Theological Nihilism

Seventh-day Adventist Missionary Society · Oakland, Cal. · Jun 14, 1883

Theological Nihilism.

Dr. RANKIN, in a paper read before the American Congregational Club in New York, made some apt remarks about Henry Ward Beecher. He said there "is a movement in religious thought that corresponds to the movement in civil thought, which is known as nihilism." Of an article of Beecher's in the North American Review he said "he blew sky high his eminent father and his theology, together with the theology of a large family of brothers and thousands of his brother ministers (not to speak of that of a long series of sermons from the 'Plymouth pulpit')" and characterized it "as of the dynamite order. All the arts of rhetoric, poetry, and ridicule, all the invective of old time infidelity and atheism, all the probabilities and possibilities of modern science were put into the compound, the fuse lighted and the skies have rained fragments of bodies of divinity from that day to this."

Beecher is no doubt entitled to the name of the great "theological nihilist" of the age. And his purpose is as aimless as that of his cousins in Russia. He tears down everything, and builds up nothing, leaving a sort of theological anarchy behind him. It is a pity that such an erratic man should have received so great homage, and been permitted to undermine the faith of so many in the truths of the gospel of Christ. He has done far more than Ingersoll to destroy genuine faith in the Bible.