01.12. XII. Christ And The Changing Order
XII CHRIST AND THE CHANGING ORDER
“For many deceivers are gone forth into the world, even they that confess not that Jesus Christ cometh in the flesh. This is the deceiver and the anti-christ. Look to yourselves, that ye lose not the things which we have wrought, but that ye receive a full reward. Whosoever goeth onward and abideth not in the teaching of Christ, hath not God: he that abideth in the teaching, the same hath both the Father and the Son. If any one cometh unto you, and bringeth not this teaching, receive him not into your house, and give him no greeting: for he that giveth him greeting partaketh in his evil works”—2 John 1:7-11. THE theme of this chapter is somewhat akin to that of a considerable volume brought from the press some years since by another writer. The speaker has no fear, however, lest this discussion should in any wise be confused with that volume. The theological cleavage will clearly distinguish them. However, they will have one feature in agreement, namely, “history is at one of its turning points,” and the Twentieth Century represents a crisis in the experience of the Christian Church!
If it be true that since the days of Kant in philosophy, and Darwin in science, we have lived in a world of thought peopled with new intellectual citizens,” one need not be surprised to find the thinking of the century rather confused since these gentlemen, approaching kindred themes from the separate standpoints of philosophy and science, came to exactly opposite conclusions, Kant contending that in the trial life the strongest and best equipped will finally fall while Darwin insists that the result will be “the survival of the fittest,” conclusions which really gave occasion to Schopenhauer’s dictum, “We are all fools living in a fool world.” When one gives himself to a study of the progress of that so-called “modernism” which is supposed to have originated with these men, he is compelled to consent that Schopenhauer had much basis for his remarks. Paradoxical as it may sound, John, writing twenty centuries ago, was dealing with the exact propaganda of certain present-day teachers known as “Modern,” and we should give candid consideration to what he has to say upon the subject.
Describing their theology he denominates its representatives as the apostles of deception and brings against their propaganda the indictment of infidelity, declaring that all who participate with them are alike members of the anti-Christ. Is he justified in this somewhat rabid arraignment? THE APOSTLES OF DECEPTION.
He describes them after this manner—“Many deceivers have gone out into the world, who confess not that Jesus Christ is coming in the flesh. This is a deceiver and an anti-christ.”
Careful consideration of the language used brings out three suggestions.
These are nominal disciples! The phrase employed by John, “have gone out,” indicates that they had been members of the Christian fraternity, and had used their place in the church as a vantage point for the propagation of false teachings. In 1 John 2:19 we read of certain ones—perhaps these same—“They went out from us, but they were not of us, for if they had been of us, they would have continued with us; but they went out that they might be made manifest that they were not all of us.” In other words, men who confessed loyalty to Jesus Christ became apostles of another gospel, the advocates of anti-Christian teaching. Even modern warfare, with all its devices for the destruction of an army, has been able to hit upon nothing more effective than to get an enemy within the camp. No men in all England, during the late war, were able to do her injury as those men who dwelt within her borders, even joining her army, wearing her uniform, using her language, but secretly communicating with and aiding her enemies. The word “spy” has long been a detested one. As a rule, a man who plays that role is not held in esteem by any save those whose interests he directly represents. Paul, writing a letter to the Galatians, declared that he had encountered “false brethren, brought in unawares who came in privily to spy out the liberty he and his friends enjoyed in Christ Jesus, the intent of whose business was that they might bring them into bondage.”
We do not desire to be harsh, nor would we consciously entertain an uncharitable spirit, but we must declare our deepest conviction, namely that the greatest enemy of any church of Jesus Christ is the man who remains in her, assumes to be one of her teachers, calmly wears her good name and yet denies the deity of Him who brought her into being, and disputes the authority of the Book upon which she has, for full twenty centuries, rested her every contention. I regard myself as declaring a most patent truth when I say that “modernism,” so-called, is just such an enemy. By lip and pen it has alike rejected Jesus and repudiated the Bible.
It is a matter of more than passing interest also to trace the parallelism between the opponents of John’s epistle and the present-day opponents of Jesus.
They denied His physical manifestations! The language in which John indicated them is this, “They confess not that Jesus Christ is coming in the flesh.” The King James version, as you recall, has it “is come in the flesh.” If that translation were correct it might refer to the first appearance of Jesus. If the text of the 1911 version is correct, “who confess not that Jesus is coming in the flesh,” then the second coming is in the mind of the sacred writer. But in either event that which these false teachers opposed was the physical manifestation of God in Christ Jesus. Truly they have their successors. God manifest in the flesh is a miracle of such transcendent import as to be utterly rejected by our advocates of evolution! They almost universally resort to the statements that Jesus, while being God’s best representative, was yet born of Mary and begotten by Joseph. This doubtless is one of those “New Testament concepts,” mentioned by a Modernist, “which the. modern world, under the dominion of science, finds it impossible to understand, much less to believe.” Concerning the second appearance of Jesus in personal visible form, known as Messianism, we are blithely told that it is a “survival of Judaism and its influence and implications must be removed before we can see the essential elements of the gospel.” Of course the resurrection of Jesus is another physical manifestation which, while not expressly mentioned in the text, is involved in the question, and it is now well nigh the common custom among new theologians to hold that New Testament contention to ridicule. In fact, we are plainly asked the question, “If a man believes in a risen Christ without believing in the events of the first Easter day or in the objective character of the appearances of Jesus to Paul and the other apostles,” should “he be excluded from preaching the gospel of salvation?” and are answered “Assuredly not,” and we are told that “He, too, can bring and must bring his conviction of the continued life of Jesus to bear upon men and women.” But this raises the logical and inevitable question—“What Jesus is he preaching and whence does he bring either his Master or his message?” Manifestly it cannot be the Jesus of the Bible, for He was “flesh and blood” before His crucifixion and “flesh and bones” after His resurrection, physical and visible in His ascension, and destined to be visible and personal in His glorious second appearance. What nonsense, then, to imagine that by the adoption of a name to which there was never a corresponding reality, one has created a personality and provided a message. Such “poetry” as the following is of the essence of inanity:—
“If He lived or died, I may not know, For who shall disprove the words of the dead, Or who may approve of the wisdom they said? For me He is not of the long ago, But speaks in the mom of my life, I know.” Who speaks; and what does He say? Is it not true, as one of their own company has confessed, that “When we take away the historical Jesus, we take away the only Jesus,” and “remove the Gospel” and thereby “change the very definition of Christianity itself,” “ for Christianity as an embodiment of the Gospel is a phase of religion determined by historical facts”? Any Jesus not begotten by the Holy Ghost, born of Mary, crucified on Calvary, raised the third day, ascended to the right hand of God and destined to descend to the earth and take His throne and reign from sea to sea, is as much the figment of a distempered imagination as are the dreams resulting from an overdose of meat, and any message based upon it has no more claims upon intelligent thinking men than do the unintelligible, incoherent babblings of a Mary Baker Eddy.
What would you think of a man who said he believed in George Washington, but not the George Washington who was born in 1732 in Westmoreland County, Virginia, who was the first President of the United States, who led in the Revolution, and whose opinions gave rise and final form to the very constitution of the country itself. He believed rather in a Washington who never had a visible, physical existence, but whose ideas and spirit dominated the colonies in the Puritan days and still lives. Candidly, one finds it difficult to be patient with men who name themselves “Rationalists” while dispensing with reason and call themselves “ thinkers” while giving proof that they are incapable of clearly stating premises or reaching logical conclusions. There never was a more just and justifiable indictment made against men than I. M. Haldeman brings against these self-named Moderns when he says:
“The Christ they preach never rose from the dead in the body.”
“The Christ they preach has no body.”
“Their Christ is a boneless and fleshless Christ.”
“The Christ of the modern theologian is an immaterial ghost.”
“Over the doors of some modern theological institutions might well be written, ‘Erected to the Ghost Christ!’ ”
“Over the pulpits of some modern preachers might be written, ‘Here the Ghost Christ is preached.’ ” Their message is as baseless as their Christ is bodiless.
These John denominated the Anti-Christ. His language is, “This is the deceiver and anti-Christ. Look to yourselves that we lose not those things which we have wrought, but that we receive a full reward.” A careful study of the Bible will show that the anti-Christ is a person destined to head up the final but fatal rebellion against God, and yet the Sacred Scriptures equally teach that preliminary to His appearance and preparatory unto the same is a whole school of men who shall speak against Jesus Christ, incessantly striving to bring God to the level of man and exalt man to the level of God. Fundamental to this whole Satanic scheme is the discrediting of the Sacred Scriptures. The man who attempts that is brought to book in John’s catalog of the Anti-Christ. Before one can successfully dispute the claim that “Jesus is the Son of God, that God dwelleth in Him and He in God,” he must discredit the whole doctrine of inspiration; and yet unless he do that adroitly, he may fail even in the judgment of his coveted followers. What could be more adroit than to insist that the denial of inspiration is not necessarily a denial of a divine Saviour? They tell us that Jesus is the foundation in our religion and whatever else we lose we shall not lose Him. It is written, “Other foundation can no man lay than that which is laid, which is Jesus Christ.” But back of the foundation laying is work in the quarries. The Scriptures are the quarries of truth. Discredit them and no Christ remains save that moral phantom of the Modern’s intellect. If man bow before him or “it,” he must concede Mrs. Eddy’s contention that our behaviour is determined by the “illusions of mortal mind,” and once and forever part company with the whole goodly company of New Testament apostles and teachers, for in the language of John McDowell Leavitt, “That company of notable names knew Jesus Christ by the same sufficient crowning proofs the chemist employs when he analyses salt; the geologist uses when examining a rock; the astronomer engages when he observes the stars: namely, the senses. These witnesses affirmed that they had seen and heard and touched Jesus both before and after the resurrection. To the visible, the audible and the tangible they gave evidence with their blood before the earth and heaven, and with it they sealed their testimony. Thus their sincerity is unimpeachable, while they witnessed not to a philosophical opinion, not to a scientific explanation, not to a religious dogma, but to the plain perceptible fact that Jesus arose from the dead and ascended unto glory.” The author of our text voices it after this manner, “That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked upon, and our hands have handled of the Word of Life: that which we have seen and heard declare we unto you.” He it is that says, “Deny that and you are ‘a deceiver and an anti-christ,’” and do become THE PROPAGANDIST OF INFIDELITY.
“Whosoever goeth onward,” as the expression in the original is, “and abideth not in the teachings of Christ, hath not God.” It is a significant fact that in the very word here employed, “proagan,” and correctly translated “goeth onward,” we have the very word “progressive,” a term which has been voluntarily assumed by the critics of the times.
They profess to be the solitary progressives of the hour. They speak of themselves as “men who really think.” In their advanced circle they claim to include practically “every biblical teacher in the world of any scholarly significance.” In youth their mothers must have told them that if they did not think well of themselves no one else would, and forgot to warn them against its vociferous expression. Against the “Thus saith the Lord” of the conservatives they have, in the language of another, set up a sacramental phrase, namely, “Scholarship is agreed.” If they ever name an exception they are careful not to name more than one or, at the most, two who are not trailing with this self-elected tribunal. In spite of the fact that some of us are privileged to minister to many men who represent the most complete scholastic training and who in circles of their respective sciences are widely known and justly honoured, and whose loyalty to the authority of the Scriptures and very deity of Christ is as unswerving as was that of Paul, it is even denied that the church now numbers among its members any considerable company of the “scientifically trained” and “professional classes.” We are even asked, “What has become of these college bred men and women who went out from graduating classes into the wide world?” Possibly these Progressives might make a discovery if they sat down and studied the membership roll of the greater churches of this land which are, without exception, under conservative leadership. If it be true that “in the church at large, not one in fifty members are college graduates,” it might bring another revelation than that which our Progressives imagine. The discovery may be made that the conservative churches far exceed this proportion. The speaker knows well one church that multiplies this number many times over, and bears testimony that these college and university men and women are not only among his most capable members, but are notable in their theological conservatism. It is not “education” that is taking the generation away from the church, but it is “scepticism masking under the name of scholarship.”
It is as impossible to make science oppose Scripture as it is to compel God to contend against Himself, and if culture oppose the Church, then the child fights its own mother, yea, even the creature its Creator. But “Science falsely so-called” has bespattered the pages of Scripture with interrogation points, and many a college and university student has thereby stumbled. Darwinism, a dogma without scientific data, or, in the words of the famous French scientist, Fabre, “A theory exploited in big words but destitute of even little facts” has undone alike the superficial student of both Scripture and Science. It is impossible to start from false premises and reach true conclusions. If, therefore, we have been able, as charged, to create a test of church membership that “compels a man under the influence of today’s scholarship to abandon not only a life of evil thought and evil action, but also the results of his education,” it may be because that education was as far wrong as either his thought or action. The outcome will not only vindicate the church but re-enthrone the Christ.
Exclusive leadership on the part of Moderns is a mere assumption. Mrs. Eddy has illustrated the fact that you may state a thing so positively, and repeat it so often as to bring the superficial to accept it. She took two of the noblest words known to human speech, “Christian” and “Science,” and by combining and adopting them has brought the unthinking to imagine her an expert in both, and that in spite of the fact that her writings reveal no knowledge whatever of either. For fully fifteen years or longer, our self-styled “Moderns” have been asserting their leadership alike in, “Science” and “Scripture.” Some have supposed that a thing so often spoken must necessarily be so, and so Modernism has accomplished its following. Such students would have been profoundly impressed by the Pharisee’s prayer and from the hour of its utterance would have been his devoted followers. The claim of “assured results” has made its easy dupes in both the oil enterprise and the hyper-critical profession. Almost without exception the devotees of that modern scepticism which discredits the deity of Jesus Christ and questions the authority of the Bible, are either still in their tender youth or else had their thinking fatally twisted before they were far out of their teens. Not once in a hundred instances do mature men turn from conservatism to liberalism; and, in that instance, the rule is that while the man was mature in years, his early education was both poor and partial, and at forty he had only the intellectual equipment of a lad. Who knows a single man in whom ripened years and scholarship have combined to produce a sceptic? But there are scores of men, many of them world-famed, in whom additional study and experience have wrought an utter revolt from the doubts of youth. But the greater seriousness of all this John does not disregard.
He charges those who reject the Son with having lost the Father also. Unitarianism, masking under the term “Evangelical,” proposing to retain God even though Christ be rejected, has no God, unless John be disputed. “He that hath not the Son hath not the Father.” “Whosoever goeth onward and abideth not in the teaching of Christ hath not God.” The New York Presbytery, in ordaining men who dispute the virgin birth, and thereby deny the inspiration of plain Scripture statement, if it continue to wear the name of “Christian” will do nothing better than cloak an infidel form with a profession of faith. The life of Presbyterianism as a positive Christian force will depend in no small measure upon its regard for the Cincinnati and Philadelphia Presbyteries’ request that such Unitarians be disfellowshipped. The history of the past has provided abundant proof of the utter powerlessness of the Unitarian propaganda. It has created no ministry worthy of mention, it has started no missions that have proven virile, it has established no colleges that play conspicuous part in the educational process. It has effected so few converts from sin to holiness that one sometimes wonders how it keeps courage enough to build an occasional church. Its people are almost universally disciples of Charles Darwin, and with equal unanimity they emasculate the writings of Moses, repudiate the prophecies of Daniel, or give them late date, and laugh to scorn the Apocalypse of John, while Jesus is to them Mary’s bastard son. Is it any wonder that John dares to say, “Whosoever goeth onward and abideth not in the teachings of Christ hath not God”? But now what is to be the attitude of true Christian men and women toward all of this? Let John speak again, “If anyone come unto you and bring not this teaching, receive him not into your house, nor bid him Godspeed, for he that biddeth him Godspeed is partaker of his evil deeds.” THE PARTICIPANTS IN THE ANTI-CHRIST.
According to John, Christian fraternity is not for Christ’s opponents. One of our best commentators tells us that the phrase, “If anyone come unto you and bring not this teaching, receive him not,” looks not to a social reception but rather to a reception into the house of God, unto Christian fellowship. The true Christian will not be unfriendly toward an infidel, nor refuse social fellowship with a sceptic; on the contrary, he will show neighbourliness for every man visiting his door and kindness to any one coming to, or going from the same. But that does not mean his reception into the fellowship of God’s family, nor a benediction upon infidelity in God’s name. I have no creed to which my neighbours must subscribe, no doctrinal standards to which my acquaintances must come. The Unitarian may be my closest personal friend, and the Universalist my fishing companion, and it is alike my privilege and pleasure to return the bland smile of Mrs. Eddy’s disciple. But the fellowship of faith is altogether another thing, and cannot be accorded to any who “bring not the teaching of Christ,” “God manifest in the flesh.” The moment you create a church that exceeds fellowship in Christ, you introduce into it the seeds of self-destruction. The weakness of present-day Protestantism is at exactly that point. We are wondering why we are not marking greater progress. We are worrying over subjects of secondary concern. We are searching every nook and corner of church life to discover the elements of weakness in our work. We are saying that by a “further federation of forces” we will “engender power.” The exact opposite is true! We are over-federated now. Our affiliations are our fundamental weaknesses. Better a Gideon’s three hundred that believe God and lap the Water of Life from the fountain of His Word than the thousands that now leisurely drink from the springs of scepticism that gush from multiplied schools as water does from the mole holes of the Southland in a wet season. But John has a further word, He makes our commendation of sceptics a self-condemnation. “He that biddeth him Godspeed is partaker of his evil deeds.” Frankly do some of us confess “to making it a part of our life work to mark the man who brings not the teaching of Jesus, God manifest in the flesh, and to refuse to recommend him to any church seeking our advice. How can we do otherwise and keep conscience at all? Would we advise you to take into your house as a boarder a man who would alienate your affections from your husband, and by criticisms finally dethrone him from the headship of the family? Can we advise any church to receive as a pastor a man who denies the deity of Jesus, and removes from the headship of the church her own and only rightful Lord? Believing as we do that He is the very God, the one and only basis of hope for time and eternity, the one and only sufficient moral ideal, and inspiring personality, the one and only Saviour from sin, in fact, the one and only way for the world’s redemption, how can we recommend the man who proposes to tear the crown of deity from His brow, dispute His authority over the conscience and His Lordship over life?
John McDowell Leavitt said truly, “Take Jesus from the world and you turn it into gloom. Let Him reign and humanity realises its dream of light and love. In His system and character are all the marks of a divine Messiah. But Jesus false, how black the picture and how inconceivable the consequences. No middle place for this Christ so perfect in character and so matchless in career. If not from the Holy Ghost in the Virgin, His conception a lie! If angels did not sing at His birth, and after temptation and amid agony, and watch at His tomb, narratives of their appearances falsehoods! If no divine voice at His baptism, His ministry of holiness opening with imposture! If no suffering mortals relieved by His touch and word, His miracles of love fabrications! If no power over Hades, His promise to the thief on the cross a deception! If no resurrection and ascension, fraud carried over life into death itself! If no return in power, then no millennium for this world is possible, and the future will grow increasingly bloody and eventuate in the darkest of nights. He who mars the Jesus of the Bible unmakes mankind. He who blots the sentences of sacred Scripture, flings a blackness over future history”
Commend him as a teacher? Ask a church to appoint him to its leadership? Write letters, dexterously dodging the facts involved, in aiding him to cover up his unfaith long enough to be comfortably seated and begin to uncover his scepticism, and thereby break the hearts of his aged parishioners and destroy the faith of his youthful ones? Never! For this would be to be a partaker of his evil deeds. The compromise of truth is a crime against Christ! The crisis is on! The injunction of Joshua lives again, “Choose ye this day!”
“He that hath felt the spirit of the highest, Cannot confound or doubt Him, or deny;
Yea, with one breath, O world, though thou deniest, Stand thou on that side, for on this am I.”