Quote:
Originally Posted by aron
Brother, now you are starting to think, which makes you useless for the 'building up'.
Looking back at my experience, it seemed as if "purity" was kind of positional: if you did whatever the local church leadership dictated, that was pure.
And purity from them was a moving target.
|
When I started this thread, my hypothesis was that the Spirit of God
did move in history, especially during times of religious corruption and hypocrisy, to initiate something afresh based on the desire for "purity," but how that eventually deteriorated into a misguided pathway for the leaders to walk. I had in mind Luther, Darby, and Lee, because I am more familiar with them.
Luther, who supposedly started the "recovery," thus becoming the first so-called MOTA, became keenly aware of the corruption in the priesthood around him. Being intensely sincere for the "purity" of religion, he went so far as to visit the Vatican in Rome, thinking that surely the "purity" he so longed for would be found among those closest to the "Holy See." Needless to say, the shock he encountered was rudely awakening. Thus his goal was to reform the mother church to her original state.
Fast forward his life, and we find brother Martin so entrenched in this same goal, that "love" for the brethren has been severely compromised. He and the Swiss leader Zwingli agreed on 14-1/2 of 15 critical items, yet he refused to offer the Swiss brothers the right arm of fellowship. His disdain for the Jews and the Anabaptists also reflects this point succinctly -- if your original goal is purity of the church, and you continue this path rigidly, you will end up loving none but your own.
John Darby also began with the lofty ideals of all brothers, without hierarchy, as a holy priesthood to God, yet, in his very core of thought, as evidenced by his first tract, he felt the unity of the believers was based on the common judgment of evil -- "
if we all agree what is evil, then we will be one." Though he had an intense desire to serve the Lord in new found "purity," he imposed his will upon all the assemblies, and they were forced to judge all things as he did. Exclusivism at its very core is a judgment of evil based on the views of the leader.
History tells us that the "lynching" of Benjamen Newton, the leader of the Plymouth assembly, and George Muller, the leader of the Bristol assembly and founder of the orphanages, was based on a struggle for power and control by John Darby. Both Newton and Muller were both rivals that had to be eliminated, but the smokescreen of Brethren "purity," clouded the minds of Darby and his followers. Once Darby decided to judge these "evils," men like George Wigram wrote scathing tracts to destroy their reputations and warn all the other assemblies. What began as a move of the Spirit to return to church "purity" and simplicity of worship concluded as a narrow, mean-spirited, "loveless" society of brothers, with a succession of MOTAs on top.
Does any of this sound familiar?
.