Nevin’s Antichrist

Religious August 15th, 2006

Found in the same little Wipf and Stock book. Antichrist is a short, but strong, argument suggesting that the the spirit of schism in the church is antichrist. He speaks specifically to an American audience - an audience that (judging by the current state of affairs in the US) refused to listen.

Has much changed?


“From it’s nature, the antichristian spirit, as now described, must always be a spirit of schism as well as heresy.” (26)

“The spirit of sect, wherever it may prevail, involves necessarily a false view of the person of Christ, and is utterly incompatible thus with sound Christian orthodoxy. As a spirit at once of heresy and schism, in this way, we pronounce it to be emphatically the Antichrist of the Church in our own time. So far as its power goes, it is at war with the whole fact of the incarnation.” (37)

12 marks of the antichrist (schism)


1.“Antichrist owns no real mediation between God and man to be necessary in order to Christian salvation” (38)

2.“Antichrist undervalues the mystery of Christ’s person.” (39)

“All sectarian, schismatic Christianity has a tendency to make Christ’s actual person of small account, as compared with his doctrine and work.” (39)

3.“With this dim sense of what is properly comprehended in the person of Christ, is always necessarily a corresponding want of faith in the Church, as a real supernatural constitution always present in the world.” (40)

“The whole Sect system shows here its true character; for it turns throughout on the assumption that Christ has no real Church in this world; but only an invisible spiritual Christianity, which men are at liberty to arrange and shape, by the help of the Bible, according to their own pleasure. Schism, as such, has no faith in the holy catholic Church; holds the very word for popish, and the thing itself no better than empty wind; save as it may be taken to mean its own figment of a Church, which exists objectively in the clouds only, are at best in the Bible…” (41)

4.“This want of faith in the Church,nas the presence of a real divine life in the world, reveals itself always in a low view of the ministry and sacraments, and of Christian worship generally.” (41)

“All Sect worship, fanatical and extravagant at first, sinks finally into the dullest routine of empty ceremony. Sects as such, we may say rather, have no worship, in the only true sense of the term; and can hardly be said to know at all what worship as a divine liturgical sacrifice, means.” (43)

5.“The antichrist spirit reveals itself still farther, in the way of contempt for all history and authority.” (43)

6.“Such affectation of individual freedom is itself again worthy of being noticed, as a separate mark or feature of Antichrist.” (44)

“[Antichrist] makes itself the last standard of truth, and is prepared to acknowledge Christ, only when He is found to suit its own preconceptions.” (45)

“All comes back finally to the form of mere individual judgment and will. The bible and the Holy Spirit against the whole Church, is a plausible cry; but it comes always to this in the end MY sense of the Bible against the sense of the whole world besides. In the riding the Bible with such pedantic parade, each sect rides in fact only its own theological hobby, in the Bible’s name; while the individual ME is arrogantly exalted (Antichrist) above all that is divine either in the Church or Bible, as though it were the source of Christianity itself, and Christ could have no being objectively in this world, save by its sovereign permission.” (46)


7.“Another mark of this schismatic spirit is found in its tendency to hyperspirtualism.” (47)

“All sects in particular boast of having the spirit, as they call it, in extraordinary measure; and affect to be more or less independent of outward ordinances in this way. They need, as we have seen, no outward historical Church, no real sacraments, no objective worship. Christianity is for them a matter of purely inward particular experience; a supernatural illapse of life upon the single subject, with or without means, as God may see fit. All is spiritualistic, rising in this form oftentimes to the region of seeming inspiration or ranting frenzy; but still fantastic, always unsubstantial and unreal; with the necessity of cooling down ultimately into the form of frigid rationalistic abstraction.” (47)

8.“This brings to view another most significant and far reaching feature of the antichristian spirit, namely the hopeless, helpless dualism, that characterizes its whole theory of the Christian life.” (48)

9.“The antichristian spirit, having the character and occupying the posture, which have now been mentioned, cannot fail to show itself fanatical.” (49)

10.“Antichrist is known still farther as a spirit of endless division“(50)

“Sectarianism goes throughout on the assumption, that there is no holy catholic Church in this world, one and universal, by its very conception, as the person of the Savior himself; but that the Church is simply what men may choose to make it, for their own accommodation, in conformity with the general law of their social nature.” (51)

11.“Another feature of the spirit in question may be found in the tendency it has always to end in the flesh.” (52)

12.“The last characteristic of Antichrist we shall notice, is presented to us in the form of false theology.” (53)

“Sects have no true theology. They are prone always to undervalue it in any form, as having a secret consciousness that for them it is in fact nothing. And in such shape as they have it, we find it to be always a system of mechanical abstractions, as barren for the understanding as it is cold and jejune for the heart.” (54)

“This judgment must not be taken, of course, as an indiscriminate denunciation of all denominational or confessional distinctions, in the Church. What we have in view all along, as before remarked, is the Sect mind, without reference to particular organizations or societies, through which it may be revealed.” (55)

“We talk of the necessity of Christian love and union, and see to some extent the misery of our sectarianism; but still we seem satisfied in general, notwithstanding, to abide in the present system, as on the whole necessary and good.” (67)

Grace and Peace,
`tim

Leave a Reply

You must be logged in to post a comment.