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The foundations under attack

Underpinning job

THE FOUNDATIONS UNDER ATTACK
By Michael de Semlyen
Dorchester House Publications
232 pages
ISBN 0 9518386 1 7

The author is concerned that the biblical foundations of the historic Reformed faith are being chopped away before our eyes by a three-pronged attack. And he unhesitatingly accuses the Jesuits of the counter-Reformation and their successors as the source of those attacks.

1. Against the Reformed historical interpretation of Bible prophecy they have spawned a futurist interpretation (p.11) — a view made popular by the early Schofield Bible and which has nothing to say about the history of the current church age. The Pope can therefore no longer be called the Anti-Christ.

2. Against the King James version of the Bible, the Anglo-Catholic scholars, Westcott and Hort, led the way in creating the 1881 English revision of the Bible, using an eclectic Greek text prominent in the production of which was Cardinal Carlo Martini, a Jesuit and leading Vatican scholar (p.83). Thus the door was opened to the plethora of contemporary Bible versions, which, he argues, are seriously inadequate (p.73ff).

3. Against the Reformed Doctrines of Grace (or the five points of Calvinism) as expressed in the Synod of Dort (1618), the Jesuits deliberately adopted the teachings of Arminius to infiltrate the Reformed thinking of the Protestant churches (p.104). The author argues that much of the modern charismatic emphasis on visions, dreams, extra-biblical revelations, is simply a return to Roman Catholic mysticism (p.142).

In an epilogue the author argues that there is ample evidence that the EU of today, whose logo is a circle of 12 stars derived from the halo around the virgin Mary’s head (p.193), is influenced by the Roman Catholicism whose Pope John Paul II publicly ‘placed Europe in [the virgin] Mary’s hands’ (p.180).

The author writes with passionate intensity. Nevertheless his book raises some questions: Is it indisputable that Revelation 9.1-11 reveals the history of the rise of Muhammad and Islam (p.37ff)? Can the problem of the 300-year-old language of the King James Bible only be overcome if we educate the masses of the people up to the Bible, instead of bringing the Bible down to their level (p.54)?

While the Reformed faith is the best expression of Bible truth, has not Arminius, with all his deviations from the truth, straddled the earth evangelistically, while Reformation thought is sometimes occupied more in criticising him than evangelising sinners worldwide? Which is worse?

John Appleby,
worshipping with a group of Christians seeking to reach into a large housing estate in south Shrewsbury with the gospel