Rod Bennett - The Apostasy That Wasnt: The Extraordinary Story of the Unbreakable Early Church

The Apostasy That Wasnt

The Extraordinary Story of the Unbreakable Early Church

R OD B ENNETT

The Apostasy That Wasnt

The Extraordinary Story of the Unbreakable Early Church

2015 Rod Bennett

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To Dorothy Carter Bennett

Of all wives, most patient

Remove not the ancient landmark
which your fathers have set.

Proverbs 22:28

You shall not make a schism. Rather, you shall make
peace among those that are contending.

The Didache, c. A.D. 70

I believe in God,
the Father almighty,
Creator of heaven and earth,
and in Jesus Christ, his only Son, our Lord,
who was conceived by the Holy Spirit,
born of the Virgin Mary,
suffered under Pontius Pilate,
was crucified, died and was buried;
he descended into hell;
on the third day he rose again from the dead;
he ascended into heaven,
and is seated at the right hand of God the Father almighty;
from there he will come to judge the living and the dead.
I believe in the Holy Spirit,
the holy catholic Church,
the communion of saints,
the forgiveness of sins,
the resurrection of the body,
and life everlasting. Amen.

The Apostles Creed
Second century A.D. or earlier

Acknowledgments

The inspiration for this book came largely from the historical works of Hilaire Belloc; his lively approach to the task of explaining difficult historical material opened my eyes to many subjects that had always been obscure to me before. Other writers whose stylistic influence will probably be recognized deserve a shout out as well; Robert Riskin, Robert Hugh Benson, and Tom Wolfe. And the book is so full of quotes from Robert Payne, Guiseppe Ricciotti, G.K. Chesterton, and John Henry Newman that a separate acknowledgment here seems almost superfluousbut is gratefully offered anyway.

Personal friends and relatives were hugely helpful as well: people like Mike Aquilina, Franklin Jones, Jim Henry III, Dave Armstrong, and Mark Shea.

God bless all of theseand you, my readers, as well!

Introduction

In the green hills of western North Carolina, not far from the Tennessee line, lies a sunny Southern tourist attraction called Fields of the Wood. Advertising itself as the home of the worlds largest Ten Commandments (spread across the face of a small mountain), the worlds largest open Bible (made of concrete and twenty feet high), and an authentic walk-through replica of Christs empty tomb at Jerusalem, this out-of-the-way corner of roadside America sounded, when I first discovered it in the 1980s, like just exactly my cup of tea. Ever since I was a kid Ive had a real soft spot for these quirky little outcroppings of mom-and-pop piety and I seldom miss an opportunity to turn off the main highway into whatever wax museum, tourist cave, or historic shrine happens to present itself. I must say, however, that I got a good deal more than I bargained for on this particular trip. I expected to find travel brochures, snow globes, 3-D View-Master reels, foldout picture postcards with twelve different Tru-Color viewsand I found them. But I found something else, too. I uncovered an enormous blind spot in my own faith; a kind of a cancer, really, of bad information that was threatening (though I hadnt realized it until then) to eat up all the rest of my beliefs as an Evangelical Christian. So right then and there I was forced to embark on a course of study Id never bothered to look into beforea quest to make sense of my own religion. I hope you will enjoy tagging along as I try to retrace my steps.

Fields of the Wood, I learned, memorializes the place where, on June 13, 1903, the one true Church of God was restored to the earth after an absence of nearly 1,600 years. Early that morning, a self-taught former Quaker named Ambrose Jessup Tomlinson climbed alone to the top of one of the Blue Ridge Mountains determined to grab hold of God and not let go. Frustrated and confused by the multiplicity of competing sects swarming over the Southern mountains in those days, A.J. Tomlinson wanted to know where was simplicity, where was certitude, where, in short, was the church of the living God, the pillar and bulwark of the truth (1 Tim. 3:15). And according to the stone tablet that now marks the spot, Preacher Tomlinson prayed and prevailed. He came down from the mountain, came down as Moses came down from Sinai, unshakably convinced that he had just been party to a sacred encounter of truly biblical proportions. Staggering back to the tiny congregation of mountaineers for whom he served as pastor, Tomlinson announced the revelation he had just received; to wit, that this small group was in reality the Church of God of the Bible, for they had agreed together to accept the whole Bible rightly divided and to walk in all the light as it shined on their pathway... This was the event and the place where Davids prophecy [Ps. 132:46] was fulfilled, I will not give sleep to mine eyes, or slumber to mine eyelids, until I find out a place for the Lord, an habitation for the mighty God of Jacob. Lo, we heard of it at Ephratah: we found it (the Church) in the fields of the wood.

My traveling companion on that visit was another theologically minded Evangelical and he and I spent quite an entertaining afternoon clambering over every inch of Fields of the Wood trying to piece the full story together. The entire twenty-acre site is thickly forested with granite monuments, biblical plaques, and the like, so checking them all against each other to develop some kind of systematic theology for Tomlinsons group became a bit like a scriptural scavenger hunt. What Reverend Tomlinson does seem unquestionably to have established is a minor Pentecostal denomination called the Church of God of Prophecy (Cleveland, Tennessee); it was what he claimed to have reestablished that we were having trouble getting our minds around. Were the friendly mountain folk we saw running the place really claiming to be the only true Christians on earth? Did they really believe that the Holy Spirit had totally withdrawn himself from humanity for sixteen centuries? It certainly seemed so: Fields of the Wood is not just a religious retreat or a tourist attraction. It marks and beautifies the very spot where the Church of God emerged from the deep blackness of the Dark Ages to become once more the great beacon of truth to a world still groping in spiritual darkness. The Church of God lay desolate and lost through the centuries; we found it again in the Fields of the Wood.

I hate to admit this but my friend and I responded at first with laughter. A concrete pillar solemnly declared, THIS IS WHERE DAVID SAID THE CHURCH WOULD BE FOUND. An old airplane on display, out of which some tracts had been dropped back in the forties, was solemnly declared to be the fulfillment of Isaiah 60:8 (Who are these that fly as a cloud, and as the doves to their windows?). Yet as we continued to explore those hushed, wooded hillsides, all of the repeated assurances that we were walking on holy ground began to have their effect. A pensive mood came over us; then deeper, more edifying thoughts came slowly to mind. Why had our laughter and unbelief come so easily? What made us so sure A.J. Tomlinson hadnt restored the true faith to the world? Was it because he was nothing but an uneducated yokel? So were Peter, James, and John. Was it because his holy place was tacky and run-down? So are many of the shrines at Bethlehem and Jerusalem. True, my friend and I thought we could rightly divide the Bible better than A.J. Tomlinsonbut then, of course, A.J. Tomlinson had felt the same way about people like us. All in all, it was a dappled, dozy, and strangely disquieting way to pass a summers afternoon.