God in Man

Review and Herald Publishing Association · Takoma Park Station, Washington, D. C. · Jul 9, 1908

IN his recent book, “Passing Protestantism and Coming Catholicism,” Dr. Newman Smyth gives an explanation of that movement in the Roman Catholic Church known as “Modernism.” In accounting for the confidence of the Modernists in the permanence of Catholic doctrine and its power to renew without limit the strength and beauty of the church, he says:—

This conviction of the saint follows directly from the Modernist belief in the Immanence of God in man, and the permanent presence of Christ in his church. Here they are influenced by one of the profoundest and most vitalizing faiths which are pervading and renewing the Protestant world. In its spiritual simplicity this is the belief that God is in man, as well as above man.

All this teaching has a familiar sound. The doctrine that “God is in man” is the fundamental assertion of the “New Theology;” and this claim for all men, apart from the incarnation and ministry of Christ, is a long step toward that pure pantheism which identifies God with his works. The Protestant “New Theology” and the Roman Catholic “Modernism” are but different phases of the same movement which rejects the authority of the holy Scriptures, and by the acceptance of the principle of evolution

as applied to man’s history, denies sin, dispenses with a divine Saviour, and makes salvation a matter of developing the divinity residing within. This is an utter perversion of revealed truth, and renders unnecessary the preaching of the gospel of Christ, the present High Priest and the coming King. Such conditions as this make necessary the preaching of “the everlasting gospel” to all the world.