p. 4 | Protestantism Drifting by G. B. Thompson

Pacific Press Publishing Association · Mountain View, California · Apr 11, 1911

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 38, No. 15.

Protestantism Drifting

By G. B. Thompson

V. The Outlook—The New Religion

As showing the drift of Protestantism at the present time, the recent utterances of Dr. Charles W. Eliot, president emeritus of Harvard College, in a lecture given at the close of the Harvard Summer School of Theology, are worthy of note. The high standing of Dr. Eliot, and of Harvard University as an educational institution, and the fact that the lecture was delivered to a class of theological students, make his statements highly significant. To the credit of many it should be said that his utterances have aroused their religious ire, and some have repudiated his statements in vigorous language. Yet those statements find a favorable response in many directions, and show the drift of much of the so-called Protestant teaching at the present time. A few quotations from this lecture may not be out of place here:

The new thought of God will be its [the new religion's] most characteristic element. This ideal will comprehend the Jewish Jehovah, the Christian universal Father, the modern physicist's omnipresent and exhaustless Energy, and the biological conception of Vital Force. . . . The new religion is therefore thoroly non-atheistic, ITS GOD BEING THE ONE INFINITE FORCE; but this one God is not withdrawn or removed, but indwelling, and especially DWELLING IN EVERY LIVING creature.—“Religion of the Future,” pages 19, 20.

A God that is merely an “Infinite Force,” or “Energy,” and is in “every living creature,” is the kind of God the Hindus worship. According to the president emeritus of Harvard, the religion of the future will be pantheism, or a return to heathenism.

The new religion rejects absolutely the conception that man is an alien in the world, or that God is alienated from the world. It REJECTS also the ENTIRE CONCEPTION of man AS A FALLEN BEING, hopelessly wicked, and tending downward by nature.—Page 22.

That is, the religion of the future rejects the fall of man as revealed in the Scriptures, and therefore the need of a Saviour to redeem him from sin. However, we would

respectfully call the attention of this noted apostle of this new religion to the fact that man is down now. If he rejects what God says about his fall, he can not reject the evidence of his own senses that he sees all about him, which demonstrates that man is down and the teaching of this new religion will never lift him up. Again he says:

The new religion will not teach that character is likely to be suddenly changed, either in this world or in any other,—altho in any world a sudden opportunity for improvement may present itself, and the date of that opportunity may be a precious remembrance. The new religion will not rely on either a SUDDEN CONVERSION in this world or a sudden Paradise in the next, from out a sensual, selfish, or dishonest life. IT WILL TEACH THAT REPENTANCE WIPES OUT NOTHING IN THE PAST, and is only the first step toward reformation, and a sign of a better future.—Pages 14, 15.

It would seem that a more Christless, crossless, and heavenless, hazy and impotent religion would be hard to invent. It is indeed “another gospel.” No more “sudden conversion” by the power of God, or “repentance” wrought by the aid of the Holy Spirit! No calling men to Jesus any more; just turn over a new leaf and brace up. No Paradise into which the redeemed are to be suddenly taken from this sin-cursed earth. The moral “improvement” that man has a chance to attain to comes to him the same as a business opportunity to get rich. Heaven is to be won by personal merit instead of by the grace of God. Dr. Eliot, of course, has the right to trek out into the wilderness of darkness and skepticism, there to wander without any signboard to guide his footsteps, if he so desires; but it is lamentable that he has so strong an influence to draw the feet of the young and less experienced into the bog of this Evolutionary hypothesis.

Having rejected the only Christian chart, like the mariner on the high sea without compass, he must sail with no fixed assurance of his destination. The doctor seems to have read the horoscope to mean that Christianity, as revealed in modern Protestantism, is dying out, that the age of faith is gone, and that a new religion, without creed or dogma, without either spiritual, temporal, or prophetic authority, without sacraments, without any promises of future reward for good, or compensation for evil, with a pantheistical God, who is everywhere, but nowhere in particular, will dawn on the world. Possibly he is correct, but that time is the doom of the world.

Concerning this new religion a “layman,” quoted in the “Bible Student and Teacher,” defines it as follows:

Of course he does not know that the same religion was proposed to man many thousands of years ago, accepted, and has ever since been worked out by our race, in various forms of native savagery and folly, until the authority of Jesus the Son of God brought in a creed beneficent to man; that the serpent is now glad to steal its humane principles in order to make his religion more plausible than anything which the propensities of human nature had ever been able to make of it. Combining the two master-principles of a nature alienated from God — self-sufficient and supreme self-interest — the new religion runs like wild-fire through the church and the world to-day.

In a recent sermon Dr. Cortland Myer, pastor of Tremont Temple, Boston, Massachusetts, paid his respects to this so-called new religion in the following eloquent and forceful language:

Men talk about the new religion. There never will be again in this world such a thing as a new religion. The new religion is as old as infidelity, and its author is the father of lies. It would drive the supernatural out of the world. It would take your Bible and cast it in the fire. It bows Jesus Christ out without even a shudder, and with just as much howling and blasphemy as the mob had at the foot of the cross. It even puts an interrogation mark after the name of God Almighty Himself.

My friends, the clock has struck the hour again in history. Jesus of Nazareth is being crucified again, and it is your business and my business to push our way this morning down the Damascus road to the green hill outside the city wall and stand by Him. The new religion is good enough, perhaps, for the man who sits in the professor’s chair, or is on the retired list and makes other people tired. But I declare to you that it has not any value in New York City, and I question whether it has any value in Boston, to the man who pushes his way up against the throbbing hearts of his fellow men.

These are good, true words. That there are some who utter stirring protests against this old infidelity masquerading in a new livery, is hopeful, and will bring salvation to some. The address of Dr. Eliot has, to some extent, lifted the curtain and let it be known what is aimed at by the so-called “liberal” religionists. It has been claimed that all that was wanted was a “restatement” of the fundamentals of Christianity, so as to bring them in harmony with present-day scientific research. This was bad enough; but the secret is out now. It is another religion, without a personal Christ, resurrection, or atonement for sin, that is wanted. It sweeps away the Christian religion, established by the Son of God, and substitutes instead a weak, human philosophy. There is a crisis on. These two do not go together any more than God and Belial. We can not carry religion in one hand and this philosophy in the other. We must fully renounce the one if we cling to the other.

How thankful we should be for the great Protestant foundation, the Word of God! While scientists can “guess,” and “conclude” that “probably” certain things “may” have taken place, those who believe the Bible in preference to such speculations can know; they can anchor on a sure foundation. Through all the ages the Word of God has stood the test of criticism, friendly and unfriendly. Scientists have contradicted each other, and devoured each other’s theories as fast as they were born; they have put forth arguments without proof, and speculations unsustained by any testimony.

But the ruins of Nineveh and Babylon, the desolation of Tyre, the degradation of Egypt, the downfall of Jerusalem, the scattering of the Jewish nation, and many other instances, stand as infallible proof and mute testimony to the divine omniscience of the Scriptures of truth. With such unimpeachable testimony piled up about them, it seems remarkable that so many leave their anchorage and drift out upon a shoreless sea of “vague speculation, wild hypotheses, misty theorizing, and uncertain assertion, there to float rudderless, and without chart or compass, into regions of fog and darkness, of skepticism and unbelief.”

But we have reached the end. Sin was introduced into the world by our first parents’ believing Satan’s denial of the words of the Creator; and as we reach the end of the prolonged controversy we are to witness its culmination in one of the most marked and terrible apostasies from the teachings of the Bible since the fall of man.

The drifting of professed Protestantism from her anchorage of nearly four hundred years, and listening to the seducing falsehoods which tend to destroy the foundation of centuries, is an ominous sign of the times. Jesus asked concerning the time of His second coming, “Nevertheless when the Son of Man cometh, shall He find faith on the earth?” The question implies that if faith is found, it will be scarce.

What is needed is a return to the Word and the Word only. Luther, when pressed as to his position, said: “It is impossible to preach the Gospel of Christ without offense. Why, then, should the fear of danger separate me from the Lord and that divine Word which alone is truth? No; I would rather give up my body, my blood, and my life.”

This is our only hope as individuals, the only hope of Protestantism, the only hope of the world.