Pastor John Samson
England was once a center for Reformation. That is no longer the case. Thank God, there are glorious exceptions. I pray that there would be many more of these exceptions in our day. But by and large, the church in England, at least the one visible to the people, is unrecognizable from days gone by. Before World War II, about 40-50% of the population in England attended church. Today, estimates suggest the percentage attending church is down to 7.5%. It was said in the past that Britain “˜ruled the waves’. Now it is more likely to be said that Britain “˜waives the rules.’ The majority of people have rejected the God of the Bible and there is a famine of the word of God in the land.
I was born and raised in Chester in the North West of England (25 miles south east of Liverpool). I love England, and its people. I therefore inwardly weep over the current state of the Church there. When Bishops can publicly and without apology deny the basic tenets of the Christian faith, from the Deity of Christ, to His virgin birth, His sinless life, His substitutionary atoning death on the cross and physical resurrection – and they can still hold on to their office as Bishops in the Church of England – something is sadly amiss.
So where did the down slide start? Where did the conscious march towards unbelief begin?
That’s a difficult question to answer, and I am sure there are many factors involved. It is rare for only one thing to be the issue… I know that, and I believe that. Yet if I had to mention just one thing that had an adverse effect, I would say it was the Church’s continued confusion over the subject of evolution. Just as a stone thrown into a pond has ripple effects, when the stone of evolution was embraced by the church, the ripple effects were very far reaching. Once the door of unbelief was opened… once Genesis 1-11 (Creation, the story of Adam and Eve, the Fall of man, Noah’s Flood, the Tower of Babel) was abandoned as being intellectually and scientifically unsustainable… it was only a matter of time before the whole Bible was viewed with suspicion and skepticism.
Charles Darwin, the popular proponent of evolution was born February 12, 1809, in Shrewsbury, England and died April 19, 1882, in the village of Downe, England. But he wasn’t buried there. You will actually find his grave in Westminster Abbey in London. He is buried close to two other famous scientists, Sir John Herschel and Sir Isaac Newton. To do this is to bestow the greatest honor that the Church of England can bestow upon a person, burying them alongside Kings and Queens and other national dignitaries in the foundations of the most prestigious Church in the land, opposite the Houses of Parliament in the nation’s capital.
Darwin’s grave is not easy to find. I remember hearing of one man who was trying to find it in Westminster Abbey, so he asked an attendant and found that he had been walking over it. Darwin is buried in the floor (the foundation) of the church. By honoring Darwin’s remains in this way, a very loud and clear message was given to the world; the Church believes evolution is true; the Bible cannot be trusted, or else, at the very least, it is perfectly acceptable to mix evolution with the Bible. But Darwinian evolution, with its teaching of death and bloodshed millions of years before man evolved, is a direct attack on the foundations of Christianity and its teaching that death and bloodshed are a direct result of the sin of Adam (Gen. 2:17; Rom. 5:12; 8:20; 1 Cor. 15; Rev. 21:4).
The theory of evolution in science led to an evolutionary worldview that has brought mass destruction over the last century. There’s no doubt that it led to Hitler’s view of a master Aryan race, and the suppression and mass butchery of the Jews because they were “genetically inferior.” (I think it would be true to say that Hitler feared the Jews and so promoted the idea of a superior Aryan race in order to eliminate them – but this idea could not have gained popularity in Germany without society’s acceptance of evolution).
Evolution has also led to the mass killing of the unborn in our own day. Evolution is a religion and worldview that says that man makes the rules and we answer to no one. Man now defines when life starts, when it ends, the definition of marriage, the definition of the family.. and on and on we could go. Yet, increasingly, many scientists are now calling Darwin’s theories unscientific – the evidence for macro evolution remains “missing.” But if life is just the survival of the fittest, and all we are as human beings are grown up germs, then, well, we can simply get rid of unwanted cats and dogs and babies and seniors without it affecting our conscience. If we are just grown up germs, then who cares if a few germs get flushed down the sink, whether they be white germs, black germs, brown germs, yellow germs or red germs? It doesn’t really matter. Isn’t that the logical conclusion of evolutionary theory?
Yet, unbelief is honored and valued in the very foundations of the Church of England. When we give unbelief an inch, it will always take a mile. And now, well over a century after Darwin, the ramifications are still being felt, both in the Church and in our world – and none of these are good.
What has happened in England acts as a warning to every nation, including the United States. The same can happen here, and I would say, is already happening. Psalm 11:3 declares, “If the foundations are destroyed, what can the righteous do?” As we pray for England, as well as the rest of our world, lets pray that the Church will return to the proper foundation that God is the Creator and all His words are true.