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   borzoi (borzoi@poa.st)'s status on Monday, 05-Sep-2022 07:37:35 JST borzoi

   Democracy canceled. Now I get to pick and I say it’s time to fight about religion.

   https://mega.nz/folder/4O5EkAzD#ovaPRjwTkMJKuPE-g2fDxw

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     touch fluffy tail (fluffy@social.handholding.io)'s status on Monday, 05-Sep-2022 07:37:47 JST touch fluffy tail

     in reply to
     >schismatics are heretical
     damn who could have predicted it
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     borzoi (borzoi@poa.st)'s status on Monday, 05-Sep-2022 07:37:48 JST borzoi

     in reply to

     The origins of what became Dispensationalism lie in John Nelson Darby. As Fitzgerald notes, dividing Scriptural history was not a new idea but what Darby did differently was develop the notion that God had two different plans, one for earthly humans which he called Israel and one for heavenly people, true Christians. This is the origin of the Rapture ideas we’ve become familiar with. Essentially, true Scriptural history has been paused, God will take the true Christians back with Him, and history for Israel will resume to be sorted out. I think you can see how easily this becomes corrupted.

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     borzoi (borzoi@poa.st)'s status on Monday, 05-Sep-2022 07:37:48 JST borzoi

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     There is a talking point in these circles that Christian Zionism was essentially the invention of the Scofield Reference Bible, a talking point which is unfortunately abused and overstated. It was an important development, but it was shaping a current that already existed, not inventing it. If you look into history, you will find examples of what I often call “proto Christian Zionist” schemes with the chief goal being to get the Jews into the Holy Lands and have them be converted. They just didn’t gain momentum until the 19th century when these theological traditions currents had ripened, Jews were able to flex more economic and political power, and the Ottoman Empire was clearly not going to last.

     Part of this was the development of Bible conferences that became very popular with conservative clergymen, which allowed them to meet, discuss the Bible, and hear these new theologians speak for themselves. This is where Darby’s dispensational theology began to get traction in the United States.

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     borzoi (borzoi@poa.st)'s status on Monday, 05-Sep-2022 07:37:48 JST borzoi

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     The style of nondenominational Christianity that I think many of us are familiar with in the United States essentially developed under Dwight L. Moody, who as a preacher felt it was more important to save as many people as possible than to be bogged down in minor theological disputes. What Fitzgerald points out is that his style of American Christianity wasn’t really anything new, it wasn’t much different from the frontier Christianity that had a long history in rural America, but Moody had found a way to adapt to urban environments in a time when people were becoming very concerned about the vice, character, and impoverishment of the cities.

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     borzoi (borzoi@poa.st)'s status on Monday, 05-Sep-2022 07:37:48 JST borzoi

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     Through Dwight L. Moody, the kind of literalism or rather the Biblical inerrancy that had developed at the Princeton Theological Seminary became more widespread in America though as Fitzgerald points out it’s not that Moody was transmitting that specifically. I think this is just part of the kind of milieu American Christianity was swimming in as a response to higher criticism and the theory of evolution, the importation of non-Protestant groups in the United States, the desire for their Christianity being able to respond to the massive changes that were happening in America, and the conversations clergymen were having with each other at these Biblical seminars.

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     borzoi (borzoi@poa.st)'s status on Monday, 05-Sep-2022 07:37:48 JST borzoi

     in reply to

     Some roots in the prosperity gospel can also be seen in Dwight L. Moody

     touch fluffy tail likes this.
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     borzoi (borzoi@poa.st)'s status on Monday, 05-Sep-2022 07:37:49 JST borzoi

     in reply to

     The importance of this intellectual thought that was developed at Princeton lies in the fact that it was a response to the currents of higher criticism, mostly associated with the German biblical scholars. This is where you get the whole “search for the historical Jesus”, doing linguistic analysis of the Bible to dispute claimed authorship, using historical records to dispute events depicted in the Bible, etc.

     This belief in the inerrancy of the Bible as a response to the higher criticism would be adopted by the conservatives and become an important component to the greater focus on eschatological prophecy (which Fitzgerald believes came about as a result of the massive social changes that happened due to the revolutions, industrialization, and modern wars).

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     borzoi (borzoi@poa.st)'s status on Monday, 05-Sep-2022 07:37:49 JST borzoi

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     The premillennialism (the belief that the Second Coming will usher in a millennium of a peaceful golden age before the Last Judgment) that developed in Dispensationalism emerged in the 1860s from clergymen discussing the prophecies in Daniel, Isaiah, and Revelation. One critique I have for Fitzgerald here however, but maybe she will double back around to it, is that the discussion of the Jews returning to the Holy Lands was not a new phenomenon that had suddenly cropped up. There had been nascent movements for this in England in the 17th century and this was something that Founding Fathers like John Adams and John Jay (two of our more religious Founding Fathers) believed in and had discussed in their letters.

     I am not quite certain how that developed, it’s something I’ve meant to research, but since the start there are people with power in America who had that belief and there were Jews exploiting it, such as Mordecai Noah who developed a few resettlement schemes for Jews utilizing America.

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     borzoi (borzoi@poa.st)'s status on Monday, 05-Sep-2022 07:37:50 JST borzoi

     in reply to

     We’re about to start getting into the development of Dispensationalism. Fitzgerald builds to that by talking about the split between the liberals and conservatives that had become extremely fractious over the slavery issue. After the Civil War however, this religious movement didn’t unify because the issue had been “settled”, but continued developing into its own independent currents.

     On the conservatives, she talks about the development of fundamentalism and this passage stood out, namely that all of these Protestant religious movements were very textual, philosophical, and educated and didn’t just spring up out of nowhere. Fundamentalism was responding to many of the currents that were developing as a result of massive changes in America, the British religious movements, and the higher criticism of the Bible. This is difficult to see now because we still have the residual superstructure that was formed while the intellectual currents that created it, and what they were responding to, has been forgotten.

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     borzoi (borzoi@poa.st)'s status on Monday, 05-Sep-2022 07:37:50 JST borzoi

     in reply to

     The kind of Biblical literalism that we associate with American Protestant Christianity owes its intellectual development to Charles Hodge of the Princeton Theological Seminary, who declared the Scriptures were “free from all error”, which was a contrast to the position of Calvin and Luther who had what could be called a more nuanced position on “errors of historical fact”.

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     borzoi (borzoi@poa.st)'s status on Monday, 05-Sep-2022 07:37:51 JST borzoi

     in reply to

     One of the chief issues I’ve often pointed to in America is the lack of a national church that would have helped define and shape Americans as a people. The religious character of Americans has always been more oriented toward folk faiths suspicious of most established traditions. There are actually both pros and cons to this but it definitely adds complications for people seeking to organize Americans under a more unified idea.

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     borzoi (borzoi@poa.st)'s status on Monday, 05-Sep-2022 07:37:51 JST borzoi

     in reply to

     The religious political divide in this country was basically between the Calvinism of the more learned, civic-oriented, and institutional churches who supported Federalism and the more frontier, free-form churches that supported popular sovereignty and the separation of church and state policies of Democratic-Republicans.

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     borzoi (borzoi@poa.st)'s status on Monday, 05-Sep-2022 07:37:51 JST borzoi

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     Every sect of Christianity has its own form of the purity spiral and the opinions arms race and this is Protestantism’s

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     borzoi (borzoi@poa.st)'s status on Monday, 05-Sep-2022 07:37:52 JST borzoi

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     Evangelicals were the only group to oppose all of these.

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     borzoi (borzoi@poa.st)'s status on Monday, 05-Sep-2022 07:37:52 JST borzoi

     in reply to

     God’s pious grugs

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     borzoi (borzoi@poa.st)'s status on Monday, 05-Sep-2022 07:37:53 JST borzoi

     in reply to

     Fitzgerald gives us a working definition of Evangelicals so that we don’t talk past each other due to confused terminology