth century classics which illustrate the deadliness of Vatican imperialism are the two cases which cost

40,000,000 people their lives (some estimates run as high as 54,000,000) and displaced23-8 50,000,000 people from their homes. These two cases are World War I and World War II, both set up by Austrian Catholics who had signed agreements with Catholic popes. Neither war was set up by capitalists or communists, and neither war could have been started without the active support and political activities of Roman Catholic nuncios, priests, nuns, cardinals, popes, and bishops, and the active carrying out of the totalitarian designs of the Vatican hierarchy through Catholic kings, Catholic ambassadors, Catholic action, Catholic dictators, and high ranking Catholic government officials.

The trick in writing history, of course, (Vol. I, pp. 304-307) is to confuse the investigator with as many irrelevant details as possible (conflicting authorities) so that the investigator despairs of any hope of arriving at a grasp of THE truth (Vol. I, p. 303). Make it look complex (Rom. 16:19) and then it will not only be considered to be a “scholarly work” but even more important it will absolve the parties dealt with from any guilt and furnish alibies for all the criminals involved in international and national debacles; one must protect the thieves and murderers for, after all, they are “kingdom builders.”

The first ominous step towards the death and wounding of over 30,000,000 Europeans and Americans was a religious move. It was the failure of Kaiser Wilhelm (Germany) to keep up Bismark’s system of alliance with ANTI-ROMAN CATHOLIC countries (Greek Orthodox and Serbian Orthodox)24 around 1890. The Protestant Bismark has been painted (and still is painted) by historians as a German Cromwell, i.e., a vicious, selfish bigot, a tempermental egotist and an implacable enemy of the “church.”25 (The church takes pains through the press and radio to convince her enemies that they are all “biased bigots” with a “vicious prejudice.”)

Kaiser Wilhem yielded to anti-Biblical pressure (all pro- Catholic pressure is anti-Biblical) and dropped his alliances with Russia, who was Greek Orthodox; Catholic France picked it up.26 The Jesuits (one might have guessed it!) had simply gone to France after Bismark booted them out of Germany. Thus an "Entente Cordiale” was set up between France and Russia, and England joined it for the purpose of stopping the Germans from building a railroad from Berlin to Baghdad (1902-1913); this railroad would pass through GREEK ORTHODOX countries.

During this time (1890-1902) the Catholics in France were in the vast majority, so along about 1894 they made an attempt to set

up a papal church state by attacking a Jewish officer (Dreyfus: historians simply sidestep the Catholic issue here and pretend that it is immaterial or at least not worth mentioning). Any fool who had read one volume of church history would have known what was involved in Rome’s ambitions to get ahold of the Greek Orthodox lands and Greek Orthodox churches in Russia and the Balkans. The outstanding testimony of history to the blindness of the journalists, authors, writers and news media men (radio and TV) to this religious-political intent was the invasion of the Balkans not thirty years later by Mussolini and Adolph Hitler (both Roman Catholics with Catholic concordances with the Catholic pope) with the full approval and support of the entire papal hierarchy including the pope himself.27 The slaughter of nearly 200,000 Greek Orthodox men, women and children at this time was called a “REVIVAL” and a “SPIRITUAL VICTORY” by the Catholic hierarchy.2* That is, what was left unaccomplished by the pope at the end of World War I (1918) was tried again in 1941 by the same church with the same outfit! There wasn’t a “communist” or a “capitalist” on the lot.

The Roman Catholic ruling family in Austria in 1914 (the Hapsburgs) had been on the throne for over 600 years. Their dream, as the dream of every pope and loyal defender of the pope, was the restoration of the old Roman Empire to “CAESAR AUGUSTUS, CROWNED BY GOD” (Vol. I, p. 222); that is, to the Holy Roman Emperor crowned by the POPE (Vol. I, p. 223) (see Rev. 13, 17). It was considered to be “unholy” because Napoleon took it over without the official sanction of the “Holy Father” (1805). All church historians adopt this peculiar Roman Catholic private interpretation of history just as if they thought they had good sense. There is no reason at all to suppose that the Roman Catholic domination of Europe was any less effective under Napoleon than under Charlemagne, and since both were “protectors” of the Catholic religion (and the popes) there is no need for historians getting in a panic about the pope being unable to “crown” Napoleon. Napoleon tore up Europe for the Catholic church exactly as Adolph Hitler and Mussolini did.

When the Roman Catholic Metternich (1814) tried to get things together after Napoleon’s defeat (“The Holy Alliance") it blew up again. By 1900 the main question was this: How could the Roman Catholic church pit the European nations against each other as Napoleon had done (Vol. I, pp. 322-323) in such a way as to recapture all of the land that is now Poland, Czechoslovakia, Serbia, Austria-Hungary, Albania, Greece, Roumania and Crotia? To those skeptical of such a murderous design and imperialistic

agenda, history fortunately gives another bright and shining lesson in Vatican politics; after signing a concordant with the pope, Benito Mussolini29 proceeded to invade Albania and then Greece (1940). If you don’t at first succeed (1914-1918), try try again (April 7, 1939).

But to return to the pre-World War I setup.

In 1912 the Balkan nations had rebelled against the Sultan of Turkey30 so Italy promptly annexed Tripolitania. By 1910, one must remember, the Jesuits were back in Germany31 and were now ready to augment a papal plan for the annexation of all of the Balkan nations back into the papal domination of the Roman Catholic church. “Apostolic succession” was taken away (1912) from all of the Greek Orthodox churches in Yugoslavia most of which were tied up with “Austria-Hungary,” thus setting up the Balkans at the south end of Yugoslavia for the Catholic kill. The Catholic kill was not long in coming.

On June 28, 1914, the Roman Catholic nephew of the Roman Catholic Emperor Franz Joseph drove down through Dallas to see the natives. (It wasn’t exactly like that, but something like that!) What business an heir to the Roman Catholic throne of the “Holy” Roman Empire had doing down near the border of Greek Orthodox Serbia is a mystery that no newspaper or magazine, TV program or radio program has dared to discuss since the day it happened.31-5 You see, Bosnia {Sarajevo is in Bosnia) contained two A VSTRIAN ARMY CORPS and Bosnia flanked Serbia on the westward side. Serbia was in a “pincers,” with Austria-Hungary above it and to the east of it and Bosnia on the west. If one will look at a map one will see that this is the position of Czechoslovakia when Hitler completed his “Anschluss” of Austria (1938).

With an official review of Army troops in mind, the Roman Catholic Franz Ferdinand went down to Sarajevo. It would have been just as appropriate for Hitler to take a motorcade through downtown Miami or Berry Goldwater to make a goodwill tour of Havana. You are to believe that it was Franz’s idea alone and that his church (with whom he had a family concordant) had nothing to do with it; but politics—to all of the Hapsburgs—was a question of FOREIGN POWER.32 Somehow all of the historians overlooked the Balkan wars that had just taken place (1912-1913), and during the time good old Roman Catholic Johann Sigismund Josef Cor- sinus Graf Berchtold (1863-1927) of Austria had not only worked hand in hand with the pope at Rome33 but he had encouraged Italian military leaders to attack SERBIA: Berchtold was the Austrian Roman Catholic who gave the Serbians the ultimatum (July 24, 1914) that touched off World War I.33-1

World War I did not begin in 1914.

It began in 1054 A.D. when the popes lost Russia and the Balkans along with Greece. All of the popes since then have nursed this personal loss and cultivated its ramifications clear up until June 2, 1848, when the Roman Catholics at the “Slav Congress” divided the Balkans off into the exact partitions that they again managed in 1918.33-2 No sooner was the Hapsburg Dynasty overthrown (1918) and the “Dopel Adler” dissolved than Pope Benedict X Vreinstated it by forming a “federation of Catholic states” which disintegrated all the small states set up by the Treaty of 1918; this gave Catholic Croatia and Catholic Slovakia to Austria. Hitler, a good Austrian, put the icing on the cake (1939). Between 1848 and 1939 one must never forget that the psychotic popes had announced that: liberty of conscience was absurd and false;33-5 all the laws of Italy that gave anyone authority over the pope were null and void; the pope himself was infallible (at times!) when he dictated doctrines;34 and he was the supreme ruler of the entire world (Leo XIII: 1878-1903). This insane religious dictator took upon himself the titles of “Holy Father of Fathers,” the “Apostolic Lord and Father of Fathers,” the “Vicar of Christ,” the “Head of the Church,” the “High Priest,” and the “Supreme Bishop.”35 Having done all of this, the American and British news media and the political leaders of France, Germany and Spain were to think (and tell their reading public!) that the popes had no designs on Greek Orthodox Serbia!35-5

Well, they had no more designs than Castro did on Cuba.

In fixing the blame for World War I, the Encyclopedia Americana (Vol. HI, p. 538) says coyly that Count Berchtold was “a tool of the military and CLERICAL sections” of the State of Austria, and that explains his bungling that led twenty-five nations into a worldwide debacle. WHA T CLERICS? Austria had been (and is) 98 percent Catholic since the Treaty of Westphalia (which the pope had declared to be null and void because it did not make all of Germany Catholic).™ How is it that the Encyclopedia Americana cannot find out the religion of the “clerics” that influenced Berchtold? Could the writers of an international set of encyclopedias be guilty of trying to sweep something under the rug so their readers would be misinformed?

The Encyclopedia Americana (Vol. Ill, p. 538) blames the war on the German ambassador in Vienna (Herr Von Tishirsky): could anything be more incredible? He had nothing to do with the ultimatum sent to Serbia. Berchtold had gotten together with his Roman Catholic buddies Musulin and Forgach and had put together a typical Roman Catholic decree similar to Boniface’s

“bull.” It was one of the harshest, most intolerant, vicious and bigoted pieces of hate literature in the history of diplomacy. The German ambassador had no part in the drawing up of this document or in its delivery. He wasn’t even called in to advise on its wording.36-5 To demonstrate to all the peculiar nature of Roman Catholic ambassadors and secretaries of state, history records that the Serbian reply to Berchtold’s ultimatum was not only a humble reply but also submissive to Austria. This reply was not accepted by Forgach, Musulin, Berchtold or the Emperor Franz Joseph. They needed a war to “spread the kingdom” (“Glory alleluia, His truth is marching on, etc.).

With Austrian and Italian Catholics hollering for war, with German and French Catholics hollering for war, and with Russian Orthodoxy hollering for war, and (later) German and English Protestants hollering for war, the Hungarian Count Tisza was the only leader of any country involved in the negotiations who objected to war in the strongest terms, and he constantly cautioned against it. Tisza not only refused to surrender this conviction after Austria declared war on Serbia but he even refused to go along with any terms that would dismember Serbia in case of an Austrian victory.37 Tisza was a Bible-believing Calvinistic Protestant. Tisza said, “War, even if victorious is terrible...misery, anguish and dev­astation.”38 Naturally the heads of Germany and Austria followed the Jesuits’ leadership. And yet even then Kaiser Wilhelm, upon hearing of Serbia’s capitulation to Berchtold’s note, was thankful that “no war would have to be fought”; this explains why Germany did not mobilize her armies until AFTER Russia had mobilized hers. (Russia was to come to Serbia’s aid if Austria attacked her.)

Now back in 1914 when “all hell broke loose,” the Serbians had a terrorist organization like the Roman Catholic IRA (1950-1983), the PLO (1950-1983) and the NAACP (1960-1983).39 Dragutin Dimitrevitch was its head and he was also head of the Intelligence Service of the Serbian General Army Staff.40 He knew all about this organization called the "Black Hand" whose motto was "UNION OR DEATH” (see Abraham Lincoln, p. 54; Adolph Hitler, p. 54; or any other “kingdom spreader,” especially the Catholic Communists in the “Irish” Republican Army, 1980). Well, down went Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife into Sarajevo not only knowing that such an organization existed but also that they might assassinate him if he came. Having already been warned that he might wind up in a box, Franz Ferdinand went anyway. “Loyal sons of the church

do as they are told for the “honor of Christ” and the “glory of Mary, ever blessed Virgin, etc.”

Franz Ferdinand and his wife got their brains blown out (June 28, 1914).

Now the way was open to steal someone’s land (see Abraham Lincoln, p. 143). Fort Sumter had been “fired up”; the Polish radio station had been “attacked” (1939), etc. Same song, same key. Instead of only sending a strong note of protest demanding an apology (see the assassination of Lord Mountbatton by Roman Catholic in Ireland, the kidnapping of Iranian hostages, the assassination of John Birch, etc.), the Roman Catholic government of Austria, with its Roman Catholic emperor and its Roman Catholic attaches (Conrad Von Hotzendorf, Musulin and Count Forgach)41 and its Roman Catholic diplomat Count Berchtold, sent the little note we have just mentioned to Serbia. It said, in effect: We are sending Austrian armies down for a military occupation. A police church state will be set up under the official church of Austria (Roman Catholic), and then we will dismember Serbia and split it up between Albania and Bulgaria.42 Although the reply to this note was humble and submissive, still the Serbians would not allow an army of Catholics to take over their churches, businesses, public parks, railways, streets, and homes.

In 1914 Europe tottered on the brink of a catastrophe from which she has never recovered. Eventually all of the Balkans were delivered to the Secret Police (NKVD) of the Communist Commintern (1945-1975).

The catastrophe was set up by FOUR ROMAN CATHOLICS: three of them Austrians.

Now the pot boiled! As the Catholic Berchtold and his Catholic buddies hesitated about a declaration of war, two journalists (see p. 134) writing for the news media in Germany ("The Frankfurter Zeitung”) guaranteed that Germany would back up Austria if she attacked Serbia. The Russian newspapers in France (!) egged the government on with every issue to declare war on Austria.43

The fourth estate was in control. They gained control in 1914 and have never lost it once since. As long as the popes can get “good press” they will continue to do exactly what they did in 1914 with Franz Joseph and again in 1939 with Adolph Hitler.

Now (1914) Marx, Darwin, and Einstein could come into “their own.” Since Marx, Engels and Lenin were all JOURNALISTS (not “workers”), evolution, communism and relativism could now have full sway over the mind of the public; at

least that part of the public that had abandoned the Bible as reading material and had taken in its place newspapers and magazines. In short, it was the “educated class” that fell for the sucker’s pitch. The French newspapers handled it exactly as the German papers did.44 “War was regenerating!” They actually were much more militaristic than Germany; they told Russia to mobilize when she didn’t have to.45 Russia told Austria that if she attacked Serbia the “bear” would enter the arena. Austria told “the bear” that the German eagle would swoop down on them if they dared attack. But Berchtold had gotten this bit of news from the German head of the General Staff (General Von Moltke), not from Kaiser Wilhelm.46 To tell the truth (which the news media has not done since 1914), it was the Kaiser who tried to halt the attack on France through Belgium (1914) but 11,000 railroad cars had already been dispatched and 4,000,000 troops had begun the “Schlieffen” plan to encircle Paris.47 Winston Churchill, always an international warmonger, promptly mobilized the fleet before Germany attacked—and against the orders of the British Cabinet!—thus committing England to war before it started.4* If that were not enough, the obstinate Limeys had the gall to say that Germany had declared war on her when they had done nothing of the kind. In France, Calillaux accused Malvy (Vivianis Minister of the Interior) of unleashing war, for he had violated the terms of France’s treaty of alliances with Russia by telling them to mobilize.49

After the war, the news media and politicians placed the entire blame for the whole war on one nation—the nation whose soldiers had done the best fighting: GERMANY.

[The pope rejoiced with joy unspeakable and full of glory! At last that hated country of Luther and Bismark had been brought to her knees where some good Catholics like Hitler, Himmler, Goebbels and Goering could get in the driver’s seat and lead her aright!]

Thus from Roman Catholic imperialism emerged an international calamity of such proportions that to this day no nation on earth has fully recovered from it. The thrones toppled: the Greek Orthodox Romanoffs in Russia, the Catholic Hapsburgs in Austria, and the Protestant Hollezollerns in Germany. The “lights went out all over the world” and, as a famous British statesman prophesied, they were never to be turned on again. The newspapers and magazines could never print the whole truth again after World War I about anything that dealt with RELIGION AND POLITICS. They had to be taken up with socialism, humanism and

Communist propaganda. Not one of them has ever noted that the opening guns of World War I fired in Belgium were the canons of a German general (Von Moltke) who patterned his entire military philosophy after the Roman Catholic church.^-5 Von Moltke even went so far as to identify himself in past incarnations as Pope Benedict II, Nicolas I and Leo IV.50 The political machinations that led to Von Moltke’s invasion of Belgium were carried out by three Roman Catholics: Bethmann, Berchtold and Forgach, who had been engaged in restoring the papal domains of Eastern Europe to the “Holy Roman Empire.”

In her was found the blood of all those slain on earth (Rev. 18:24).

Now, where men fail to learn the lessons of history they must repeat them. By now any student of church history could have easily prophesied what would continue to take place in Europe following World War I—exactly what had always taken place: efforts to revive the Roman Empire with the Catholic pope as a substitute “Caesar” for its head, seated on the Throne of David (2 Thess. 2) at JERUSALEM (2 Thess. 2). That is what Charlemagne went after; that is what the Crusaders went after; that is what Napoleon went after; that is what Franz Joseph went after; and that is what will eventually happen.

Now history will corroborate such theological truths. No sooner had the press (radio, newspapers, magazines and books) absolved Pope Benedict and Pope Pius XI of all of their responsibilities in the bloodiest holocaust the world had seen since the days of Genghis Khan than up popped another “defender of the faith” (Napoleon, Charlemagne, etc.) to restore the old “Holy” Roman Empire. He was the perfect candidate. Like Franz Joseph he was Catholic. Like Franz Joseph he was Austrian. Like Franz Joseph he was all of his attendant politicians and leaders were Catholic (Goebbels, Hess, Goering, Himmler, Heydrich, etc.), and like Franz Joseph he could create little “incidents” as a ways and means to shed blood.51

His name was Adolph Hitler (1889-1945).

He was raised not eighty miles from Franz Joseph (born in Braunau and raised in Linz, Austria) as a devout Catholic, going to Catholic school where a Benedictine monk was the instructor.52 Hit­ler never ceased to be a Catholic, for in 1929, 1924 and 1932, re­spectively, he honored Catholic concordants in, Bavaria, Prussia and Baden, thereby eliminating all Bible groups from equal privi­leges and civil rights and thereby installing Catholicism in the public

schools as the only religion approved of by the state to be taught to German children.53 Why would any pope think of excommunicat­ing a member like THAT? Hitler’s Catholic ambassador (Von Papen) spoke calmly of the Third Reich as “A CHRISTIAN REVOLUTION.”54 And since according to Pope Pius XI Italy and Germany represented the “nucleus of the Christian world” (July 14, 1933),55 the terms of the Nazi concordant (Catholic from start to finish) which was signed by Eugenio Pacelli on July 9, 1933 (later he was Pope “Pius” XII) stated that the Nazi Party was to pay tax money to the Catholic church and subsidize Catholic bishops; further, there were to be no Protestant chaplains in the Wermacht or the SS.56 It was to be a genuine Irish Republican Army: no Bible believer had any civil or religious rights.

The American press and radio didn’t open their mouths to peep. They didn’t dare; they were busy at home trying to get those rights for African communists!

Not only was Adolph the providentially chosen successor to the Hapsburgs but he was born in the same country, raised in the same church, lived in the same city, fought in the same war, and his party (the National Socialist Party: NAZI) originated in Catholic AUSTRIA, not Germany.51

The only thing that men learn from history is that men never learn from history.

In less than twenty years after World War I the pope was again in full charge of the destiny of the lives of every man, woman and child in Europe and Russia; and through the machinations of his diplomats, nuns, priests, nuncios, ambassadors, dictators (he had THREE of them in Europe: Franco, Mussolini and Hitler), and cardinals, the “Holy Father” was about to produce a war that would take 40,000,000 lives. Counting the wounded, the casualty list would be over 54,000,000.58

“And in her was found the blood of all those slain on earth.’

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

HELLISH MOTHER WHORE

“And I gave her space to repent of her fornication; and she repented not. Behold, I will cast her into a bed, and them that commit adultery with her into great tribulation, except they repent of their deeds. And I will kill her children with death; and all the churches shall know that I am he which searcheth the reins and hearts: and I will give unto every one of you according to your works.” Revelation 2:21-23)

The life of the Roman Catholic Adolph Hitler is well-known. His work "Mein Kampf’ is not on the Catholic Index of forbidden books nor will it ever be. He was never excommunicated from the church either before or after his death. His anti-Judaism came from studying the famous "Protocols of the Elders of Zion," a Catholic work written by a Roman Catholic lawyer (Maurice Joly); the original title had been "Dialogue aus Angers Entre Maichiavel et Montesquieu ou la Politique de Machiavel au XIX Siecle par un Contemprain." [It was published first in 1864 with a final version coming from Russia (1918) supposedly from a J ewish community.'] A regular contributor to the Munich Branch Organization (1924)— whose periodical “Der Rutlischwur” published anti-Semitic articles by the Katholicen Bund—was Joseph Roth, a Catholic priest who later became Hitler’s minister for ecclesiastical affairs.2 The ridiculous attempts of the TV networks and the American press (1950-1980) to try to prove that the Catholic church befriended the Jews during these years (or even opposed Hitler’s invasion of Russia, Austria, Norway and France) by the often quoted "Mit Brennedend Sorge" is too tragic to discuss. The pope printed nothing in his own newspaper ("L’ Observatore”) that was anti­German, anti-Nazi, anti-Hitler, pro-Jewish or pro-Protestant through the entire debacle (1938-1945). He only, at times, voiced opinions which were not allowed to be printed until AFTER the war

was over!3 The hard facts of documented evidence show that the pope was not only indifferent to the genocide of the Jewish race but that he also3-5 was highly elated at the prospect of the genocide of all the Serbians in Yugoslavia (see note 28).

Fact 1. The papal nuncio in Berlin (Monsignor Cesare Orsenigo) was jubilant about the establishment of Hitler as dictator.4

Fact 2. Hitler attained his status as dictator only by the manipulations of Franz Von Papen (vice-premier), who was given orders from the Vatican to dissolve their Roman Catholic “Center Party” at the crucial time in the German elections when Hitler could have been stopped. The Catholic Center Party contained the “balance of power” in the elections, so the pope had it dissolved in order that the Nazis might be able to install a dictator.5 He had just done it in June of 1923 in Italy to get Mussolini in as dictator!

Fact 3. Archbishop Grober (upper Renish) supported and promoted the SS; Bishop Vogt of Aachen, Bornewasser (Bishop of Trier), Cardinal Faulhaber and Vicar General Steinmann (Berlin) all praised Hitler and promised him the full cooperation of the entire Catholic church.6

Fact 4. All Catholic bishops had to take an oath of fealty to the Third Reich since this was Article No. 16 in the Vatican Concordant with the pope. Those Catholics (clerics and laity) who would not follow these papal instructions from the Vatican were sent to concentration camps by their Catholic colleagues, and then they were resurrected as “pro-Jewish MARTYRS” by the press after the war. When Hitler disrupted Austria in 1937, the man he used was Seyss Inquart, the home secretary, and Cardinal Innitzer; naturally they were both Roman Catholics.7

Fact 5. Cardinal Pacelli, who set up the papal concordant, became the next pope and remained pope (Pius XII) while Germany invaded Poland, France, Norway, Russia and the Balkans. This scoundrel promptly opened up diplomatic relations (acting as a politician for a STATE) with JAPAN8 while they were proceeding to invade the Philippine Islands and kill over 10,000 of the pope s best church members there: Luzon is 90 percent Catholic. Leon Degrelle, the Catholic, did the pope’s dirty work in Belgium, Weyland and Laval and Petain (all Catholics) did the pope’s dirty work in France; Premier Alcide De Gaspari took care of it in Italy, and Francisco Franco carried out orders in Spain. They all made sure that the underside of Germany was secure while she invade Poland and France. The only protest the pope made against

Mussolini’s invasion of Albania (on Serbia’s west flank!) was that it had been done on “Good Friday.”9

Fact 6. Finally, when Hitler met with the cardinals and bishops of the Catholic hierarchy in Germany he told them that he was just doing to the Jews what the Roman Catholic church had done to them for 1500 years.9-5 He told the truth. But the news media had long ago (1914) passed the place where they could print the truth. Truth was “fallen in the street” (Isa. 59:14). Bishop Berning and Monsignor Steinmann, at that meeting, only nodded their heads when Hitler made that remark: they knew he was telling the truth. And they knew that no newspaper or magazine in Britain or America would print a word of it: they didn’t.

The pope (1939-1945) remained right where he had remained throughout the slaughter of World War I: neutral. When he was asked by Harold Tittman (October 1941) to issue a public protest against the mass killings of the Jews, Pope Pius did not offer even to mention the Jew or “Jews” or Israel in any public communique. Pope Pius XII informed Mr. Tittman that nothing could be said publicly to anyone as this would jeopardize the situation for Ger­man Catholics who supported Hitler.10 To the contrary, the pope said that he would praise those who fought and died fighting for Hitler and Himmler (head of the Gestapo) although he opposed “fascism” (since it was a threat to Roman Catholic domination of the world). When the converted Jewish philosopher Dr. Edith Stein (April 1933) asked the pope for an encyclical on the Jewish ques­tion, it too was denied." After all, the popes on paper (Civilta-Cat- tolica, 1936) agreed with Hitler that the Jews in Germany should lose all of their civil rights and be put in ghettos.12 For her human­istic endeavors on behalf of “equality of human beings” and “civil rights,” Edith Stein was gassed in Auschwitz under the Roman Catholic Commandant Rudolph Hoess. Later a bloody hypocrite of the vilest sort (Pope John Paul II, 1980) actually knelt in pious prayer at that memorial so the Associated Press and the British Broadcasting Corporation would think that the Nazi popes had not supported Jewish genocide. “YE ARE THE CHILDREN OF THEM WHICH....” (Matt. 23:31).

Adolph Hitler, knowing who his real allies were, praised the “discretion” of the popes for not taking a public position that was pro-Jewish one time during the entire war.13 Not one single Roman Catholic bishop had to resign his office any time during Hitler’s entire Reich; and after the war, Bishop Berning and Franz Von Papen were promoted. Von Papen, the Catholic vice-premier under

Hitler, was “acquitted” by the American and British allies at Nuremberg; Huess was put into solitary confinement for thirty-five years.

Pius XII (the German Catholic cardinal to Germany while Hitler was rising to power) stated on the eve of the invasion of Poland that all the trouble in Europe was not due to fascism, Nazism, anti-Semitism or even genocide: it was due to the abandonment of the teachings that came from his own "chair” (“Peter’s Chair”) at Rome.14

Disobedience to a religious megalomaniac was considered to be more catastrophic than mass murder: at least that is what the pope stated PUBLICLY.

And at this point we should not close our books on twentieth century Vatican imperialism against humanity without seeing how good Europeans acted who DID follow the teachings from “Peter’s Chair." Since World War I was the source of World War II (all historians agree), wouldn’t it be interesting to go back down from Belvedere (Franz Joseph’s home in Vienna) to SERBIA once more and see how Franz Ferdinand’s assassination was “followed up” twenty years later? After all, Vatican politics are quite manifest and quite predictable to anyone who cares to examine documented evidence apart from the news cult (AP, UPI, INS, Life, Look, NBC, CBS, ABC, Pravda, Tass and Newsweek).

To continue World War I where we left off, the Catholics in Croatia (Yugoslavia) next door to Serbia organized another Irish Republican Army. This gang of terrorists (100 percent Catholic) were called the “Ustashi." They were led by Ante Pavelich and Vladimir Macech and the Roman Catholic Archbishop Stepinac, who was the leader of the Catholic hierarchy in Croatia.15 Here in Yugoslavia, the pope designed to set up an ideal Catholic church­state as a demonstration to the world of how prosperous and blessed a people would be under Catholic domination. If this could be done, a real Roman Catholic foothold could be gained in Greek Orthodox territory (see p. 217) and the old “Eastward Ho! movement” could be carried out. Fatima was going to have to convert Russia16 or old Fatty Fatima would prove to be a liar. Of course, her “secret utterances”—which until 1983 could not be revealed publicly!— might just reverse that prophesy in case things fell apart! [No Catholic pope ever had any trouble putting across a lie or covering one up (see Vol. I, pp. 148-150).] Fatima in 1940 was going to get her help from Herman Goering, Josef Goebells and Adolph Hitler.17 With Russia in the Catholic bag Greece would fall flat on her face,

for this would mean that all of the territory west, north, and northeast of her would be Catholic. The trick was to get Yugoslavia: that would lock the circle northwest.

With this in mind the Catholic Ustashi under the Catholic Archbishop Stepinac went to work; they were soon to have a golden opportunity to “bring in the kingdom,” for a “loyal son of the church” (Adolph Hitler) was coming their way with troops! Another loyal “son of the church” (Mussolini and Hitler both had signed concordants with popes) had attacked Greece (October 28, 1940) after conquering Albania, and now the Greek Orthodox church could be wiped out if necessary. However, the little Greek nation pitched into Musso’s armies with such gusto that they pitched them clean out of Greece and even captured Koritsa in Albania about fifteen miles from the Greek frontier.18 About 28,000 Italians had been captured by the Greeks by December 4, 1940. This forced the Roman Catholic commander (Marshal Pietro Badoglio) to resign, and the Greek Orthodox troops promptly pushed the Catholics forty miles up into Albania (December 9, 1940).

Hitler now would have to come to the aid of his fellow church members. But there was no way to get down into Greece and Albania from Germany except through Yugoslavia. After two meetings with Prince Paul of Yugoslavia, in an effort to get a permanent treaty set up (February 14 and March 2), a temporary treaty or “alliance” was drawn up (March 25); but when Hitler delivered the terms of this ultimatum (see Berchtold’s note to Serbia!) to the people of Yugoslavia, four members of the Cabinet resigned rather than yield (March 20). With an entire nation determined to keep its independence, seventeen year old Peter II became king; he assumed power over a government that now repudiated its alliance with Hitler. So, on April 6, 1941, thirty-three German divisions supported by 1200 Luftwaffe planes attacked the country that had caused the pope so much trouble; it was the bridge to SERBIA (see p. 218) and it contained thousands of Croatians who were fanatical Roman Catholics; above all, it contained the Catholic Ustashi who were waiting to kill every man, woman and child in Serbia and Yugoslavia who stood in the way of a revived “Holy Roman Empire” with the Catholic pope at Rome in the driver’s seat and the Greek patriarch at Constantinople (Greek Orthodox) hitched up to the team.

What followed left no doubt in anyone’s mind about why the Catholic pope (Pius XII) wanted to support Nazism and a Catholic “Fuehrer” and keep his mouth shut about atrocities against Jews,

Russians and Poles. All the Croatian cities were spared by Hitler although 17,000 civilians were killed in the bombing of other cities.19 A Roman Catholic Croatian government was immediately declared at Zagreb (April 9) when the German Wermacht came to town. By April 10, Serbia was back in the Catholic fold, exactly where Franz Joseph, Berchtold, Pope Benedict and Franz Ferdinand had intended them to be in 1914. The “fold” turned out to be a wolve’s den. There was no problem about “security.” The head of the Catholic church was in league with the Catholic commander in chief of the Nazi Army of occupation. Now Archbishop Stepinac and his friends could set up the “ideal” European church-state after which all others were to be modeled. This time it was not in the thirteenth or fifteenth century; no, this time the Roman Catholic Whore demonstrated before the “civilized world” in the twentieth century (mid twentieth century) what she would do to any country if it ever had an army to back up its “one, true, holy, Roman Catholic and Apostolic FAITH.”

Dr. Mirko Puk, Dr. Fictor Butcih and Dr. Mile Budak (Pavelich’s Minister of Public Education) at a public meeting in Gospic (July 22, 1941) gave the basic plan in line with “Holy Mother Church”: “We shall KILL one part of the Serbs, we shall transport another and the rest of them will be forced to embrace THE ROMAN CATHOLIC RELIGION” (see Vol. I, pp. 293-300). Dr. Puk (the Croatian Minister of Justice and Religion) announced in Parliament (the Catholic church controlled the parliament here, although they failed to get control of the English Parliament when Cromwell was alive!) that the Serbian Orthodox church would no longer be recognized. The Archbishop of Sarajevo (remember Sara­jevo!! p. 218) Father Petar Pajic said simply that since the Greek Orthodox people in Europe had not listened to God when He spoke (i.e., the pope) through papal encyclicals that now “God” was using a new method: European missions—world missions. “They will be upheld not by priests but by ARMY COMMANDERS, led by Hitler. The sermons will be heard with the help of cannons, MACHINE GUNS, tanks and BOMBERS.”20

Rome will use anyone’s armies to destroy “anti-Catholicism”— even Communist armies.

And now old Hellish Mother Whore again gathered up her bloody and filthy skirts to go to work murdering Christians exactly as she had done for a thousand years preceding the Reformation. No one in 1941 had to put on a pious “ecumenical” pretense of “sharing one faith” in “one fold” with “one shepherd”; no, not when

an army was available to kill anyone who didn’t get into the “FOLD.”

One-hundred seventy-two churches were destroyed in Lika, Bnija, and Kordun (provinces); 120,000 Serbians who would not join the Catholic church were murdered.21 [This was in one month (May 1941); in April 200 of them had already been killed by the Ustashi in the village of Gudovac.22] In the city of Kljuch 2000 were murdered between July 31 and September 2. Italian soldiers at Dubrovnik (Dalmatia) took pictures of Ustashi wearing necklaces made up of cut out eyes and torn out tongues of murdered Serbians.23 What the pope had been unable to do through Franz Joseph and Franz Ferdinand he was able to accomplish through another Austrian twenty-six years later: Adolph Hitler.

Father Srecko Peric of the Gorica Monastery near Livo advocated mass killing: “Kill the Serbs. First of all kill my sister who is married to a Serb, and then all Serbs. When you finish this work come here to the church (the “church that Christ founded!!!”) and I will confess you and free you from sin.”24 Same song (Vol. I, Chap. 13), different key. Following this “holy apostolic message” by a “holy father,” 5,600 Serbs were murdered in one city (Livno) and a concentration camp was set up at Jasenovac to match Dachau. There “Father” Zvnonko and “Father” Culina, with others, became responsible for the deaths of 40,000 men, women and children who would not join the “one, true, HOLY, Apostolic and Catholic” faith. A Jesuit priest (Dr. Dragutin Kamber) ordered the killing of 300 Serbs in Doboj. “Father” Zupanic, a personal friend of Ante Pavelich, had more than 400 men, women and children killed in one village alone (Ragolje).2i The remaining 244,000 Greek Orthodox Serbians who joined the church to keep from being murdered were reported to have been “converted to THE CHURCH OF GOD” by “His Eminence” Archbishop Stepinac, and this report was sent to Pope Pius XII, the man who had engineered the election of Adolph Hitler as chancellor and had gotten him to sign a concordant with the pope!

The news cult never peeped. Not one word from the American press or the BBC; not a peep. They didn’t dare. They wouldn’t dare today, for then they would be accused of “bigotry.”

But the most amazing thing about this twentieth century St. Bartholomew’s Massacre (it was four times as deadly) was the fact that both the pope in Rome (Pius XII) and the Catholic archbishop in Yugoslavia knew about the details of the killings and confiscations of property the entire time the debacle was going on.

Dr. Simrak, administrator and bishop of Krizevici, said in the official Bishopric News of Krizevici (November 2, 1942) that the forced conversions under threat of death were “IN ACCORD WITH OFFICIAL VATICAN POLICY” and in line with the directives of the “cardinals of the Eastern church.”26 It was nothing really new because Stepinac gave canonic sanction to forcible conversions on November 17, 1941, at Zagreb.27 Pavelish, the Ustashi terrorist, and Stepinac, the archbishop, informed Pope “Pius” (!!) of the entire operation throughout the whole year of 1941; and if that were not enough, the pope received letters of complaint from his own Catholic members in Croatia and from Prvislav Grizogono, who was the Minister of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia.28 The information on the massacres was forwarded to the Vatican by the Catholic Archbishop of Belgrade himself; the pope knew that 850,000 men, women and children had been mas­sacred by the leaders of his own church.29 He never opened his mouth. His papal encyclical “Mit Brennende Sorge’’ (with burning sorrow!) couldn’t have been a more hypocritical sham if Judas Iscariot had written it at Nero’s dictation. And all of this happened not on St. Bartholomew’s night in France in the 1500s but in Freudian, Einsteinian, Marxist, Darwinian Europe in the middle of the twentieth century.

What did the “Holy Father” do when he learned about the slaughter? Well, what would any “Prince of Apostles” do who was burdened for “peace on earth to men of good will” and the “human rights” of oppressed minorities? He did the only thing that such a good, humble, lovable, godly, pope would do: he made a cardinal out of Archbishop Stepinac,30 and when the terrorist Pavelich31 was arrested and tried the pope excommunicated the men who tried him!

And thus ended another one of the greatest chapters in anti­church history ever performed by the members of the bloody Mafia who claim to be “the Church that Christ founded” (Vol. I, Chap. 13). From start to finish, from the sending of Franz Ferdinand down to the Serbian border (1914) to foment a World War, to the murder of 850,000 Serbians during a Nazi Army of occupation (1941), there wasn’t one figure involved anywhere in the operation for FIFTY YEARS (Berchtold, Kaiser Wilhelm, Von Moltke, Berthmann, Pope Pius XII, Pope Benedict, Stepinac, Pavelich, Franz Von Papen, Himmler, Goering, Winston Churchill, Czar Nicolas II, or Woodrow Wilson) who was ever a member of a New Testament local church. Connecting “church history” with such a

ghastly and abominable performance is more than a civilized mind can bear.32 Vatican imperialism has nothing to do with “church” history. Not one major aim, purpose, goal, plan or execution of a plan made by any of the Catholic leaders in the Catholic hierarchy from 1912 to 1945 had one Christian motive behind it or one “Christian impulse” behind it, and you could not have found their “faith” or their “practise” anywhere in any New Testament in print if you had looked until Doomsday. The Roman Catholic church between 200 and 1950 played no part in church history whatever, if the Bible’s definition of the church is accepted. In the twentieth century, Catholic history is /LV TV-CH URCH HISTORY (Vol. I, Chap. 1) and only crosses church history where it is involved in murdering Bible-believing Christians who are guilty of “bigotry.” Catholic history from 1950-2000 A.D. is absolutely predictable. Roman Catholicism will be involved, neck deep, in organizing the Communist “third world countries” into a world pact, with each Communist country signing a concordant with the Catholic pope to the effect that only one church is legitimate on this earth: HELLISH MOTHER WHORE (Rev. 17, 18).

As the night fighters (Vol. I, Chap. 11) come out of their fox­holes for the last time to “fight the good fight of faith” they will be facing this worldwide imperialistic “religion” that is now organizing the Communist nations into a bloc for her own purposes: Commu­nists will use that church to keep populaces in subjection to commu­nism; the whore will use the Communist party to keep Bible believ­ers killed off. Mutual exchange; prostitution is the oldest business on earth (Rev. 17:1-9). It was not for “tiddledy winks” that the cardi­nals elected a Communist pope (John Paul) from a Communist country and got rid of an Italian Conservative (John Paul I). Since cardinals, bishops, and archbishops cannot teach, preach or believe the Bible, they have nothing to preach but “spreading the kingdom” (see The Sure Word of Prophecy, 1970). In this century they know which side “their bread is buttered on.” The Roman Catholic hierarchy were /Nazis between 1933-1944. Now they must be Communists (1960-1990). It depends upon who has the ARMIES (see Vol. I, pp. 215, 224). The Bible never enters as a spiritual factor or a theological factor once in the Vatican’s dealings with any nation in this century.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

LAND MINES AND BOOBY TRAPS

“As also in all his epistles, speaking in them of these things; in which are some things hard to be understood, which they that are unlearned and unstable wrest, as they do also the other scriptures, unto their own destruction.” 2 Peter 3:16

With the coming of the twentieth century a child’s garden of “Christian” works appeared in full bloom, all claiming tax-exempt status as “Christian” churches. Among these were the Mormons, founded by Brigham Young (1801-1877) and Joe Smith (1805- 1844); the Jehovah’s Witnesses, founded by Pastor Russell (1852- 1916) and Judge Rutherford (1869-1942)', the “Christian” Scientists, founded by Mary Morse Baker Patterson Glover Eddy (1821-1910); the Seventh Day Adventists, founded by Mary Ellen White (1827- 1915) and William Miller (1782-1849); and last but not least the “Full Gospel” Charismatics who had begun in Bethel College (1910) in Topeka, Kansas, and were glamorized and promoted by a Negro pastor at the Azusa Street Mission in Los Angeles (1900-1920) and Aimee Semple McPherson (1890-1944). Other “old wives’ fables” came from Emily Cady (“Unity”) and Annie Besant and Madame Blavatsky (“Theosophy”). “Father Divine” (a transformed African hedge clipper from Georgia) made his way in New York with several white wives and an integrated congregation (1930) and modestly promoted himself into the Trinity.1 The Campbellites bloomed in Kentucky, Texas and parts of the rural South, after Barton Stone (1772-1844) and Alexander Campbell (1788-1866) defected from the Presbyterian church and set up a half-Baptist, half-Catholic “church.” Like the ancient Babylonian Whore (Rev. 17), they taught that the Lord’s Supper should be taken every Sunday, that water baptism was the means of regenerating the sinner, and that their church was the “true church” .which Christ “founded,” etc. They also taught the ancient heresy which Rome had taught for

fifteen centuries that no born again child of God could know for certain where he is going until he is dead. They were “Southern Catholics” to be exact.

Doc Brinkley’s Kansas and Mexican radio stations (1928-1933) added miraculous healing with “goat glands”;2 and Del Rio, Texas, became famous for pieces of Olive trees from Gethsemane, mustard seeds, “Lord’s Supper” tablecloths, rocks from the tomb of Christ, magic handkerchiefs and aprons that would heal cancer and (if they could have gotten away with it!) portions of Peter’s shadow going down the street (Acts 5:15). Later the “healers” did such miraculous works as healing flatfeet (Branham, Coe, Jaggers, Roberts, Copeland, Goreman, etc.). Daddy Grace and "Bishop” Johnson (1950 and 1960) plied their wares over the airwaves. “Grace” had peanut concession stands at his “baptismal” services which were mass baptisms executed by fire hoses; the bishop managed to fleece the faithful of insurance policies, old age pensions, paychecks and social security checks, etc.

None of the churches above were ever connected with the New Testament local church and not one man leading them, supporting them, attending them, or believing them would know a New Testament local church from the Book of Moroni when it came to “rightly dividing the word of Truth” (2 Tim. 2:15).

However, the influence of these stunted, immature and mongrelized “sheep” (infiltrated by several thousand unconverted Billy Goats) on the body of Christ was of international consequence. Oral Roberts, A. A. Allen, Rex Humbard, Jimmy Swaggert, C. W. Burpo, “Reverend Ike,” Rev. Shambak, “Brother Terrell,” T. T. Osborne, Charles Kapps, David Epps, and dozens more took their cues from Aimee Semple McPherson and her "Full Gospel” (“Four Square Gospel”) in spite of the fact the Paul pronounced a CURSE (anathema) on men or angels who preached anything as the “Gospel” in this dispensation (Gal. 1:8-12) other than the death, burial and resurrection of Jesus Christ (1 Cor. 15:1- 5). The psychotic “Christianity” which these religious charlatans produced was as tragic as it was comical. Roberts began with a tent (1950) barnstorming up and down the country, hitting people in the head and yelling at them; he wound up as a Methodist University Chancellor (1975) in charge of a hospital. His income turned out to be better than a million dollars a year3 and his home at Fort Myers, Florida, would knock your eyeballs out. (When one of his associates wrote an expose' of Roberts’ “ministry,” the associates’ eyeballs were nearly LITERALLY “knocked” out of his head.4) In the entire

time that Oral preached (1945-1984), he never preached the Biblical truths of Romans, Colossians, Ephesians, or Galatians a day in his life. When his son committed suicide (1982), he did so in the midst of “Something GOOD is going to happen to you today!” which his father had used as a Madison Avenue pitch for suckers for nearly two decades. When Kathryn Kuhlman (ministry, 1960-1978) got sick, she went to the Baptist Hospital in Tulsa and did so without once calling on the two greatest “healers” in Texas who both lived right in that same city: Oral Roberts and T. T. Osborne.5 Evidently the professional pitchmen (and women) knew a “gaffed act” when they saw it and had no more confidence in each other than Carter had in Reagan.

Evangelist Ewing came to Pensacola (in the 1960s) and had a woman drop dead of a heart attack in his “healing line.” After being run out of town by the police, he broadcast it far and wide that Pensacola had “rejected the Holy Ghost” and “persecuted God’s man, etc.” He then bought Dean Martin’s old Hollywood home for several hundred thousand. “Healing ministries” in the twentieth century had more “gold” connected with them (see Matt. 10:8-10) than in Apostolic times (Acts 3:6), even though these healers howled about Jesus Christ being “THE SAME yesterday, and to day and, for ever” (Heb. 13:8). The healers who taught that and preached it could no more follow Christ’s instructions (Matt. 10:8-10) than they could skate backwards up a pile of sand. There is no record in the lifetime of one of these fakirs (including 300 nameless “backwoods” Full Gospel men) that they ever WALKED ON WA TER anywhere. History is also silent about which one of them resurrected a dead man (John 11) after he had been BURIED more than three days.

Eventually this gaffed act produced the “Full Gospel Christian Businessmen’s Association” which replaced the original Christian Businessmen’s Committees founded in 1940 for the purpose of street preaching in large cities and for the distribution of tracts to servicemen. Preaching on the street corner and winning men to Christ was replaced with a mongrelized mass of sentimental humanism coupled with an ignorance of Bible doctrine that was absolutely appalling. “Sharing your testimony,” “Sharing a miracle,” “Sharing Christ,” “Sharing God’s love,” “Releasing your faith,” and “Using your gift, etc.,” replaced the explicit instructions given in the Bible for Christians to carry on an aggressive, militant, anti-world, anti-humanistic witness (Matt. 23, Titus 1, Eph. 5, Acts 1, Acts 10, 2 Tim. 3, 4, John 8, etc.). The whole ungodly mess eventually degenerated into a commercial gimmick called “PTL” or

the "400 Club" (1970-1983), which were nationwide TV pitches for millions of dollars. Knowledgeable Christians referred to PTL as "Pulling The Leg." The Baptist distinctives which had marked the Donatists, Novatians, Montanists, Waldenses, Lollards, etc., were pitched out the window. No one mentioned separation of church and state; no one mentioned the eternal security of the believer; no one mentioned the autonomy of the local church; and no one opened their mouth about the immersion in water of an adult believer AFTER he was regenerated.

The “No Hellers” (Jehovah’s Witnesses) and Mormons (Latter Day Saints) and Campbellites (“Church of Christ”) gradually “lost out” in the 1950s and 1960s as the whole nation turned to the “boob tube” for their religious convictions; up till then they had been going to newspapers and radio to get their “Bible.” Now suddenly the visual medium came into its own6 and with it came a whole new brand of “Christianity” which altered the face of the nation in matters of believing the Book and preaching the Book. This new brand of Christianity was not only commercial and theatrical, but it was artificial and definitely EFFEMINATE. Above all, it was HUMANISTIC. It eliminated from its format any reference to the inferior righteousness of man, and with this deletion it was careful not to tell ANYONE (anytime, anyplace, anywhere under any condition) that man’s best works and his best motives would put him into a Lake of Fire (Rev. 20) if he was not resting on the finished Blood Atonement of Jesus Christ. Such Biblical truths had no place in the “new” Christianity for they would cut off the huge incomes needed to support TV and radio ministries. The Charismatics, after fifty years (1910-1960) of bragging about their spirituality and sanctification and their “gifts,” fell completely apart in the 1980s and wound up as liberal Methodists back in the Roman Catholic ecumenical movement to set up the Antichrist’s church.7 Their radio and TV preachers simply degenerated into amateur psychologists who destroyed the body of Christ by emphasizing the SELF life of the believer. This was done by talking about prayer, devotions, positive thinking, releasing faith, applying faith, “speaking promises,” claiming promises, etc. Hell and the Second Coming were avoided and soul winning, where it dealt with the actual mechanics of leading sinners to Christ, was eliminated from the broadcasts.

But before these spiritual spoiled brats and religious dwarfs “went down the tube,” they so influenced the Christians who spent time watching TV that the whole framework of Fundamentalism

gave way. The RV of 1884 and the ASV 1901 had already given the building a good shove (see p. 167) and now (1970) the Bible-believ­ing saints in the body of Christ adopted the theatrical and humanis­tic approach to church building, preaching, Bible teaching and promotion of their schools. By 1980, when one viewed the scene in America, the Fundamentalists were calling Bible believers a “cult,” and they were defending their errors with humanistic arguments. The Charismatics were acting as Catholics and the Baptists as Charismatics; healers were acting as dentists, and white girls were singing like African Negroes. Christian schools (Bob Jones, Hyles- Anderson, Dallas and Wheaton) were promoting Jesuit Bibles from 1582, and Christian rock music was coming off of 500 radio stations four to six hours a day. As Lester Roloff (1914-1982) put it: "America is an insane asylum run by the inmates." Nowhere was this more true than in twentieth century Christian education and twentieth century “TV Christianity.”

The five main contributors to the mine field which lay across the path of these TV Christians were the Mormons, the Jehovah Witnesses, the Christian Scientists, the Seventh Day Adventists and the Theosophists.

The teachings of the Mormons were explicit; Jesus Christ was not begotten of the Holy Ghost8 and Adam was the saviour: not Jesus Christ. The Holy Ghost had a physical body just like any man,9 and the Gospel is preached to people who die; you can be baptized in order to save a man who is already dead.10 Christ will return to Independence, Missouri, for his Millennial reign11 (with Harry S. Truman as a forerunner!?) and until then priests and high priests operate the New Testament church.12 The Book of Mormon, supposedly written on golden plates, was found and “translated” by Joe Smith (Palmyra, New York), who was a “notorious liar” and lewd as well as vulgar, according to his neighbors who knew him intimately.13 Mormons backslid to “Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints" in Salt Lake City and then to "REORGANIZED Church of Jesus Christ and Latter Day Saints” (1830) and then to the "Church of Jesus Christ” (Sidney Rigdon, 1862) and then to "The Church of Jesus Christ” (Alpheus Cutler, 1853) and finally to the “Church of Jesus Christ OF Latter Day Saints” (1850, James Strang). Since not one group in the lot was even “a church of Jesus Christ” (in the New Testament sense), there was no possibility that the conglomerate then or later (1800-1980) was anything more than a rat’s nest for self-righteous sinners.

The Jehovah’s Witnesses were equally as confused. Jesus

Christ will never come back to this earth as a human being.14 “All is well, there is no hell” (at least not one that will bother you more than a few seconds); and Christ actually came back to earth in 1880, or 1894 (or 1914: add the years as you go!).14-5 Salvation is by works, and Christ is a “created god” as found in the New ASV recommended by Bob Jones University and Tennessee Temple.

Christian Scientists had some booby traps for boobs. They said frankly that heaven and hell did not exist, nor did sin, death or judgment.15 No one was “sick” and Jesus didn’t pay any debt or ransom for anyone at Calvary.16 You have to ransom yourself. “Christ” was here long before Jesus showed up (this is the ancient Docetic heresy that taught that “the Christ” came upon and left various religious leaders); “the Christ” came on Jesus at His baptism and left Him on Calvary. This explains the peculiar attack on the Deity of Christ found in Luke 23:42 in the “Bibles” recommended by Bob Jones, III, and the faculty at Bob Jones University (1950- 1980).

The Seventh Day Adventists were precise: you work your way to heaven by observing the Jewish signs given to Israel. The devil will reign on the earth for 1000 years and Satan will bear away your sins. Christ had a sinful nature, and “all is well, there is no hell.”17 The “hell” which the Seventh Day Adventists speak of (and also the Jehovah’s Witnesses) is a DIRT GRAVE which men dig in the ground. Their final hell (the Lake of Fire: Rev. 20) is a place where body and soul are not destroyed (Matt. 10:28) but are annihilated. Both groups absolutely refuse to accept the Bible definition of “destroy” as the Scriptures themselves define the word (see Jer. 12:17, Ezek. 28:16, Ecc. 5:6, 1 Chron. 21:12, Hosea 4:6, 1 Cor. 6:13, etc.). There is not one place in either Testament where the word "perish" or “destroy" means to "annihilate” (that is, to wipe into NOTHINGNESS).

The Theosophists wrote out their fantasy in plain letters: Christ was part of a spiritual hierarchy that guided the evolution of humanity. People are reincarnated, and Salvation (naturally) is by good works.18

The Campbellites had their people running to the bathtub (or somewhere) trying to get under some water so they wouldn’t have to go to a literal hell, and then they told them that if they lost their salvation they could get it back without a second trip to the water. With the Seventh Day Adventist saying that the Mark of the Beast was going to church on Sunday19 and with Mary Baker Eddy (Christian Science) requesting a telephone in her grave so she could

phone back after her burial—she wouldn’t really be “dead,”20

many Americans took the fanciful road of flightful fantasy and wound up with a “Christianity” that was no more New Testament Christianity than humanism or Satanism.

But perhaps the most fantastic of the lot were the faculty members of the Christian schools (Clearwater, Maranatha, Pacific Coast Bible College, Bob Jones, Tennessee Temple, Pensacola Christian College, Hyles-Anderson, Midwestern, Pillsbury, Piedmont, Dallas, Cedarville, Moody, Talbot, Rockmont, Columbia, etc.). These monumental fools taught their ministerial students that there was no final authority under heaven given to man but that all Biblical truth was relative to the opinions of Christian educators and scholars; and many of them taught (from 1900 to 1980) that the Greek text of the Roman Catholic Jesuit Rheims Bible of 1582 was more accurate than the Authorized Version of the Protestant Reformation (Vol. I, Chap. 16). They put this over by telling young ministerial students that the ASV of 1901 and the NASV of 1959 were superior to the AV Holy Bible. Having destroyed the faith of these young men in the absolute authority of the Holy Bible, these deluded fanatics went further and spent hours (literally hours) in writing articles (and teaching in the classrooms) about the folly of believing in any infallible Holy Bible. These bloated fanatics actually taught that real Bible believers were a “cult.” At the most calamitous time in the history of the New Testament church (Laodicea: 1890-1990), when front-line soldiers were needed on every spiritual battlefield in the world, these pseudo sophisticated, apostate dupes disarmed every young man as they went through their schools. They could not have ambushed them more perfectly if Lee Oswald and Jim Jones had done the job. With more than 150 “Christian” colleges, universities and seminaries in America training “Christian heroes” and “Christian champions,” they managed to matriculate over 50,000 young men who had no more spiritual authority to guide them in their life ministries than the opinions of their professors!21

Now it was into this spiritual madhouse that the last “night fighters” of church history went. They sallied forth trusting in the old 66 caliber, black-backed Book that had come through the bloody engagements of the German and English Reformations (Vol. I, Chap. 17). These night fighters faced painted teenaged “Christian” girls who dressed and acted like professional prostitutes while they sang “Jesus keep me near the cross, there a crystal fountain....” They faced rhythm sections in churches where bongo

drummers with hair down to the middle of their backs were playing “Have you been to Jesus for the cleansing power, are you washed in the Blood of the Lamb?” The night fighters went on combat patrol to “take on” college graduates who had matriculated from Bob Jones University, Tennessee Temple and Pensacola Christian College (where no one danced, smoked, drank, or wore “matador britches”), and these graduates were confident that they were spiritual because they had the right haircut and the girls had knee length skirts; they had been taught that SEPARATION was godliness. These whitewashed Pharisees came out by the thousands without believing that there was on this earth one single Book that was the final authority for anything; and 90 percent of them had been told that if you believed there was One Book, you were a “heretic.”22 These apostate Fundamentalists had been taught that Christian scholarship was superior to the Holy Bible and that the relative opinions of saved sinners was of a higher authority than the Authorized Text of the Protestant Reformation. These half-baked graduates went out into communities to drum up attendance by using promotional gimmicks to start small cliques of “discussion groups,” interdenominational tongues groups, intervarsity, interdenominational, international, integrated, interrelated, introspective groups for social discussions, Sunday morning TV extravagances, Baptist Brider churches, five-point Calvinistic “holes in the wall,” “kiddy clubs,” corporations for bleeding rich Christians of their money, family counseling corporations for “youth tensions,” and schools that had no higher authority than the carnal trash written by Westcott and Hort, A. T. Robertson, Kenneth Wuest, and Philip Schaff and the traditions of Princeton, Columbia, Harvard, Yale, Dallas, New Orleans, Louisville AND HOLLYWOOD.23

This imbroglio of hodgepodge “Christians” was marked in the main by three outstanding Laodicean characteristics.

1. Multiple Bible "versions” (including the Jesuit Bibles: the American, Jerusalem, ASV, NASV, RSV, NRSV, IV, NIV, etc.) where any “believer” could find a “proof text” for anything he wanted to believe or didn’t want to believe. The alibi among evangelistic believers for this was that since “soul winning” was the most important thing, the Bible should just be a TOOL which one “used” or “preferred” in order to get the job done: Pragmatism, pure and simple. John Dewey and William James would have agreed.

2. An inability to preach or teach negative truths. The Baptist Briders and the five-point Calvinists were able to do this, but having

rejected 2 Peter 2:1, 1 Peter 1:2, Hebrews 10:29, 1 Corinthians 12:13 (the last verse was “Greekified” to get rid of its meaning), Ephesians 2:1-3 and other passages the end result was a tight group of firm lipped Pharisees who thought they were the elect church, or at least an elect individual who was so “elect” that all he had to do was wait for the other “elect” to get elected. None of the interdenominational groups (ecumenical or Charismatic) could preach or teach Matthew 23, Jeremiah 23, John 8, 1 John 4, 5, Romans 8, Galatians 5, Matthew 13, Revelation 13, 17, 18, etc., so they left this to one or two authors who couldn’t hit a lick at a snake when it came to PREACHING (Kirban, Pentecost and Lindsey). These writers (none of them were preachers) simply reprinted what Clarence Larkin (p. 197) had printed in 1928. Bill Gothard made a mint by simply avoiding ALL Bible doctrines and sticking to personality adjustments, dynamic tensions, personality development, material provisions, psychological potentials and mental gymnastics. He applied fifty verses in the Bible that were written to the body of Christ to unsaved sinners.24 His conscience never bothered him once. To him the Bible was a “TOOL” as it was to Bob Jones, III. It was not an authority to be obeyed.

3. An artificial culture and artificial refinement which amounted to little more than mastering the "Power of Positive Thinking" (by Norman Vincent Peale) or "How To Win Friends and Influence People” (by Dale Carnegie). The smiles were pasty, the handshakes formal, the “enthusiasm” and “piety” were as forced and as phony as a marionette show. These Christians had been raised on puppet shows and cartoons in their living rooms.

The new twentieth century booby trap fundamentalism and booby trap conservatism was plainly an effeminate Hollywood production, and the nation followed the fad to the letter: it elected a movie actor for president! He had just replaced a BAPTIST!

By 1970 the news media through TV had such an iron grip on the minds of all of the main Christian leaders in America—of ANY profession of faith—that the Fundamentalist leaders saw American Christianity in pictures instead of realities. Publicity, advertising and promotion (the mainstays of all newspapers, radio, movies and TV) had accomplished their job. They had produced a theatrical church whose job was to entertain instead of enlighten, to excite instead of rebuke, to please instead of to correct, and to gain support—not produce Bible believers. Attendance and income became the ultimate goals for Jerry Falwell, Jack Hyles, Bob Jones, III, and Arlin and Becky Horton; and every decision they made in

private or public, concerning any issue spiritual or political dealing with any group (Christian or otherwise), was done with A TTENDANCE or INCOME in mind. For this reason all of the FOUR “Bibles” recommended by these leaders (and their faculty members) altered 1 Timothy 6:6, 10 (see ASV, NASV, NIV and the so-called “NEW KJV,” promoted by Jerry Falwell). Those two verses identified the modern apostate Fundamentalist by pointing out to the real Bible believer what these people had in mind when they recommended the translations and their MOTIVE for so doing. The verses had to be changed: they were.

Hard, straight Bible preaching and teaching nearly disappeared from the American scene in the 1970s and 1980s. The motto of the Laodicean church in the latter half of the twentieth century was four words: “DON’T ROCK THE BOA 77’The leaders were too far in debt financially to afford a “rock.”

By 1980 the Antichrist was ready to receive his cargo; his curia at Rome was at the wharf; his tugboats were in the harbor; his Catholic agents were all through the customs rooms; and his welcoming committee was ready to start the gala celebration as soon as the ship docked. Don’t rock the boat; get it safely into port! Now, at the last minute we can have a revival, but let it be a revival of HUMANISM, not a Bible revival. Have a “Bible,” but not God’s Bible; have church services, but not any in which the Holy Spirit can do anything; train young people for “Christian service,” but for goodness sake don’t train them to believe in the final authority of a Book they can read, memorize, teach and preach and carry in their pocket! Don’t rock the boat! “Share God’s Love,” but for heaven’s sake don’t tell any Catholic priest he is going to burn in the Lake of Fire if he continues in his pagan religion. “Prefer” your version and “discuss versions with charity,” but don’t BELIEVE any of them. Sing the hymns and learn to act the words out with the proper breathing and lip movements and the proper eye and head movements and with the right smiles and the right nods. DON’T ROCK THE BOA T.

Applaud the choir when it sings. Applaud anyone who is introduced in the congregation; applaud a testimony if it is given: make the show “exciting”! Finally, Christians began to applaud any incompetent idiot who got up and hollered, “God is going to do a miracle for you!” or “God loves you!” or “God Bless!” The Americans (at least the professing Christians) had lost their senses when they picked up the ASV and the NASV and the New International Version and Falwell’s so-called “fifth edition” of the

AV—which wasn’t even an edition; it contained the NCCC Communist readings of the RSV in six dozen places.25

“Fundamentalists” proceeded to mistake smiles for love, handshakes for spirituality, fine clothes for godliness, education for brains, discipline for holiness, promotions for burdens, attendance records for blessings, and smooth talk for Biblical preaching. In such an atmosphere any “rig” could join the flotilla and sail with the fleet into “port.”

The rigs came.

The Southern Baptist Leadership Conference sprang up in the South, sporting the greatest Communists who ever attempted to overthrow a republic: Ralph Abernathy, Eldridge Cleaver, Martin Luther King, Jr., Jesse Jackson, Coretta King, Andrew Young,26 etc.; and they carried out to the best of their ability the official Communist party plan for the destruction of the capitalistic society which had given them cars for donkeys, steaks for toads, air conditioners for grass huts, $400 suits for loin cloths, and Bibles for witch doctors.27 Riots, murders, looting and the destruction of the public school system (1964) followed their well organized attempts to “bring in the kingdom.” In this case it was said to be a mongrel “dream” where all the races would be reduced to a pale gray. Over eighty percent of the leaders of the riots and lootings that took place in the 1960s and 1970s were ordained "Christian” ministers2* Not to be outdone by these bloody terrorists was the World Council of Churches,29 who participated in the murders in Africa by sending money to guerrilla terrorists there30 and by encouraging blacks to kill blacks. The killer who outstripped the entire record of the Ku Klux Klan from 1860 to 1984 was himself a black man, an African black man, Adi Amin.31 He murdered more blacks in ten years than all the white policemen and Klansmen in America had killed in 100 years. The press naturally backed up and said little or nothing about “civil rights” or “oppressing the blacks” in the land that Amin ruled. They attacked what they called the “terrorist” activities of the white Klansmen in America (Gannet publications: 1980-1983)!

When one black man was hung by someone in Mobile, Alabama (1981), the press spent four weeks crying to the Justice Department for vengeance on the “whites.” The NAACP harassed the police day and night till the killers were caught, and then instead of claiming that they should be set free—as black killers had been constantly let free throughout the 1960s and 1970s—they claimed the killers should receive capital punishment immediately.32 The Associated Press and the Gannet news service (after beating the

drum for NO death penalties for any crime) backed up the NAACP to the limit and made an exception where a white kills a black. Christians in the twentieth century who spent time with this perverted prostitute press were going to have to come out as lopsided hypocrites. “Evil communications corrupt good manners” (1 Cor. 15:33).

The National Council of “Christian” Churches displayed some of the outstanding Communists of the twentieth century parading as “ministers.” They openly professed to be using the Christian religion as a means of “mutual coexistence” with communism, in spite of the fact that all official Communist documents from any level of Communist dominion state that they have no intentions at all of tolerating the “Christian religion” or any other religion except communism. The reasoning of the fifth column turncoats in the NCCC for their actions was that communism had so many “Christian” elements in it33 (i.e., if you took the Jewish Sermon on the Mount or the Jewish local church out of Acts 2 and applied its teachings doctrinally to Gentile NA TIONS). The NCCC officially adopted the Communist position on every major political issue that came before either House during the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s.34 They wholeheartedly supported UNESCO and the UN and took part in the destruction of African republics through those organizations.35 The NCCC republished the Jesuit Catholic text of Rheims, France, (1582) as the RSV (1952) and the New RSV (1970) and made ecumenical efforts to drag every Protestant church in America back under the skirts of Unholy Mother Whore (see Chap. 12). The NCCC professed to represent over 5000 churches and so they set up their own international headquarters in New York with “canned press releases” issued through the Associated Press to every major “daily” in America. These canned releases were all pro-Communist, pro-Catholic, anti-Biblical, anti-American and anti-moral; they favored SIECUS for grade school children under ten years old,36 free use of drugs, registration of firearms, censorship of all fundamental radio broadcasts, the teaching of the theory of evolution as a FACT37 and the submission of the American people to an international police force financed by a one world bank.38 This was done “in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ” for “the glory of God, etc.”

Their watchwords were the watchwords of Abraham Lincoln, Lenin, Stalin, Marx, Castro, FDR, and Mao Tse-tung: UNITY, LIBERTY, and equality: “All power to THE PEOPLE” (see comments in the Commentary on Acts, Acts 21:28).

Biblical Christianity in China had been wiped out by Mao Tse- tung39 while the leaders of the NCCC and the Southern Baptist Convention were bragging about how “well Communism was working for the people in China and Russia.”39 Biblical Christianity had been obliterated in Russia40 by applying the teachings of Martin Luther King, Jr., and Ralph Abernathy (both men were Leninist- Marxists—exactly like the Beatles and John Lennon by

profession and practise).4' Biblical Christianity as a whole had been wiped out of Germany and France by the Roman Catholic priests and Jesuits more than a hundred years ago. Spain and Italv naturally disappeared as Biblical testimonies more than 600 years before the Reformation. South America and Mexico had never been Biblical testimonies, nor had they ever had enough Biblical Christianity in them to amount to a hill of fire ants. Only the USA was left, and by 1980 it had assumed the proportions given above— the spectacle of a painted clown (with a Hollywood star as a ringmaster) trying to juggle two-edged razor blades while balancing on a tight rope.

Amid this carnival of news media brainwashing and sanctified stupidity, augmented by pornographic “vespers,” oriental transcendentalism, fake healers, psychotic madmen, demoniac kiddy teachers, brutal killers, brainwashed idiots, passive psychologists, and UFO’S (!), the last of the Philadelphia night fighters took up their firing positions. The Church Age was ending and the “Time of Jacob’s Troubles” (the Great Tribulation) was about to set in. ,

In every age God has had a remnant, and whether that precious group of Bible-believing people be called Montanists (200 A.D.) or Novations (300 A.D.) or Donatists (400 A.D.) or Paulicians (500 A.D.) or Bogomiles (600 A.D.), etc., they bear the same marks of Christ (see Vol. I, p. 425) that are found in the New Testament. The outstanding marks of these people is their similarity to Pauls ministry exclusive of his Apostolic signs given to Israel (2 Cor. 12:12, Mark 16:17-20). They are usually marked by rudeness of speech (2 Cor. 11:6) that is “contemptible” (2 Cor. 10:10) in the eyes of educated people, street preaching that upsets and disturbs “devout” people (Acts 17:17), an absolute faith in the words of God as received (1 Thess. 2:13, Acts 27:22), an absolute belief in all of the Bible (Acts 24:14) and a desire to declare all of it (Acts 20:20), harassment and imprisonment by religious authorities (Acts 23), opposition by educated “intelligentsia” (1 Cor. 1-3, Acts 24), a

constant expectation for Christ to return (1 Cor. 15, 1 Thess. 4), and a vast store of negative and destructive criticisms including “name calling” (Titus 1, 1 Tim. 1, 2, 2 Tim. 1, 4, Matt. 23, etc.) which is reserved for careful and crafty religious counterfeits (Rom. 16, Phil. 3, 2 Tim. 4 and 2 Cor. 11).

Harold Sightier (Greenville, South Carolina), Van Nortwick (Hamilton, Ohio), Carl Lackey (White Plains, North Carolina), Lavonne Lowe (St. Petersburg, Florida), Bruce Cummons (Massillon, Ohio), Victor Sears (Indiana), and Howard Sears (Middletown, Ohio) fired away in the night. Bill Reese (Piney Heights, Georgia), Buz Reese (Montgomery, Alabama), Webber (Tulsa, Oklahoma), Perry Rockwood (Nova Scotia), Bynum (Texas), Jack Peters, Dick Kidd, Ford Porter and Gregg Dixon stuck by the guns. They preached against Catholicism, communism, capitalism, Campbellism, Charismaticism and evolution; they attacked religious councils, ungodliness and worldliness. Garland Cofield in Holland, Michigan; Tom Duff in Troy, Ohio; Pack in Tulsa, Oklahoma; B. M. Page in Indiana; Mills in Lebanan, Ohio; Gregg Estep in Xenia, Ohio; Jack Dinsbeer and Al Janney in Florida; LeRoy Wright in Pascagoula, Mississippi; and Bill Maher in Florida “socked it to them.” They all preached salvation by grace through faith in the finished blood atonement of Jesus Christ, without sacraments or water baptism. They were all anti-Catholic, anti-Socialist, anti-Communist and anti-“new” morality; that is, they were against the news media and the news media was against them.

Gerald Fleming (1926- ), one of Norris’ “boys,” held forth in Dayton, Ohio, with a radio program, a TV program, a young people’s camp and a church that got up to about 1000 in Sunday School attendance. Fleming pulled no punches while accomplishing this, and he dealt with race mixers (integrationists), the liquor traffic, the Papists and the International Socialists; that is, he was “anti-news media.” Fleming led over 2000 sinners to Christ with nothing but a black-backed, 66 caliber Authorized Version, which according to Jerry Falwell, Ed Hindson, Stewart Custer, Ed Dobson, and Farstad (Dallas Theological Seminary) was more than 300 years “out of date” (or at least 100 years by the standard Cult line of the Alexandrian Cult).42 Timothy Pietsch, a lifelong missionary in Japan, stood up for the AV text and opposed John R. Rice and Bob Jones, Jr., when they both compromised on that issue overseas, where readers of Faith Magazine (BJU) and the Sword of the Lord could not check on them.43 While lambasting “liberals”

and “Neoevangelicals” for their “unreliable versions” (RSV, NEB, NRSV, etc.), Rice and Jones used the Japanese RSV when "preaching” in Japan.

Cecil and George Hodges set up large independent works in Jacksonville, Florida, and Savannah, Georgia. Glenn Tingley got a work going in Birmingham, Alabama. Bob Perssons preached in half a dozen state prisons along with George Mesnick, a converted gangster. George Myers, the chauffeur for Al Capone, got saved and ministered to prisoners. "Nick the Greek” and JackWoods (Houston, Texas) were saved from lives of drug peddling, whiskey drinking, knife fighting, armed robberies and assaults and became Bible-preaching evangelists to the “down-and-outters.” "Chaplain Ray” took on a nationwide prison ministry. Peter and John Bissett set up a Baptist work in Arlington (Baltimore), Maryland, near the Pimlico Race Track and held forth the word of life for years with a radio broadcast and a youth camp (River Valley Ranch); scores of Roman Catholics were saved under their ministry. Roy Kemp, Noel Smith, Luther Peake and Elbert Peake went on with various phases of the ministry after the death of Norris. Jimmy Stroud and Clyde Reynolds established Gospel preaching ministries in Memphis, Tennessee, and Mobile, Alabama. Wayne Mullens set up a work in Rochester, New York, which at this present time is the strongest Bible testimony in the entire state of New York. It is now pastored by Jim Modlish, a King James Bible man from head to foot. Mod- lish takes orders from no Christian celebrity or “clique” and he re­ceives no publicity from any school or any fellowship. The Bible Baptist Church he pastors has converted over 1000 Catholics to Christ in the Rochester area and has set up at least five other local churches and mission stations that are completely independent, unlike Robertson’s “chapels” (see p. 200).

The evangelists who stuck by the Authorized Version during this time were Billy Kelly, Maze Jackson, Ed Vallow, Ed Ballew, Percy Ray, Joe Boyd, Estes Perkel, John Mitchell, Don Chennowith, Jack Van Impe, Fred Brown, “Cotton” Mercer, Oliver Green, Fred Garland, Moody Adams, Millard Box, Manley Beasley and others. In spite of the vicious propaganda put out by the faculty members of Tennessee Temple, Arlington, Springfield, Lynchburg and Bob Jones, these men continued to believe what “Ruckman” believed about the King James Bible: it was the word of God, containing the words of God. Any one of them accomplished more spiritually for the Lord in one year of ministry than the

combined faculty members of Bob Jones and Hyles-Anderson had in a five year period.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

THE NIGHT FIGHTERS

“Now the Spirit speaketh expressly, that in the latter times some shall depart from the faith, giving heed to seducing spirits, and doctrines of devils; Speaking lies in hypocrisy; having their conscience seared with a hot iron.” (1 Timothy 4:1-2)

In fulfillment of Christ’s words (Luke 21:28), Christians in the twentieth century began to look upward; but the world looked up in anticipation of receiving Satan as their guide, leader, director, teacher and dictator (John 5:43) instead of the Lord Jesus Christ (Acts 3:14). Darwin had been wrong; Marx had been wrong; and Einstein couldn’t have been anymore “wrong” if he had poisoned all of his relatives. Freud missed the mark; every leading scientist and educator from 1900 to 1983 led the blind into a ditch; and it turned out that the leaders of the NCCC and the WCC and the Catholic church didn’t have enough Biblical Christianity to put in the left eye of a blind mosquito. The popes had already proved to be professional liars (see Chap. 13 and Vol. I, Chap. 17) on so many occasions that they no longer called forth any wonder on anyone’s part who studied church history. Further, the LWand the League of Nations had been about as helpful in “bringing peace on earth to men of good will” as the Mafia and the Communist party.1 The only One who proved to be right 100 percent of the time was Jesus Christ (Matt. 24, Mark 13, Luke 12, 17 and 21). In spite of a twenty-four hour a day ballyhoo carried on by the news media cult (NBC, CBS, ABC, Mutual, etc.) all over the world, mankind degenerated right back into a jungle environment, accepted the writings of an unsaved B.C. philosopher to be the “latest” in sociology (Plato’s “Republic’') and accepted its own damnation cheerfully, believing that becoming one tribe enmeshed in an electronic net was man’s salvation (2 Tim. 3:13). In spite of 5000 speeches by blinded fools like Eisenhower, Ted Kennedy, Pope John XXIII, Winston Churchill, Adolph

Hitler, Franklin Roosevelt, Stalin, Lenin, Pope Pius XII, Engels, Jane Fonda, Michael Luther King, Jr., Coretta King, Max Plank, Dr. Spock, Pope John Paul II, Jack Kennedy and Ralph Abernathy, plus 50,000 lectures by PhD’s and MA’s and the NEA, mankind went right back to mass murder (Russia and China), mass slavery (Bulgaria and Roumania), terrorism and torture (Afghanistan, Iran, Syria and South America), cannibalism (Africa), and an ignorance of the revelation of God (the Bible) that would appall an eighteenth century grade school teacher. Professing themselves to be “wise” they had become FOOLS (Rom. 1:22).

John Stormer’s "Death of a Nation” and "None Dare Call It Treason” layed out this format according to historical truth instead of the news media cult position. Stormer dropped completely out of sight after writing these books. The news media cult continued with its positive presentation; they had to sell radio time and newspapers.

The only place where the prostitute press and the tumorous TV took a negative stance was in dealing with Bible doctrines or moral imperatives. This explains why every Bible-believing soul winner in the last half of the twentieth century had to be “anti-news media.” The news media had assumed the position of a RELIGIOUS DICTATOR called upon and self-authorized to dictate MORALS to the nation, and from 1930 on (unconsciously or subconsciously) she sided with the unsaved liberals and Communists on every political and moral issue that came up (see the front page of any issue of the New York Times, Washington Post or Chicago Tribune in any week between 1940 and 1983). The half-baked, left-wing reporters who wrote for these publications were rooted and grounded in falsehood and couldn’t forsake it for “love nor money.” The formats for NBC, CBS, Mutual, ABC, the AP, INS, and UP from 1940 to 1980 were the identical formats of the Communist party, modified only by the toleration of one form of religion—a HUMANISTIC Roman Catholicism. No major “daily” between 1918 and 1983 was impartial or objective in its treatment of any issue that dealt with morals, righteousness, international politics, Vatican politics, the Communist party, capitalism, racism, evolution, integration, prophecy or justice. When Falwell’s "Moral Majority” finally got underway (1982), the newspapers ran a whole series of articles, syndicated nationwide for ten months, to the effect that no citizen had a right to use any kind of pressure on anyone to vote against abortion or the use of drugs or equal rights of sex perverts or the right of women to take jobs from male heads of

families or the politics of the NAACP or the teaching of evolution in the public schools. The prostitute press exerted its own pressure nationwide through 18,000,000 subscribers and 40,000,000 TV viewers to coerce the entire nation into voting YES if any of those issues came up. The NCC took the news media side, as always.1-5

This meant that every one of the combat patrols who roamed the Laodicean midnight of America (1960-1990) had the most powerful alignment of forces against them since the time of the Caesars, for they were opposed at every move they made by their own church members, whose thinking processes were controlled by the TV, radio, magazines and newspapers. The enemy was now “in the camp” (Joshua 7) and he was in control of the MINDS of the members of the body of Christ who were supposed to have “the mind of Christ” (1 Cor. 2:16). Now (1960) nine out of ten decisions made by the body of Christ were made with news media propaganda as the determining factor in the choice. This deadly preference was made in the face of the fact that the news media for seventy years had failed to inform one Christian on earth of:

1. The fact that the WCC was a Communist organization from head to foot and it supported TERRORISM in the name of Jesus Christ.2

2. That the Roman Catholic church in every country but America was COMMUNIST from head to foot (1950-1990) and was supporting revolutionaries in Ireland for the purpose of obliterating Protestant Christianity from that country.3

3. That integration had not "worked” in one major city where it had ever been tried one time in twenty years.4

4. That Communist Russia was operating more than ten times as many concentration camps as Hitler had in operation in his lifetime.5

5. That no “anti-nuke” demonstrations were possible anywhere in East Germany, Russia, the Balkans, or China, so those countries could produce all they wanted to without anyone checking anything.

6. That the press word “GAY” was the artificial designation for a genuine SEX PER VERT (according to Webster’s Dictionary).

7. That “Women’s Lib” was a movement to destroy women’s rights and reduce them to cogs in a social machine.

8. That every Bible in English printed between 1800 and 1981 was a Roman Catholic Bible after the fashion of 1582 (Jesuit Rheims).

9. That Martin Luther King, Jr., was born “Michael” (not

Martin) and that he was the greatest Communist conspirator America had produced since Roosevelt.

10. That sex education in the public schools (SIECUS) had not reduced venereal diseases or premarital pregnancies in one school in which it had ever been tried; it had not even checked or slowed those debilitating “accidents.” (To solve the mess that SIECUS had made, the news media recommended abortions to take care of the pregnancies!)

11. That the “Civil Rights Act” of 1964 was designed to give the federal government (through the IRS “guidelines”) control over every PRIVATE SCHOOL and PRIVATE CLUB in America, and eventually the local churches.6

The “Christian” congregations that sat in front of Jerry Falwell, Jack Hyles and Billy Graham in the 1970s and 1980s were raised on television propaganda that omitted these truths. So, the body of Christ in America in the Laodicean period wound up sporting a mass of TV brainwashed automatons with no more final authority for anything in their lives than a stuffed Yak.

To retrace our steps for a moment: While Moody and Sunday (Congregationalists), Gypsy Smith and Torrey (Inter- denominationalists), Bob Jones, Sr., and Barnhouse (a Methodist and a Presbyterian) had been carrying on (1880-1950), the Baptists had been multiplying by tens of thousands.

Mr. and Mrs. Paul Hackett worked in Burma from 1910 to 1940. Ason (Bill) wound up working with refugees from Burma (on Macao and on ChuLapkok Island7).

"Mother” George (Eliza George) worked fifty-five years in Liberia (1929-1979), and as a missionary of the National Baptist Convention she was largely responsible for the raising up of 1200 Baptist churches with 19,000 students in mission schools.8 Rev. George Green was a Southern Baptist medical missionary to Nigeria. William Wallace went to Wuchow, China, as a surgeon and after helping sick Catholics (the Maryknol Mission depended upon the Baptist Hospital for their medical services!) he was killed in a Communist prison.9 John Birch, of course, was an Independent Baptist who was trained under J. Frank Norris; his martyrdom is well documented.

Back in the States, the membership of the Baptists had passed the 30,000,000 mark (1979). The Southern Baptist Convention had five seminaries and the American Baptists had six. By 1964 the American Baptist Convention had seven universities, nineteen seminaries and two junior colleges with over 28,000 students

enrolled. In the same year, the Southern Baptists were putting out literature to over 1,500,000 Baptist readers.10 There were 72,000 Koreans who responded to Billy Graham’s Baptist invitation which was given over microphones to an assembly of over 3,000,000 people.11 The Baptists multiplied in America to the point where the people finally had to put two of them into the White House (Carter and Truman).

Of course, during all of this monstrous growth the faculty members of the Baptist colleges, seminaries and universities were leading young men and women down the primrose path of apostate corruption, exactly as they are doing it right now at Hyles- Anderson, Wheaton, Tennessee Temple, Bob Jones, Pensacola Christian College and Falwell Schools in Lynchburg. These educated fakirs have always assumed that “corruption” is limited to beer, whiskey, cigarettes, short skirts, Neoorthodoxy or “Neoevangelicalism.” Nothing could be more naive or more tragic.

Individual Baptist pastors in the Convention (Northern and Southern) stuck by their guns: Oliver Van Osdel, David Otis Fuller, A. H. Strong, Courtland Myers, J. C. Massee, M. Goodchild, C. S. Thomas, C. L. Lawes, R. G. Lee, Criswell, Truett, J. Harold Smith, etc., and others continued to preach the truth, but the ecclesiastical organizations to which they belonged followed the Methodist church (as the Methodists had followed the Episcopalians) right on down to Abaddon in the bottomless pit. They were led, as always, by the Greek and Hebrew teachers and “heads of the Bible department.” Human nature never changes (see Vol. I, Chap. 5).

In isolated spots (Greenville, S.C., Chattanooga, Tennessee, the Dallas-Ft. Worth area and Pensacola, Florida) the pastors made some attempt to line up with the Bible-believing Baptists in the area and to pretend that they too were “militant, aggressive soul winners, etc.,” which they were NOT; but in the main the Convention decayed and crumbled under the onslaught of the news media (and the scholarship of A. T. Robertson, Kenneth Wuest, Machen, Davis, Warfield, and the University of Chicago) like a wet log. The root and source of this corruption, as we have said, was the universities (see Vol. I, Chap. 5). The professors and faculty members there all looked at two Biblical phenomena in exactly the same way as they do at Bob Jones and Falwell Schools today.

1. Any Bible truth they could not understand or had failed to see (or find in their library) had to be a ‘‘HERESY’ or a ‘‘peculiar doctrine. ”

2. Any group that thought the A V Holy Bible was able to correct their own scholarship and rebuke their dirty, rotten,

stinking sins was a “CULT.” It had to be.12 Self-preservation is the first law of life.

Both Conventions (Northern and Southern) were out of the race (Heb. 12:1-4) by 1970. Individuals within them still carried on, but if they were “notables” like R. G. Lee or Herschel Hobbs, they carried on only on paper; they wrote articles and sermons, and the Christian news media “puffed them” (a Hearst and Gannet expression). Their own congregations were nothing but large, small, or medium assemblies of man-fearing, man-pleasing, money­worshipping worldlings who cared (and knew) no more about New Jerusalem than they cared for the Holy Bible. True, some individuals in these churches continued to read and study the Book; true also that a few individuals in them continued to witness and to pass out tracts, but this was not the intent of the Convention politicians, nor was it the work of the Conventions. The Conventions both took the original Roman Catholic position:13 UNITY and POWER are to be the determining factors in any decision made by the group as a group. In this respect the Southern Baptist Convention even by 1950 had become a machine (pp. 192, 197) and was no longer a spiritual movement. No one should be sur­prised, therefore, to find that King, Jr. (the international Commu­nist), old “cussing Harry Truman” and the pious peanut from Geor­gia (Carter) emerged from “Baptist” surroundings.

By 1958 the Southern Baptist Convention was in such condition spiritually that it took 900 members to win one person to Christ; there were 5000 Baptist churches in the Convention that recorded no baptisms for that year, and the “giving” for the Southern Baptist Convention amounted to about $24.50 per person. The Southern Baptist Convention thereby set a world’s record for lack of stewardship and “tithing.” Not even the Episcopalians or Jehovah’s Witnesses ever attained to that all-time low level of giving. Less than 40 percent of the Southern Baptist Convention’s church members attended church at all, and of those who came nearly 10 percent left after Sunday School and 20 percent did not attend any evening services (Thursday, Wednesday or Sunday) during the week. The ecclesiastical machine continued to operate with twenty-seven different forms needed for the Sunday School Department alone; this mass of bureaucratic paper work included classification slips, enrollment cards, class cards, group records, monthly extension reports, monthly class reports, individual report envelopes, six-point credit cards, etc. On top of this the apostate leaders used up over $40,000,000 worth of “missionary” money by printing eighteen monthly publications.

[The author has never been in the home of a Southern Baptist (I have been in over 500 of these homes and knew the families by personal acquaintance) where anyone in the family read ANY of the material sent to them. It filled up book racks, magazine racks, and lay in piles on the driveway or in the “breezeways.”]

The outcome of this waste of money, waste of time and “simultaneous revivals” was: 1. A defection of nearly 1,000,000 Baptists to the Charismatic movement (1960-1980). 2. The sponsorship and promotion of two of the most ungodly and corrupt translations ever printed (the J?STand the NEB: see Vol. I, p. 253- 255). 3. A tidal wave of worldliness that swept the Young People’s Departments clean of nearly every separated, soul-winning young person. 4. The investment of literally millions of dollars in stocks and bonds and government corporations. 5. The sponsorship of race mixing and the Communist activities of the World Council of Churches in Africa.14 6. Over four million “baptized church members” who couldn’t name two “Baptist distinctives” (Vol. I, pp. 416-427) if their soul’s salvation depended upon it.

The unwritten history of the real Bible-believing Baptists is to be found in the ministries of Noel Smith, J. Frank Norris, John Rawlings, Beauchamp Vick, Louis Entzminger15 and Harold Henniger, or men like Art Wilson, B. B. Crimm, Dallas Billington and Harvey Springer; none of whom were American Baptists or “Southern” Baptists or “Northern” Baptists. These men raised up local independent Baptist congregations whose job was to set up other New Testament local assemblies. Of course, they did not “bat a thousand,” nor did the schools they established; but at least they were right on the New Testament doctrine of the New Testament local church, the New Testament doctrine of the Second Coming, the New Testament doctrine on the immersion of the believer after conversion, the New Testament doctrine of eternal security and the New Testament doctrines on taking Scripture as the final authority instead of Christian scholarship. And that, of course, was a great deal more than anyone could say for the interdenominational compromisers at Bob Jones University (1940-1983); it was also a great deal more than one could say for A. T. Robertson (Greek scholar), Machen and Warfield (two dead orthodox apostates), J. Vernon McGee, Percy Crawford, Jack Wyrtzen, Anita Bryant, Pat Boone, Fred Afman, Price, Porter and Martin (Tennessee Temple Schools), Custer, Wisdom, Wood and Panosian (Bob Jones University), Evans and Fink (Hyles-Anderson), the Gaithers, Dave Wilkerson, Bill Gothard, Oral Roberts, Lowery and “Yoho” (Pensacola Christian Schools), Johnny Cash, Billy Graham, and

the leaders of all three Baptist Conventions. No Convention church is independent and that was proved several times between 1930 and 1970 in actual court trials.16

The men who took the most credit to themselves for a temporary “awakening” in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s were John R. Rice (a Baptist interdenominational tract evangelist) and Bob Jones, Jr., and Bob Jones, III, (interdenominational promoters of a school plant). Actually none of these men nor their associates had very much to do with it. The stage was set by Baptists and not Baptists who were afraid of their scholarly associations. The stage was set by Scotty Alexander, Robert Bevington, Charles Billington, Dallas Billington, John Birch, Keith Brooks, Mark Cambron, Richard Clearwaters, George Crittenden, Parker Dailey, Oliver Green, Robert Ketcham, James McGinlay, Clarence Larkin, Ford Porter, Harold Henniger, Herschel Hobbs, Bob Ingel, Bob Gray, Harvey Springer, Vance Havner and 3000 Baptist pastors trained by J. Frank Norris or his associates. Hyles and Roloff came from Norris’ “stomping grounds.” Falwell and Al Janey were trained by Norris’ teachers and Rawlings, Henniger and Vick were trained by the old man himself.

What little BJU graduates know about church building and planting they got from these men: wot from Rice or Bob Jones II, III or IV*4. And this explains the strange “rifts” and “feuds” one often finds today among the outstanding Christian celebrities in America. It comes from a Laodicean sense of self-importance that is nurtured by TV and the news media. It amounts to apostate Christian educators in the Christian colleges and universities thinking that they are leading the local churches in some kind of a real battle when they had actually deserted the army years ago. These schools actually tried to control the local churches by censoring material on the King James Bible, by forcing pastors to accept their own graduates, by blackballing anyone who didn’t support their school, and by substituting their own classroom teachings as the final authority in the PULPIT of the local churches over the King James Bible.16-2

The monstrous “ego trip” carried out by these superficial TV Laodiceans resulted in the colleges, seminaries and universities accepting a standard “historic position”: if the school could not control the preacher, teacher or pastor, the man was a HERETIC, and if the college or university professors could not understand the. Bible doctrines that were taught in the pulpits, those Bible doctrines had to be HERESIES. Further, these incredible idiots assumed that anv group of Christians who accepted the Holy Bible as the absolute

and final authority over Greek or Hebrew scholars (and their scholarship) was a CULT.16-5

The leaders who espoused and encouraged this ungodly and depraved position were the faculty members at Pensacola Christian College, Tennessee Temple Schools, Hyles-Anderson, Falwell’s Schools in Lynchburg and Bob Jones University.

The teachers in these “soul winning” institutions destroyed the lives and ministries of about 800 young men every year while boasting of their “militant stand for the plenary, verbally inspired original autographs.” They made vicious attacks on anyone who “compromised” with liberalism or Neoevangelicalism, while they themselves had been out of fellowship with the Lord for so long you would have to backslide to find them. They erected mammoth publicity programs with an emphasis on attendance and enrollment and income that was designed to sucker the “touch” into thinking that “gain was godliness” and then altered that very verse in the New Testament (1 Tim. 6:5) and called their translation a “New King James Version”!17 To keep up a sagging enrollment they erected sumptuous buildings on gorgeous grounds, put in high scholastic standards, sent out brass quartets and girls trios to drum up business and then they threw in Biblical “principles” (instead of belief in the Bible) and “vespers.” In many cases the whole depraved mess from top to bottom was nothing but a mammoth display of stinking FLESH.

The things you SEE will burn (2 Pet. 3).

Only human beings will survive the fire, and then only if saved, and many of them will not be able to keep their works from burning (1 Cor. 3).

By the 1960s in America, the Baptists (that long line of despised Cathari, Manicheans, Paulicians, Novatians, Montanists, Donatists, etc.) had become “somebody”—at least in America, where they had been allowed to multiply according to the First Amendment attached to the Bill of Rights (see pp. 56-60). The Southern Baptist Convention numbered 32,000 churches (plus seven seminaries, thirty senior colleges, twenty-one junior colleges and thirty-nine hospitals) as far back as 1965. The Northern Baptists (American Baptist Convention) had about 7,000 churches, with ten seminaries, twenty-four senior colleges and five junior colleges by 1965. If one were to count all of the other Baptist groups (General Baptist, Freewill Baptists, GARB, Landmarks, Primitive, etc.) they would number well over 12,000 churches, not counting the Conservative Baptists who had 2000 churches supporting 400

missionaries on the foreign field and at least 100 home missionaries.18 The two largest Independent Baptist groups (the World Baptist Fellowship and the Baptist Bible Fellowship) added another whopping 3,800 churches to the total. There were more Baptist churches in Fort Worth, Texas, than there were in Germany, France and Spain combined. There were more Baptist churches in Pensacola, Florida, (population 80,000) than there were in Madrid, Rome and Mexico City combined (population 14,000,000). Furthermore, there were scores of churches in Amer­ica (Brethren, Mennonite, “Bible” churches and Interdenom­inational groups) that took the Baptist stance on eternal secur­ity, separation of church and state and even water baptism, although they did not ally themselves with the Baptists in name. By 1980 nearly all of the Churches of God (3275), Assemblies of God (8094), and Pentecostal groups (5000) were Baptist in matters of church polity, form of service, teaching on the Second Coming, separation of church and state, form of water baptism and the “plan of salvation.” A few diehards stuck to tongues as a sign of salvation and tried to run a few works in but the ecumenical movement drove hundreds and thousands of Baptists into these Charismatics groups and they brought the right plan of salvation with them (the eternal security of the believer), even though they were “patsies” where it came to the Jewish signs of tongues and healing. These Baptists radically changed the former “holiness” churches into Baptist- Charismatic churches.

It was a Baptist preacher (William Doane) who wrote the music for “Pass Me Not Oh Gentle Saviour,” “Rescue the Perishing,” “Take the Name of Jesus With You” and “Safe in the Arms of Jesus.”19 A Baptist wrote “I Need Thee Every Hour.”20 It was also a Baptist layman from Texas (Robert H. Coleman) who published “The Modern Hymnal” and “The American Hymnal,” which wound up in the church pews of over 18,000 churches. Mahalia Jackson, the Negro spiritual singer, was a Baptist; but further, even the greatest unsaved liberal that America ever produced was a Baptist: Harry Emerson Fosdick. The founder of the Rockefeller dynasty was a Baptist Sunday School teacher (John D.), and the greatest Communist America produced since Abraham Lincoln was also a Baptist (Michael Luther King, Jr.). Truman and Carter were Baptists, and the only internationally known evangelist after Billy Sunday was a Baptist: Billy Graham. It was the Baptists, and the Baptists ALONE, who objected three times to an American president trying to establish diplomatic ties with the Catholic

church as headed up by the Vatican State. When FDR sent Myron Taylor as a “personal representative” to the old professional killer Pius XII (see previous chapter for the correct adjective to use in regards to this pope), the Baptists objected.21 Again, when Harry S. Truman (a Baptist!) tried to send General Mark Clark as an “ambassador,” the Baptists hollered; and again on March 4, 1969, when Richard Nixon voiced a desire for a “personal representative,” the Baptists protested. They evidently had retained the true hallmarks or “distinctives” of the Protestant Reformation whereas the Lutherans, Episcopalians, Methodists and Presbyterians had forgotten “the pit from whence they were digged” (Isa. 51:1). In spite of these objections, Nixon proceeded to appoint Henry Cabot Lodge as his personal representative. When the Baptist (!) Jimmy Carter got into office he appointed David M. Walters (a Roman Catholic) as his personal envoy to the Vatican State (July 6, 1977). Walters was recommended to the president by Cardinal Cooke of New York and Archbishop Coleman Carroll cA Miami; a more anti- American, anti-Christian, anti-Biblical, anti-common sense blunder could not have been made by a president.22 Miami and New York in 1977 represented “Americanism” and a Republic of Conservatives about the way that Torquemada would represent Youth for Christ International.

By 1980 the “Baptists,” in fellowship, were back in the arms of Mother Whore, at least when represented by the official leading denominations of the “Establishment,” i.e., the conventions and associations.

By 1970 something had also gone all cockeyed with Christian music. We do not know of any writers of hymns in the local New Testament churches in the Book of Acts, although it is certain that singing went on (Mark 14:26). Paul would not have admonished the Christians to worship the Lord with “spiritual songs” (Col. 3:16) unless there were some around, and the ones that were being sung were not all “Psalms,” which is evident by the three classifications given in Colossians 3:16. Further, Paul practised (Acts 16:25) what he recommended. Hymnology, in the sense of congregational singing, begins in the New Testament but it certainly suffers a catastrophic relapse when the Catholics seize control of the Roman Empire (325-590 A.D.) and the local churches (200-325 A.D.). By teaching that no Christian can know where he is going at death, the heretical Catholic bishops and archbishops killed praise in the local churches. A “Gregorian Chant” is about as joyful (see Psalm 5:11; 149:5; 63:5 etc.) as Elvis Presley singing “Heartbreak Hotel.”

It is Martin Luther23 who begins the restoration of family and congregational singing to the churches on any kind of a large scale. The old "Ausbund” (of which I have a copy) shows that singing continued throughout the Dark Ages in local congregations in spite of the Catholic priests, but most of the authors of the songs are unknown. In the Philadelphia period (see Chap. 5) they pop up by the score. There is Austin Miles (1868-1946), Isaac Watts (1674- 1748), Joseph Scriven (1819-1886), Adelaide Pollard (1862-1934), Phillip Bliss (1833-1876), Reginald Heber (1783-1826) and many others. John Rippon published "How Firm a Foundation,” but to this day the original author of that piece is unidentified. Clara Williams, Charlotte Elliott, Fanny Crosby and other Christian women produced some great hymns of enduring beauty. Edwin Hoder (1837-1904), George Duffield (1818-1888), Henry Barraclough (b. 1891), Charles Gabriel (1856-1932), William MacKay (1839-1885), John Sammis (1846-1919) and Judson Venter (1855-1939) all added to the store of hymns that came out of Luther’s Reformation. The most prolific writer of scriptural hymns in this century is John Peterson (1921- ); and the biggest

commercial huckster of the century who made most of the money off of the suckers was undoubtedly Bill Gaither (Trio, etc.), who turned out sheet music with little or nothing more in it than African “riffs” set to jazz music. The “contemporary Christian music” of 1950-1980 fell into two classes, as the Classical music of the twentieth century did, Drunken Cossack Charge and Lost in an Oriental Swamp—neither of which had anything to do with the Bible or the New Testament church. One was what we call "cocktail lounge music" and the other was thinly disguised "African rock music” which often adopted a “Jelly Roll Morton” or “Scott Joplin” sound, at least in the keyboard sections. It was actually the beer hall music of the 1920s and 1930s or the “jukebox” music of the 1960s and 1970s. Naturally it sold “like hotcakes.”

James Robinson replaced Eddie Martin (1950-1955) as the Southern Baptist’s fair-headed evangelist; and although he went along with the Cooperative Program line and did what he was told by the local bosses (“Associational Missionaries”), he still preached salvation by grace through faith in the finished work of Jesus Christ and the Premillennial Second Coming of Christ to destroy a Catholic-Communist-Capitalistic world system that had been degenerating for 2000 years. Jack Van Impe (1970-1980) made a desperate attempt to follow Bob Jones, Sr.’s, instructions to gather the “conservatives” together to have “city wide campaigns” but it

turned out to be a flop as the Lord was no longer interested in the “historic positions” of apostate Fundamentalists. The Independent Baptists (J. Frank Norris) were having their day, and to get even ten of these churches together for a “city wide effort” would be something akin to uniting the Arab world to fight against Egypt, as anyone knows who had done much preaching in Independent Baptist churches. Dr. J ones was living in the past by now (1965) and his concept of “city wide meetings” was an impossibility. No one would ever reach a “city” anymore unless they got it done by television; once on television, James Robinson found out that there were certain political and social subjects that a preacher better hadn’t bring up (in this case—1980—sex perverts). He found out that the commercial aspects of TV obligated the stations to follow the news media line: pro-sex perversion, pro-abortion, anti-Bible, pro-Catholic, pro-South Ireland, anti-Christian, pro-Communist, pro-drug use, pro-Welfare state, and pro-gun control.

The news media had succeeded in setting up a RELIGIOUS CREED and had established doctrinal “dogmas” which no telecaster (preacher, reporter, news analyst, or commentator) could violate without getting thrown off the air.

Billy Graham controlled the airwaves and audio waves for the most part in the 1950s and 1960s; but the price that he paid to get control was “going along” with the Roman Catholic hierarchy in New York, Chicago, Rome, and Washington, D.C., and the National Council of Churches. When Billy hit New York (1956) he found that cooperation with unsaved Communists and Catholics was essential to a real “city wide” effort. In vain did James Bennett (1956) and John R. Rice and Bob Jones, Sr., try to tell Billy how to set up the campaign; it was no longer the 1920s or 1930s. The days of Billy Sunday were over. Bible reading no longer controlled the minds of Conservatives or Evangelicals; they were controlled by the Associated Press, the National Broadcasting System, the American Broadcasting System, Mutual and CBS. The “Christian” leaders of the 1950s and 1960s had been produced by Christian colleges who taught HUMANISTIC RELATIVISM in matters of final authority.24 They were, for all purposes, PRACTICAL ATHEISTS (see Vol. I, pp. ix-xiv), at least in matters of final authority— although they were “Christians” on the “fundamentals” or the “historic Fundamentalist position.” Whereas Billy Sunday had preached to lost drunkards and harlots who believed the AV was the Holy Bible, Billy Graham, Jack Van Impe, John R. Rice, Jerry Falwell, and Bob Jones, II, were preaching (1960-1975) to Fundamentalist scholars and conservative “Evangelicals” who no

more believed it was the Holy Bible than they believed their left foot was a tractor tread.

The Baptist apostasy followed the Methodistand Presbyterian apostasies to the letter. The Baptists began by correcting the AV in their schools (exactly as Jerry Falwell’s group with Thomas Nelson is doing it now) then they began to teach doubts about the AV in their schools (exactly as Hindson at Falwell’s and Custer at Bob Jones University are doing it now) and then they began to deny the CONTENT of the AV in their schools on the basis of German Rationalism and English Deism.25

At the head of every column of apostate Southern and Northern Baptists one could find a cap and a gown, a diploma, or a degree on a sinner who held Nestle’s Greek text in one hand and an ASV (1901) in the other (or an RSV, 1952).26 Drinking and smoking on the Southern Baptist campuses (1930-1950) was followed by dancing (Wake Forrest, Stetson, Judson, Furman, etc.); and if it had not been for the harassing tactics of J. Frank Norris (seep. 174), not one Premillennial Baptist preacher would have been found left in the Convention by 1970. Dr. Ralph Elliott, Dr. Berquist, Nels Ferre, Theodore Clark, George Buttrick, Dr. Minear, F. Bredahl Petersen and others helped the Southern Baptists down the ladder into the sewer of international socialism and prepared them for the one world “church.”27

Once in a great while the Baptists would “fire” a professor if he became outstanding in his infidelity, but as long as he simply attacked the Holy Bible in the CLASSROOM (as they do in Tom Malone’s school, Lee Roberson’s school, Rodney Bell’s school, Arlin Horton’s school, Dayton Hobbs’ school, Jack Hyle’s school and Jerry Falwell’s school, etc.), the professor remained. He was part of an educational conspiracy to see that no student left the school with any higher authority than that of THE SCHOOL.

The last real Biblical work done in America before the rapture was done by scattered groups of men who had various connections with independent Baptist churches or “fellowships.” Not all of these men were Baptists and not all of them could resist the temptation to correct the AV once in a while when their old natures wanted to demonstrate their talent, but in the main these men were Bible­believing, soul-winning witnesses of a New Testament nature and they “stirred the dust” when they came into a town (Acts 17:6). None of them could be found on the “Bible faculties” of any major Christian university or seminary in America and Dallas Theological Seminary could not sport ONE of them in a period of forty years H 950-1990). Thev may properly be called “night fighters,” for the

lights went out in 1901 and 1904 (America and Britain) with the official acceptance of the Jesuit Greek text of the Roman Catholic church (RV, ASV, NASV, RSV, NRSV, NIV, NEB, etc.) by Fundamentalists. This was the “Bible” that had ushered in the Dark Ages (Vol. I, Chap. 11). It had the unqualified approval and recommendation of every “recognized” and “accredited” conservative scholar in America, and the same crowd that produced the Falwell-Nelson “Bible” (the “New King James Version,” 1982) approved of this recommendation and protected the names of the rascals connected with the recommendation.28

Hugh Pyle (whose name was omitted from the list of “Fundamentalists” in the back of George Dollar’s History of Fundamentalism), of Pensacola, Florida (1948), was a newspaper reporter with no education above high school. He received no training in any college, university, Bible institute or seminary in America, and yet he set up three of the largest Independent Baptist churches in the South (Pensacola and Panama City) in the 1940s and 1950s. In the 1940s Pyle had a Youth For Christ operating with as many as 600 young people in it on Saturday nights; he led well over 10,000 souls to Christ in a forty year period and left such a mark on Pensacola that it sprouted three Christian colleges, five Christian day schools, three Christian radio stations, two Bible institutes, one seminary and 500 street preachers. [It was Hugh Pyle who led the author to Christ in the record room of radio station WEAR on a March morning of 1949. If Hugh Pyle is to “enter into the labours of others” (John 4) then he also is indirectly responsible for the 500 preachers, 39 books going into over 900,000 copies (plus his own books), 200,000 cassette tapes of Bible studies, 5000 souls saved (besides his own results), 35 baptistries painted, 1,000,000 cartoon tracts put out in Chinese, Spanish and German and 500 young men called to preach who are now in the ministry. This is why Hugh Pyle was omitted in Dollar’s list of “Fundamentalists.” It is verbotten for an historian to mention the name of anyone even CONNECTED with “Peter S. Ruckman”!] Pyle used nothing but a King James 1611 version all the days of his life.

Glenn Schunk (1918-1976) was a converted Catholic who was responsible for getting the author into the ministry. (Had George Dollar known this he would have excluded Schunk from his list also!) Schunk roamed up and down the country foi nearly twenty­eight years as an Independent Bible-believing evangelist. He averaged about 200 souls a year through the 1950s and 1960s. He was anti-Catholic and anti-Communist (that is anti-news media)

and stood firmly against ecumenicism and worldliness of any kind.

Bobby Ware, of Orlando, Florida, was a converted prizefighter and an ex-“swabbie.” He set up the largest Independent Baptist work in Orlando without “going into receivership,” etc., and established outreach ministries for transients (bums), and teenagers, as well as for handicapped people and Negroes. Ware took orders from no one but the Lord; and although he remained friendly towards birds of various “feather,” he never compromised his own convictions once nor did he cut corners in his preaching. He was probably responsible for the salvation of more than 500 people every year that he pastored.

Alex Dunlap held forth with a Conversion Center for Catholics in Pennsylvania. Angel Martinez, Anthony Zeoli, John Carrera and others who had been converted from Catholicism poured it on to the false teachings of Pope Paul, Pope John, Pope John Paul and their adulterous, whoremongering associates (Rev. 17). Ian Paisley, the fire-eater from North Ireland, jeopardized his life a dozen times a week in standing for the absolute separation of church and state. With the Irish Republican Army against him, the Archbishop of Canterbury against him, the British Parliament against him, and the British Broadcasting System against him, Paisley “fought the good fight” for the liberties and freedoms of North Irishmen who had no desire to give financial support to a religious Whore (Rev. 17). The National Geographic magazine (April 1981) pictured Paisley as a rabid fascist who was against “human rights” while picturing the Catholics in Ireland as an “oppressed minority” and part of the “downtrodden masses” who needed “liberation.” Nothing was said about the Protestant minority in South Ireland; not a word. Nor was one word said about any Bible-believing people left in Spain or Italy. Nor was one word published about “minority” rights in Mexico and South America. Not a word. Instead, the National Geographic magazine gave (in full color) the official Roman Catholic view of the Vatican State on Ireland: i.e., the British were “invaders” and should leave; if they left then North and South Ireland would “peacefully integrate” and settle their “religious differences” under a humanistic, socialistic set up. In all countries where Roman Catholicism is a state religion (Italy, Spain, San Salvador, Columbia, Argentina, etc.) “religious differences” are handled in a standard way: every religion is run out of the country but Romanism and those individuals who stay are harassed, hampered, bombed, arrested, tortured or killed to make sure they get no “converts.”29 (In the 1970s and 1980s the British Army was

the only thing left in Ireland standing between security and the mass murder of over 100,000 Protestants by their Catholic “countrymen.”)

By 1968 there were only seventeen Baptist churches left in Russia after an original 800 had disappeared, and there were 10,000 Bible-believing Baptists in prison in Russia by 1970.30 Ketchik was jailed and shot; Dragonovic likewise; Y. I. Koshev likewise; Krasnov-Levitin likewise; while Stasvik and Hamara were tortured before being executed. Aida Skripnikova was in prison four times before her twenty-seventh birthday and thousands of others were in prison with her. Slobodchikov was given two years at hard labor for mentioning Christ at a wedding.31 Peter Restjuk was arrested for printing Bible verses, and Cherviakov was arrested for conducting a DVBS.32 To match this, the federal agents in Nebraska arrested a Baptist pastor along with some members of his congregation (September-October 1982) and threw them in jail for trying to teach children in a church school. The American news media—including every major TV network—refused to print or telecast the event. Instead they photographed guerrilla terrorists in Lebanon being “liberated” by American Marines! (April-May 1983)

After the Russians had locked up 1200 Greek Orthodox churches in Roumania and killed all the bishops but one (who was imprisoned), the pope (Pope John XXIII) greeted the Communist leaders Manescu and Michel Zhidkov with a Christian welcome: Zhidkov, leader of the “Baptist” churches in the USSR, said that no one had ever been persecuted in Russia for “their faith.”33The news media in America made no comment but refused to print the testimony of Richard Wurmbrand, a Roumanian pastor, who was whipped to within an inch of his life after spending three years in solitary confinement.34 Zhidkov (an incredible hypocrite) made his statement on “religious freedom in Russia” knowing that there were NKVD agents (secret police) attending the World Council of Churches (an offshoot of the NCC) disguised as ordained ministers.35 While Billy Graham was bringing back glowing reports on Russian Christianity (1982), Harlan Popov was touring America with documented firsthand information on the facts: the facts were that there was not one church anywhere in Russia that operated openly that was not told what it could preach and teach and what it could not.

Of 6000 Protestant missionaries who had gone to China, there was not a single one left by 1970. When Chairman Mao learned that the Vatican was taking the Communist hardline stance against

America (see p. ), he promptly invited the Jesuits back into the country (1978) for they had said that “PROTESTANTISM was definitely anti-Christian.”36 Chinese communism and Russian communism were both vigorously defended by the major leaders of the NCCC37 in America. The Communist pope (Pope John XXIII) had gone about “taking a stand” in his own inimitable way; he begged special graces from “The Queen of Siponto,” referred to statues of Mary as “HOLY images,”38 and called her the “Salvation of the people of Rome,” since she herself had said that France was “firstborn.”39 Pope John XXIII had been trained by the Jesuits of Bergamo. Fatty Fatima then showed up for a tour of the USA following this (1981), and in Pensacola the Roman Catholic mayor (Vince Whibbs) had the News Journal set apart a special few weeks for “veneration” during her visit. Throughout all of this, Alex Dunlap, Avro Manhattan, Paul Blanshard, Carl McIntire, Harvey Springer, Ian Paisley and Jack Chick (p. 275) fired away!

Up and down the land the night fighters went on into the darkness and held forth the word of life like the ancient Albigenses and Waldenses. They received no publicity from the Sword of the Lord, Christianity Today, Faith Magazine or from anywhere else. Bryan Stensas labored in Madrid without any millionaire to help him. Roy Grigsby ministered in Kindsbach, Germany; Jim Ellis in Fort Myers, Florida; Charles Lynn in Dayton, Ohio; Brother Reeves in San Diego; Mark hodges in Winter Haven, Florida; Terry Williams in Porterville, California; Steven Byrd in Fayetville, North Carolina; Dave Masterson in Illinois; William Hatfield in Oklahoma; Clyde Gilman in New Mexico; Garland Rodehorst in Wiesbade, Germany; Verle Ackerman in Florida; Ed Gibson on Okinawa; Jeff Meel in Costa Rica; and Kay and Michael Baumgarnter in Bolivia.

Scores and scores of these anonymous soul winners and Bible preachers kept pounding away at the enemy long after the sun had gone down and the Laodicean church had held “open house.” Dick Inlow labored for years in Chile, John and Janet Young in New Zealand, and George Zane in West Germany. Not one Christian in the list believed that “sacraments” or church membership were any more connected with the new birth than Mary or the pope. They preached the eternal security of the believer, the autonomy of the local church, the separation of church and state, and the premillen­nial coming of the Lord Jesus Christ; the news media hated them with a purple passion and hated everything they stood for. Tim Ku-

cifi preached in Pine City, Minnesota; Charles Groover in States­boro, Georgia; Brother Price held forth in Milford, Delaware; and Sam Ingram in Fredericka, Delaware. James Odom preached in Naples, Florida; Richard Angwin pastored in St. Paul, Minnesota and Eddie Goddard in Rainelle, West Virginia. Earl Madison and Lon Stewart preached in Denver. James Lee, James Black, Dwight Tomlison and Bob Benefield all pastored Bible-believing churches in California. Bob Batchelder held forth the word of life in Flag­staff, Arizona and Rob Dustman in Durgango; Jerroll Martens preached in Newton, Kansas.

The old black backed 66 caliber Authorized Version from 1611 still poured forth its healing balms and ointments, its scathing and blistering denunciations of sin, its infallible promises and prophecies and its authoritative judgments against Christian educators, Bible revisors, “manuscript detectives” and other as­sorted stuffed shirts. Its anti-Catholic revelations were preached by these night fighters and very few of them failed to warn sinners on scores of occasions that without the new birth they would burn for­ever in a literal lake of fire.

The age in which they lived taught that this warning was anti­humanitarian, Dark Age bigotry of the worst sort. Conspiring against them were the Associated Press, the National Educators Association, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, The Columbia Broadcasting System, the Internal Revenue Service, OSHA, the American Broadcasting System, the Gannet string of newspapers, the Mutual Broadcasting System, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the International News Service, the United Press, the British Broadcasting System, the National Council of “Christian” Churches, Life and Look magazines, Mike Wallace, Time, Newsweek, Phil Donahue, the World Council of Churches, and many faculty members of “Fundamentalist” schools.

They set up New Testament churches.

Holding true to the original positions as set forth in the Book of the Acts and the Pauline Epistles (see Vol. I, Chap. 1), they majored in prayer and the “ministry of the word,” leading sinners to Christ and rooting and grounding the saints in the great truths of the New Testament.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

THE LAST DAYS OF THE NEW TESTAMENT CHURCH

“For I am now ready to be offered, and the time of my departure is at hand. I have fought a good fight, I have finished my course, I have kept the faith.” (2 Timothy 4:6-

7)

As the night fighters fought through the spiritual and Biblical darkness of America’s final midnight, fundamental Christianity became more effeminate and artificial by the hour. The young people were taught to drum up business for the schools by putting on little musical and dramatic “performances.” They appeared painted and dressed like Fred Waring and his “Pennsylvanians” (1935-1939). They sang while looking soulfully into each others eyes (the girls looking at the boys first, and then vice versa). These poor, wretched apostates with “proper haircuts” and proper “knee-length skirts” posed and strutted and smiled and blinked like stuffed peacocks, and when they gave their memorized “testimonies” it was like listening to a broken record accompanying the talk of a computerized robot. Their leaders (Bob Jones, Jr., Bob Jones, III, Jack Hyles, Jerry Falwell, Lee Roberson, Tom Malone, Arlin Horton, Dayton Hobbs, Rodney Bell, etc.) had made the ghastly mistake of thinking that rules and regulations could produce spiritual Bible-believing Christians. Nothing of the kind happened. The leaders who had been spending their time in front of the “boob tube” were now having their “fruits” displayed publicly; their sins had found them out. Commercial advertising had rubbed off on all of their students. Applauding replaced “amening” in most congregations; films replaced the Sunday night services; choirs and “specials” replaced congregational singing by 1980; and in the largest “fundamental” churches in America (by that time) there were literally thousands of people whose combined voices singing could not have awakened a sleeping dog. As these churches were flooded with graduates and supporters of the apostate fundamental colleges, universities, seminaries and institutes, they were converted

into Disneyland sideshows where the only real fundamental of the “faith” was “DON’T ROCK THE BOAT.”1

The “Orthodox Conservatives” sat passively and watched a paid staff of professionals under a motivator “carry on” with the entertainment. Mammoth Sunday School layouts were erected that weren’t “schools” in any sense of the word; they were nothing but vast evangelistic gatherings where children were bused into a child evangelism program carried on on a massive scale. Unable to follow their own “convictions” about “saving whole lives when they are young,” the motivators had to bus the black children out of the main services and finally even the unruly whites had to be put out of the main services lest they “rock the boat.” Sunday morning services were combined in many churches (at 9:30 or 10:30) because of the distances that the bus drivers had to drive to find even one child who was interested in hearing the truth (the price of gas doubled while this was going on and then tripled). Finally the Sunday School became the “main service” with no one teaching anything; instead, an evangelistic message was preached and an invitation was given. The “main service” would then be a leftover handful of staff workers and older people who didn’t have to hurry to get home. One church in Indiana bragged about 14,000 in Sunday School but told no one that their buses were going 75 miles into a city with a population of 7,000,000 people in it. Pastors in Alabama and Mississippi towns of 10,000 people were running 300 in Sunday School, which made their attendances twice as big as the pastor in Indiana!

The result of this artificial, commercialized extravaganza was about twenty churches running over 4000 in Sunday School while a whole nation around them went to a Catholic-Charismatic hell as fast as the speed of light. When five of these pastors got on TV they simply took away another 50,000-100,000 church goers from the smaller congregations. The fruit of such an operation could only have been one thing: a mass of spiritual babes (many of them saved) who could not tell their right hand from their left when it came to Bible doctrine. After their salvation they simply occupied a chair, either by the TV or in a large Sunday School complex, completely immersed in the professional performance of actors out of Hollywood, New York and Chicago. You could no more “root and ground” them in the Bible than you could root a pair of crutches. They were so gullible that their leaders convinced them that the LEADERS IN CHRISTIAN EDUCATION were the final authority in all matters offaith and practise for a Christian and that if anyone of them dared believe the A V was the final authority then

he was a heretic who belonged to a CULT.1-5 The stupid TV chil­dren believed them.

By 1980 enthusiastic or emotional congregational singing was passe'. It had been replaced by a professional choir and trained vocalists. Action was no longer required by the congregation as long as you didn’t “rock the boat.” TV had accomplished its mission on the body of Christ. The body was PASSIVE.

In the artificial light of artificial “chapels” these artificial Christians gave artificial testimonies and sang artificial songs, and occasionally one of their butter-mouthed, syrupy-tongued “Bible” faculty members would preach an artificial sermon (with artificial gestures) that had no more Biblical substance in it than a floss candy cone. As a realization of this hypocritical nonsense came to the attention of people like Lee Roberson, Dayton Hobbs, Arlin Horton, Jerry Falwell and Bob Jones, HI, they hastened to invite a handful of real Christian preachers (Lester Roloff, Bob Gray, John Rawlings, etc.) into their sanctuaries to help maintain the public illusion that their schools were still "militant," but it was to no avail. When faced with Biblical truth from the AV, all the schools had to censor the Bible Believers’ Commentary Series (Ruckman) and the works of Hills and Fuller and also the churches that used the AV to correct the faculty members of the schools.2

‘‘Don’t Rock the Boat" was written over the door of every major “militant” school in America by 1980. They actually began to “ship” (or threaten with dismissal) any student who really believed the AV was the word of God. The Christian colleges and universities in the 1980s were “cleaning house.” They were trying to get rid of every Bible-believing Christian in the school and replace him with a humanistic relativist (like Ed Dobson, Stewart Custer, Elmer Towns, Robert Sumner, etc.) who worshipped education. To keep themselves from falling apart while carrying out this persecution, a complex system of disciplines, formats, rules and regulations were installed; this was done to make the body of Christ think they had to be SPIRITUAL because they were ORDERLY. The apostates (as all apostates in all centuries: see Vol. I, chap. 11) then had to rely on these enforced regulations to keep the institution operating because they had lost the power and glory of God (1 Sam. 4:21). When the faculty members took credit for God’s work (Rom. 1:21) the end began. God will not let any saved sinner (Fundamentalist or Evangelical) steal His Glory (Isa. 48:11), no matter how “godly” he thinks he is because of his “secondary separation.”

Baptist pastors of New Testament local assemblies continued

to stand by the book and face the wrath of apostates like Bob Jones, Jr., Jerry Falwell, and Bob Jones, III, with their pseudo “scholarly” backers. Harold Council in Kentucky; Edmund Dinant in Flint, Michigan; Weido in Arlington, Texas; Audrey Mitchell in Mobile, Alabama; Corliss Thorne in Fort Walton Beach, Florida; and Bobby Clarke in Orlando, Florida, stood by the book. As the Christians of Philadelphia (Rev. 3:8), they “kept His word.”

While Tom Malone assigned special services for all the students at Midwestern on Friday, Saturday and Sunday nights (October 1982) so they could not go to Livonia, Michigan, to hear “Ruckman,” Culbertson in St. Petersburg, Florida, continued to “lay it on the line”; he didn’t care if anyone went to hear anyone. Peace, Adkins, Lawson and Don Mangus held forth the word of life in Knoxville, Tennessee, and Louisville, Kentucky. The faculty and staff of Tennessee Temple and Bob Jones could not shake their faith in the old AV of 1611 one half an inch. Art Wilson (Wichita, Kansas), Wendell Zimmerman (Kansas City), Harold Henniger (Canton, Ohio), Matijevich (Las Vegas), Claude Bonam (San Antonio) and scores of others kept right on preaching the AV no matter what the “educators” said or thought.

While the bloated egotists at Lynchburg, Dallas, Bob Jones, Hyles-Anderson, Arlington and Springfield continued their war on the saints in an effort to exert their own authority, hundreds of Bible-believing pastors and evangelists went right on with the New Testament ministry without giving them the time of day. This vast majority of Bible-believing people continued right down through the 1960s and 1970s and 1980s, outnumbering the scholars in the Alexandrian Cult by a ratio of about 2000 to one.

Among these were Mike and Caroline Tester who labored in Taiwan, Phil and Lori Brown who worked in Norway, Charles and Elda Coleman who labored in Pakistan while Joe and Margueritte Vella set up local churches all over the Philippines. Japan was the mission field for the Neels, the Sorensons, the Rodgers, the Platts and the Marsdens, while the Daniels, Clarks, Cunninghams and Konnerups worked in Kenya, Africa. John and Karry Barnes served the Lord in Costa Rica, Jim and Sharon Smith in Ecuadore. Ray and Geraldine Redmon worked in Korea, Marvin and Becky Robertson in Spain, and Walter and Betty Holske in Puerto Rico; and John and Charlene Sawyer put the gospel in Uruguay.

These were a handful of the thousands of born-again, Bible­believing Baptist Christians who followed the New Testament pattern of local church planting, teaching the Bible to the saints and

evangelizing the lost around them. They put the New Testament into practise instead of wasting time correcting it to show off their superior knowledge. Anyone of them did more New Testament work for the Lord in a year than the apostate faculty members of Christian schools accomplished in a lifetime.

By 1983 the name of “Christ” in America was used by anyone for anything, and it was bandied about with such frivolity that you could find it used by Rock groups who were singing songs glorifying Russia3 and by Rock groups who were glorifying the use of heroin and cocaine.4 Everyone in America was a “Christian.” As the downward pace continued and accelerated, the “Christians” decided the Bible was “chauvinistic” so they set about to convert the “God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ” (2 Thess. 1:1) into a nonsexed, hermaphrodite “person.” In the 1980s this ridiculous homosexual nonsense reached the point of forcing weathermen to call hurricanes by MALE names, while college students (the dumb­est of the dumb) were saying, “God, she is black.” Their educated class in the 1980s had lost their “marbles” (see pp. 148-151). Their educated “logic” was as simple as their minds; if the Godhead were masculine then the Godhead would have to step aside for the great new twentieth century TV brainwashed imbecile whose SOCIAL and POLITICAL standards were more eternal (and of more importance) than Bible truth (2 Tim. 3:16). Humanism was in full bloom; and humanism, as anyone know, is the socially acceptable news media term for “ATHEISM.”5 The Humanist Manifesto^ declares that man is a self-made god who created and developed himself without any help from any God and that his faith in himself is guaranteed to perfect himself and also to perfect nature and the universe.7 The Manifesto (as Marx’s Manifesto) is the work of deranged minds on a psychotic binge; it could properly be identified as “ILLOGICAL Positivism.”

As the twentieth century closed out on the Laodicean church, the Rev. Moon and the Rev. Jim Jones got on the bandwagon with the Rev. King and Rev. Herbert W. Armstrong (and Gardner Ted Armstrong).8 Not a man in the list could be identified as a New Testament, Bible-believing Christian by the wildest stretch of the Associated Press and United Press.

Amid this carnival of theatrical productions, pornographic “vespers,” oriental transcendentalism, fake healers, demoniac kiddy teachers, brutal killers, brainwashed idiots, passive psychologists, and ecumenical overtures, the UFO’s showed up!9

The church age was ending; the Tribulation was about to set in.

While the last of the Philadelphia night fighters took up their firing positions, Mao Tse-tung wiped Biblical Christianity off of the map of China.10 (He did this while the leaders of the NCCC and the Southern Baptist Convention in America were bragging about how well communism was working for Christians in China and Russia.)11 Biblical Christianity had been obliterated in Russia12 by applying the teachings of Martin Luther King, Jr., and Ralph Abernathy (both men were Leninist-Marxists by profession and practise),13 and Biblical Christianity as a whole had been wiped out of Europe years ago. While the TV, radio and newspapers in America beat the drum for the Soviet-Catholic One World Government by promoting international socialism; while the Super Bowls came and went (I-XV); and while the crowds screamed over the World Series and the “Stanley Cup” and the “Heismann Trophy winners,” Bible-believing Christians continued to knock on doors, pass out tracts, preach on the street, make jail and hospital calls, marry Christians and bury them, teach the word of God, preach it and make “full proof’ of their ministries (2 Tim. 4:1-8).

Jim Vineyard was the man who put Hyles-Anderson on the map. He did more leg work and soul winning work than any faculty member in the history of the school. It was Brother Grooms who put Jerry Falwell on the map. A King James man until 1978 (and maybe he still is!), Grooms did the “leg work” while the sissified teachers (Dobson, Hindson, etc.) tried to establish their own opinions and preferences as the final authority over the AV. Wally Beebe put the spotlight on bus ministries. With the help of a millionaire (Anderson), Hyles was able to build a large work; with the help of a millionaire (Coberly), Becky Horton was able to build her large work. With the help of a millionaire (McKenzie), Bob Jones, Sr., was able to build a large work, ditto Falwell, etc., etc.; but it was men like Carl Hatch who did the “footwork” for these mammoth plants. When the books are opened it will be discovered that the soul winners were not teachers in the “Bible” department; they were fanatical students or slow plodding bus drivers who were underpaid and overworked. Professional football “stars” cannot perform without unnamed, unknown “tackles” and “guards” who do the dirty work for them.

Mickey Carter was an old “Carolina boy” who came down into Haines City, Florida, and set up the largest Baptist church in thirty miles—an independent church. He then set up a Christian school and began to fight a relentless hand to hand battle with the

bureaucrats at Lake City, Florida, which lasted nearly ten years. He received no publicity for this, nor any for his work, as he went from 300 members to 400 to 600 to 800 and produced scores of tough, young “red-necks” who believed the old AV from cover to cover, including the cover.

Bob Gray (1925- ) of Jacksonville, Florida, was raised as a

“showcase Christian” for the Southern Baptist Convention, but they gave him the boot (exactly as they did Lee Robertson)14 when he began to talk publicly and plainly about the devilment going on in the Christian university of which he was a graduate (Stetson).15 Gray stuck by the King James Bible through the years in spite of his associations with the “educated class,” and by sticking to it he became responsible for the salvation of over 5000 souls in the Jacksonville area. Since this amounted to more than all the faculty members at Bob Jones had led to Christ in ten years, Gray did not hesitate to stand up for the authority of the AV when facing the faculty members of Tennessee Temple in 1982 (SWB Fellowship). He told them plainly that God didn’t call any man into a ministry of correcting the word of God with Greek scholarship. This “settled his hash” with Bob Jones, HI, and Tennessee Temple, for both of those apostate schools were teaching thousands of young people that such a belief was “RUCKMANISM.” Gray didn’t care; he went on preaching the Book and God went right on using him while the faculty members sat on the shelf. Bob Gray, naturally, is anti­Catholic, anti-Communist, anti-United Nations and anti-ERA; that is, he is anti-news media.

Clyde Owens is a relatively obscure pastor in Tallahassee, Florida, where he has pounded away with the AV for nearly twenty- five years. Owens now has a large congregation though he began with a very small one in a “run-down” building. Owens preaches against new versions, against ecumenicism, against Charismatics, against Hollywood, against modernism and liberalism and against lazy Christians. To the positive thinkers of this day that means that he is a “trouble maker.” In the Bible this means that he is for Jesus Christ and the Book; no man can be for anything who is not against something. “Every action has an opposite reaction, etc.” This is a law which apostate Fundamentalists in Laodicea (1984) often forget. A Christian cannot be for critical Greek and Hebrew scholarship in this age without being against the AV of 1611; it doesn’t work out that way. The scholars only pretend that it works that way so they can keep up their incomes and enrollments.

The study of Greek and Hebrew should never be confused with

“Greek and Hebrew scholarship.” “Greek and Hebrew scholarship” means the whole rotten bag of apostate claptrap (Dobschutz, Zodhiates, Wuest, Angus, Dana, Green, Chafer, Vincent, Jowette, Deismann, Terry, Horne, Keil, Harkavy, Wisdom, Afman, Price, Custer, Hindson, Terry, Grotius, Raschi, Zockler, Muntz, Toy, etc.) from Origen to Ed Hindson (see Vol. I, Chaps. 3, 5).

Jack Chick of Chino, California, caused the biggest stir of all the tractarian evangelists in the twentieth century, passing by John R. Rice like Rice was on a side rail. Oliver Green (1915-1976) also had a tremendous tractarian ministry (books and pamphlets) which he sent out by the thousands from his radio program, but it was Jack Chick who “tied the rag on the bush” so to speak when it came to making an impact on the entire nation. John Rice never came near to Chick when it came to real, bold, plain, up-to-date scriptural attacks on contemporary sin in every form. Chick would single­handedly take on lions that John R. Rice and Curtis Hutson and their entire staff were afraid to look in the mouth. Chick, through color cartoons and black and white publications, went after the revolutionaries, the hippies, the advocates of the new morality, the cursing construction workers, the cursing truck drivers and drill sergeants, the popes, the queers, the lesbians, the tensions of modern marriage, the Satanists, the Communists and the Catholics with a gusto that raised their hair a foot off of their scalps—if they had any to start with. His publications of Sabotage and Alberto caught the attention of some of the prostitute faculty members at Bob Jones, Tennessee Temple, Hyles-Anderson and Lynchburg as well as the prostitute press (Gannett, Hearst, AP, UP, INS, Our Sunday Visitor, etc.) and they attacked him day and night.

Chick was a five foot six inch veteran from World War II, and he didn’t give a “flip” for his theological adversaries or his Christian opponents one way or another; he published his convictions so effectively that the Roman Catholic church had to put out an international comic book glorifying the pope to offset Chick’s cartoon magazines.16 Our Sunday Visitor made an international appeal to all bookstores to ban Chick publications from their shelves; many of these bookstores obeyed the Roman Catholic hierarchy (1982) and many of them that did were BAPTIST bookstores. Chick’s books were labeled as “spiritual pornography” by the apostate conservatives who wrote for Christianity Today. His books were “hell on wheels” because they described how the Jesuits were infiltrating the Charismatic movement and using women and girls to ruin “fundamental” preachers by blackmail and

scandals.17 Hollering and screaming “bigotry and slander” (see pp. 78-79), old Mother Whore had a raving fit against “Chick Publications”; but, of course, she stayed out of the COURTS. A sudden appearance of the “nihil obstat” Catholic Encyclo­pedia in a court at this point (where the news media would be present) would be a catastrophe of gigantic proportions, for the Catholic Encyclopedia (nihil obstat) states that the pope is the secular ruler of the United States and Great Britain and that his church alone is the true church and should have privileges allowed to no other church. It also states that no salvation can be found outside of the Roman Catholic church. It further teaches that all the decrees of the Council of Trent (1564) were binding on all popes; this would mean that Vatican II (1960) was completely nullified where it spoke of religious tolerance and ecumenicism. The Council of Trent (1546-1564) stated that all Jews (Henry Morgenthau, Bernard Baruch, David Lilienthal, Lewis Strauss, Arthur Burns, Abraham Ribicoff, Ann Landers, Jack Benny, Elia Kazan, Irving Berlin, Mike Todd, Al Jolson, Eddie Cantor and Don Rickies) were CURSED (Vol. I, p. 395).18 Vatican II was a lie from start to finish according to the official Roman Catholic writings in the official Roman Catholic Encyclopedia, and the star performers in it knew that their “decrees” on “toleration” were no decrees at all; they were only contemporary expedients for propaganda purposes. OFFICIAL DECREES and CANON LAW state that “heretics” are to be punished or killed by political authorities who are under the orders of the Roman Catholic church.19 “Heretics,” in the official Roman Catholic articles in the official (nihil obstat) Catholic Encyclopedia, are Protestants, Mohammedans, Taoists, Jews, Buddhists, and Bible-believing Baptists. The old Catholic Whore will never face Jack Chick in court about anything anymore than she did Paul Blanshard, Avro Manhattan or Walter Montano, who “slandered” her for more than fifty years.

By 1980 the Rice-Hyles clique reached out to embrace some really fine Bible-believing preachers (Jack Hudson, Curtis Hutson, Hugh Pyle, Bill Rice, Tom Wallace, Rodney Bell, Ed Nelson and others). In spite of the inferiority complex these men had from associating with the faculty members of Bob Jones and Tennessee Temple, they still had enough sense to use, preach and teach the right book; none of them wasted any time with the ASV or NASV recommended by those schools, although some of them did not have the courage to attack those two Roman Catholic obscenities in the manner befitting a God-called preacher of the TRUTH.

As the leading apostate Alexandrian offshoots (Bob Jones, Pensacola Christian, Tennessee Temple, Springfield, Arlington, Lynchburg and Dallas Theological Seminary) became relativistic humanists in their attitudes towards authority (see Church History Vol. 1, Introduction, notes 1-3), the “celebrities” adopted radical and extreme measures to prevent the Bible from being the student’s first consideration. An outstanding example of this humanistic relativism designed to rob God of His glory was the Eusebian eulogy (see Vol. I, pp. 114, 115) written by Jack Hyles in the Swor d of the Lord upon the demise of John R. Rice (Article, January 16, 1981). According to Hyle’s TV Disneyland presentation, John R. Rice was a combination Eisenhower, Billy Sunday, Knute Rockne, Spurgeon, Will Rogers, Jack Demsey, R. G. Lee, Sam Jones, Churchill, Lester Roloff, Sergeant York, John Wesley, Bob Jones, Sr., and General MacArthur.

The truth of the matter was that Rice was an interdenominational tract evangelist. He could not have filled the shoes of John Wesley or Billy Sunday for twenty-four hours and he never in a lifetime received half the persecution that Lester Roloff or Sam Jones received. His “fighting” (see Jack Demsey and Sgt. York) was about as rough-and-ready as the combat experience of Lawrence Welk, and he never pastored a church in his life with one- fourth of the membership that Spurgeon preached to.

All twentieth century Laodicean Fundamentalists are anxious to sell themselves and their friends (HUMANISM) to the Christian public. They often overdo it, as it was grossly overdone above.

Lester Roloff (1914-1982) fought the good fight with the good Book. He led scores of people to Christ and ministered to hundreds of cast-off young people whom no one else would take. He put the HEW to shame with his “results,” for Roloffs rehabilitation programs (alcoholics’ home, girls’ and boys’ homes, etc.)20 were ten times as effective as anything the Socialist welfare state could do with twice the tax money. For this reason—jealousy—the HEW department and the Texas bureaucrats hated his guts. Herman Fountain (Lucedale, Mississippi), the Barnwells (Georgia) and Scotty Drake (Tampa, Florida) all tasted the lash of the HEW’s cat- of-nine-tails as it attempted to keep young people as robot wards of a Communist state; this was Plato’s position21 more than 200 years before the New Testament was written.

The idea was basic; you kept the young people in a passive state of confusion (“situation ethics,” “reevaluation of social and ethnic in an enriched curriculum,” etc.) so the

government would have to support them. This way they would look on the STA TE as God: Hegel’s position.22 The fur began to fly at Corpus Christi, Texas (1973-1974), and later the Baptist pastors showed up at Garland, Texas, to show their sympathy with Roloff, and at this point (1975) Bob Jones, III, suddenly decided that he had better “get in on the act” so that Christians would think he was a Baptist—which he wasn’t. Again (1981) Bob Jones tried to associate himself with Baptist pastors, as by this time Bob Jones was beginning to lose enrollment to a Baptist pastor—Jerry Falwell—so he now pulled alongside Roloff and his Baptist friends (1981) to convince everyone that he too could take a bold MILITANT STAND.

Laodicea is a remarkable period of church history.

When the smoke cleared in Corpus Christi (1982), Roloff had changed his interdenominational church into a BAPTIST CHURCH. Jones went right back to an interdenominational campus (1982) that didn’t confess in its creed ONE SINGLE DISTINCTIVE OF THE BAPTIST FAITH: separation of church and state, autonomy of the local church, eternal security of the believer or immersion of the adult believer in water.

The shades of night had fallen.

In the streets and alleys and on the highways and byways the night fighters kept it up. Thousands of unknown, unpublicized soul winners worked night and day to keep buses running, going after the parents of “bused-in children,” getting cussed out in the doorways, getting doors slammed in their faces, being threatened with shotguns and rocks, and coming home Sunday night with 100-200 miles logged on vehicles that couldn’t get ten miles to the gallon (1950-1980). Faithful pastors like David McPherson in New Orleans; Wayne Mund near Cincinnati; Tom Bard in New Hampshire; Karl Baker in South Carolina; Tom Woodward in Milton, Florida; Nathan Bemis in Kalispell, Montana; David Rowley in Chicago; Rod Phillips in Lockport, New York and David Strunk in Jacksonville, Florida, kept at it night and day. In Brazil, Don and Flo McMillan, Bill and Sharon Smith, Tim and Betty Hawkins, Gordon and Annie Avery and Phil and Debi Harris put out the truth. In Guadalajara Weldon Jones set up two Independent Baptist churches. Brother Howell and his family labored their entire lives in Honduras and never received a by-line in the Sword of the Lord for it. Brad and Ronda Hastings ministered in New Zealand; Herb and Shelby Conley labored in Peru. Over in Singapore John and Marjorie Malanowski put out the word. Not one in the list

fooled with an ASV or a NASV long enough to break in the binding.

Over in Germany Brother Falk and Brother Griggers passed out tracts and witnessed on the street. Brother Trosclair set up a local church in Bayreuth, Germany. The Delaneys and the Adcocks witnessed to the Irish; the Martins and the Whaleys went to Guatemala. Mike and Cathy Gilbert wound up in Australia and scores and scores of Bible-believing Baptists continued to go to the ends of the earth (Japan, France, the Philippines, Alaska, Ghana, Lebanon, Italy, Spain, and New Zealand) to set up New Testament local churches under the noses of the Antichrist and the False Prophet.

The persecutions in Russia had begun again in earnest on September 9, 1944. Between then and 1945 there were 10,900 Christians sentenced to prison for life and 2000 more were put to death.23 All the Bible societies were stopped and in 1948 Atheism was taken into the curriculum of the public school system to augment evolution, which had been taught there for nearly forty years. In 1949 the following Bible believers got twelve years in Russian concentration camps for teaching the Bible: Neofit Tsakov, Gavril Zvetanov and Stefano Bezlov. The following got fifteen years in the concentration camps: Lambri Mishkov, Harlan Popov, and Georgi Vassev. The rest got life imprisonments: Vassil Zyapkov, Jank Ivanov, Nicola Naumov and Georgi Chernev.

Among thousands of Christians who were imprisoned, tortured and killed for witnessing for Christ were Georgi Shipkov, Nicolai Odintsov, Polina Skakunova, Alexandra Mozgova, Pavel Zarkharov, Alexandra Semirch, Pavel Datsko and Georgi Vins.24

“Human rights” never entered these matters once. “Civil rights” were never enforced by anyone. “The Free World” (news media baloney) did nothing and they are going to do nothing. Instead, the American news media led by TV put out two racist documentaries. The one called "Roots” was to make every Afro- American feel like he was persecuted and had a right to steal or take anything he wanted, and the second one was called “Holocaust” and was designed to make the suckers think that the most vicious killers on this earth in the twentieth century were Germans. No Christian who spent any amount of time watching these kinds of “documentaries” was able to retain his senses or his ability to discern good and evil (pp. 252-253). This was proved in 1982 when a combination RSV-AS V was printed by Thomas Nelson and Sons and was promoted by Jerry Falwell as an “edition” of the Authorized King James Version. The ridiculous counterfeit had the

RSV-ASV readings in it in Acts 4:27; 17:22, Romans 1:18, 25, Genesis 1:28; 49:6, 1 Timothy 5:5, 10, 1 Thessalonians 5:22, Philippians 2 and a score of other places. No one caught it. Their brainwashing by TV had been completed.

All the time that vicious killings and arrests were going on in Russia and Bulgaria (1945-1975), both countries professed in their Constitutions exactly what the AMERICAN CONSTITUTION professed! “Absolute separation of church and state” and absolute “freedom of religion” for all religions.25

In Laodicea PROFESSION rarely means anything.

The way these constitutions were overthrown was simple in the extreme; government bureaucrats demanded reports and licenses from the churches and then claimed power to examine the church records (especially the financial records and membership rolls) so they could stop all attendance and giving to the church.25-5 If the “required forms” were not filled out according to the “guidelines” of the bureaucrats, you had to shut down the church. The reports and “guidelines" were invented to overthrow the Constitution.

The Communists got off to a flying start long before 1980.

In 1921 (December) William Reimert was murdered in China. In 1924 George Byers, an American Presbyterian, was killed by bandits in Hainan Province. (“Bandits” in America refers to “militant civil rights workers” or “militant ecologists” or “positivistic pluralistic demonstrators,” etc. You have to change the label to swallow the poison.)

Jack Vinson (Southern Presbyterian) was martyred in China (1931).

Watchman Nee died in a Chinese prison after being tortured.26

The great ministry of evangelism carried on by John Sung (1901-1944) was over. Bible witnesses like Wang Ming-tao (Japanese occupied Peking) and David Yang were gone. John Ku, Timothy Tow, Yap Oon-tham, Ta Bee Kun, LeKwang Phu, Gouw Kwan Yang and others continued Sung’s witness in Indonesia, the Philippines and Vietnam as well as in China.26-5 Chinese churches in Java were still carrying on Sung’s work in 1949.

Henry Lin was arrested in 1957 and died in jail in Nanking in 1960.

Missionaries Peter JTyssand David Schweitzer were murdered in Thailand. Dick and Sandy Watson were buried alive by the Viet Cong.27 Walter Erikson and Edward Tritt (October 17, 1952) were murdered when attempting to evangelize in New Guinea. Pastor Arseny was murdered by atheists in Central Siberia (1933). Hilda

Anderson, a missionary to Arabs and Jews, was killed by a sniper in Jerusalem (1948). Miss Mavis Pate (forty-six year old Southern Baptist missionary nurse) was killed in Gaza in 1972. Twenty missionaries with their dependents were slaughtered in Rhodesia (June 1978) thanks to the financial assistance given to Communist Africans by the National Council of Christian Churches in America.28 Abel Binyoni was killed (1972).

Down in Mexico the Roman Catholic church continued to practise her standard policy: kill as many as you can get away with under the contemporary situation (Vol. I, pp. 300, f.n. 99). In 1945 (May 27) Feliciano Juarez and Vicente Garita (Mexican pastors) were lynched and cut into four pieces and had their homes dyna­mited. When atrocities were committed by Catholics in San Felipe De Santiago, the police came to investigate and “Father” Pedro Juarez had a mob capture them and torture them29 so the news media would get no report on the atrocities. A Protestant minister (San Luis Potosi at Rioverde, April 13, 1949) was found dead with eighty-five knife wounds in him; the murder was attributed to “Father” Jose Maria Rosales, a typical Catholic priest. In Mayoro, Zacamitla, and Tixtla, in Mexico, pastors were killed and the only response from the Vatican came from the Archbishop of Mexico who blamed the trouble on the Protestants for witnessing to the Catholics.30 In Central America a whole family of Bible believers was murdered a few miles from Managua, Nicaragua (1957).

Canadian missionary Gilbert Reimer was murdered in Panama City, Panama (1974).

And time would fail to tell of the night fighters who carried on the “good fight” in these dark alleys long after the lights had gone out all over the world.

Back in America it was Lawrence Grandy in Ohio; Rev. Noe tn Livonia, Michigan; Don Mangus in Louisville; Shelton Smith in Maryland; David Iness in San Francisco; James Powell in Montana; Jerry Prevo in Alaska; Charles Hand and Charlie Pack in Oklahoma; Ken Blue in Washington; Tolbert Moore in Georgia; Fred Lowrey in West Virginia and scores of others.

None of them would touch Jerry Falwell’s “New King James Version” with a ten foot pole.

Clyde Kendall, Jack Yost, Eldon Stevens, Paul Wyrteen, Bud Lyles, Harold Vaughn and Ray Jameson did evangelistic work. Ray Hart sang for the Lord. Ron Adrian pastored in New Castle, Delaware, and John Powell in Wadsworth, Ohio; they knocked on doors, made hospital calls, planted “negative” signs in front of their

churches, preached on the street, married the saved, buried the dead and dumped out gospel tracts all over fifty states and twenty foreign countries.

While Americans basked in the sun, “flashed ’em a copper tan,” and took “time out for Miller High Life,” the Chinese and African Christians trod the winepress alone and bloodied their garments with their own blood. While millions of Christians in America cheered the Dodgers, the Packers, the Colts, the Rams, the Oilers, the Cowboys, and the “Angels” and millions more sank thousands of dollars into monuments for training kiddy teachers, the Russian, Chinese and African Christians dodged the NKVD, the Vatican and the Communist party and tasted cold steel and became “angels” literally.

Inuwa Ibrahin was strangled to death by Moslems for witnessing.31 Malam Birmai, Kwazi Jenatua and Malam Ibrahim had become bicycle evangelists. Musa Auwa, Hawa, Hernan, Mwado, Sal Gumsa and Sha'aibu sold Bibles to the Mohammedans in Africa.32 Yerkawa, Ncida and Pilesar and Risku, converted African pastors, were all persecuted for their faith. A young man named Gwahu was struck down by his own father who used a club to beat his brains out.32-5 Sarkin Samari, Kandi, Dugwali, Jibirin, Haruha, Dziga, and Turyankur were all whipped or stoned for their Christian witness at one time or another. In the dark night of Dark Africa the night fighters stuck to their guns even if they couldn’t “capture a city for Christ” with “Flaming Evangelism, etc.”

Roland Bingham, Walter Gowan, Thomas Kent, A. B. Cook and Dr. Karl Kumm preached (1920-1950). They put out the scriptures into forty different African languages and set up 100 churches with 13,000 members in Africa; they cured 193 leper patients out of a group of 2,270 lepers.

The real New Testament witnesses continued to carry the battle to the gates of the enemy even in the dark. While the “celebrities” (Bob Jones, III, Jack Hyles, Jerry Falwell, MacArthur, Jimmy Swaggert, Billy Graham, Oral Roberts, and Rice) gained reputations for leadership, their own ability to actually preach deteriorated by the hour. Great preaching began to die out in the twentieth century after the death of J. Frank Norris, exactly as it had died out in the years following the Council of Nicaea and the years following the death of Luther. The real preachers in America in the last half of the twentieth century were not even recognized by the leading Christian celebrities. These preachers were men like Carl Lackey, Rick DeMichele, Marty Few, Ronnie Bonds, Maze

Jackson, Ed Vallow, Sammy Allen, Billy Kelly, Percy Ray, Jack Woods, Buddy Cargill, Tim Green, Tim Lee, John Mitchell, LeRoy Wright, Jim Modlish, Harley Keck, Herbert Gilbert and scores of others. These men kept up a continual scriptural bombardment in hundreds of local churches from coast to coast, with complete disregard for the executive-promotional type of “rapping” that had been adopted by Jack Hyles, Bob Jones, III, and Jerry Falwell. Jack Hyles in the 1980s began to don the mantle of the “educator.” To suit this artificial role he had to start pronouncing his “ts” more clearly and he had to lower his voice through most of his messages. In addition to this, his messages had to become saturated with talk about “standards for teenagers"; the New Testament doctrines of salvation practically disappeared from his preaching. He had forgotten that the Fundamentalists who had the highest standards of separation in the New Testament were the Fundamentalists who murdered Jesus Christ (Mark 7:2, John 18:28).

Bob Jones, III, and the Alexandrian Cult went much further and undertook to instruct pastors of local churches on how they should conduct their services, who was qualified to pastor and who should be barred from the pulpits. The head of the “Bible department” at BJU went so far as to forbid certain soul-winning, Bible-believing preachers from preaching in local churches under the threat of VIOLATING “THE REVEALED WILL OF GOD."” This poor apostate egomaniac had confused the will of God with his personal “preferences” in preachers. Another BJU writer (Faith Magazine, 1981) went so far as to say that no Christian had a right to make belief in the Bible a basis for fellowship among Christians. The basis had to be the belief that once upon a time there were some original manuscripts that got lost before they could be put into a “Bible.” This automatically condemned about 4000 Baptist pastors (neither Bob Jones, Jr., nor Bob Jones, Sr., nor Bob Jones, III, were Baptists) who believed the Authorized Version was THE BIBLE; it also condemned about 40,000,000 converts (1611-1990) who had believed that when they got saved. As BJU followed the way of all flesh it sought to overthrow the authority not only of the Book but also of the local churches whose pastors believed the Book. Anyone could guess (Vol. I, pp. ix-xiv) what they substituted for the final authority in those churches: their own opinions.

In 1983 it was still the same old Alexandrian Cult at work (Vol. I, Chap. 5) after 1800 years.

What power and authority were left in the Laodicean church were to be found in THE BOOK. What scriptural truth they had

and what fundamentals they professed to believe in in 1983 were found in THE BOOK. What soul winning they did, what cleaning up of their communities they did in 1983 was done through their use of the BOOK (Isa. 55). Where the BOOK was not believed, the fundamental churches with their pastors, deacons, schools, congregations, presbyters, conferences, conventions, associations and fellowships simply dropped out of sight into the morass of TV Christianity; they abandoned the foreign mission field altogether and left their brothers and sisters in Mexico, China, Russia and Africa to die in the torture cells.

Fortunately, hundreds of Bible-believing pastors were not deceived for a minute by the selfish, egotistical, lying apostates at Bob Jones, Tennessee Temple, Santa Rosa and Lynchburg; they knew the faculty members of these schools were simply trying to seize control of the local churches by slandering the pastors. So while the “educated class” (see p. 38) continued to assert itself as something slightly short of the Trinity, hundreds of Bible-believing pastors went right on preaching the truth. None of them wasted their time promoting schools, for they were called to preach. None of them corrected the AV Bible because they were called to preach; everyone of them was a soul-winning, street preacher and they could preach Jack Hyles, Jerry Falwell or Bob Jones, III, out of the pulpit in ten minutes when it came to real PREACHING. They had no strings on them. They were under obligation to no one; and unlike Roberson, Jones and Falwell, who were held in bondage by the “scholars” on their own faculties, these men didn’t give a flip if some school fooled around, fouled up or folded up. None of them worried about “standards of fellowship” or “secondary separation,” and you couldn’t have gotten them interested in “Neoevangelicalism” (pro or con) with a bribe. When a man takes a true BIBLICAL STANCE— unlike Falwell’s school or Bob Jones—he never has to worry about FELLOWSHIP OR SEPARATION.

No Bible-rejecting apostate of any kind in this century (Fundamentalists foremost) wants to have fellowship with a real Bible believer. Modern Fundamentalists whose “convictions” were shaped by Christian colleges, universities and seminaries look upon real Bible believers in the last century as HERETICS.34 This explains why twentieth century apostates like Bob Jones, HI, Truman Dollar, Arlin Horton, Dayton Hobbs, Arthur Farstad, Rodney Bell, Robert Sumner, A. V. Henderson and Ed Hindson believe that what they cannot understand has to be a “heresy” and what they or their friends cannot control is a “cult.” This is the

absolute spiritual depth of twentieth century materialists. In the final analysis their real “convictions” amount to these two things, and these alone, as all else is irrelevant to their income, enrollment or attendance. Their thinking is limited to issues that deal with MONEY in one form or another and they really are not even interested in what they do not understand or what they do not control. To them not only the “fundamentals” but also the Book itself are tools for obtaining control and getting attention. What they can’t understand and what they can’t control takes attention from them so they label it as “heresy” or as a “cult” and abandon it. Their real concern is for nothing more than their own opinions and their own ministries; one might say that Laodicean “convictions” for a “militant Fundamentalist” in 1983 amount to self-love and self-interest shellacked with a veneer of moral principles and theological professions. The Holy Spirit will be found nowhere in the operation.

And here the history of the New Testament churches reaches its full circle. Their roots originally sprouted in a way that was called “HERESY” (Acts 24:14) which Paul preached as a “ringleader” of a cult (Acts 24:5). This was at the dawn of the history of the New Testament local church. Having come through a dozen full circles (a man, a movement, a machine and a monument), American Fundamentalism is now (1983) in the monument stage, and all monument builders (Matt. 23:29) have a terrible time tracing the true course of the true Apostolic witness, especially as it nears their own day (see Vol. I, Introduction and Preface). By the time the “machine” has grown to where it is a rich, powerful, cultured and effective operation, its operators have long ago forgotten its source and its humble beginnings with a bunch of “crackpot fanatics” who went out and “scattered Jesus Christ” all over the Roman Empire (see Vol. I, pp. 51, 52 and 61). Like all Christian degenerates (the Adamic nature is in every saved sinner), these operators push Biblical truth aside and obliterate the lessons of church history and then put on a false front in order to attract rich people and cultured people. Having become genuine apostates they then turn on the true Bible believers who have kept the original position and call them “fanatics,” “heretics” and “cultists” who “follow a man.”

The only thing that men learn from history is that men never learn from history.

As the Roman Empire of the first century contained only a handful of Bible-believing Christians (less than 50,000 as late as 90

A.D.), so the last century of the church age, the twentieth century, saw the collapse of Biblical Christianity on a scale that left less than two percent of the earth’s population in that category. In “Christian” America only twenty-five percent of the people professed to be “Christians” and this twenty-five percent included Roman Catholics and the “land mines and Booby traps” (Chap. 15) we have just unearthed. It would be safe to say that of twenty-five percent of the professing Christians in America, certainly less than five percent ever experienced the New Birth.

Still the Holy Spirit carried on His work to the end. Here and there the truth was still held forth to the masses. Down in Mexico L. Horton, Jim Mundey, Arturo Aviles, and B. Cummings preached the unadulterated word of God; J. Tyner and J. White preached in India, Spain and Africa; Gary Ginsky preached in Oahua, Hawaii; Taber, Sumnath and Jacob Chelli led literally hundreds of natives in India to the Lord. Rachel Metzler continued her father’s work until forced out of the Chad and now she is in Haiti. Rev. Griffin ministered in Japan and Joe Vella set up local churches all over Luzon in the Philippines.

Other countless and nameless Bible believing missionaries continued to labor through the night hours in Alaska, Italy, Greece, Spain, Honduras, Puerto Rico, France, New Zealand, Norway, Sweden, Morocco, Cambodia, and Africa. Right on through two world wars, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, the wars in Lebanon Cyprus, Israel and Afghanistan, the wars in Cambo­dia, Laos, Pakistan and San Salvador; right on through the Oscar Awards and the “Emmy” Awards, right on through the presen­tations of the Heismann Trophy, the Stanley Cup, right on through the soap operas, belly dancers, pornographic cable vision and right on through the “new” KJV, the New Testament remnant held forth the word of life.

Not a preacher we have listed (or a thousand more like them) were fooled by the “Full Gospel” movement or a minute. There wasn’t a fake “healer” or “Charismatic” in the bunch. Not one of them was ecumenically minded, and not one of them believed ninety-five percent of anything that Karl Marx or Charles Darwin wrote. Not one man in the list (or any of his converts) believed in Gay Liberation or Women’s Liberation; not one man in the list was against capital punishment and you couldn’t find a promoter of “gun control” within fifty feet of them in any direction. None would vote for a man like Kennedy or Carter; none of them would have classified Brooke Shields or Elizabeth Taylor as anything more

than a slut and not one of them would have thought that degenerates like Elvis Presley and John Lennon were worth listening to for one minute. Further, they were all pro-Israel, anti- PLO, anti-IRA (Ireland) and none of them would have thought any pope was anything more than a poor lost sinner putting on religious airs to impress ignorant people.

To sum it up they were out of step with the times, they lived “cross current” to their age, they were “anti-social” and dangerous “reactionaries” by any standards of conduct taught by any fac­ulty of any state university in America. They were New Testament Christians who had been sent out to establish local New Testament churches. They continued to do it unto long “after midnight.”

As the early morning hours approach, the New Testament church prepares to meet her Lord and Head. Far from being “separated” and “holy,” in America she has become a disheveled reject who is about half psychotic. Except for the bright lights we have mentioned she has little to recommend her to a sinless Bridegroom. She is “rich and increased with goods” and knows not that she is “poor and wretched and miserable and naked and blind.” If the Lord tarries she will certainly go through the refining fires that her Chinese, Russian, Mexican and African brethren went through (1900-1980), and then perhaps she will be worthy of that heavenly praise which sings, “Thou art fair, my love!...Thou art all fair, my love; THERE IS NO SPOT IN THEE!” (Song of Sol. 4:1, 7).

Here endeth the history of the New Testament church.

EPILOGUE

With the coming of the dehumanized “humanism” which took away the civil rights, called “human rights” (1980-1990), the New Testament churches folded up under the stress of government con­trol. Plato’s “Republic” came in, accompanied by an electronic web which ensnared every man, woman, and child on the earth into a computerized technocracy controlled by the news media. The press had replaced the Bible in the local churches as well as in the United Nations, Congress, and the Vatican. “Good press” was the final authority in the last days of the New Testament church.

The mark of the beast was forshadowed by his number (666) appearing on the stock shelves of every major grocery store in Europe and both Americas, and as the scientists involved with GNA and RNA experiments pooled their inhuman experiments with the philosophers’ theories (1980-1990), a worldwide “religion” was created over which the pope at Rome was placed; he was to be a figurehead for the United Nations. Wherever any Biblical re­sistance showed up (Scotland, North Ireland, England, or the USA), crises were created by the news media to give the federal government a stronger control over the lives and properties of Christians. The Negro was the main source of these self-created “crises” in America and Africa, and “poverty” was the main source of those created in North Ireland and South America.

When the church age closed, only Israel was on the upward swing (1990) after returning to Palestine and establishing a national state (1948). In spite of 100 percent support by the news media, the Palestinian Liberation Organization was unable to drive them out, and they remained seated waiting for the invasion of Russia, the coming of the Antichrist, the Great Tribulation and the Second Advent of their True Messiah. Local churches in the Tribulation followed the pattern of Acts 1-7.

These local churches are typified by the “seven churches” in Asia as found in Revelation 1-3. We have not discussed them here as they are a matter of prophecy, not past history. The churches whose origins, routes, methods, goals, aims, and practices we have traced here are the local New Testament churches that begin with the calling out of the Twelve (Matt. 10) and ended with the Rapture (1983) plus—). In these churches Jew and Gentile make up ONE BODY (Eph. 3:1-5), which they do NOT before Acts 2 and which they will NOT after the Rapture; but this is a discipline that deals

with Prophecy and will be found in our Bible Believer’s Commen­tary on the Book of Revelation.

To all doctrinal purposes, “CHURCH HISTORY,” in the New Testament sense of the New Testament local church, ends with the Rapture.

It ends as we have indicated, with Fundamentalists who have no higher authority than their teacher’s opinions, with Conservatives with no higher authority than their pragmatic preferences, with effeminate Christian colleges and universities turning out degenerate cream puffs, with UFO’s sailing around, with the number of the Beast on credit cards, with government sponsored pornography and drug use, with federalized prostitu­tion, with liquor stores, with loss of tax exemption by Bible-believ­ing churches, with tax exemption for all Catholic organizations, and with a concept of individual human life as a chemical accident that should be controlled by scientific technology (Adolph Hitler).

Even so, come Lord Jesus.