Book: The Kingdom of the Cults

I have just finished reading Walter Martin's magnum opus The Kingdom of the Cults (Revised, Expanded and Updated Edition 2003) recently. Overall, this book is very informative, as it provides historical facts, theological distinctives and biblical refutations of the various overt biblical cults like Jehovah's Witness, Mormonism, Christian Science, Spiritism, Theosophy, Baha'i, Unitarian Universalism, Scientology, Unification Church aka Moonies, New Age, and some of the major religions of the world like Buddhism and Islam. It then goes on to analyze the growth of the cults in America and the rest of the world, and the various ways to evangelize cultists. In the Appendices, it studies the Worldwide Church of God as it evolves from a cult to comparative orthodoxy, analyzes the Seventh-Day Adventists, and then touches a bit on the esoteric cults of Swedenborgianism and Rosicrucianism.

In this and subsequent articles, I would like to analyze some areas of the book and comment on them.

First of all, with regards to feminism and the rise of women clergy, here is what Walter Martin mentioned in a chapter on Theosophy:

It is one of the strange historical percularities of the saga of cultism that some cults were either started by women or were influences in a major way by the allegedly weaker sex: Christian Science, Mary Bakker Eddy; the Unity Schol of Christianity, Myrtle Fillmore; Spiritism, the Fox sisters; Jehovah's Witness, Marie Russel; Theosophy, Helena Blavatsky and Annie Besant; the Peace Mission Movement (Father Divine), Sister Penny and Faithful Mary (Viola Wilson) (p. 284)

It should be remembered that the apostle Paul enjoined the Christian church to forbid women to ursurp authority over tha male head, and leadership roles should more properly be filled with men where available to meet this need:

Let the women learn in silence with all subjection. But I suffer not a women to teach, nor to ursurp authority over the man, but to be in silence. For Adam was first formed, then Eve. And Adam was not deceived, but the women being deceived was in the transgression. (1 Timothy 2:11-14)

It can be clearly seen from the study of non-Christian cults, ancienct and modern, that the female teaching ministry has graphically fulfilled what Paul anticipated in his day by divine revelation, and brought in its wake, as history tells us, confusion, division, and strife. This is true from Johanna Southcutt to Mary Baker Eddy to Helena Blavatsky and the Fox sisters, all of whom were living proof of the validity of our Lord's declaration that "if the blind lead the blind, both shall fall into the ditch" (Matthew 15:14b). (p. 286)

I concur. Women are not allowed, by God's express decree, to officially teach in church, and definitely not exercise authority. Therefore, women pastors, elders and deacons are definitely violating Scripture. In fact, in my opinion formed from looking at the development of the Church in the last 50 years, the inclusion of more women in the teaching and pastoral ministry has only worsened the problems in the Evangelical church as a whole, by feminising theology (i.e. the lovesick god of Arminianism) and allowing all kinds of heresy to surface without the exercise of church discipline against the heretics.