Volume 19  Number 5                              September/October 2008

The Kingdom.   The last 20 years has witnessed the teaching on building a Kingdom here on the earth rising to fever-pitch proportions.   The Apostles and Prophets have been making kingdom decrees as they are doing far more than just “aligning” Todd Bentley.   They are aligning heaven and earth, angels, governments and powers.  At the beginning of 2008, Dutch Sheets held a conference entitled “Starting the Year off Right”.    Exact quotes from Dutch Sheets:  “So when we begin to emphasize the king and the Kingdom rule of the Lord -guess what happens? The church goes to a whole new level of Kingdom authority and that is what is about to happen.  If your emphasis is a local church emphasis first it can be selfish- it can be mine- I can build walls. I can emphasize what is best or what is going to benefit me at the expense even of others but if I am emphasizing a Kingdom- you can’t build walls  because you can’t build walls around the kingdom- it’s too big.  SO God is going to have to shift our emphasis.”

 

Then he said some amazing things in regard to the Gospel:  “EVEN OUR GOSPEL HAS BEEN DEFICIENT.  We are always told in scripture to preach the gospel of the what?  Do you know we are not told to preach the Gospel of the cross?  The word Gospel means what? Good News- s The Gospel of the Kingdom- oh we are told to preach the good news of something.  When we preach the Good News of the cross and leave it there- and that’s important- we have to preach the cross but the Good News goes beyond the cross. The cross is the entry point into the Kingdom.   He didn’t say preach the Good News just of salvation but preach the Good News that I have come and reestablished the dominion of God in the earth and restored to you the dominion that you lost in Genesis.  My Kingdom is now functioning in earth in a people. The cross is the entrance – The Kingdom is the realm.  The cross gives us life- The Kingdom gives us something to live for.  The cross is about redemption- the Kingdom is about restoration.  I want you to think about that- we are not just to emphasize redemption- that gets us in but He’s about restoring everything that has been lost. 

 

We are going to move from a mindset of saving souls and growing churches to producing disciples of the Kingdom.  Kingdom disciples have eternity in their hearts and weapons in their hands.  They are Kingdom thinkers- difference makers- culture shapers.”

 

The “Kingdom” teaching has a long history and bodes for a fearsome future.   It is this teaching that has undermined the Gospel of Jesus Christ for this generation.   The upcoming conference will deal with the roots of the Kingdom teaching and its influences.    We are privileged to have special guests at this conference.

 

       Featured Speakers

 

Dr. Martin Erdmann is one of the foremost experts in the world on the doctrine and practice of “building the kingdom of God on earth.” This phrase sums up what we commonly refer to as “Dominionism.”

 

Dominionism is a pervasive heresy with many manifestations. In a nutshell, it teaches that what Christ did at the Cross was insufficient; that man must somehow finish and complete the work of Christ. It arises from a false view of man’s Fall in the Garden of Eden as a “mistake,” something which needs to be worked out in the unfolding of history, and that God’s redemptive plan for humanity involves progressively new stages of revelation until man finally “gets it right.” It teaches that man must DO something to defeat Satan –spiritually, politically, socially, etc. In the end, it corrupts eschatology by focusing on man’s efforts here on earth, teaching that we can bring heaven to earth and restore paradise, become gods, or bring Jesus back.

 

Dr. Erdmann is an expert on this doctrine historically as well as theologically. He has spent the past several years researching the archives of European church history to uncover the roots of this heresy. He is also an expert on how the medical scientific community and occultists are working to create a “New Breed” genetically. Several years ago Dr. Erdmann wrote a book about the early history of this doctrine’s rise to prominence in the liberal Protestant denominations the first half of the last century. We reviewed his book, Building the Kingdom of God on Earth: The Churches’ Contribution to Marshal public Support for World Order and Peace, 1919-1945 (Wipf & Stock, 2005) for Herescope on April 17-18, 2006. Below we have reproduced those two columns. You will note the many parallels to today’s efforts by New Apostolic Reformation leaders and Rick Warren to accomplish this same agenda.

 

The New Order of the Kingdom

“We believe that we see the goal and we believe that men can get hold of that power to move on to that goal. That goal is the Kingdom of God on earth. The Kingdom of God is a new order standing at the door of the lower order. The higher order, founded on love, justice, goodwill, brotherhood and redemption, stands confronting this lower order founded on selfishness, exploitation, unbrotherliness, with its resultant clash and conclusions. . . it [the higher order] will finally replace this lower order, for it is God’s order. We shall present Christ as the open door to that era. We shall unfold the possibilities of that era both within the individual and the collective will

.(E. Stanley Jones, Federal Council of Churches, Federal Council Bulletin 19, no. 8 (Oct. 1936), New York 5)

 

There truly is “no new thing under the sun” (Eccl. 1:9). The quotation above is from the year 1936. It is cited in Dr. Martin Erdmann’s groundbreaking book, Building the Kingdom of God on Earth: The Churches’ Contribution to Marshal Public Support for World Order and Peace, 1919-1945.

 

       The history behind this quotation is a fascinating look into the rise of liberal denominations 50-100 years ago. They embraced a dominionist doctrine of building the kingdom of God on earth long before it became a New Apostolic Reformation or Reconstructionist “mandate.”

 

       The thesis of Dr. Erdmann’s book is that the rising popularity of this doctrine was substantially influenced and perpetuated by the same academic, political and religious intelligentsia who were busily forming the beginnings of a New World Order on earth. These elites seized upon certain doctrines of the Gospel as a mechanism to forge an international consensus on “moral” ideology.

 

     Dr. Erdmann writes that in 1934 the Federal Council of Churches began a grassroots public relations campaign to further its social gospel. The end goal was to create enough groundswell that another international organization could be formed to replace the faulty League of Nations. Erdmann explained:

 

“A new commitment to the concept of the kingdom of God on earth needed to be generated among the people at large and from the constituencies of the member churches, a commitment that had been notably absent for some time. Unless the Council succeeded in mobilizing a grassroots movement of socially conscious Christians it would never realize the goals set out in the Social Creed. Thus the new emphasis on propagating the principles of the Social Creed was again designed to attain the kingdom of God on earth rather than to reach lost souls with the Gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ.” (p. 154)

 

     The modus operendi to accomplish such a mass motivation is strikingly similar to the methods utilized with today’s evangelicals:

 

“Without adhering to basic Scriptural concepts. . . the Council’s social appeals were couched in biblical terminology. Although mentioning the sin problem frequently, it was usually in the context of sins against society rather than sin against God. Regeneration was masterfully redefined as a new social awareness. The substitutionary atonement of Christ upon the cross was deemed insignificant and was rarely if ever mentioned. The Reformation dictum, that humankind can find peace with God only by being justified by faith, was simply ignored as without relevance. The residue of evangelical concepts which could be found in their gospel messages were mostly based on Arminian theology. . . .” (p. 155)

 

In order to achieve this organic unity, the reformers of that era proposed that a “sense of urgency” or “crisis” be created. E. Stanley Jones, who is quoted at the top of this post, proposed in 1935 that the various branches of Protestantism “come together on the simple doctrinal basis found in Matthew 16:16-19. He defended his proposal on the grounds of the urgent necessity to unite, in view of the task confronting the church.” (p. 147)

 

     Dr. Erdmann notes that “Jones was less than candid in his statements.” It was not unlike the call for a Second Reformation that we see today:

 

“The whole plan rested upon an indifference to the development of Christian theology from the Council of Nicea onwards, and it actually called upon the creedal churches, the Presbyterian and the Lutheran, for example, to surrender the heritage of the Reformation.” P.148

http://herescope.blogspot.com/2006/04/new-order-of-kingdom.html

 

The “New Deal” Kingdom“ Upon the men of this time is breaking the light of a new social order. The outstanding fact of today is the rediscovery of the kingdom of God. To the world this comes almost as a new revelation from heaven. For eighteen hundred years men have believed in this kingdom and have prayed for its coming; but now at last conception of its meaning becomes larger and more true. We are coming to see that the kingdom of God in Christ’s conception never means anything less than a righteous human society on earth. Christ has come, not to condemn the world, but to save the world. He has come to reveal a kingdom in heaven and to realize a kingdom on earth. He has come not alone to save people out of the world and fill them for a far-away heaven; but to make a heaven here. He has come not to patch up human society and make the world a little less intolerable for men; but to make all things new and to create a new social order.”

(Samuel Z. Batten, The New World Order, 1919, p. 4-5) [emphasis added]

 

This quotation above is cited on page 151 in Dr. Martin Erdmann’s excellent book, Building the Kingdom of God on Earth, which Herescope began to review in yesterday’s post.  Dr. Erdmann explains how, in 1932, the Federal Council of Churches began to revise its outdated Social Creed. This revision bears striking resemblance to current “marketplace transformation” efforts, described last week and in previous Herescope posts:

 

“Toyohiko Kagawa, a Japanese churchman, asserted in the January issue [of the Federal Council Bulletin] that the propagation of the Christian gospel must include a total reconstruction of society. The Church should aspire to nothing less than the constitution of Christian collectivism. It is evident,’ he wrote, ‘that we must Christianise industry and get rid of the acquisitive motive in economic life. It seems to me that we cannot solve our problems on the basis of individualism.’ His idea was to replace the supposedly defunct capitalist system with a number of Christian co-operatives modeled after the pattern of the medieval guild system. The FCC was enthused about Kagawa’s proposal and incorporated it (in a modified form) in its revised version of the Social Creed.” (p. 151-2) [emphasis added]

 

This resultant Social Creed adopted by the FCC in 1932 was part and parcel of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal. So much so that eventually the FCC was able to move on to other projects. Many of the tenets of this Social Creed called for a radical restructuring of economic, social, cultural, family, and political order.

 

This “new social order” was being implemented in a supposed “new age of faith”:

 

“The Commission on the Church and Social Service spearheaded the campaign for a Christian collectivism among the American public by preparing a message which was delivered on Labour Day 1932. This message directly advocated a redistribution of wealth in the United States and also among the nations of the world. It asserted that only by the intelligent regulation and management of finance, credit, and industry could the kingdom of God be advanced for the common good. It pleaded for the extension of minimum-wage laws, and the payment of the highest wages possible in order to achieve the redistribution of wealth and to realize the kingdom of God.

 

“It became clear that the thinking of a large segment of the leadership of the Council was dominated by political and economic idealism.” (p. 153)

 

By 1933 the “FCC initiated an amalgamation process which in time blurred the distinction between its new social order and the New Deal.” (p. 159)

 

The Truth:  Some of the rhetoric has changed. Some of the doctrinal focus has shifted so that it now incorporates the “Great Commission” and Stewardship of the Earth “mandates.” Some of the political lessons learned over the past 75 years have changed the initial game plan, the dynamics, and even some of the implementation. And the methods have been updated to use state-of-the-art psycho-social techniques. But the basic “plan” to institute a global “kingdom” in the name of Christ is still the same.75 years ago this plan was a fraud and a sham. It had nothing to do with true Christianity. Today, this same plan — slightly revised and updated — is still a fraud and a sham. It is an antichrist kingdom which is being built upon Earth. 

http://herescope.blogspot.com/2006/04/new-deal-kingdom.html

 

Read entire newsletter here:

 

http://www.discernment-ministries.org/NLSeptOct_2008.htm

 

Their next conference is

 

Discernment Ministries

Cordially invites you to attend

the

TRANSFORMATION of  THE CHURCH

CONFERENCE

October 10 & 11, 2008

 

The conference is being held at:

 

The Michiana Christian Embassy

1922 E. Main Street

Niles, MI  49120

269-683-3518

 

 

There is no registration fee for the conference.  Free-will offerings will be taken.

Inquiries:  765-583-4799/ 765-583-4177