"Christian Scholarship and the Defense of the Faith"

The following is from the writings of J. Gresham Machen and thought it relevant to our Saturday morning Bible study as we are getting ready to look at unapologetic preaching.

Men tell us that our preaching should be positive and not negative, that we can preach the truth without attacking error. But if we follow that advice we shall have to close our Bible and desert its teachings. The New Testament is a polemic book almost from beginning to end.

Some years ago I was in a company of teachers of the Bible in the colleges and other educational institutions of America. One of the most eminent theological professors in the country made an address. In it he admitted that there are unfortunate controversies about doctrine in the Epistles of Paul; but, said he in effect, the real essence of Paul's teaching is found in the hymn to Christian love in the thirteenth chapter of I Corinthians; and we can avoid controversy today, if we will only devote the chief attention to that inspiring hymn. 

In reply, I am bound to say that the example was singularly ill-chosen. That hymn to Christian love is in the midst of a great polemic passage; it would never have been written if Paul has been opposed to controversy with error in the Church. It was because his soul was stirred within him by a wrong use of the spiritual gifts that he was able to write that glorious hymn. So it is always in the Church. Every really great Christian utterance, it may almost be said, is born in controversy. It is when men have felt compelled to take a stand against error that they have risen to the really great heights in the celebration of truth. 

 J. Gresham Machen (1881–1937) was born in Baltimore and was graduated with a degree in classics from Johns Hopkins University. He studied at Princeton Theological Seminary under B. B. Warfield and R. D. Wilson.

Temple Comparison

I thought this was a great illustration to show the size difference between the Temple of Solomon and that of the one we read about in the New Testament. 

Solomon’s Temple, finished in 957 BC, was less than one-half the size of Herod the Great’s expanded Second Temple in Jerusalem, built in 20–19 BC.

 

 

The Radical Act of Baptism?

Believer’s baptism by immersion was no insignificant step when Baptists championed it in the 17th Century. This radical and public act was a break with over 1300 years of recognized practice in Christian society and it won few converts in the early years. Why was it so unpopular?

Infant baptism was important to almost everyone. With it came a Christian name, a recognized family and community relationship. For the church it meant another communicant who would obey its teaching and support it financially, either through offerings or taxes (or risk severe punishments!). Since church and state were wed across Europe, infant baptism was significant because it was the first point of accountability and authority which a person met.

Baptists, on the other hand, saw no scriptural basis for infant baptism and no need to succumb to the authority of the church in this way. Dedication of children to the Lord was permitted, but scriptural baptism was something else. A believer’s baptism by immersion was a profession of his faith in Christ as Savior and Lord … it was a picture of his death, burial and resurrection. When Baptists immersed new converts, the believers knowingly and voluntarily sought baptism and church membership, thus exercising each individual’s precious liberty of conscience. Believer’s baptism was an act that no parent, guardian or sponsor could do on one’s behalf. It was a personal, public witness of faith.

For those who defended the baptism of infants, the public spectacle of immersion was disgraceful, unbecoming and unhealthful. More than that, believer’s baptism was an affront to church tradition, control and authority, and certainly the continued well-being of both church and state.

Baptism is a declaration to the world that we belong to Jesus. Believer’s baptism by immersion … a radical act indeed!

Bibliography

Christian History Magazine-Issue 6: The Baptists (Worcester, PA: Christian History Institute, 1985).

Difficult Subjects

I have decided to teach some lessons this year called “Primers”.  These lessons are designed to introduce people to some of the more difficult subject areas in Christianity.  Probably one of the reasons that they are seldom taught in the church.  The major topics will include Theology, Church History, The Bible, and Apologetics. 

Well, we had our first class and it was on the Trinity – what a heady subject to start with and to teach in only an hour.  I told the class at the beginning that they were going to find themselves being a “heretic” because of the way they most likely viewed and explained the doctrine of the Trinity.  I defined a heretic as person that claims to be Christian, but deny some essential aspect that has always defined Christianity both biblically and historically for the last 2000 plus years. 

It’s been said, “God writes straight with crooked lines,” meaning God has allowed heresy to arise to help Christians clarify what they believe.^[1]  That is something that we don’t know for sure, but it often helps to go back in history and look at differing views (heresies) of the Trinity to help clarify the biblical and historical view.  The Bible also says that as believers we should put our ego’s and pride aside and be willing to be corrected.  “All scripture is given by inspiration of God, and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness: (2 Tim 3:16).  Part of discipleship, not only involves growth, but correction and we all need to allow Scripture and others to correct us on our journey. 

Well the class ended and I fell that it was a success – not that everyone there had a clear understanding of the Trinity, but by their actual looks of confusion.  They left that night wrestling in their minds and hearts who God really is as revealed in His Word.  Hopefully, they see that God is much “bigger” then the box we often put Him in.  Hopefully, they have a greater awe of God and as they pray and sing praises to His name that they will know Him just a little better than they did before.

“But let him that glorieth glory in this, that he understandeth and knoweth me…” (Jer 9:24).

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^[1] Christian History Magazine-Issue 51: Heresy in the Early Church (Carol Stream, IL: Christianity Today, 1996).

The Council of Nicea

What was at stake in the church's first general council (325) was the simplest, yet most profound, question: Who is Jesus Christ?

This question brought about a great divide in the church. The emperor, Constantine told the church leaders that they were to come to an agreement on this crucial question and that this division must come to an end.  This was remarkable, considering that this was the first time that the church was not under such persecution and an enemy of Roman Empire.  Many of these leaders still bore the scars. 

To settle divisions in the church the emperors called for church councils that would promote doctrinal unity.  The Council of Nicea, would bring together some 220 bishops, who would meet for two months to hammer out a succinct definition of Jesus Christ.  It’s interesting to note that the first council held would take on such a critical question.  A question that is still being hotly contested today. 

The prevailing teaching that brought this about stated that Christ was more than human but something less than God.  God started out alone and then created the Son, who then created everything else.  Arius, a notable pastor in Egypt, was the one that this false doctrine was attributed to.  However, it’s important to note that he did not do this maliciously, but was only trying to make the person of Jesus understandable.  This false doctrine became very popular to the many new converts as it was similar to their religions of their youth.  This was a religion that looked at there being one supreme God, who dwells alone, and who makes a number of lesser gods who do his bidding.  They found it difficult to understand the Christian belief that Christ, the divine Word, existed from all eternity, and that he is equal to the Father. 

As the Council met, there were many who were quick to compromise, yet there was one young man, Alexander, who was obstinate that Arius’s doctrine left Christianity without a divine Savior.  He called for a creed (statement of faith) that made clear Christ Jesus’ full deity (Jesus actually being fully God in human flesh).

Eventually, they began to hammer out a definition of Jesus Christ that would include some exceedingly important series of phrases – “True God of true God, begotten not made, of one substance with the Father…”  From this came the word homoousion (homo = one, ousion = substance) “of the same substance.”  Thus Jesus is the same substance as the Father (homoousion), namely, the eternal, uncreated, and identical substance.  He differs in function, not in essence, from the Father.

This first Council of Nicea, laid the foundation for the orthodox understanding of Jesus Christ. That foundation, praise God,  has stood ever since.

Bibliography:

Norman L. Geisler, Systematic Theology, Volume Two: God, Creation (Minneapolis, MN: Bethany House Publishers, 2003).

Christian History Magazine-Issue 28: The 100 Most Important Events in Church History (Carol Stream, IL: Christianity Today, 1990).

The General: William Booth

We will be “ringing the bells” again this year and I thought it would be good for us to know a little history behind the Salvation Army.  By the way, there is still some slots left to sign up. 

William Booth was born in economic and spiritual poverty, yet he founded a worldwide organization dedicated to their eradication.

by Norman H. Murdoch

Few would deny William Booth the title “The Prophet of the Poor.” He is best known today as founder and first general of The Salvation Army, an organization that exists to bring a better life to the poor through both social and spiritual salvation.

Booth urging sinners to repent. Booth preached in naphtha-lit tents on disused burial grounds (shown here), haylofts, rooms behind a pigeon shop—anywhere to fulfill his famous words, “Go for souls and go for the worst!”

Pawnbroker’s Apprentice

Yet Booth did not come to this high appellation by a direct route; he was not to the manor born. Rather he was born in relative poverty, in Sneinton, a Nottingham, England suburb, on April 10, 1829. One biographer described William’s father, Samuel, as “an illiterate speculative builder.” His mother, Mary Moss Booth, was Samuel’s second wife. The Booths were at best laboring class, with little education. His father, “a Grab, a Get,” by William’s definition, died when William was just 14. By that time William was helping to earn the family income by working as a pawnbroker’s apprentice. Mrs. Booth ran a small shop in a poor Nottingham district where she sold household wares.

Life-Changing Influences

After his father’s death, a Wesleyan couple invited William to attend chapel. William’s family had not been religious, although they had had William baptized at the Sneinton parish church (Anglican) two days after his birth. William’s conversion at age 15 cannot be fixed in time or place. Various biographers describe it as coming in the streets of Nottingham, in the Broad Street Wesleyan Chapel where evangelist Isaac Marsden was leading a revival, or in a small prayer meeting. William did recall a long siege of conviction after he had made a profit in a transaction with a friend. He remembered the relief he felt when his guilt was removed.

Soon after his conversion William had another life-changing experience: hearing American revivalist James Caughey, who led “a remarkable religious awakening” at Nottingham’s Wesleyan Chapel. The rush of souls to hear the gospel led Booth to see that “soul-saving results may be calculated upon when proper means are used for their accomplishment.” Booth went on to make a lifelong commitment to the scientific revivalism methods of Charles G. Finney.

With Caughey’s example fresh in mind, Booth and a group of friends set out to evangelize the poor of Meadow Platts. They held nightly open-air addresses, after which they invited people to meetings in cottages. Their use of lively songs, short exhortations calling for a decision for Christ, visitation of the sick and of converts (whose names and addresses they recorded) all anticipated methods Booth would write into Salvation Army Orders and Regulations thirty years later.

Mission to Military Movement

In 1854 William was ordained in the Methodist New Connexion. By 1861 he found that “settled ministry” did not suit him, and he resigned. He and Catherine became itinerant evangelists in Wales, Cornwall, and the Midlands, Britain’s “burned-over” districts.

Booth had seen no career for himself in urban evangelism when he left the New Connexion. But an invitation for Catherine to preach in London in 1865 led him to accept support from lay-run East London missions as a temporary solution to his vocational quandary. He soon organized his own East London Christian Mission which, by 1870, resembled a Methodist society. His mission failed to attract the “heathen masses,” however. So in 1878, he energized it by giving it the name “salvation army,” an idea he borrowed from the successful British Volunteer Movement in which thousands of working-class men found that civilian soldiering during their leisure hours gave them new status.

The Salvation Army struggled to win converts in London’s East End and other urban areas in which Irish mobs attacked Wesleyan intruders into their neighborhoods. So Booth again found a popular idea that solved his problems. Women Salvationists, working in slums since 1883, convinced him that reform activities would save sinners from a heathen urban environment and breathe new life into his mission.

Booth agreed, which ultimately led him to become both the leader of a worldwide evangelistic mission and a renowned social reformer. At the time of his death on August 20, 1912, the Salvation Army had become a family-run Christian empire, with seven of the Booths’ eight children (one daughter was retarded) taking leadership positions. (Four of these were women, and one, Evangeline, became the Army’s fourth general in 1934.) William Booth bequeathed to his son Bramwell the generalship of the Salvation Army, a religious and social service organization whose 15,945 officers “occupied” 58 countries and colonies. Today, following the pattern established by the first general, the Salvation Army marches on with over 25,000 officers in 91 countries.

Bibliography:

Christian History Magazine-Issue 26: William & Catherine Booth: Salvation Army Founders (Carol Stream, IL: Christianity Today, 1990).

George Whitefield

I believe it is crucial that we learn about our Christian heritage. We are blessed to be able to stand on the shoulders of great people who have uncompromisingly preached the Word of God and have given us the great doctrines of the Bible.

Below is an article by Kevin Miller that appeared in the Christian History Magazine.

When George Whitefield preached his first sermon, at age 21, someone complained to the bishop that Whitefield (pronounced WlT-field) had driven 15 people insane.

Anglican ministers of the day were controlled, dignified, even stuffy in preaching. Whitefield, though, was intense, emotional, and dramatic. “I could hardly bear such unreserved use of tears,” wrote one observer, for Whitefield was “frequently so overcome, that, for a few seconds, you would suspect he never could recover.” Whitefield explained, “You blame me for weeping, but how can I help it when you will not weep for yourselves, though your immortal souls are on the verge of destruction?”

In America, Whitefield was a sensation. His impassioned preaching on the “New Birth” in 1739 helped spark what historians have called The Great Awakening. It’s easy to “underestimate the effect of the Awakening on eighteenth-century society,” writes Richard Bushman in The Great Awakening, 1740–1745. “The Awakening was more like the civil-rights demonstrations, the campus disturbances, and the urban riots of the 1960s combined.”

But in colonial America, the social upheaval was caused chiefly by one young British field preacher who considered himself “less than the least of all.” Whitefield traveled from New Hampshire to Georgia (where he founded America’s first charity) and unified the colonies as no one had before. Thousands discovered, as one Connecticut farmer put it, “my righteousness would not save me.”

Bibliography:
Christian History Magazine-Issue 38: George Whitefield: 17th C. Preacher & Revivalist (Carol Stream, IL: Christianity Today, 1993).

"The Life of Trust" - George Müller (1805–1898)

I came across this article in Christian History Magazine and thought it to be interesting. As a young convert, I often heard quotes from the pulpit on Müller’s incredible trust in the Lord to provide for his needs in ministry. Why it interests me is because, we today trust very little in God and first try to meet our needs in our own strength, ingenuity, and wherewithal, and it’s only when we have totally exhausted our means that we’ll turn to God. My prayer is that the church, God’s people would rekindle this type of faith and trust in a good and great God.

Born in Germany, the son of a tax collector, George Müller lived a wicked life as a youth but was converted at about age 20 at a Moravian mission. He went to England in 1829 to do mission work and eventually became a preacher affiliated with the Plymouth Brethren. He determined to rely totally on the Lord for his financial support. His policy continued even after he started an orphanage in Bristol. Without direct appeals for funds, his orphanage was supported and grew. By the time he died, more than ten thousand orphans had been cared for in his orphanages—his possessions amounted to merely a few hundred dollars’ worth.

The following is excerpted from his journal, The Life of Trust: A Narrative of the Lord’s Dealings with George Müller.

I stated to the brethren, at the end of October, 1830, that I should for the future give up having any regular salary. After I had given my reasons for doing so, I read Philippians iv., and told the saints that if they still had a desire to do something towards my support, by voluntary gifts, I had no objections to receive them, though ever so small, either in money or provisions….

About the same time, also, my wife and I had grace given to us to take the Lord’s commandment, “Sell that ye have, and give alms,” Luke xii. 33, literally, and to carry it out. Our staff and support in this matter were Matthew vi. 19–34, John xiv. 13, 14. We leaned on the arm of the Lord Jesus. It is now twenty-five years since we set out in this way, and we do not in the least regret the step we then took. As I have written down how the Lord has been pleased to deal with us since, I shall be able to relate some facts concerning this matter, as far as they may tend to edification.

Nov. 18, 1830. Our money was reduced to about eight shillings. When I was praying with my wife in the morning, the Lord brought to my mind the state of our purse, and I was led to ask him for some money. About four hours after, a sister said to me, “Do you want any money?” “I told the brethren,” said I, “dear sister, when I gave up my salary, that I would for the future tell the Lord only about my wants.” She replied, “But he has told me to give you some money. About a fortnight ago, I asked him what I should do for him, and he told me to give you some money; and last Saturday it came again powerfully to my mind, and has not left me since, and I felt it so forcibly last night that I could not help speaking of it to brother P.” My heart rejoiced, seeing the Lord’s faithfulness, but I thought it better not to tell her about our circumstances, lest she should be influenced to give accordingly; and I also was assured that, if it were of the Lord, she could not but give. I therefore turned the conversation to other subjects, but when I left she gave me two guineas. We were full of joy on account of the goodness of the Lord. I would call upon the reader to admire the gentleness of the Lord, that he did not try our faith much at the commencement, but allowed us to see his willingness to help us, before he was pleased to try it more fully….

I would observe here, by the way, that if any of the children of God should think that such a mode of living leads away from the Lord, and from caring about spiritual things, and has the effect of causing the mind to be taken up with the question, What shall I eat?—What shall I drink?— and Wherewithal shall I be clothed?—I would request him prayerfully to consider the following remarks: 1. I have had experience of both ways, and know that my present mode of living, as to temporal things, is connected with less care. 2. Confidence in the Lord, to whom alone I look for the supply of my temporal wants, keeps me, when a case of distress comes before me, or when the Lord’s work calls for my pecuniary aid, from anxious reckoning like this: Will my salary last out? Shall I have enough myself the next month? etc. In this my freedom, I am, by the grace of God, generally, at least, able to say to myself something like this: My Lord is not limited: he can again supply; he knows that this present case has been sent to me: and thus, this way of living so far from leading to anxiety is rather the means of keeping from it. And truly it was once said to me by an individual,—You can do such and such things and need not to lay by, for the church in the whole of Devonshire cares about your wants. My reply was: The Lord can use not merely any of the saints throughout Devonshire, but those throughout the world, as instruments to supply my temporal wants. 3. This way of living has often been the means of reviving the work of grace in my heart, when I have been getting cold: and it also has been the means of bringing me back again to the Lord, after I have been backsliding. For it will not do,—it is not possible to live in sin, and at the same time, by communion with God, to draw down from heaven everything one needs for the life that now is. 4. Frequently, too, a fresh answer to prayer, obtained in this way, has been the means of quickening my soul, and filling me with much joy.

Bibliography:
Christian History Magazine-Issue 14: Money in Christian History: Part I (Worcester, PA: Christian History Institute, 1987).