Click to join the conversation with over 500,000 Pentecostal believers and scholars

Click to get our FREE MOBILE APP and stay connected

Beating the State: Third Century Christianity in the Third World Today

Remnant Review by Gary North

Let me start with saying that Gary North is NO Pentecostal. Gary North is known a post-millennial Christian reconstructionist…

“A spectre is haunting Communism. It is the spectre of churches without buildings.”

If there were a Christian Karl Marx today, his Manifesto of Third World Christianity could begin with these words.

In 1973, in his last years, Mao’s persecution had reduced the number of Protestants in China to something in the range of 3 million people. The estimate today is 120 million. No one knows. This is a good thing. If the state cannot count them, it cannot persecute them.

Chinese Protestants have adopted a strategy used in the late Roman Empire. They are worshiping in homes and secret buildings. They stay on the move. In short: the churches do not have 9-digit zip codes.

The same strategy was used under the Soviet Empire before it collapsed in late 1991.

The same strategy has worked in the tribal states of the post-European empire world in sub-Sahara Africa.

The same system is working in Latin America, to the dismay of the bureaucrats.

This has received little attention in the West, because this strategy relies on invisibility. The West’s intellectuals suffer from a myth of modernism: “If bureaucrats cannot count something, it cannot be important. It it cannot be computerized, it cannot be socially relevant.” Call it the NSA’s blind spot. Call it the IRS’s nightmare. The strategy is simple to describe: no permanent real estate. There are no permanent church buildings.

http://www.garynorth.com/public/12131.cfm

Marc Alfano [08/30/2015 7:21 PM] The problem is that ISIS and Islamic militants are using the same strategy to infiltrate various countries. There is a spiritual battle going on for people’s hearts and souls. We must pray for God’s intervention!! Violence breeds violence!

Charles Page [08/30/2015 7:59 PM] Marc Alfano, make this comment to Charles Howard Huffman.

Charles Page [08/30/2015 8:33 PM] Charles Howard Hartman- I don’t think the Christians are violent.

John Kissinger [08/30/2015 10:23 PM] Charles Page there’s a major problem with North’s Christian Reconstruction – I think we discussed it with Liberation Theology/NAR

Charles Page [08/30/2015 10:24 PM] I’m ignoring North’s reconstruction in the same way I ignore Pre-mill/dispensational construction

John Kissinger [08/30/2015 10:27 PM] how do you do that when his social role of the church is placed namely in the eschatological juxtapose of his Christian Reconstruction?

Charles Page [08/30/2015 10:28 PM] whut???

Charles Page [08/30/2015 10:29 PM] I understand eschatological manifestation of the ground of all being but whut did you say????

John Kissinger [08/30/2015 10:31 PM] if you ignore the way he approached the social role of the church via post-mil eschatology, how can you ignore his eschatological preform and still understand/accept his social role of the church?

Charles Page [08/30/2015 10:35 PM] you’ve lost me! Did you read the link – I was only interested in the references to Modern Pentecostalism and their great grown and subsequent stagnation but social construction??? You need to talk to Peter about that!!!