A world Without Islam pdfdrive com

The Great Apostasy
Perhaps the most extreme and sweeping assault ever against the foundations of
the Christian Church is the concept of “The Great Apostasy,” a body of ideas
that has captured the thinking of a small but articulate and vocal minority and
that receives considerable time on the airwaves of Christian broadcasting and
publishing. This approach condemns the very institution of the church, nearly
from its beginnings, and levels a series of bold and diverse charges:
The church’s original teachings and practices began to be distorted,
changed, and even corrupted extremely early on, even perhaps during the
lifetime of some of the Apostles; the church went on to compound these
errors by persecuting and expelling advocates of the original principles of
Christian faith.
The church began to move inexorably down the road of worldly corruption
with the official adoption of Christianity by the Roman Empire; this event
wed the church to state power, and the state manipulated the church and its
doctrines for its own end. The church has not only committed grievous
errors but it also is fundamentally incapable of change or reform in this
respect.
The church compounded its errors when it then propounded the doctrine of
church infallibility on doctrinal issues; and yet again when the church
extended this infallibility on doctrinal issues to the pope himself. The
reality is that the church, both Catholic and Protestant, will, in fact, never
be able to speak infallibly until the end of time.
“Human weakness is naturally drawn to a form of false religion that is
worldly, pompous, ritualistic, anthropomorphic, polytheistic, infected with
magical thinking, and that values human accomplishment more highly or
more practically than the work of God (divine grace) is valued.” Humans
are also inclined to accept tradition as being on par with the written
testimony of the Bible.
These concepts represent a revolutionary, even subversive critique of the church
in various strands of radical Protestant thinking that has included at various
times Anabaptists, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Adventists,
and Jehovah’s Witnesses. It has also shaken up the thinking of liberal

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denominations of the church in its direct charge of corruption of religion through
power. Interestingly, classical Shi’ism is right on message here: a belief in the
inevitable corruption of the true faith through clerical association with the state
and power (even though violated by the ideology of contemporary Iran). Today,
radical Sunni Islam calls for Muslims to think for themselves, even to resist the
state when the state clearly is not Islamically legitimate. But this is all relatively
new to Sunni Islam—and is almost Jeffersonian in its belief in the obligation to
overthrow unjust and illegitimate government.

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