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Advent HOPE Sabbath School

Jonathan Zirkle

Coexist

Well, this is the first presentation in my series, Coexist.

When I was putting this series together, I didn't really know how to title it.

I didn't know whether to call it Coexist or something related to evolution.

And so you see this slide here starting out, and I think it captures the spirit of the times that we live in and some of the heresies that we deal with today.

Now this presentation is gonna cover a whole lot of different subjects and I hope you'll come to the afternoon where we'll cover some of the ones that we don't get to cover here this morning.

But as a way of introduction, I wanted to kind of talk about the different subjects that we'll be talking about.

I tried to find pictures that you guys would recognize and understand what I was talking about, but this is a...

What we're talking about is something called the emergent church, but the emergent church has roots going back a long, long time.

This is something that that is a modern phenomena that's happened in the last few years.

1 little note on this, people will try to argue with you, are we talking about emergent church, emergence, and they have all different variations on a term.

It's really all the same thing, no matter what anyone will tell you.

But when we look at this, we're going to talk about all kinds of different subjects.

Really at the heart is this guy here, Charles Darwin.

Charles Darwin lays the foundation upon which the Emergent Church builds, But he inspired these other people, Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud.

All of this was also inspired and came out of a little thing called the French Revolution.

I was trying to decide what to use as a symbol for the French Revolution, and I chose the Declaration of the Rights of Man.

And this is a very famous way of depicting it.

When you look at that, doesn't that look like 2 tablets of stone with some laws written on it?

But the story, you know, if you were to just ask a secular person or a theologian about the Emergent Church, they would probably talk about some of these things.

We'll talk about that a little bit this afternoon.

And they may talk about Vatican II and how it kind of laid the foundation so that this would be possible with what's going on with the Emergent Church.

And if any of you have studied the New Age, then a lot of what I'm going to be talking about is old hat, because in a lot of ways, the New Age, when it tried to come into the church in the 1980s, what we're seeing with the emergent church is a lot of the same things.

It's just New Age 2.0, so I have the New Age and the flower children here.

What you may not realize though is the relevance of this man right here, John Harvey Kellogg.

And I hope that you will come this afternoon to learn more about this.

You see, there's nothing new under the sun and we can learn from our past, and I think you'll see a parallel that's very, very strong, and there's much for us to learn.

Probably the most important picture that I have up here is this 1 right here.

That's a Bible, and that's a Bible that's been terribly abused.

The reason why I put that there is because I wanted something that would symbolize higher criticism, and higher criticism is a very important element that allows this to happen.

And for those of you that don't know, I'll just talk briefly about higher criticism.

Higher criticism is the belief that we can bring a critical discussion to the Bible, And by bringing this critical discussion to the Bible, we will apply things that we know from science, at least science so called, to pass judgment on what is true and what is false in scripture.

And it leads people to just throw things out willy-nilly, and eventually you just get rid of all the parts you don't like and keep the parts you do like, and nobody can be sure what's the inspired Word of God and what is not the inspired Word of God.

But if you get rid of the Bible in this method, you lose your anchor, and then you're lost on a sea of relativity.

Spirit of Prophecy had this to say, as in the days of the Apostles, men tried by tradition and philosophy to destroy faith in the Scriptures.

So today, by the pleasing sentiments of higher criticism, evolution, spiritualism, theosophy, and pantheism, the enemy of righteousness is seeking to lead souls into forbidden paths.

To many, the Bible is a lamp without oil because they've turned their minds into channels of speculative belief that bring misunderstanding and confusion.

The work of higher criticism in dissecting, conjecturing, reconstructing is destroying faith in the Bible as a divine revelation.

It is robbing God's Word of power to control, uplift, and inspire human lives.

You know, we're reaping the consequences of allowing higher criticism to enter into our thinking and sometimes into our schools.

I want you to turn with me in your Bible to Revelation 16.

And I want to look particularly at verses 13 and 14.

This is the counterfeit 3 Angels Messages.

And I saw 3 unclean spirits like frogs come out of the mouth of the dragon, out of the mouth of the beast, and out of the mouth of the false prophet.

For they are the spirits of devils working miracles, which go forth unto the kings of the earth and of the whole world to gather them to battle of that great day of God Almighty." So let's look at that.

We see these 3 frogs, and they all look the same, right?

3 frogs coming out of the mouth of the dragon.

Now I think most of us are Adventists here who've had a lot of training in the prophecies.

I heard someone say paganism and I'm like, yeah, that's right, boy.

You got to listen to me to be sure I don't fool you.

Out of the beast, papal system, and out of the false prophet, and the false prophet being apostate Protestantism.

And these are the spirits of devils working miracles.

If this is a counterfeit 3 angels message, what does the 3 angels message say?

It basically says, fear God and give glory to him, for he's the creator, correct?

And then also to summarize the rest, it's come out of her my people.

If you listen to the emergent church, it's an embrace of evolution and ecumenicalism of coming together in unity.

So let's look and see if we can see if there's something going on in the world that would be a counterfeit 3 Angels message.

And in order to do that, we need to see this coming out of the mouth of the beast, out of the mouth of the dragon, and out of the mouth of the false prophet, correct?

Juergen Moltmann is a professor of systematic theology at the University of Tübingen.

Now my presentation, I apologize, is going to have some big words and stuff that you're maybe not familiar with, and I'm gonna make an effort to always define those and explain them so it's easy to understand.

Systematic theology is a theology that gives you a overarching picture, the big picture.

It's where you can make everything fit together.

As Adventists, we have a very sophisticated systematic theology, and it's a beautiful thing because a lot of Christian churches don't have it, especially among the normal membership, but for us we have it, and it's the great controversy.

Now, he's from the University of Tubingen.

This is also an interesting place because this is widely thought of as the birthplace of higher criticism.

He's made significant contributions to a number of areas of Christian theology, including systematic theology, eschatology, or in time events.

That's really important and near and dear to us as Adventists, and to the theology of creation.

These are the big things that we're interested in.

And by the way, just so you know, he's Protestant.

He's influenced heavily by Hegel's philosophy of history.

I'm going to talk about Hegel in a minute.

The Frankfurt School, Frankfurt School is interesting.

This is a branch of Marxism that didn't believe in violent overthrow of the bourgeois.

And so they kind of got scooted out of the East and they eventually made it to Frankfurt and then they eventually made it to the United States.

They actually brought us the sexual revolution.

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