| From the TeachingtheWord Bible Knowledgebase |
Part one of a series
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May 2024 - One hundred years ago this month, liberals began a major offensive to achieve their long-planned takeover of the Presbyterian Church in the United States by issuing an "affirmation" attacking Biblical Christianity as "intolerant".
Do not be unequally yoked together with unbelievers. For what fellowship has righteousness with lawlessness? And what communion has light with darkness? And what accord has Christ with Belial? Or what part has a believer with an unbeliever? And what agreement has the temple of God with idols? - 2 Corinthians 6:14-16
In early 1924, liberals in the Presbyterian Church in the USA published a manifesto of their false principles that came to be known as the Auburn Affirmation.[1] The subsequent acceptance of this landmark document in the PCUSA, and the fact that none of its signers was ever disciplined by the church or evicted, revealed the extent to which the cancer of the old liberalism had corrupted the denomination over the preceding three generations. The publication of the Auburn Affirmation was one of the key events leading to the secession of conservatives from mainline Presbyterianism in 1936.
Christians today can learn a great deal from these events of church history, as we face ungodly "affirmations" in our day. The most notorious of these is the rise of support, even within organized pseudo-Christianity, for so-called "gender affirmation" beginning with the psychological deception, drugging and genital mutilation of young children and teenagers. Liberals are poisoning the thinking of millions of young people, especially through government-run schools, encouraging them to embrace transgenderism. Unscrupulous doctors are mutilating young people's physical sexual characteristics so that they can identify as being of a different sex, in rebellion against the ordinance of God who creates each individual male or female.
Likewise, liberals encourage religious "affirmation" - the monumental complex of lies which claims that no sin requires repentance or cleansing by the blood of Christ, all roads lead to eternal bliss as long as we all just coexist, and only those whom liberals deem politically incorrect are in danger of damnation.
It is not far-fetched, as we shall see, to assert that such evil present-day "affirmations" have their roots in the kinds of twisted thinking we find in the Auburn Affirmation one hundred years ago.
What happened in those days? How did such a spiritual crisis come about? What were the false principles of the liberals? Who opposed them? Why did the opposition fail to turn the tide? We shall address these questions as we continue.
References:
1. The full text of the Auburn Affirmation appears here.
Next: The Situation in 1924
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