Information Related to "Europe's Coming Religious Revival"
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Europe's
Coming
Religious
Revival
Europe’s experience
with Christianity—including the dark side of its abuses and excesses—tells
an astonishing and even violent tale.
If Bible prophecy is any indication, that story will again be dark and violent.
by Howard Davis
God
is dead," wrote Friedrich Nietzsche in 1886, tossing a spiritual bombshell
whose fallout lasted well into 20th-century Europe. "God remains dead,"
the German philosopher continued, "and we have killed him."
A master of the shocking statement-as was his disciple Adolf Hitler a generation
later-Nietzsche explored the nature of a psychological crisis that comes on
people when they refuse to believe that God exists.
Nietzsche helped set the stage for a collapse of belief in God in 20th-century
Europe. He was a proponent of a philosophy that came to be known as existentialism.
According to this view man exists in a world that simply is; man cannot know
why he exists because God doesn't exist. Alone in the universe, said Nietzsche,
man must make his own rules to live by, forge his own meaning for the universe
and abandon the concept of a living God who divinely and deliberately influences
history.
You and I live in such a world. It is a confused place. God is spoken of but
only amid a babel of traditions, theologies and denominations. We can trace
much of this confusion to a 2,000-year history of abuse and manipulation of
the name and authority of God and Christ, but stripped of obedience to the teachings
and practices of Jesus.
Although Christianity springs from the Middle East, Europe has been its primary
home for 2,000 years. The startling truth about Europe's view of Christ, however,
is that it bears little resemblance to the teachings and practices of Jesus
we read about in the New Testament. A history of nearly 2,000 years of forced
conversions, church-state alliances, absorption and adaptations to paganism,
pogroms and persecutions has left millions of people dead in persecutions and
holy wars.
We can find many individual exceptions, but the typical European does not believe
in the God described in the Bible. Why not? What stands in the place of God
in the
European mind?
The silent superpower
To understand Europe, we must know the European mind.
The Continent is the home of multitudes of brilliant people, spectacular scenery,
stunning architecture and beautiful music. Its cultural achievement is unmatched
in variety and extent. It is the birthplace of many of humanity's highest achievements.
Yet the history of much of the last 1,500 years is a list of horrors against
humanity, many of them
perpetrated in the name of Christianity.
We need to understand why Europe's ideas and perspectives remain important to
the future of the world. If some of its nations decide to again become a dominant
force in the world, again bringing it into direct confrontation with the United
States, civilization as we know it could end.
The European Union, with its collective population of 370 million people, is
functionally a superpower now, though largely a silent one. It tolerates U.S.
economic and military policy, but to believe this situation will always be so
is to be naive. The unspoken fear of American foreign-policy experts is that
the days of voluntary European submission
to American leadership are numbered.
Deep in the heart of Christianity
As you study history, you come to understand how it is possible-and likely-that
the greatest wars of the future will emanate from Europe.
How so? you might ask. Do not the European and North American continents share
the values of human dignity and the Christian heritage?
That was the precise opinion of Americans and Europeans at the beginning of
the last century. But consider the facts. It is from Europe, this most historically
Christian of continents, that the greatest wars in history have come.
Nearly all the great wars of Europe have one element in common. Messiahs of
one stripe or another are almost always at the heart of European wars. Leaders
arise from time to time who claim a superior calling from God, or the gods,
to implement and exercise universal rule.
During wars of aggression under the emperors, Rome claimed the right to bring
Pax Romana to the world. Medieval crusades were promulgated by a papacy that
even now claims for the church continuous universal power over the salvation
of everyone. Monarchs invaded their neighboring European kingdoms to consolidate
the Holy Roman Empire and preserve a universal faith. Napoleon's messianic vision
fueled his ambition to rule not only France, Africa and the Middle East, but
the entire European Continent all the way to Moscow. Most recently, of course,
came the tyrannical rule of Hitler.
Trouble in Europe almost always starts with a politically powerful messianic
visionary who claims the right of world supremacy.
A Christian continent?
Europe is where Christianity has had its biggest impact for the last 2,000 years.
However, Jesus' authentic teachings and practices have not held sway in Europe
(or anywhere else) for long. Jesus Himself predicted that a great conflict,
the mother of all holy wars, will yet flow from Europe to the rest of the world
(see "Coming: A Religious Revival With Deadly Consequences").
Nietzsche, too, saw a coming religious war. A pan-Europeanist, he believed Europe
should work for unification. His would not be a Europe that believed in Christ
as the functional ruler of the world. In Nietzsche's Europe man would replace
God after faith in God was stripped away.
He predicted a future fraught with danger. "The story I have to tell,"
he wrote, "is the history of the next two centuries ... For a long time
now our whole civilization has been driving, with a tortured intensity growing
from decade to decade, as if towards a catastrophe: restlessly, violently, tempestuously,
like a mighty river desiring the end of its journey ... Where we live, soon
nobody will be able to exist."
Nietzsche's abyss
Nietzsche predicted his nihilistic way of thinking would lead Europe into an
abyss of violence. "There will be wars," he said, "such as have
never been waged on earth ..." Again: "I foresee something terrible,
chaos everywhere. Nothing left which is of any value."
Nietzsche used words deliberately designed to play off the prophetic words of
Jesus. Only days before His crucifixion Jesus' disciples asked Him what would
be the signs of His coming to establish the Kingdom of God. "... Many will
come in My name," He replied, "saying, 'I am the Christ,' and will
deceive many. And you will hear of wars and rumors of wars ... for nation will
rise against nation ..." (Matthew 24:5-7).
Nietzsche was a masterful manipulator of language. He used terminology from
the Bible, but he cleverly twisted it and adapted its meaning to suit his own
ends.
He and his protégés of the 20th century intended to turn biblical
teachings inside out. He even described himself as an Antichrist. In his last
book, The Antichrist, written six months before he went insane, he advised that
"one had better put on gloves before reading the New Testament. The presence
of so much filth makes it very advisable."
Ironically, Nietzsche had been a brilliant Bible student as a youth, intent
on following his father's footsteps as a Lutheran pastor. His adolescent classmates
had even ridiculed him as "little pastor."
In the famous "God is dead" passage of his book Thus Spake Zarathustra,
Nietzsche designed a blueprint for a European future shaped by leadership that
would despise the biblical prophets and Jesus. These leaders would be supermen,
the übermench who would become gods, creators of a way of life and a world
power structure without God.
For that to come about, the elite of Europe had to be stripped of real faith
in a real God.
The aftermath of Nietzsche
Europe in 1900 was ripe for a collapse of faith. The major European religions,
beyond appropriating the name of God and theological terminology from the Bible,
were never built on the authentic teachings and practices of Christ. If they
had been, two world wars would never have been fought.
Confidence in God shatters when people believe in leaders who claim to represent
Christ but don't heed what He said and don't do what He practiced. Belief in
God disintegrates when people live through impossibly horrible events and personal
trauma, then are encouraged to attribute them to acts of God rather than their
own failure and sins. When built on the sands of wayward traditions and religious
institutions, faith crumbles.
And God often gets the blame.
What is the foundation of your beliefs?
Is it the teachings and practices of Jesus Christ? Jesus said: "... Everyone
who hears these sayings of Mine, and does not do them, will be like a foolish
man who built his house on the sand: and the rain descended, the floods came,
and the winds blew and beat on that house ... and great was its fall" (Matthew 7:26-27).
Europeans' faith at the beginning of the 20th century lay in their kings and
their religious hierarchies, denominations and traditions. They trusted in politics
and the supposed righteousness of national superiority. They prided themselves
on their military genius, their advanced arms and their nations' economic strength.
"The outbreak of war in 1914 was generally accepted with confidence and
jubilation by the masses; few people imagined how long or how disastrous a conflict
of the
great powers would be. The war was greeted patriotically, as a defensive one
imposed by national necessity ... (and) idealistically, as one for right against
might, for the sanctity of treaties, and for international morality," says
the Encyclopaedia Britannica (1971 edition, Vol. 23, "World War I,"
p. 692).
European Christians were certain God was on their side in the conflict. He was
not. Christ did not pull the trigger. Misguided humans did.
By World War I, Nietzsche's influence was widely felt. The kaiser in Germany
sent a copy of Nietzsche's Zarathustra to the battlefront with each German soldier
along with a copy of the New Testament. The Germans were to mingle Christ with
Europe's supermen.
Most people in 1914 believed the war would quickly end. Churches were crowded
with people praying that God would deliver their soldiers from evil and conquer
their enemies. Christians all over Europe prayed to the same God for His assistance
in killing each other. German and Austrian Catholics prayed in the name of Christ
for their soldiers' success against French Catholics and members of the Russian
Orthodox Church. British Anglican and Baptist Protestants prayed with Scottish
Presbyterians against German Lutherans.
Whose side was God on?
All were sincere. All were full of faith. The problem was that they had the
wrong interpretation of the Christian faith. Christ did not endorse their killing.
Their faith was woefully misguided.
In four years 10 million German, French, Russian, Austrian and British soldiers,
and many more from outside Europe, died in unbelievable carnage that stretched
from Turkey and Russia to the outskirts of Paris.
In today's terms the war destroyed $20 trillion of property, infrastructure
and other resources. The flower of European youth and much of its elite were
dead or maimed.
God was not dead. The old Europe was. This carnage glorified no one-God, country
or man. In the end, millions had died in vain.
Europeans asked: If God exists and is all-loving, how can He allow horror and
suffering? Hadn't God anointed the German's kaiser and the Russians' czar?
But in the war's aftermath Germany lost territory (a prelude to further losses
after World War II), and Russia was taken over by Bolshevik atheists who systematically
murdered the nation's aristocratic elite, an act not seen on that scale in hundreds
of years of European bloodshed.
Events by 1920 had left many Europeans' faith in God shattered. Then the Nazi
movement gave birth to the ferocious dictatorship of Adolf Hitler and eliminated
the vestiges of the sentimental faith among many Europeans that the Continent
enjoyed God's blessing.
Hitler's rise to power was a near-religious event for many Germans. He projected
himself as the Führer, the "leader," a messiah promising 1,000
years of German world rule.
Germany's embrace of Hitler resulted in the greatest war in history and a nightmare
for his people. European belief in God as a supernatural restraint on evil was
even more severely damaged. European theology lay in a shambles.
Beliefs about God and the Bible
At the beginning of the 21st century most Europeans still call themselves Catholic
or Protestant in accordance with state or cultural custom, but surveys show
that few believe
in a supernatural God. Only a small minority accept the concept of a personal
God as described in the Bible.
The overwhelming majority of Europeans believe in the theory of evolution. A
small minority accept the supernatural miracles of the Bible, and fewer believe
in a literal second coming of Christ. Few believe in the Kingdom of God as Jesus
and the apostles taught and explained in the New Testament.
On the whole the spirit of Europe is one of disbelief that biblical laws, prophecies
and teachings make any difference to anybody. Regrettably, American televangelism
with
its glitz, shallowness and biblical illiteracy is cablecast by satellite in
Europe, deepening European cynicism regarding the Bible.
However, we need to remember that Christ and other prophets of the Bible predicted
this collapse of belief and faith. Remember, Jesus asked, "... When the
Son of Man comes, will He really find faith on the earth?" (Luke 18:8).
Throughout the 20th century thousands of reports of armed conflicts in daily
newspapers read like prophecies in the Bible of "wars and rumors of wars"
(Mark 13:7).
The 21st century will be no different.
Mystery woman
Much of prophecy is clothed in symbols. When you understand what they mean,
they connect God's sayings with world events, governments and prevailing beliefs.
Lutherans and supporters of the Church of England nearly 500 years ago recognized
in Revelation 17 a remarkable metaphor and symbol. They cited it to describe
the nature of the church-state amalgam that had dominated European history since
Constantine had made Roman Catholicism the official religion of the Roman Empire
more than 1,000 years earlier.
The Bible is blunt. In its prophecies a church is often personified as a woman-in
this case a fallen woman, "the great harlot who sits on many waters, with
whom the kings of the earth committed fornication ..." (verses 1-2).
God's Word describes the abuses perpetuated by such a church-state combine.
Europe, to its dubious credit, does not pretend to deny the history of the immorality,
abuse of power and untold millions killed in the name of Christ.
In the 16th century Martin Luther cited a biblical passage to illustrate the
differences between the biblical teachings of Christ and Catholicism and to
justify his decision to break with Rome: "I saw the woman, drunk with the
blood of the saints and with the blood of the martyrs of Jesus" (verse 6).
But Europe never returned to the practices and teachings of Jesus. The Protestants,
too, continued many of the abuses of Christianity under different guises. This
is not to say Europe will not have a significant religious future. This and
other biblical prophecies make it clear that it will.
A new leader
Does the Bible tell what will happen next in Europe?
In a fascinating way, the Bible and Friedrich Nietzsche make the same predictions
about particular aspects of Europe's future, violent predictions that center
on the rise of a new generation of powerful leaders.
"Dead are all gods: now we want the superman to live," wrote Nietzsche
in Zarathustra. He predicted the consequences of the rise of a superman at a
great moment in European history. The "great noon," he said, would
be a day of fire.
The apostle Paul spoke of a great religious leader who will arise immediately
before Jesus' return. He, too, will meet his end with fire. He will not believe
in the biblical God and will act as if God indeed is dead. He will claim to
be God Himself on earth.
"... That Day will not come," wrote Paul, "unless ... the man
of sin is revealed, the son of perdition, who opposes and exalts himself above
all that is called God or that is worshiped, so that he sits as God in the temple
of God, showing himself that he is God." Paul says of this deceiver: "...
The Lord will consume (him) with the breath of His mouth and destroy (him) with
the brightness of His coming" (2Thessalonians 2:3-4,8).
The woman rides a beast
The book of Revelation describes wars and abuse of Christianity finally coming
to an end. After Revelation's description of a religious system symbolized by
a fallen woman, the account continues: "I will tell you the mystery of
the woman and of the beast that carries her, which has the seven heads and ten
horns" (Revelation 17:7).
In Europe religion is often linked to governments. Sometimes the church has
functioned politically as a state. It has been part of a church-state relationship-religious
and political power combined-symbolized by the woman on a beast that she influences
as she "rides" it. Governmental systems are the "beast"
in symbolism.
A governmental system involving 10 political leaders is coming. They will be
"ten kings who have received no kingdom as yet, but they receive authority
for one hour as kings with the beast. These are of one mind, and they will give
their power and authority to the beast" (verses 12-13).
|
Recommended Reading What does the Bible
reveal about a coming religious revival? Be sure to request the eye-opening
booklets You Can Understand Bible Prophecy and The Church Jesus
Built. Both will help you better understand the meaning behind world
events and trends. |
Eventually, though, they will turn their wrath on the system that was once their
ally (verse 16). Europe, and the world, is in for a violent future if it continues
to act as though God is irrelevant and uninvolved in human affairs-and as if
He is dead. The Bible spells out what will happen if we continue to fashion
religion and government in our own image rather than believing God in His Word.
The God and Christ of the Bible are alive, as humanity will come to see. The
Bible is not psychologically clever fiction.
As verse 14 says of these prophesied leaders: "... These will make war
with the Lamb, and the Lamb will overcome them, for He is Lord of lords and
King of kings."
Beyond this time of violent turmoil, shows the Bible, humanity has a spectacularly
positive future. Unlike Nietzsche's depressing fiction, the Bible, on balance,
depicts mankind's history as bright and uplifting.
Nietzsche, the world will soon learn, was badly mistaken. It isn't God who died.
I'm reminded of the T-shirt someone gave me emblazoned with these words: "Nietzsche
is dead. Signed, God." GN
©
2001-2022 United Church of God, an International Association
Related Information:
Sidebar: Coming - A Religious Revival With Deadly Consequences
Table of Contents that includes "Europe's Coming Religious Revival"
Other Articles by Howard Davis
Origin of article "Europe's Coming Religious Revival"
Keywords: European religious revival woman of Revelation Revelation, symbols of Nietzsche
Nietzsche: