Spanky Speaketh

Another issue of Tomorrow's World, another rant by Roderick "Spanky" Meredith. This time the old boy is laying into (you might even say spanking) "all Protestants".

As a former Protestant with many family members still Protestant, I feel compelled to warn you of a soon-coming disaster! Most of the Protestant churches will not even exist a decade or two from right now!

Wow, talk about qualified to comment! Just look at that first sentence. Half the readers of this blog share those credentials. And look, a wee prophecy: most Protestant churches will be gone in twenty years. How come?

Millions of Protestant church members are voting with their feet and getting out. They are becoming Roman Catholics.

Millions? Really? It gets dumber as it goes on.

On the other hand, the Roman Catholic church appears to "stand" for a few things! And millions of confused people out there "searching for something"—anything of real substance—are slowly but surely beginning to look at the original "mother church" of Protestantism as a place of religious safety. Many observers realize that the perceived stability of Roman Catholicism is making it more and more attractive to former Protestants, who have grown tired of their own denominations "waffling" on so many issues. Students of Bible prophecy will not be surprised to see hundreds of thousands and even millions returning to their "mother church" in the next few years!

Poor old Rod, he seems to have missed all the news about Pope Francis. Hardly the hard-line pontiff needed to match up with the blood soaked Great Whore of Revelation.

My friends, millions more in this horribly confused world will soon turn to the Roman Catholic church.

Yup, there are those millions again, though I have to say there isn't yet much sign of my neighbours suddenly charging off to mass on Sunday morning. But Spanky knows this because he's got it all worked out based on a miraculous misunderstanding of the apocalyptic genre - and a bone-headed nineteenth-century exegesis of Matthew 24, Daniel and Revelation. Rod explains it thus.

They simply do not study their Bible with the care and attention they would apply to a book on history, mathematics or quantum physics.

Now there's your problem Roderick. The Bible is multi-genre ancient literature, and you'd have to be a complete moron to think you could read it like a text on history (!), mathematics (!!) or quantum physics (!!!)

Rod Meredith, noted authority on almost everything

On a bilious roll, Spanky drags out his authorities to impress us; Alexander Hislop's Two Babylons and "noted Protestant theologian" William Chillingworth.

Earth to Rod; Hislop's Two Babylons - first published in 1853 - has been thoroughly debunked. All you had to do was check out the Wikipedia entry if a bit of your own investigation was too much to ask.

Scholar Lester L. Grabbe has highlighted the picture presented by Hislop, that Nimrod is equated with Ninus is based on a misunderstanding of historical Babylon and its religion, however his book remains popular among some fundamentalist Protestant Christians and among Jehovah's Witnesses, with The Watchtower frequently publishing excerpts from Hislop until the 1980s. 

The book's thesis has also featured prominently in the conspiracy theories of racist groups such as The Covenant, The Sword, and the Arm of the Lord and other conspiracy theorists. [Wikipedia]

Rod should recognise Lester Grabbe's name. Lester began his academic career at Ambassador College, in the years since acquiring an international reputation in the field. Lester well knows what Rod refuses to see. Rod however would apparently prefer to hold hands with the nice people at The Watchtower and assorted conspiracy nuts.

If you thought Hislop was a bit on the dated side even for Meredith's reading list, William Chillingworth is even more antique. And not so "noted" really, as nobody much has heard about him for several centuries; he died in 1644!

Is it just me, or is there a whiff of irony in ballyhooing a "wake up call" to Protestants when you're relying on scholarship that hasn't been current for up to 350 years?

Rod is as welcome to an opinion on other churches as anyone else, and there's no doubt that he's splendidly accomplished at spotting splinters in other people's eyes, but perhaps he should beware of the boomerang-like properties of careless predictions. For all Francis' popularity, he will be doing well to simply shore up current Catholic membership in Western nations. And even given a growing irrelevance in the eyes of many, those pesky Baptists, Presbyterians and Lutherans are likely to be around for a very long time. Much longer one suspects than Mr Meredith's own tiny group, the Living Church of God. And would it be terribly cruel to point out that the original Meredith sect, the Global Church of God, imploded only a few years after it was founded?

None of which will stop similar tonsil-rattling rants by Presiding Evangelist Rod in upcoming issues of Tomorrow's World, which given the mouldering quality of his library resources might more properly be called Yesterday's World.