Disguised and Subtle Infidelity
By F. M. W.
The greatest menace to Christianity at the present day is the disguised and subtle infidelity working within the ranks of the professed church of Christ. Formerly, infidelity made an open onslaught against the Scriptures of truth. With contemptuous sneer, with ribald jest, and with fierce denunciation, it held up the mistakes of Moses, or the inconsistencies which it thought it had found in the Holy Scriptures, to the ridicule of its admiring followers. These efforts proving largely ineffectual, it has changed its course of operations and its method of attack, and insidiously and subtly has sought, during the last few years, to insinuate itself into the good graces of so-called Christians, and of men occupying prominent places in the Christian ministry. In the name of science, Higher Criticism, and natural Christianity, it has sought to undermine the very foundations of Christian faith. In the case of thousands it has too well succeeded. Of the results of these rapid and profound changes which have been leavening Christendom during the last two decades, we see with our own eyes evidence on every side. In the Scriptures and in Christian experience there is a mingling of two fundamental elements, the human and the divine. Our fathers believed, and the Scriptures of truth plainly teach, that all transformation of human life and character has come through the operation of the divine and supernatural in religion. The so-called new school of Christian thought largely discounts the supernatural, and places emphasis upon the operation of the human. The tendency of all this is to exalt the creature instead of the Creator, to discount the merits of the divine Sacrifice, to make of Christ only a human model, and of regeneration a result of human striving, of education and esthetic culture, instead of a work wrought by the transforming grace of Christ. In the December number of the Homiletic Review, E. G. Howard writes at length upon “The Changing Emphasis in Religion.” He analyzes the claims of the new school of religious thought, and shows, by liberal quotations from leading churchmen, the tendency and influence of the pernicious principles which are now being taught. To this excellent article we are indebted for the quotations which follow. Says Prof. F. C. Burkitt, of Edinburgh:— Modern science and modern Criticism, if they have not destroyed the real value of the Bible, have certainly shattered many popular beliefs about it. . . . We have abandoned the intellectual atmosphere of the older Protestantism, and we find ourselves in a position analogous to that of the church theologians of the third century. Says Prof. W. Sanday, D. D., of Oxford:— Fifty years ago a good Christian consulted the Bible as he might consult a law-book; he went to it as an authority from which there was no appeal, as a rule of life and conduct, and for a rule of faith. The Bible was authoritative for him because he regarded it as a sacred book. It was sacred because it was inspired. It was in a true sense the Word of God; the human authors wrote down what was put into their minds to write by the Holy Ghost. . . . The new school differs from the old in this, that the conception of the Bible as a law-book no longer seems adequate to it. It no longer starts from the Bible as a fixed text, written as it were on tables of stone. . . . It considers itself called upon to investigate the living process by which it came to be written, and never loses sight of the fact that the text itself is the product of life, with the characteristics of such a product. Protestants after the Reformation stood as a unit, solidly committed to the inspiration of the Scriptures of truth. They recognized the Bible as the Word of God, divinely inspired. Says Prof. James Orr, D. D., of Glasgow:— We have changed all that. Criticism has come in, with its scientific methods, to take the Bible to pieces for us, and show us its historical genesis. It has gone farther, and assailed a large part of its historical contents. It has converted most of the early history into legends; has torn the laws from their historical basis, and transported them to a later period; has assumed the text to have undergone extensive mutilation, manipulation, interpolation, at the hands of irresponsible editors. . . . The Book becomes a corpus vile, on the mangled form of which every new theorist delights to manifest his ingenuity. Historical works are dissected out among authors and redactors; prophetic books are shivered into fragments; Gospels are traced to “sources;” and hardly a statement or saying is allowed to stand in the multitude of conjectures in which it is smothered. This species of criticism has got into the church and schools of learning, with the result that faith in the reliability, the authority, the inspiration, of the Bible, is in many minds thoroughly upset, and an unhappy feeling of uncertainty in regard to the validity of the Scriptures is widely diffused among all classes. This situation which Christianity is facing in its own ranks to-day is an extremely grave one. How can the church of God meet the foes assailing it from without, when its own ranks are divided? As one writer expresses it,—16The parents are living on the spiritual inheritance of their fathers, and the children are drifting away. . . . Probably what the church is starving for is religion, the apprehension of a living God, who is here as much as he was in Abraham’s time or Paul’s. Men need as much now as in Jonathan Edwards’s time to feel the overwhelming calamity of sin in their own lives. Even Puritan New England has not escaped the deadly results of this subtle working of infidelity. Says Dr. A. C. Dixon, now pastor of the Moody Church, in Chicago, but for some years a pastor in Boston:— It is an alarming fact that there has come to some New England communities a disintegration and a degeneration of public morality which, according to Dr. Horr, who gave several summers to a careful study of the subject, has brought them down in moral tone below the mining-camps of the West. Degenerates in Western mining-camps are willing to acknowledge that they are bad; but not so with the degenerates in New England. . . . I am sure of this, that wherever the pulpits of New England have been untrue to the Bible and the deity and authority of Christ, in those places irreverence, profanity, immorality, and godlessness almost hopelessly exist. There has been a complete loss of the sense of sin, and with this loss of the sense of sin goes the indulgence of sin without protest from reason or conscience. In the article referred to, Mr. Howard discusses the effects of this new Christianity upon evangelism in the home land and upon missionary operations among the heathen. He says:— Is the new emphasis of the new evangelism better than the old? Do the fruits testify to greater power? If so, we have not heard thereof. We venture the assertion that the most fruitful evangelism of this day is that which exalts the offense of the cross, and proclaims its saving power. . . . The new emphasis undermines the missionary imperative. Upon this latter point Dr. Zwemer, a leading missionary to the Mohammedan world, says:— If religions differ only in degree and not in kind, if Mohammed and Buddha were sent of God as truly as John the Baptist, then we may put our reliance on the laws of spiritual evolution, and await God’s own time to evolve his own purpose for the non-Christian world. There is no urgency. Concluding his article, Mr. Howard raises these pertinent questions:— What results may we expect to follow in our mission work if the new emphasis is maintained? Can the world be evangelized either in this generation or in an eternity? Can a mere human Christ arouse his church to the required self-sacrifice? Or will the loss of the supernatural in our creeds, item by item, mean a loss of supernatural power in our work? . . . Subtly has this change come to be felt, not by the ministry alone, but by the members of our churches; and I doubt not that one of the mightiest causes of the seeming apathy and spiritual impotence of the church to-day is to be found in the change of emphasis in the beliefs and the preaching and teaching of our times. . . . But, doubtless, we all breathe the poison of the prevailing miasma, even though unconsciously, and find our sense of the presence and power of an almighty and ever-living God and of a risen, living Saviour dull, and to some degree, decadent. By such teachings from so-called Christian pulpits and schools of theology is the enemy of truth preparing the world for the last great deception. Verily, we have reached the time when, even in the church of God, evil men and seducers are waxing worse and worse, deceiving and being deceived. The great professed church is fast filling up with errors and delusions, and is becoming drunken with the wine of Babylon. But in spite of the apostasy of the church, in spite of the machinations of the enemy of all righteousness, God still lives and rules. The Scriptures of truth are still the divine revelation of his will to his children. Jesus Christ still pleads as our great High Priest, and to every trusting soul he will show himself mighty to deliver from all the snares of the enemy. Men may scoff at the supernatural in religion; but he who takes the Word of God as the man of his counsel, he who has known in his own life the forgiveness of sins, and the transforming grace of Christ, knows for a certainty that the supernatural exists, because he has experienced in his own life its divine potency.
F. M. W.