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

Read the full article at www.gnmagazine.org/issues/gn34/religiousrevival.htm