Status Updates From Dynamics of Spiritual Life:...

average American Fundamentalist… ha[d] a way of confusing America, the Republican Party and the capitalist system with the kingdom of God. He did not practice. circumcision, but he did assume that only those who had gone through a certain form of conversion experience were
"born again" and that the salvation of these persons was either unquestionably sure or else maintained by works of personal morality.

“Evangelicalism erected a stronger shell of protective enculturation (than the Puritan training-code morality) to guard it from the world… the revivalists of the 1820s and 30s moved on to redefine temperance as absti-nence, to the horror of Charles Hodge, who protested that the replacement of Communion wine with grape juice was an insult to Jesus and to biblical ethics.”

A missionary strategy which calls on its converts to "drop out of the Monopoly game" of normal human activities and become part of a quasi-military commune, like the Children of God, may seem to gain by focusing the attention of its whole membership on proselytizing new members… fails to see that converts are won more by the observable blessedness of a whole war of life than by the arguments of individuals.

The biblical symbols used have been so debased and trivialized by folk religion that modern imaginations find it hard to reach behind popular stereotypes to apprehend the serious realities described in Scripture.

Superstition was common in pre-Reformation Christianity as any readers of the lives and legends of the saints know. Now that it has been chased out of the church it should not be brought back in under the guise of faith and piety. Parts of the Pentecostal testimony are a jungle of superstition today, although discerning critics in Charismatic circles have carefully sought to correct this situation.

WOOOF. “The gravity of self-interest which naturally operates in our lives whenever we move out of the light and walk in the flesh is able to shape even religious intentions into carnal patterns.”

“Birth is a passive experience and not the effect of action initiated by the one born… The style of Evangelical Christianity which is constantly pushing and forcing people toward conversion in order to get them regenerated, manipulating them with music, repeated invitations or a sort of sales routine, is an ugly deformity of Christian practice resulting from bad doctrine.”

“…,the church substituted a new god who was the projection of grandmotherly kindness mixed with the gentleness and winsomeness of a Jesus who hardly needed to die for our sins. Many American congregations were in effect paying their ministers to protect them from the real God.”

“The thrust of the church’s development in Acts seems to prove that the Christian movement cannot go on to achieve its full maturity unless its mind is fully articulated by theologians like Paul (Acts 9–28) and its cultural limitations transcended by a clear separation of the absolute Christian message from its relative cultural incarnations (Acts 10–15).” (p. 79.)

"Virtually all of the problems in the church, including bad theology, issue from defective spirituality." (p. 58)

As I continue reading Lovelace, I find my heart stirred more and more toward a greater pursuit of holiness and a more carefully examined life. I also find renewed interest in prayer and fasting. Thus far, it really has been outstanding!

"The devil, who is losing ground as the revival progresses, fights back in a number of ways. He may plant lies, caricatures or stereotypes in the minds of unbelievers or unrevived Christians so that they will reject the work of God and attack its progress. If possible, he will set the leaders of the revival against one another in this way in order to divide and conquer."

p. 41.

..perhaps the root cause of the decay of evangelicalism in America was the replacement of the old comprehensive concept of revival with the post-Finneyan machinery ofrevivalism. "Holding a revival" became synonymous with "using new methods to do mass evangelism…” this approach would never have satisfied the Puritans and Pietists.

"Moving toward the advent of Constantine, however, the church began to be schizoid in its missionary consciousness. Gradually the great mass of the laity and the regular clergy attending them became a system concerned not so much to advance the kingdom of God as to decorate the occasions of ordinary human existence with religious meaning."

Is this happening again?

"Demonic agents italicize the defects of Christians and the churches in the minds of unbelievers and cause true Christianity to be branded with the image of its own worst exemplars."

I am becoming more persuaded that this is the game being played out on social media with exvangelicals and the like. There simply cannot be that many bad churches to blame. We've been generalized.

"We are not to set the estimates of our power to conquer sin according to past experiences of our will power, but are to fix our attention on Christ and the power of his risen life in which we participate: for we have died, and our life is hidden with Christ in God."

"Modern man is not immune to the impact of traditional Christian terminology; he is simply inert in the presence of answers to questions he has not yet been induced to ask."