Ankerberg & Weldon.
Surprisingly good. You never can tell with pop apologetics tracks. It doesn’t get into the hermetic issues of Freemasonry. It focuses on the “Blue Lodge,” as most Masons are there. It mainly stays with standard Masonic texts and is fair. Instead of quoting the actual text, I am going to quote from the Masonic manuals from which they quote.
They argue that Masonry is a religion because a) some of its key texts say it is; b) it requires specific religious beliefs (immortality of the soul; belief in a supreme being), and c) promises an eternal reward. And koinonia. This is exactly what the church offers (Henry Wilson Coil, Coil’s Masonic Encyclopedia 1961:512). And since they require belief in these, that fits the definition of a Creed.
Since this religion disagrees with Christianity in key aspects, Christians can’t be Masons. We will focus on some of these aspects:
- Jahbulon. This name of God is a combination of Jehovah, Baal, and Osiris. By definition this isn’t the God that Christians worship. We worship the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ.
- Freemasonry teaches that a man is in darkness prior to becoming a freemason (Albert Mackey, Manual of the Lodge, 520). The Bible, on the other hand, says that before Christ we were in darkness (Galatians 1:4).
- Freemasonry openly mocks the biblical God, calling him “a partisan tribal god” (Coil 516-517). And they aren’t nearly as apophatic as they claim. They make a number of positive assertions about God: he is unitarian, deistic (Martin Wagner, Freemasonry: An Interpretation, 284). Even on Masonic principles there is no way they can reconcile these disparate claims (and that’s not even mentioning Islamic theology or Judaism). We don’t have the same view of God, as both Pike and Coil admit.
This is a good primer. I read it in under an hour. It doesn’t get into the occultic darkness aspects, which is just as well. It ends with an evangelistic appeal to those Christians who are caught in Freemasonry.
A Patriot King 
This is the tricky thing about Freemasonry: it will claim to be “biblical” in the sense of being in the “Judeo-Christian” tradition, deploying Christian themes, and luring in many unsuspecting and confused people to double-dip, as it were. But that’s the problem: the question is which engine is driving the car, where FM theology is clearly driving and Christianity is reduced to a constellation of symbols charged with divergent meanings. As much as Justinian was the wretched creature described by Procopius, Origenism was a problem and reflected the master’s (whether intentional or not, I don’t know, though there’s new work on Origen that suggests he was pagan most of his life by Panayiotis Tzamalikos) interaction with Scripture. Allegorical method, as it has been practiced, uproots the text from the inter-scriptural dynamics and derives its conclusions, as Diodore put it, from a “nocturnal dream”.
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Later Origenism was a problem, but I think Origen suffers from a lot of urban legends. I don’t think he was a pagan at heart. That is almost certainly false. McGuckin has documented the amount of torture Origen went through. Pagans normally don’t fake that kind of stuff.
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I didn’t say that. Tzamalikos isn’t arguing that Origen remained a Pagan, only that there are not two Origens, the Christian and the pagan student of Ammonius Sacchus, but that there was one and that means that Origen was a late convert to Christianity. And it was his metaphysics, primarily learned from Anaxagoras. Tzamalikos isn’t critical of Origen, but a huge fan. Here’s his website: http://www.tzamalikos.gr/index.php/en/
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Gotcha. That makes more sense.
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And just because he was tortured and died a martyr doesn’t mean he was not tragically confused about the faith or adhering to something mixed. One can think of Michael Servetus or Giordano Bruno.
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I had said that under the assumption that “pagan” was used literally.
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