Second Fall
Our Disabling Legacy
by
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As we approach the end of the church-age, the acknowledgement and correction of these misdeeds increasingly becomes essential if humanity is to reach its individual and cultural potential: the loving embrace of God in all human endeavors. While all of these misdeeds are grave some are more momentous than others. Accordingly, these legacy misdeeds are divided into major and secondary blunders. Here is that list, composed first of the Judean mistake followed by the gentile church legacy blunders, which together generated a second fall for humanity by 410 AD, continuously contributing to it even into our times. First legacy blunder was the first-century Judean rejection of Yeshua. The initial birth of the kingdom of God was aborted. Of course, this was a major blunder. Second legacy blunder was the second century decision to forfeit the church leadership by the Holy Spirit after the Montanist debacle at Pepusa. Church leadership was shifted to the intellect of men via the development of the first church canon. This was the most serious of the major blunders. Third legacy blunder was the inability of the early church to grasp the fullness of Jesus’ rescue, forfeiting many of His redemptive capacities. Thus, because of ignorance, the Adamic curse was not defeated. Of course, this was a major blunder. Fourth legacy blunder was inability to grasp and integrate the fullness of Paul’s theology, especially his Christian mysticism that Christ dwells within, not me with his redemption via justification and kingdom of God concepts. Fifth legacy blunder was the inability of the early, and current, church to understand the different stages of the kingdom implementation as the various growth phases of the same kingdom entity, i.e., infant, adolescent and adult. This was a major blunder. Sixth legacy blunder was the fourth century decisions of the Christian church fathers to adopt a pragmatic route for the survival of the church. This adaptation is called the Pragmatic Curse upon the church in this text. This decision, with its curse, generated an informal Pact of Cooperation with pagan Rome, an agreement that passed beyond the death of Rome, becoming an agreement that aborted the gentile attempt at birthing the kingdom of God. With the forfeiture of the drive to the kingdom of God, the full Gospel message of Jesus Christ was invalidated. Pagan influences infiltrated the church. Here, it is asserted that the church lost the keys to the kingdom, i.e., God-given authority over the affairs of Jesus’ house. Obviously, this was a major blunder. Seventh legacy blunder was early use of false authorship. To attract attention, authors often attributed their work to others, sometimes men long dead. This was intellectual dishonesty then, even as it is today. But it gets worse. As with the Ignatius letters, there have been fraudulent attempts at deception in order to win some given point of view, which has led later generations into serious scholastic question about the authenticity of some of the Epistles of the New Testament. This we do not need. What was the influence of Gnosticism and the mystery religions? How much did the Hellenistic environment influence the early formation of our Christian beliefs? Can we even define pure undefiled Christianity? So the inability of the early underground church to better monitor the authorship, the origination dates of the Holy Scriptures and the environmental influences constitutes a serious legacy blunder. Eighth legacy blunder was the degradation of the Baptism of the Holy Spirit into the largely meaningless Sacrament of Confirmation. Most likely a gradual development lost in history, the author does not know the exact date this occurred. Yet, this degradation influenced the spiritual warfare of the church. With less Spirit-filled saints, spiritual warfare, the prime condition of the early church slipped into obsolescence. Ninth legacy blunder was the reconstruction of the vanished church canon in Le Mans France in 850, attributing undue authority to the pope while ascribing this rewrite to men of the church long dead. The canon rewrite was deemed necessary because the original canon was lost in the deep regression of knowledge occurring as the result of God’s first discipline. Unscrupulous or ignorant men used this rewrite to centralize the authority the church upon the papacy. This focused too much power in the hands of the few, simply inviting the mischief of the enemy of God, which was forthcoming! Tenth legacy blunder was the church’s violent thirteenth century suppression of the Spiritual Franciscans and with it the drive to usher in the age of the Holy Spirit. It appears that this event was significantly more important in the history of the church than understood by historians or church theologians then or since. Of course, Jesus’ special appearance to Francis of Assisi in 1205 asking for the reconstruction of His church would warrant this conclusion, but yet, even this event’s significance is largely lost. Indeed, the Spirit points at this legacy blunder, as the turning point of history because enclosed within this movement, before its destructive apostasy, is the vision of our future as an agape civilization. This was a major blunder. Eleventh legacy blunder was the Reformation’s refusal to return the leadership of the church to the Holy Spirit, instead retaining church leadership via the intellect of man. This leadership flaw resulted from the second legacy blunder of the early church, and reflected a general church naiveté about the need to shift from worldly to spiritual church orientations, the latter achievable exclusively under the leadership of the Spirit of God. Both Luther and Zwingli had followers that pushed for this correction. Yet, in both incidents these men and their reform ideas were rejected. Conrad Grebel, Zwingli’s follower was imprisoned, escaped and then hunted down, dying of the black plague before he could be found and killed. His only crime was his Spirit-led desire to return to the spiritual church. Luther told his follower, Muntzer, that he could ‘swallow the Holy Spirit, feathers and all.’ In the rejection of these special people, men such as Carlstadt, Muntzer and Grebel, each which believed in the dynamic role of the Holy Spirit in the church, a great opportunity for reform was missed. Twelfth legacy blunder was the Reformation’s inability to grasp the indwelling role of the Holy Spirit in the personal life of the saints (as differentiated from the church leadership). Leaders like Luther, Melanchthon and other reformers saw the action of grace, which is the Spirit of God operating outside the saint, and stopped there, thinking there was no more. But the Spirit of God functions within the human entity, making it the temple of God. So in a mystery that is difficult to grasp, the Spirit aids us from outside our personage as grace, pushing us into the embrace of God, as well as inside each saint as the indwelling Presence of God. To just accept one orientation of the Spirit, grace, was a grave mistake, one that the Spirit of God has attempted to correct four times in the last 160 years, the last effort as the Charismatic outpouring. Why is the indwelling Presence so important? Because void of the indwelling Spirit of God, the human intellect remains supreme over the human spirit, eliminating the spiritual capacity of the saint. While many important functions of the Chr
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About the Book
A fact that is largely unknown is that human civilization is directly dependent upon the Christian churches for societal health. In this age of mass destruction, we have moved this dependency from interesting to crucial, to that threshold point where the very survival of the human species is dependent upon Christian renewal. So, how are the churches doing? Brownsville, Florida stirs, but generally the divided, passive Christian churches are not in a position to provide that moral direction necessary to avoid mass self-inflicted suicide. Instead, the humanists would lead us to the global village, a trail void of the presence of God. It is a trap, like Marxism, doomed to harvest vast misery. Yet, no effective Christian opposition has risen to combat these appalling events. Clearly, Christianity desperately needs an awakening! The purpose of this book is to identify the main legacy blunders in our inheritance, searching for the awakening. Sadly, the Spirit of God says it is too late for human correction. Instead, only God’s intervention can save us, first in His discipline, and secondly in the Holy Spirit’s love-touch. To survive, humanity must embrace the Holy Spirit. To assist in this embrace, this book offers a primitive theology of the Holy Spirit, trusting that it can help in the difficult times ahead. Praise Jesus!
About the Author
Eugene Shults was born in a rural area of Northwest Detroit just after the onset of the Great Depression. After college he served for five years in the Navy as an aviator followed by more than six years as a weekend warrior reservist. In the late 1950s he returned to school to earn an advanced degree in physics. Mr. Shults then joined IBM and began a career in computers and data processing. He taught information technology at the University of California Santa Barbara extension school, and later was president of his own computer company where he created many computer software innovations. In 1973 he received the baptism of the Holy Spirit which dramatically changed his life interests. In 1986, under the guidance of the Spirit of God, he gave up his life's vocation and began an intense study of church history, theology, and US History. This work is one of more than ten manuscripts he has produced with God's leadership. Father of eight children, Mr. Shults and his wife Carol, now live in Florida with two children still in the home.