Church history class number 155. I'm trying to cover everything in the church history classes. We even put a little bit of systematic theology in it. We're studying about deism right now. Deism because deism has an effect on all the churches. Even Baptist churches sometimes deists come wandering, slipping in underneath corners and underneath the door seal and getting into the churches and affect that. Jehovah's Witnesses have done that with their Jehovah's Witness doctrine. We see all of these things and we understand, we must understand that doctrines of the Bible are very important. The doctrine of God is important. And deism is not God, the God of the Bible. Now, deists get into churches. They got into the Valley Baptist Church, I saw that. It has a Unitarian idea, Unitarian deists. Unitarianism is not Christianity. It may be a slight flavor and shade of Christendom, but it's not Christianity at all. Contemporary deism attempts to integrate classical deism with modern philosophy. and current state of scientific knowledge. This attempt has produced a wide variety of personal beliefs under the broad classification of deism. Most of your religious people out there today don't know anything about doctrine or they don't want to know anything about doctrine. Say it's not necessary. You don't want anybody to be a member of your church that is not saved, that does not know the Lord. Now, other churches out there, they don't, we're not talking Catholicism, they don't make this statement at all. Catholicism, your future and your salvation is completely in their hands. In the salvation and the doctrines of the Bible, salvation is in the hands of God, not man. And God deals with every man to His Holy Spirit to draw you unto Him. Whether you accept or reject that, of course now we got the religions that say you can't accept or reject. Simply because you are saved, that means that you never successfully rejected the grace of God or the holy wooing of the Holy Spirit. But we know that God deals with every man's heart. He doesn't create the damned the repute. God does not create bad. He creates good and perfect. There are a number of subcategories to model deism. The default standard concept of deism, pandeism, panandeism, spiritual deism, process deism, Christian deism, poly-deism, scientific deism, humanistic deism. Some deists see design and nature and purpose in the universe and in their lives. Others see God and the universe in a co-creative process. Man helps God create the nature. Some deists view God, as classical terms, as observing humanity but not directly intervening in our lives, while others deists say that God is subtle and pervasive in spirit who created the world and then stepped back to observe what mankind is going to do with it. Now I can tell you this, in church history, in this chart up here, I can show you where religions stick up their heads. Every false religion has some satanically inspired leader. As God inspired the prophets of old and the writers of the New Testament to write the Bible, Satan is very capable of doing the same thing in false religion. And deism is one of those false religions. You can go into a Buddhist temple and you can see Buddha there, whatever, you know, and we see people standing down and worshipping and touching and adoring these idols. There is power in those idols. That power is satanic and demonic influence. It is drawing power. As you look down to here and you see it, you see Catholicism coming up in 325 A.D. You see the church and the state united. You see the Mariolatry, the worship of Mary. We see in 500 to 600, we see Leo II, the Pope officially established, we see infant baptism established by law, all of this is right out of hell, people. The church in the state, now I know many of you are primitive Baptists, you listen out there, this is true. Up until this day, as far as I know, if you ever get married with a marriage license according to the state, you are excluded from a primitive Baptist church because you have aligned yourself with the church in the state. And even for hundreds of years Baptists practiced the same thing. The Catholic Church, you had to get married by this date, you had to get buried by this date. You had to get born by this date and you had to be baptized or else somebody's going to be punished. And baptismal regeneration is a hellish doctrine. You're not baptized for salvation. Baptism is not a vehicle of grace. You follow Christ in doing that. The Lord's Supper is not a Eucharist. It is not a vehicle of grace. It is something we do for God. We remember Him. We remember what Jesus did for us. We don't get anything out of it. We already got it. We remember Him when we take that bread and we take that wine or grape juice, get them off to stay sun-blue. Whatever we do, we remember Him. We remember Him. And those are two church ordinances. Indulgence. In other words, you can buy indulgences. When you went into the Catholic Church, if you became a mercenary in the Catholic Church, everything that you stole, every woman that you raped, whatever you did was forgiven. Purgatory was invented so that you would have to pay your friends out or your loved ones out of purgatory by some priests or priests praying prayers to Mary. Mariolatry. Mary substituted Christ. Image worship, 787. Intercommunion, transubstantiation. That's where the idea and the doctrine of churning the bread into Jesus and the wine into his blood. That is right out of hell, people. That's not of God, that's not of the Bible. We have the celibacy, 1123 established, where the priest couldn't marry anymore, so then here's where all the child molesting and all of the wives being impregnated by the priest. And then all of the nuns getting pregnant and exposing babies. Auricular confession. The Bible is totally forbidden in 1229 A.D. Now you tell me how that is from God. The Bible, God's revelation, is forbidden to be written? To be read? You think that's of God? Back up here, you come back up here and you see in 595 A.D. we have Muhammad and his religion. 570 Muhammad was born, 610 Islam begins. He declares war on Christianity and declares war on all religions except his and the world, and that war has never been withdrawn. In the 1960s, a theologian by the name of Charles Harshorn scrupulously examined and rejected both deism and pandeism as well as pantheism in favor of the concept of God whose characteristics included absolute perfection in some aspects and relative perfection in all others. And writing this in his theory is able to consistently to embrace all the positive in either deism or pandeism including the pandeistic Doctrine contains all deism and pantheism except their arbitrary negations. Charles Taylor in his book in 2007, A Secular Age, The History of the Role of Deism, Exclusive Humanism. The Prosperity Gospel is humanism, people. The book, The Shack, is humanism. The prosperity gospel gives mankind exactly what the lost world wants. The Bible says set your eyes on heaven and they say get everything you can get because God wants you to have everything. We need to be thankful for whatever we have. I'm thankful for every day what I have, a home that I can live in that's warm and cool and warm in the winter and cool in the summer and protects me from the elements. And it's easy for me to get around in my older, close to 80-year-old age. Charles Taylor, in the 2007 book, showed the historic role of this and exclusive humanism. Humanism invokes a moral order whose ontic commitment is wholly intra-human. The special achievements of such deism-based humanism is that it discloses new anthropotentic and moral sources by which human beings are motivated, your motivational seminars. This is all related, people, and empowered to accomplish action to mutual benefit. The province of a buffered, disengaged self, which is locus of human dignity, freedom, and discipline, is endowed with a sense of human capability. According to Taylor, by the early 19th century, the deism mediated exclusive humanitarian development throughout the world. an alternative to Christian faith and a personal God. The rejection of miracles and the mysteries. The miracles and mysteries in the Bible are very important. Basically, we don't have miracles and mysteries in the world today. The miracles that Jesus performed and the apostles performed was to prove that he was Messiah to Israel and to prove that the Bible they were receiving was of God. When the Bible was finished, then we don't need all the miracles anymore. Now, deism in Nazi Germany. Now, Nazi Germany had two great effects. Lutheranism. Luther believed in the basically Augustine, or Augustine, however you want to pronounce his name, the replacement theology in that the Jewish people were damned into annihilation. John Calvin believed the same thing. Look at when they come up. Now here we have this, we have a Greek Orthodox here, we see Roman Catholic here, and out of the Roman Catholic Church we have a Lutheran Church, 1530. Martin Luther. Martin Luther lived between 1483 and 1546. We have the Augsburg Confession. We have a Presbyterian Church. We have Calvin, 1509 to 1564. We see the Congregationalists. We see the Presbyterians. We see the Cumberland. We see the Disciples. We see the Church of England. We see the Methodists coming out of the Church of England. All of these are a conglomeration of beliefs. But they all came out of Catholicism. They all came out of Catholicism except the Baptists. The Baptists go back to Christ. They're called by different names, as you see. Nazi Germany. Nazi Germany wanted to exterminate the Jews, didn't they? Well, the Jewish people had a lot of power and money. And they wanted to get rid of them. They believed that God had denounced them. And of course, in Nazi Germany, then they became a deistic society. Now let's look at that. You're getting the history of the world when you study this and what the world believed. That Gottkribig, literally believing in God, was a Nazi religious term for a form of non-denominationalism practiced by those German citizens who had officially left Christian churches but professed faith in some higher power or divine creator. Such people were called Gottliebik, believers in God. And the term of the overall movement was Gottliebigkeit, belief in God. And the term denotes, and I may not be pronouncing that exactly correct, the term denotes someone who still believes in God but without having any institutional religious affiliation. With Catholicism, with a church state, it's always necessary to lay aside your beliefs and join the church state, the established religion. And this was the established religion of Germany. In the Catholic church, When baptism was established by law, there was a fine if you didn't, what they wanted is they wanted a child born into the world, they wanted him to be a member of the church and a member of the state, his citizenship. And if that didn't take place, the parents were fined or persecuted or killed, and the baby sometimes was left in a, they would put him in a tub of warm water and slit his wrists and say, tell me when you want me to baptize him. Boy, that's hard. That's viciousness. In false religion, there's also always persecution, death and deprivation and torture. These nationalist socialists, socialism is a religion, communism is a religion, were not fragile towards religious institutions of their time. Nor did they tolerate atheism any time within their ranks. They didn't tolerate atheism either, see. When you get into this type of situation, you have no freedom of religion, people. In Catholicism, there wasn't freedom of religion. In Muslim world, you have no freedom of religion. In a Catholic world, you didn't have any freedom of religion. In Germany, you didn't have any freedom of religion. They rejected irregular godlessness, so to speak. The Gottholipic Act is considered a form of deism and was phenomenally based on creationist and deistic views. In 1920, the Nationalist Socialist Program of the National Socialist Germany Workers' Party, NSDAP, Adolf Hitler was mentioned, the phrase Positive Christianity. Positive Christianity. He was extremely religious. He was extremely superstitious. The Nazi Party did not wish to tie itself to a particular Christian doctrine, but with Christianity in general sought freedom of religion from all denominations, so long as they did not endanger its existence or oppose moral senses of the Germanic race. When Hitler and the NSDAP got into power in 1933, they sought to assert state control over churches. See, church, state, church, state, church, state. And on one hand, the Ribbentrop Act with the Roman Catholic Church and the forced merger of the German Evangelical Church Confederation into the Protestant Reich Church on the other. policy seemed to have gone relatively well until the 1936 when gradual worsening relations between the Nazi Party and the Churches saw the rise of a Kirchen-Nachtlicht, leaving the Church. While there was no top official directive to revoke Church membership, some Nazi Party members started doing this voluntarily and put the other members under pressure to follow their example. Those who left the churches were designated as believers in God and also specified the term political disassociation with the churches, a non-active religious apostasy, the term dissident, which some churches leavers had used up until then was associated with without belief, glubenesius, and most of them emphasized that they still believed in God and thus required a different word. In a sense, since 1939, six years into the Nazi realm and era, and after the annexation of a mostly Catholic federal state of Austria, mostly Catholic German-occupied Czechoslovakia into a German-occupied Europe indicate that 50%, 54% of the population considered itself Protestant and considered itself Catholic by 3.5%, self-identified Gatovego, and 1.5% as atheist. Then we come to different nations in the world. This has a lot to do with what's going on in the world today. If you don't believe what's going on in the world today has got to do with the religion, look at Islam. Look at Islam. You know, if you're not a Muslim of their sect, you are a kafir, you are infidel, you are dirt. And to kill you, cheat you, cut you into a million pieces, doesn't matter to them because you are non-human. in Turkey and many of these other countries. The Turkish Ministry of Education titled the youth as sliding toward deism, observing that an increasing number of pupils in Amman Hatip schools were reputing an ism afraid of deism and irreligious belief in a creator god. It caused a large scale controversy. in the Turkish trash and societies large as well as amongst conservative Islamic sects. Muslim clerics and Islamist parties in Turkey had a walleye-calypson fit, so to speak. But they were called progressive Muslims. By the way, the progressive Muslims are the less violent, by the way. The Muslim people are violent. It said the cause that the real reason for the loss of faith in Islam is not the West, but Turkey itself and Islam. Deism in the United States. Post-Enlightenment, it never died out entirely. Thomas Edison. You ever heard of Thomas Edison? He's the one who created the light bulb and all this kind of stuff. The phonograph and the motion pictures and all that. was also heavily influenced by Thomas Paine's The Age of Reason. Edison defended Paine's scientific deism. It has been called an atheist, but atheist he was not. Paine believed in supreme intelligence and representing the idea which other men often express in the name of the deity. Edison joined the Theosophical Society in New Jersey. But according to its founder, Helena Blavitsky, he was not a very active member. In 1910, he had an interview with the New York Times Magazine. Edison said this, these are his words. Nature is what we know. We do not know the gods of religions. Nature is what we know. We do not know the gods of religions. And nature is not kind or merciful or loving. If God made me the fabled God of the three qualities of which I speak, mercy, kindness and love, He also made the fish which I catch and eat. And where do His mercy and kindness, love for the fish come in? No, nature made us. Nature did it all, not the gods of religion. And we are all man eat man, the survival of the fittest. Edison was labeled an atheist for his remarks. Although he did not allow himself to be drawn into the conversation publicly, he declared himself in a private letter. He said, I've been misunderstood in the whole article. We ought to jump to the conclusion that it denies the existence of God. There is no such denial. What you call, what I call, I call nature. What you call God, I call nature. The supreme intelligence that rules all. All the article states is that it is doubtful, in my opinion, in our intelligence and soul, whatever one may call it, lives hereafter as an entity and disperses back again from which it came, scattered among all the cells of which we were made. He also stated, I do not believe in the God of the theologians, but I believe there is supreme intelligence. I do not doubt. In 2001, America's Religious Identification Survey, ARIS, between 1900 and 2001, the number of self-identifying deists grew from 6,000 to 49,000. And some of them are not counted in churches. Some of them are members of your Baptist churches, your Presbyterian churches, your Methodist churches, whatever. Rather than their religious identification, 70% of Americans believe in a personal God, 70%. Roughly 12% are atheists or agnostics. By the way, an atheist is one that doesn't believe in God. An agnostic says that God does not reveal himself and nobody can prove that there is a God. That they're ignorant of God and so are you. 12% believe in a deist, a paganistic concept of divine or as a high power rather than a personal God. Their term ceremony deism was coined in 1962. and has been in use since 1984, the Supreme Court of the United States assesses exemptions from the established clause of the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution and thought to express a cultural tradition and not earnest invocations of a deity. It has been noted that the term does not describe any school of thought within the deistic itself. The Bible says God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son that whosoever believeth in Him shall not perish but have everlasting life. God did not send His Son into the world to condemn the world because the world was already condemned. The Bible teaches that God is involved with mankind and God became related to man. Out in the world These deists believe that the ends justify the means. World wars and things, whatever, the slaughter of humankind, it doesn't matter as long as you bring mankind closer together. And now in the world today, in America today, there's no such thing as right and wrong. There's no such thing as right and wrong. There's no such thing as male and female. There is no such thing as a murderer. A multi-murderer is just as valid in society and should be supported as a citizen that pays his taxes and goes and takes and raises his children up. Both of them are equal. Something is wrong with that, isn't it? When you get into atheism, when you get into deism, And there's a lot of flavors and shades of deism as you know now. You don't have any real standards. You don't have any real standards of right and wrong. Because who is going to set the standard between right and wrong? It's all relative, isn't it? It's all relative. It's relative to where you are, what you are doing. And we have in the Muslim world, we have absolute totalitarian rule. We have people ruling over people that you believe. You have to eat like they say. You have to live like they say. If you want to go any other religion, you will be killed. If you try to make a convert to Christianity, you're going to die. And so is a convert. We look at all this in a world of religious chaos. And we know from the Bible that there are set standards. We have the Ten Commandments. The Ten Commandments tell you how bad you are. That's all it does. You're not going to keep the Ten Commandments. It's going to tell you how bad you are. When you know how bad you are, then you come to God with a broken heart and say, Lord, forgive me of my sins and shortcomings and of my horrible life. Please save my soul. Forgive me. Help me to live for you every day. That's Christianity. That's Christianity. That's salvation. For in grace ye are having been saved through faith and not out of you. It is the gift of God, not a work lest any man should boast. For we are created unto good works. When we're born again, then we do good works. Not to get born again, but because we are born again. You're not dipped in baptism or sprinkler poured. Excuse me. The Hellish Doctrine of Baptismal Regeneration. First of all, baptism is only one form, and that's dipping, immersion. Baptizo means, the Latin form is mergeo, and we get our word immersed in the English out of the Latin. Baptism is dipping. Baptism is not baptism by a church to put you into the family of God. You baptize because you have become a member of God's family. You take the Lord's Supper not to get something out of the Lord's Supper, but you take the Lord's Supper to remember what God did for you. You don't go praying, you know, you see religion holding their hands up, you know, I want a blessing, I want a blessing, I want a blessing. Why not be a blessing to God? You want a blessing, follow the Lord. We always want something. We always want something, we always have our hand out religiously. You know what? Jesus Christ wants to save you. That's what He wants to do. He is not content that any should perish, but all should come to the knowledge of salvation. Jesus Christ died for your sins. He died for the sins of all mankind. And by special revelation from the Old Testament to the New Testament, it tells us thousands of times in the Old Testament that Jesus is coming. Starting with Genesis 3.15. Salvation is by grace. You can't do anything to get it. You respond to the gift of God is what you do. You respond to it. When you're baptized, you're baptized by submitting and declaring to the world that you heard. You died to your old life and you're raised anew into a newness of life. When you take the Lord's Supper, you're not getting something from it. You're not getting salvation. It's not a vehicle of grace. It is a vehicle of thanks. You thank God for what He did for you. You thank God, thank Jesus for the blood He shared on that cross and before the cross and the great, all the horrible things in His life. being rejected and beaten and scourged and blasphemed. And yet he opened up his mouth. Isaiah 53, Psalm 22 tells you about what is going to happen to him. God sent Jonah to Nineveh to save those people. Nineveh created crucifixion because crucifixion is how Jesus is going to die. If Jesus, you know, there were forms of capital punishment in Israel. One, you were stoned. Two, you were strangled. Three, you were burned. Four, you were beheaded. And finally, when God allowed Rome to take over that area, Rome used crucifixion to punish the worst offenders. And Jesus Christ was looked upon as the worst offenders on that cross of Calvary. That cross of Calvary is the tree of life. It's the tree of life to us. Jesus was, he said, I am the water. He said, come unto me and I'll give you drink. He said, come unto me, I am the bread of heaven. Through Jesus Christ's death, burial, and resurrection, we have eternal life. Not in deism, not in Unitarianism. Not in Mormonism, Islam, Catholicism. I mean, there are probably some Catholics out there who say they have a personal belief in God, but if you follow what the Catholic Church says, it's going to lead you away from God and not to God. In spite of the Catholic Church, some would say, I don't think you can say that to the Jehovah's Witnesses and the Mormons. Their idea of God is completely deranged, blasphemous. I hope that you've learned something with these messages, number 154 and number 55 today. Church history is a fantastic subject, isn't it Marilyn? She learned more in church history. I remember some of my students, they said, when they come to church history, they learn more theology than they had in any class. Because church history is an evolution of theology. What's right and what's wrong. Now you know what's right and wrong. Our Father, we send this message out for your honor and glory. Please use it. Please forgive me for I fail you. Please help give me the ability to go on and teach for you, that I might instruct people all over the world about you, a lot closer walk with you, and a true walk with you, and what real Christian doctrine is, and what salvation is and is not. In Jesus' name I pray, and please forgive me