Martin Luther reacted against the replacement of justification by faith with a system of works. Such a recovery has always involved a prophetic ministry that called believers back to the biblical standard. Positively speaking, the history of the church has been a history of reactions against degradations, a history of the recovery of the precious truths concerning the life and practice of the believers as revealed in the Bible. We sometimes call these local churches to distinguish them from the church as a whole, or the universal church. Scripture refers to each group of Christians by the city or town in which it was located: “the church in Jerusalem” (Acts 8:1), “the church at Antioch” (Acts 13:1), “the church of God which is at Corinth” (1 Corinthians 1:2). There is no clergy/laity distinction in the New Testament. It is a “holy” and “royal priesthood” (1 Peter 2:5, 9). In the same book, McCarthy wrote:Īccording to Scripture, all true Christians are members of the same priesthood. Is this not a tragedy? If what McCarthy says is true, and we have no reason to doubt it, it means that most people in Christendom do not understand the basics of the Christian faith, much less are they growing properly in Christ. In the so-called “Christian countries” of the world, relatively few people have any real knowledge of the Scriptures or can explain the gospel of Jesus Christ. It has become a religion of misguided people who think peace with God can be achieved through religious practices and moral living. I fear that much of Christendom today, including many Protestant denominations, has gone the way of Judaism. In Letters Between a Catholic and an Evangelical, James McCarthy wrote: In fact, recently Harvest House published a book which echoed at least in part the same themes. It is hard to understand Harvest House’s objection to our criticism of the failures of Christianity when measured against this biblical standard. 4:4) manifested practically as local churches city by city (Acts 8:1 13:1 1 Cor.
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