221) Departures From The Faith

“Now the Spirit speaketh expressly, that in the latter times some shall depart from the faith, giving heed to seducing spirits, and doctrines of devils;” (I Timothy 4:1)

New religious movement (NRM), the generally accepted term for what is sometimes called a “cult.” 

NRMs offer innovative religious responses to the conditions of the modern world, despite the fact that most NRMs represent themselves as rooted in ancient traditions. NRMs are also usually regarded as “countercultural” alternatives to the mainstream religions of Western society, especially Christianity in its normative forms…The new movement is usually founded by a charismatic and sometimes highly authoritarian leader who is thought to have extraordinary insights. Many NRMs…often make great demands on the loyalty and commitment of their followers and sometimes establish themselves as substitutes for the family and other conventional social groupings.

Apocalyptic belief that the end of the world is imminent has formed the backdrop for the development of many of the NRMs in the West.

Unless specified otherwise, the following is a partial list of new religious movements that began in the United States, which unquestionably has become the heartland for the explosion of new religious movements.

Western New York was still an American frontier prior to increased transportation via the Erie Canal, and established clergy were scarce. Nonconformist sects founded by laypeople won many converts during the revivals of the Second Awakening to such an extent that Charles Finney (1792–1875) called this area a “burnt district”.

There had been, a few years previously, a wild excitement passing through that region, which they called a revival of religion, but which turned out to be spurious… It resulted in a reaction so extensive and profound, as to leave the impression on many minds that religion was a mere delusion.

Still known today as the Burned-over District, a host of spurious spiritual movements were founded here during the Great Revivals.

  • The Latter Day Saint movement (whose largest branch is the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints), originating circa 1828. Joseph Smith, Jr., lived in the area and said he was led by the angel Moroni to his source for the Book of Mormon, the Golden Plates, near Palmyra, New York.
  • The Millerites, originating circa 1834. William Miller was a Baptist farmer who, basing his calculations principally on Daniel 8:14: “Unto 2,300 days then shall the sanctuary be cleansed”, he preached that the literal Second Coming would occur on October 22, 1844. “The power of the press, in this particular form, was one of the foremost factors in the success of this now vigorous, expanding movement.”…Millerite papers were published in numerous cities. When March 21, 1844 passed without incident, Miller announced a new date—April 18, 1844, then October 22, 1944, resulting in The Great Disappointment and the dissolution of the Millerites.
  •  Jonathan Cummings, another of Miller’s disciples, formed the Advent Christian Church, currently with about 61,000 members.

    The Seventh-day Adventist Church was founded by William Miller, Ellen White, her husband James White, Joseph Bates, and incorporated in 1863. 

    We can examine the faith and practice of one denomination as an example of many others. The Seventh-day Adventists state they accept the Bible as their only creed.

    The Scriptures testify that one of the gifts of the Holy Spirit is prophecy and we believe it was manifested in the ministry of Ellen G. White. They also make clear that the Bible is the standard by which all teaching and experience must be tested. Her role was to point people back to the Bible—never to replace it or supersede it.

    Ellen White became a prolific writer. Due to her writings SDA claims more than 19 million followers in over 200 countries, with less than ten percent of the church’s members in the United States.  In 2014, the Smithsonian Magazine named White as one of 100 Most Significant Americans of All Time.

    What about “Let your women keep silence in the churches:” (I Corinthians 14:34-35)? Does Ellen White fall afoul of this commandment and thereby discredit the entire SDA Church?

    “for it is not permitted unto them to speak; but they are commanded to be under obedience as also saith the law. And if they will learn any thing, let them ask their husbands at home: for it is a shame for women to speak in the church.” (I Corinthians 14:34-35)

    Within the context of this commandment, it appears that debate is the context in which women are forbidden to engage. And that is precisely the practice of the early church, in both

    1. the pluralistic debate in Jewish rabbinic tradition demonstrated in Acts 18:19, “[Paul] entered into the synagogue, and reasoned with the Jews”,
    2. and the means by which the early Christians evangelized pagans, “almost throughout all Asia, this Paul hath persuaded and turned away much people” (Acts 19:26)

    Certainly there are biblically legitimized prophetesses: Deborah (Judges 4:4), Miriam (Exodus 15:20), Huldah (II Kings 22:14), Noadiah (Nehemiah 6:14), the unnamed prophetess (Isaiah 8:3), Anna (Acts 2:38), Philip the Evangelist’s daughters (Acts 21:9).

    So simply having a prophetess doesn’t discount the SDA. It’s the proof of staying 100% true to biblical authority, never replacing or superseding it. Consistent with SDA’s Millerite foundation, which was obsessed with treating biblical prophecy as symbolic to be interpreted, among other discrepancies with scripture the SDAs deny the reality of hell and the events detailed in Revelation.

    Since the SDA is focused on surviving the End Times, we can expect to see an upsurge in converts to this unbiblical faith as a means of salvation.

  • The Fox sisters of Hydesville, New York, conducted the first table-rapping séances in the area around 1848, leading to the American movement of Spiritualism – centered in the retreat at Lily Dale and in the Plymouth Spiritualist Church in Rochester, New York – which taught communion with the dead.
  • Spiritualism was also popular in Western New York during this period, with the Lily Dale community and the Fox Sisters playing a defining role in the movement’s development. Spiritualists believe that the afterlife is a realm where spirits continue to evolve and souls live on with consciousness. They believe souls can interact with those living on Earth through mediums in the spirit world connecting with those in the physical world.
  • The Shakers established their communal farm in central New York in 1826, and had a major revival in 1837.
  • The Oneida Society was a large utopian group founded in 1848, disbanded in 1881, was known for group marriage under which mates were paired by committee; the children of the community were raised in common.
  • The Social Gospel was founded by Washington Gladden then succeeded by Walter Rauschenbusch of Rochester, New York.
  • The Ebenezer Colonies first settled in New York near Buffalo in what is now the town of West Seneca then moved to Iowa in 1856, becoming the Amana Colony.

The Jehovah’s Witnesses was built by Charles Taze Russell…founder of what is now known as the Bible Student movement and co-founder of Zion’s Watch Tower Tract Society. From 1886 to 1904, he published Studies in the Scriptures predicting that the rapture would occur in 1878. In 1881, Russell founded Zion’s Watch Tower Tract Society. By 1909, Russell’s writings had achieved a greater circulation in North America than the combined circulation of the writings of all the priests and preachers in North America and had become the third most circulated on earth, after the Bible and the Chinese Almanac.  Jehovah’s Witnesses use their own Bible translation, the New World Translation of the Holy Scriptures in teaching various predictions about major biblical events.

  • Christ had returned invisibly in October 1874.
  • The outbreak of war in 1914 was the beginning of Armageddon.
  • The Great Pyramid of Giza was built by the Hebrews, to be understood only in our day through calculations equating an inch per year resulting in prophetic years 1874, 1914, and 1918.
  • Jews should not convert to Christianity.

New Religious Movements were not limited to New York State.

 

Emanuel Swedenborg (1688-1772), wrote The Heavenly Doctrine in order to reform Christianity, stating that the Last Judgment had already occurred in 1757, affecting only people already dead, and no-one alive since has to worry about being judged. He stated that his information came to him direct direct from angels, demons and other spirit beings during his visits to heaven and hell.

Swedenborg’s writings formed the basics of Spiritualism, according to spiritualism spirits are more advanced than humans. Spirit guides provide spiritual guidance to individual humans regarding moral and ethical issues, and the nature of God.

By 1897, Spiritualism was said to have more than eight million followers in the United States and Europe. In the era of women’s suffragette.

Several factors combined to make Spiritualism a viable new source of comfort and assurance during this period.The mid-19th century was a time of social and geographic mobility,
encounter with immigrant groups, industrialization, and intense revivalism; all of these engendered bold individualism and normless anomie (Juster and Hartigan-O’Connor 2002:403; Nelson
1969:69–70). Unsettled by secular developments, freed from traditional norms, and individually
empowered, many Americans were attracted to Spiritualism’s “radical individualism” (Braude
1990:406).

This describes our current social situation exactly.  

For a time, Spiritualists were among the few American women allowed to speak in public. On this basis, they proclaimed woman’s rights, a more benevolent heaven than orthodox ministers preached, and critiqued white male failings such as intemperance, solicitation of prostitution, and the ill treatment of women, children, blacks, and American Indians (Klass and Goss 2002:711–12; McGarry 2008:163)…In addition, Spiritualism had an undeniable entertainment value (Cox 2003:17; McGarry 2008:9; Moore 1977:26; Taves 1999:186–95)…

Spiritualism burgeoned during the Civil War when concern with the dead increased and the consoling power of traditional religion diminished.

Some of the most famous adherents to spiritualism are the wife of President Abraham Lincoln who famously held seances in the White House seeking her young deceased son, Queen Victoria, Thomas Edison, the author Arthur Conan Doyle of Sherlock Holmes fame,

At this same time in the late 19th century, Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, cofounder of the Theosophical Society embracing Buddhist and Brahmanic notions such as reincarnation, announced a coming New Age. She taught that enlightened humans should cooperate with the Ascended Masters of the Great White Brotherhood whose mystical brotherhood guided the destiny of the planet. Her ideas contributed to expectation of a New Age among practitioners of Spiritualism and believers in astrology, for whom the coming of the new Aquarian Age promised a period of brotherhood and enlightenment.

Blavatsky’s successor, Annie Besant, taught that the Indian teacher Jiddu Krishnamurti, was the fulfillment of the biblical coming Messiah. In the 1940s Alice A. Bailey, founder of the Arcane School taught that the Master Maitreya, would appear in the last quarter of the 20th century. After Bailey’s death, former members of the Arcane School created a host of new independent theosophical groups claiming the ability to transmit spiritual energy to the world and allegedly received channeled messages from various preternatural beings, especially the Ascended Masters of the Great White Brotherhood.

In the 1970s and ʾ80s the variety of occult and metaphysical religious communities were brought together in anticipation of a New Age of love and light through personal transformation and healing.  Carlos Castaneda is considered a father of the New Age movement for his series of books based on the mystical secrets of a Peruvian Yaqui Indian shaman. The movement’s strongest supporters were followers of modern esotericism. Popular in the West since the 2nd century AD, especially in the form of Gnosticism, the original frankly pagan methods of acquiring mystical knowledge were supplanted by various esoteric movements including Christian-oriented Rosicrucianism in the 17th century and Freemasonry, theosophy, and ritual magic in the 19th and 20th centuries.

The Theosophical Society was formed in New York City in 1875 by Helena Blavatsky, Henry Steel Olcott, William Quan Judge and others. “Associating it closely with the esoteric doctrines of Hermeticism and Neoplatonism, Blavatsky described Theosophy as “the synthesis of science, religion and philosophy”, proclaiming that it was reviving an “Ancient Wisdom” which underlay all the world’s religions.”

Early 1900’s – Thelema was founded by Aleister Crowley.  Three statements in particular distill the practice and ethics of Thelema:

  • Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law,
  • Love is the law, love under will, i.e. love itself is subsidiary to finding and manifesting one’s authentic purpose or “mission”.
  • Every man and every woman is a star implies by metaphor that persons doing their Wills are like stars in the universe: occupying a time and position in space, yet distinctly individual and having an independent nature largely without undue conflict with other stars.

Thelema describes what is termed “the Æon of Horus” (the “Crowned and Conquering Child”)—as distinguished from an earlier “Æon of Isis” (mother-goddess idea) and “Æon of Osiris” (typified by bronze-age redeemer-based, divine-intermediary, or slain/flayed-god archetype religions such as Christianity, Mithraism, Zoroastrianism, Mandaeism, Odin, Osiris, Attis, Adonis, etc.). Many adherents (also known as “Thelemites”) emphasize the practice of Magick (glossed generally as the “Science and Art of causing Change to occur in conformity with Will”).

Witchcraft, which includes Wicca, paganism, folk magic and other New Age traditions, is one of the fastest-growing spiritual paths in America. A 2014 Pew Research Center study assessed that 0.4% of Americans identified as pagan, Wiccan or New Age. (Most modern pagan worship, of which Wicca is one type, draws on pre-Christian traditions in revering nature.) By 2050, it said, the number of Americans practicing “other religions” — faiths outside Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Hinduism and Buddhism — would triple “due largely to switching into other religions (such as Wicca and pagan religions).”

“It’s clearly increasing,” said Helen A. Berger, one of the foremost academic experts on contemporary witchcraft and paganism in America and draws knowledge about its appeal from surveys she’s co-conducted on the pagan community.

The religion is individualistic in many ways,” Berger told me. “You can do your own thing. It’s not signing on to an institutional religion. It’s not signing on to a set of actions or beliefs that you must adhere to.”

“I’ve felt the reassuring presence of the otherworldly in the midst of difficult circumstances, and I know that magic happens when I stir away the guilt that bubbles up if I choose self-care over self-sacrifice.”

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Published by kingdomcome777

A grandmother who loves to study the Bible and bases life on "know the truth, and the truth shall make you free."

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