Abandoning Protestant Ground
So long as the early Christian church received the Word of God as the Word of God, it was full of light and power. When it began to exalt men, and to put the word of man in the place of the Word of God, its light gradually became darkness, and its power was changed into weakness. The Reformation of the sixteenth century was an attempt to restore the Word of God to its proper place as a sufficient rule of faith and practise. An extract from the history of those times will show this. We quote as follows:— On the eighteenth of October, 1512, Luther was received licentiate in divinity, and took the following oath: “I swear to defend the evangelical truth with all my might.” On the day following Bodenstein solemnly conferred on him, in the presence of a numerous assembly, the insignia of a doctor of divinity. He was made a Biblical doctor, and not a doctor of sentences, and was thus called to devote himself to the study of the Bible, and not to that of human traditions. He then pledged himself by an oath, as he himself relates, to his well-beloved and Holy Scriptures. He promised to teach them faithfully, to teach them with purity, to study them all his life, and to defend them, both in disputation and in writing, against all false teachers so far as God should give him ability. This solemn oath was Luther’s call to the Reformation. By imposing on his conscience the holy obligation of searching freely and proclaiming boldly the Christian truth, this oath raised the new doctor above the narrow limits to which his monastic vow would perhaps have confined him. Called by the university, by his sovereign, in the name of the imperial majesty and of the see of Rome itself, and bound before God by the most solemn oath, he became from that hour the most intrepid herald of the Word of life. On that memorable day Luther was armed champion of the Bible. We may accordingly look upon this oath, sworn to the Holy Scriptures, as one of the causes of the revival of the church. The sole and infallible authority of the Word of God was the primary and fundamental principle of the Reformation. Every reform in detail that was afterward carried out in the doctrine, morals, or government of the church, and in its worship, was but a consequence of this first principle. In these days we can hardly imagine the sensation produced by this elementary and simple but long-neglected truth. A few men of more enlarged views than the common, alone foresaw its immense consequences. Erelong the courageous voices of all the Reformers proclaimed this mighty principle, at the sound of which Rome shall crumble into dust: “The Christians receive no other doctrines than those founded on the express words of Jesus Christ, of the apostles, and of the prophets. No man, no assembly of doctors, has a right to prescribe new ones.”—D’Aubigne’s History of the Reformation, Vol. I, chap. 7, pars. 6, 7. Thus the Reformers appealed from tradition and the creed of the church to the authority of the Word of God, and by the power of that Word they wrought a reformation, and brought in a revival of primitive religion. This was the beginning of Protestantism. Hence came a separation from the Roman Catholic Church, because Rome makes the Word of God secondary to the traditions of the church. Here is an official statement of the Roman Catholic belief upon this subject: “Though these two divine streams [Holy Scripture and tradition] are in themselves, on account of their divine origin, of equal sacredness, still, of the two, tradition is to us more clear and safe.” Thus true Protestantism places the Bible as supreme in matters of faith and conscience, while Catholicism gives the preference to tradition. During recent years there has been a decided tendency to abandon the true Protestant ground concerning the infallible authority of the Holy Scriptures and to lean toward the Roman Catholic position, exalting the value of traditions and creeds. Two causes have doubtless contributed to this change: the work of the higher critics, and the inability of the defenders of the Sunday sabbath to present any Biblical evidence for the observance of the first day of the week as the sabbath. The higher critics have weakened the faith of many in the reliability of the Scriptures, and the effort to justify Sunday-keeping has driven religious teachers to turn to tradition for their authority in the absence of a “Thus saith the Lord.”4 A clear instance of this tendency to weaken the authority of the Holy Scriptures and to exalt tradition is found in the case of Dr. Agar Beet, an English clergyman who has rejected the doctrine of eternal torment, and the Methodist church leaders. Dr. Beet stated his position as follows:— I have endeavored to reproduce the teaching of the New Testament about the fate of the wicked, thus appealing from the traditions of the church to the earliest Christian literature. In this research I have found abundant and decisive proof that Christ and his apostles taught that all who put faith in him and walk in his steps will enjoy endless blessedness in the presence of God; and sufficient proof that he also taught that ruin, utter and final, awaits those who disobey him. The tradition of the church during many centuries has gone beyond this teaching by asserting that this ruin involves endless torment as bad as the intense pain caused by fire to a living body. It has also asserted the endless conscious existence, in happiness or misery, of every human soul. This last doctrine was undoubtedly taught by Plato. So far as I know, it was never taught, at least among those with whom the early Christians came in contact, outside the influence of the school of Greek thought, of which Plato is the best-known representative. Moreover, I have quoted proof that the earliest Christian writers who spoke of the soul of man as immortal—e. g., Tertullian—attribute this teaching to Plato. I have also tried to prove that the New Testament, which speaks frequently about the intense suffering of the lost, does not justify the assertion that their sufferings will be endless. In other words, by an appeal to the earliest Christian writings, I have endeavored to purify the Christian tradition from unwarranted accretions which seriously misrepresent the teaching of Christ. In attempting to weaken the force of Dr. Beet’s teaching, which rests upon the authority of the Word of God, the Methodist Times, the organ of Methodism in England, suggests that it is a mistake, especially in dealing with a subject of so much importance, to depend wholly upon the Scriptures, and urges that “the mind of the church” should be taken into account. It says:— We are disposed to ask, further, whether, in endeavoring to confine himself to the text of Scripture, Dr. Beet has not taken too narrow a range. However high may be placed the authority of the group of inspired books which make up the New Testament, and which the Christian consciousness, both at and since the making of the canon, has recognized as standing by themselves, they are not the sole means of communication from God to man. The Holy Spirit has been actuating the church ever since the day of Pentecost, and guiding it into truth, and the authority which set its seal on these books as proceeding more or less directly from the apostles, has not exhausted its powers. The mind of the church remains, and has always been operative; and though it has no claim to infallibility, it can not be neglected as the revelation of Christ proceeds from age to age. It is, therefore, we submit, a mistake, especially in dealing with the deep mysteries of evil—its origin, its atonement, its end—to confine the Christian view to a balancing of the texts of the first documents of our religion. In commenting upon this extract the Present Truth (London) well says:— If “the mind of the church” is to interpret or displace the plain statements of Scripture, then indeed is the Bible a worthless guide, for “the mind of the church” has interpreted it in many different ways. By such a conception of the Scriptures they are deprived of their power to safeguard the church against error, and to recall it from its wanderings, since by those very wanderings, according to the Methodist Times, the Bible is to be interpreted. To appeal to tradition as against the Bible is to abandon Protestant ground and to stand with the Roman Catholic Church. This is one of the signs of the times. It shows the tendency Romeward. It indicates that the time may not be far distant when Protestantism will “stretch her hand across the gulf to grasp the hand of the Roman power.” It becomes those who bear a message of warning against the beast and his image to hold fast to the fundamental principle of Protestantism—“the sole and infallible authority of the Word of God.” This is the hope of this advent movement.