An important part of our seminary/Bible college/Christian universities has been poisoned but I have not heard ANYONE talking about it.
Most do not seem to notice it.
And I think they do not notice it because they do not know enough to notice it.
For years our seminaries/Bible Colleges/Christian universities and churches have correctly been trying to promote and teach good theology. As they should!
But they have not noticed another part of their curriculums has been infiltrated.
I sat through a church history course at a prominent Southern Baptist Seminary. I love church history, at this point was on year 2 of our church history podcasts, so I had looked FORWARD to this class so much.
But what happened shocked me.
The professor was very energetic and engaging. His speeches were good. His classwork was not too hard.
Yet I noticed something bizarre in how he taught church history. Take any issue on any given day, he always tore down the people we'd normally look up to. Whether it was Charles Spurgeon, John Wesley, Martin Luther. He'd always EXTENSIVELY go into every single crevice or crack in their armor.
Which is fine, except when it came to the people you wouldn't like, he always gave excuses for their behavior. Voltaire, for example, he called brilliant repeatedly. Darwin he explained away. The Moravians were great. The pietists are good and need to be studied. The Catholic Jesuits were better missionaries than the protestants. Etc.
I thought this was troubling, but it was reflective of my Bible college experience with church history years before. Now my wife is finishing up some classes online and had to read a Church History book for a church history class: Turning Points, by Noll, which has a 4.6 out of 5 stars on Amazon with 500 ratings.
This textbook is supposedly covering church history turning points, yet when she put into the search bar "Great Awakening," or "Jonathan Edwards" nothing came up. NOTHING.
How can you teach Turning Points for the church without mentioning them? Much praise for the Catholic church. Praise for the Moravians. And yet heaps of scorn for Protestants and "what they could do better." I have been sitting next to Elise for the past few hours as she says thing after thing that is missing in this book or that the book gets wrong.
The exact same experience I had in Church history at a Southern Baptist seminary she is having at a different school.
Do you know why?
Because they know that 99% of us do not know any of church history. So they can say whatever they want and most people will never even notice. I remember looking around my class at seminary to see if anyone else was noticing what was happening. Everyone was taking notes but I did see one guy and we talked after class.
He had the same opinion as me, and couldn't believe this professor was one of the most praised professors at the school considering how much he tore down heroes of the faith. That same year this professor won an award for his service at the school, top professor of the year or something.
Most people don't know church history it so they have no idea when it's being changed. I am teaching an 11th grade class the other day and I ask if they could tell me anything in church history from the end of Acts to the present. They came up with: Martin Luther, Crusades, Martin Luther King.
That was it. I have done this for years and that's about what I usually get. We spend a lot of time teaching young people apologetics and theology yet we completely skip this part of our story.
You need to know the story of God's church before soon it is completely forgotten and rewritten.
God didn't just create a systematic theology when He wrote the scripture. He gave us 1 & 2 Kings, 1 & 2 Samuel, and the story of the people of God. We have 2000 years of stories of God's people that we can grow and learn from.
Progressives almost always start with history for a reason.
If they can change where you come from, they can change where you are going.
