Introduction to the Twentieth Century

Vince Massi said:
Good Heavens, Ransom. You finally got a non-scorner to join you in your sin. It certainly took you long enough.

Heavens, Vince. It only took you two weeks to realize that there's someone in here with you, and that you don't have an absolute right to monologue without interruption or criticism.

Also, making fun of inept history presentations is not a sin, and you definitely don't get to place people laughing at your "history" on a par with people mocking the Christian faith. Get over yourself.
 
The first fundamentalists were members of mainline denominations who fought to drive out the modernists. When they lost, they withdrew to form new denominations that believed the same thing as the original denominations, except that the new ones stood without compromise for God's Word.

The Christians who stayed behind rejected the term "fundamentalist" and chose "evangelical." DOCTRINALLY, an evangelical believes the entire Word of God with an emphasis on the four Gospels. The first evangelicals viciously attacked the fundamentalists for their lack of love (Seriously) and the two groups became enemies.

Over time, fundamentalists emphasized separation, fighting, in-fighting, and "standards" (man-made rules). And,strangely, much of the genuine Christianity in the US today is the result. Evangelicals emphasized getting along with everyone (good and evil), learning from Christians outside their own groups, and genuine holiness. Most born-again Christians in the US today are evangelicals.
 
Vince Massi said:
Evangelicals emphasized getting along with everyone (good and evil), learning from Christians outside their own groups, and genuine holiness. Most born-again Christians in the US today are evangelicals.

Oh good grief. Are you serious? This whole "lesson" was a turd, but your characterization of evangelicals in particular is especially foul.

Where are you getting your history, Mad magazine?
 
Baptists in the US

The second-largest religion in the US today, Baptists thrived in early America due to freedom and the inability of European Protestant churches to enforce religious laws. Only the Bahamas has a higher percentage of Baptists.

Cursed by Calvinism, Modernism, and racism, Baptists were the first to evangelize the slaves, and then abandoned them when they became free. The National Baptist Convention is predominantly Black, rife with financial fraud, unable to win its own people to Christ, and suffers from a poorly-trained clergy.

Modernists have seized the American Baptist Convention, but suffered a major defeat in "The Fundamentalist Take-over" of the Southern Baptist Convention. It is Bible-believing Baptists who did more successful evangelism in the US than any other group.

In the Nineteenth Century, John Gill introduced Calvinism into the Baptist religion, virtually destroying European Baptists. In the US, Calvinists constantly struggle to seize Bible-believing Baptist churches, and they are often successful. When revival breaks out, Calvinist churches successfully attract deacons, Sunday School teachers, and tithers who were trained elsewhere but do not want to partake in revival.

Independent Fundamentalist Baptists (IFBs) hit their heyday in the sixties and seventies. At one point, the largest church in 17 states was IFB, while the largest non-Catholic church in another 17 states was IFB. Emphasizing man-made rules as the cause and result of holiness, most IFB growth came from Southern Baptists who wanted to do something with their lives, rather than from soul-winning. An ongoing series of sex scandals (still in progress) began in the early 1980s and has caused the movement to decline.
 
Vince Massi said:
In the Nineteenth Century, John Gill introduced Calvinism into the Baptist religion,

John Gill was born in 1697 and died in 1771. In other words, he spent his adult life in the eighteenth century.

The First London Baptist Confession was framed in 1644, which is the seventeenth century, and fifty years before John Gill was even born.

Benjamin Keach was another Particular Baptist preacher who lived in the seventeenth century. A catechism named after him was published in 1677. Gill was one of Keach's successors at the Baptist chapel that eventually became the Metropolitan Tabernacle, whose most famous preacher was, of course, Charles Haddon Spurgeon (who did in fact live in the nineteenth century, but he didn't introduce Calvinism to the Baptist faith).

John Bunyan was a Calvinist Baptist. He died in 1688, almost a decade before Gill was born.

The next year, the Second London Baptist Confession was published. It, too, was in existence eight years before John Gill ever drew his first breath.

Gill didn't introduce Calvinism to the Baptists. It was part of our theological warp and woof from the beginning.

But hey. What's a two-hundred-year error? Who needs facts? It's only revisionist history! Why consult Wikipedia or books or libraries or stuff when it's just easier to BS your way through it, right Vince?
 
Don't forget about Particular Baptist and Calvinist Andrew Fuller whose book "The Gospel Worthy of all Acceptation", restated Calvinist theology and so impressed William Carey that he gave his life to Missions. Yep William Carey, Calvinist. That was in the late 1700s.

Yes that William Carey called "Father of Modern Missions" who said, "Expect great things from God; attempt great things for God".
 
My tremendous apology, Folks. I goofed.  I should have said:

"In the Nineteenth Century, the Calvinism of John Gill was widely- introduced to Baptists, virtually destroying the Baptist religion in Europe."

Opposed to man-made creeds, British Baptists got stuck with Calvinists creeds before the Nineteenth Century. The pagan philosophies of Mani and Saint Augustine cannot be found in Scripture, so man-made creeds were (and still are) necessary to support Calvinism.
 
You goofed again...

Gill was a highly successful pastor. One of the largest churches in England and very supportive of the Calvinist George Whitefield.

Fast forward 100 years+. Ever hear of Spurgeon, a 5 point Calvinist and his fight against the Downgrade Controversy?

It was the Downgrade that destroyed Europe.

Arminians destroy churches. Arminians rewrite history and ignore their heritage in the Baptist Union.
 
THE FAILURE OF RELIGIOUS EDUCATION  Part 1

Catholic Schools in the US

By 1880, there were enough Catholic schools to provoke opposition. Several states stopped providing funding and Protestant legislators called for the children of Catholic immigrants (mostly Irish) to learn to be Americans in the public schools.

From the beginning, Catholic schools were staffed by poorly-trained teachers who produced a better education than the public schools.

1900  3,500 Catholic elementary schools and 100 high schools
1920  6551 Catholic elementary schools and  1500 high schools
1925  US Supreme Court rules that religious schools are Constitutionally protected.

1965 Catholic schools hit their highs with  5.5 million students.  With most children having a parent who was a World War 2 veteran, the Catholic schools used strict discipline to control large, understaffed classrooms. Later, accusations of brutality would cause a mass exodus out of Catholicism by its school graduates.

1970s  A nationwide movement to the suburbs leaves inner-city Catholic school without adequate money, as wealthier Catholics leave. A decline in women entering convents leaves the Catholic schools without enough sisters. Decreasing morals, tuition fees, and a rejection of strict discipline lead many Catholics to send their children to public schools.

1998 study shows that Catholic school children are 13% more likely to graduate from high school.

In 2010, about 2 million American children were in Catholic schools. US Census shows that 1 out of 7 American adults are ex-Catholics. Dropping from about 48% of the population to about 1/3 in 45 years, total Catholic numbers stay about the same due to immigration.

What went wrong? More than one thing, but many Catholic school graduates were more affected by the brutality than by the doctrines. When they got old enough, they got out.
 
Vince Massi said:
My tremendous apology, Folks. I goofed.

By which you mean you lied.

I should have said:
"In the Nineteenth Century, the Calvinism of John Gill was widely- introduced to Baptists, virtually destroying the Baptist religion in Europe."

Except that this isn't true either. English Baptists were Calvinists. Gill's theology didn't introduce Calvinism to English Baptists; he was a Calvinist because he was an English Baptist.
 
Ransom says "By which you mean you lied."
Romans 2:1 says "You who judge do the same things."

I apologize, Folks, In discussing how Calvinism has fouled up Baptists in the United States, I used a badly-blurred sentence about how Calvinism has virtually destroyed the Baptist religion in Europe. I apologized immediately upon learning of my mistake and restated the sentence correctly.

But since the subject came up: If you want to see a frustrated Church historian, look at a Protestant explaining away the fact that Baptists appeared suddenly all over Europe whenever the Catholic Church lost its control. With as many records as possible destroyed by the Catholic Church, and their existence kept secret by the Baptists themselves, they cannot prove that they go back in an unbroken line to Christ. But Baptists were there before the Calvinists, and they did not come out of the Protestant Reformation.

Needing man-made creeds to present the philosophy of irresistible grace (invented in the early 17th Century), Calvinists wrote man-made creeds that eventually devastated the Baptist religion in Europe. But Baptists thrived in the US. Unfortunately, Calvinism specializes in seizing Bible-believing churches, and it has been a curse on US Baptists.
 
Vince Massi said:
But Baptists were there before the Calvinists, and they did not come out of the Protestant Reformation.

Which Baptist predated Calvinists?

For those who did not go to a IFB college, this thread is a perfect example of IFB historical revisionism you would get in History 101. Perhaps you can understand the world of the IFB better.

The anti-creedal liberalism, historical revisionism, anti-scripture and anti-education all baptized in tubs in Hammond, Watertown and wherever IFB schools were located.
 
THE FAILURE OF CHRISTIAN COLLEGES


During the 1970?s, a new Christian school opened every seven hours. As a teacher, I had to attend teachers? conferences and noticed that less than half the teachers had entered their third year. This does not include the teacher grads who never got a school to teach in. Decades later, I started looking for former Christian school teachers to help in the ministry, and I found out that most of them are not even attending church.
Continuing my search, I realized that most Bible college graduates are not attending church either. Most of them never get a pastorate and are not serving as laymen. Bible colleges rarely publish their numbers.

Using Wikipedia and other online sources, I was able to find the number of churches in various evangelical groups, their total attendance, and the number of students in their Bible colleges (not all of whom graduated). If you count the drop-outs, the average evangelical church in the US should have 22 former Bible college students, if those students all live to be 65. You know yourself that we?re not even close.
I left teaching in 1989 and have not met a HAC, BJU, or Tennessee Temple grad ever since. I have never met a Maranatha, Oral Roberts, Texas Baptist College, Wheaton, or Philadelphia College of the Bible grad. I have met three Moody grads (including Joe Combs), one Pillsbury grad, two Prairie grads, and one Liberty grad. I have met two HAC, one BJU, and one Tennessee Temple drop-out who attended church, noting that they had dropped out only a few years before.

An angry Assemblies of God missionary challenged my statement, promising publicly to bring proof that the AOG wasn?t like that. She never produced the proof, and after researching the AOG numbers, I concluded that they are about the same as the others.

One Southern Baptist seminary posted that five years after receiving a doctorate, less than half their grads had any ministry at all, including Sunday School teacher. Perhaps replying to my posts, Bob Gray (who graduated from HAC) posted that less than 5% of freshman pastoral theology majors would ever pastor a church. He did not state that the 5% would be able to pastor for the rest of their lives.

Of the HAC grads currently pastoring, a disproportionately large percentage are the sons of pastors?they received training and mentoring  that the rest of us didn?t receive.

When I explain this to surprised brethren, I ask how many grads of Bible colleges they have met who are serving as laymen. A small number have met one or two.
 
You post this in the middle of your IFB historical revisionism?
 
Vince Massi said:
Folks, In discussing how Calvinism has fouled up Baptists in the United States, I used a badly-blurred sentence about how Calvinism has virtually destroyed the Baptist religion in Europe. I apologized immediately upon learning of my mistake and restated the sentence correctly.

By which you mean you lied.

First you said you "goofed.". Considering the extent of the falsehood in that particular post, I assume your "goof" must have consisted of taking your binder marked "Fake History" off the shelf, typing an entire page into the forum and clicking "Post" before you realized your "goof."

Now, you're claiming the issue was a "badly-blurred sentence" and not, as ordinary observation would indicate, a clearly worded post containing unambiguous misinformation from start to finish.

So you lied.

Then you tried to excuse your lie with a fake apology and another lie.

Then you tried to excuse your second lie with another fake apology and a third lie.

You are either grossly inept or grossly dishonest, Vince. Either way, for what reason should we continue to tolerate this thread, since it is not based on truth or reality?
 
I want to thank the readers who stayed with this thread, averaging about 35 hits per day. As usual, Ransom latched onto an opportunity to disobey God's commands not to scorn, and as usual, most lurkers ignored him. However,  I was pleased to note that he couldn't get as many scorners to rally to his sins as he used to.

Now, the purpose of this series: Everyone has their own concept of reality, and the more isolated that person is from the vibrant, ever-changing world around him, the more incorrect his concept will be. HAC kept us isolated from a lot of truth, "protecting" us from knowledge of the success of other Christians, ordering us not to discuss sins in the leadership, and claiming that God's greatest blessings are reserved for IFBs.

As a result, we have Godly HAC grads unhappily trapped in the most sexually corrupt religion in the United States, missing the blessings of reading translations they can understand, ignoring spiritual gifts, and thinking that their obedience to unsuccessful man-made rules is both the cause and result of holiness.

Years ago, my family carefully attended a soul-winning, fundamental Southern Baptist church and were amazed at the blessings and opportunities to serve that we found. When a handful of people were able to seize the fundamental, soul-winning Baptist church we attended here in Mexico, my wife and I were able to find opportunities to serve in a Godly, soul-winning Assemblies of God church while remaining IFB. Brethren, you're allowed to leave a movement that honors an unrepentant sex criminal, and God won't abandon you if you do.

A surprising spin-off occurred when Calvinists expressed their respect for the unscriptural man-made creeds they follow. I will be starting a four-part series on "Why Calvinists Need Man-Made Creeds," and I hope that it can help our readers.
 
[quote author=Vince Massi]...the more isolated that person is from the vibrant, ever-changing world around him, the more incorrect his concept will be...[/quote]


...

Nah, it's too easy.
 
Vince Massi said:
As usual, Ransom latched onto an opportunity to disobey God's commands not to scorn, and as usual, most lurkers ignored him.

How would you know, Vince?  Lie #4.

At least you didn't try to "profoundly apologize" or something this time.

Everyone has their own concept of reality, and the more isolated that person is from the vibrant, ever-changing world around him, the more incorrect his concept will be.

When your "concept of reality" is John Gill introducing Reformed theology to the English Baptists in the nineteenth century, and that someone who calls you on your error is a "scorner" who tries to lead others into "sin," how isolated are you?
 
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