09 - The Church Degrading Christ
IX- THE CHURCH DEGRADING CHRIST
"I CONCLUDE, therefore, that the fate of Jesus and His gospel is in no way bound up with the fate of miracle. It is evident, even if naturalism is to control men’s views of all history, that the really great things in Christ and His gospel abide. . . . Only the fringe of the evangelical career is torn away. We lose the stilling of the storm, the walking on the sea, the feeding of the multitude, the raising of the widow’s only son and the dead Lazarus," and His bodily resurrection." - The Rev. G. A. Gordon, "Religion and Miracle," page 130.
"Who do men say that the Son of man is?" Matthew 16:13, A. R. V.
After dissecting the Old Testament, the higher critics turned their scalpel upon the New Testament, and have now been dissecting it with an ever-growing boldness, and would fain turn their weapon of destruction upon Christ Himself.
Dr. Briggs, who holds a brief for higher criticism, says that "the higher criticism of Holy Scripture is a science, and its results as sure as those of any other science."-"Study of Holy Scripture," page 105. Let us see, then, what some of the "sure results" of this "science" are when applied to Christ.
"Back to Christ" has been the cry; and so in the last fifty years, more lives of Christ have been written than in all the eighteen hundred years previous. Having discarded most of the Old Testament as useless husk, and discredited a large part of the New as myth and legend, the higher critics at last awoke to the realization of the fact that they were on dangerous ground. To excuse their course, and steel their arm for further dissecting, they claimed that they were discarding only the inconsequential husk, or outer shell, to get to the kernel - Christ. Yet in spite of their claim to sacrifice nothing essential, they are making desperate efforts to convince themselves and the church that they have not given up Jesus. When it is pointed out that their understanding of Him is contrary to ours in the fundamentals, they inform us, with a pitying smile, that they have "rediscovered Jesus," that they have "cast new light upon His life." When Paul or James or John contradicts their interpretation of Him, they calmly tell us that the apostles were wrong. When the facts are against the theory, why, of course, the facts must be altered or excluded, that the theory may stand! In short, though Christ gave His Spirit to guide His disciples "into all truth," these Spirit-guided disciples "misinterpreted Christ" in many instances, falsified Him in others; and it has been left to the infallible "critical divination" of the modern higher critic to interpret Him aright! Now let us briefly review a few points of this new interpretation, which is casting so much "new light" on Christ, and is such an improvement over the antiquated views of the bosom friends of Jesus.
Since the critics had previously branded the fall, the Flood, the destruction of Sodom, the exodus, and much else, as "utterly unhistorical," and all the persons mentioned in the books of Moses, with Moses himself, and Job, Jonah, David, Solomon, and even Ezra, as alike pure myths; when they found that Christ, in every instance that He has occasion to refer to any of these persons or events, invariably accepts them as actual, historical, and never as legend or myth, they were for a while staggered, and endeavored, with a zeal worthy of a better cause, to reconcile the facts with their theory. It never occurred to them to alter their theory to fit the facts. But they soon recognized the impossibility of such a reconciliation, and so the inexorable logic of their theory forced them to take another step in the history of the movement - they boldly proclaimed that Christ was mistaken in His belief in these accounts. The Rev. Dr. Clarke tells us that He had "ideas inherited from an expiring age, existing side by side with His vision of eternal truth," and that He conceived "the coming kingdom in the mistaken manner of the time."-"Use of Scripture," page l09.
Christ, then, erred! He was deceived! And since He taught these deceptions, He was also a deceiver! For hadn’t they, the higher critics, proved that Moses and Abraham were myths, and the Flood and the destruction of Sodom the silliest legends? Christ believed these old legends and childish accounts as actual history, and thus taught them; so here was an open disagreement between the critics and Christ. The critics could not be wrong, so of course Christ must be! What a sight- a deceived Saviour still further deceiving a deluded people! When Ingersoll lectured on "the mistakes of Moses," the Christian world was shocked, and held up its hands in horror; but to-day, when hundreds of professed Christian ministers are lecturing to professed Christian churches, from their own pulpits, on "the mistakes of Christ," there is hardly a whispered protest in the same churches that were so horrified by Ingersoll. Once the attacks were made by skeptics upon despicable trivialities; but now they are made by ministers, in Christian pulpits the world over, against the foundations of the Christian religion.
Since the fall is discarded as a legend, the fact of sin is ignored or denied; or as Campbell, minister of London City Temple, says, "Sin is, after all; a quest for God."-"New Theology," page 151. But, says the Bible: "Sin is the transgression of the law." "He that committeth sin is of the devil ; for the devil sinneth from the beginning." 1 John 3:4, 1 John 3:8. The devil, then, was engaged in "a quest for God." But in spite of Campbell’s dictum, we know that "the wages of sin is death" (Romans 6:23), and not, as this sugarcoated theology would have us believe, eternal life.
Since the atonement is founded upon the fact that "all have sinned, and come short of the glory of God" (Romans 3:23), and is the very heart of our redemption, and the burden of the Bible, and the object of the gospel, we need not be surprised that their logic compels them to reject this also. Nay, they spurn it.
"The doctrine of the atonement, as popularly held," says the Rev. R. J. Campbell, "is not only not true, but it ought not to be true: it is a serious hindrance to spiritual religion. Why in the world should God require such a sacrifice before feeling Himself free to forgive His erring children ?"-"New Theology," page 115. Such a question reveals a lamentably false conception of what the claims of justice are. But this is the view everywhere prevalent in new theology books, and is the logical outcome of their fundamentally infidelic theories. The prevalence of such vicious doctrines is sapping the spirituality and cutting the sinews of faith in the Christian church. Of course, with the atonement goes the belief in the incarnation. "The nativity stories belong to the poetry of religion, not to history. To regard them as narratives of actual fact, is to misunderstand them." "The simple and natural conclusion is that Jesus was the child of Joseph and Mary."-"New Theology," pages 101, 102.
Other exponents of the new theology, like Canon Cheyne, of England, and Pfleider, professor of theology in the University of Berlin, carry this conception to its logical conclusion. The latter seriously informs us that "to the men of old, the Christ of modern thought would have been incomprehensible and therefore untrue; while to the mind of to-day, simple faith in the antique mythical epic is no longer possible."-"Early Christian Conception of Christ," page 13.
Having assumed that which most needs proof, he proceeds to tell us that "an attempt has been made, by means of separating away later accretions and by falling back upon the oldest historic sources [which sources, by the way, the critics themselves manufacture, as we shall see later], to approach as nearly as possible to the historical truth concerning the Founder of our religion, and to present His form in its simple human grandeur and stripped of all mythical accessories."- Id., pages 7, 8.
Having swept away the accumulated evidences of nineteen centuries of research, in one jaunty sentence, he then delves into the musty accounts of the hoary myths of the ancient religions of Egypt, Greece, Persia, and India, and upon finding among the thousands of puerile absurdities of these religions, a legend here and there remotely similar to the New Testament accounts of Christ, he triumphantly points to it as the origin of the New Testament record. "In the history of religion, many parallels," he says, "are found to all these traits of the New Testament conception of Christ as the Saviour of the world."-Id., pages 86, 87. The stories of Christianity are dependent upon "the myths and legends of universal history."-Id., page 14. And so, in the teeth of all evidence to the contrary, he pens the monstrous sentence that "all the miracles [of the New Testament] find countless parallels in the legends of pagan heroes."-Id., page 65. The logic of such a conception leads him, and numberless others who hold such views, to the conclusion that Christianity "sprang up in the world of those days as the ripe fruit of ages of development, and in a soil already prepared. Now it is of course easily comprehended that this evolutionist method of inquiry should have a disturbing influence upon many persons, . . . because it appears to be nothing more than a combination of ideas that had existed for ages," in heathen and degraded minds. (Id., pages 152, 153.)
What! you exclaim. Did Christianity emanate from heathen darkness? Is our New Testament but a garbled edition of the crudities of a superstitious people who worshiped stocks and stones? Are the accounts of Him who calmed ’the raging sea, spoke peace to the soul, and went about doing good, the fruit of the immoral superstitions of a people who ate one another?
No, these infidel theories are not the ravings of a Voltaire, nor the sneers of a Paine. They are the sober and earnest statements of a number of the greatest religious teachers of the world, standing in the van of Biblical scholarship, high in the councils of the church. And their ideas are eagerly absorbed by thousands of young ministers, anxious to distinguish themselves by their "broad scholarship" and "liberal theology," and are retailed to their congregations in graduated and sugar-coated doses. Thus hypodermic injections of spiritual poison are given to the church by her "doctors of divinity"; and with her spiritual nerves paralyzed, she is sinking into a deathlike lethargy, from which only the last fiery message of the Holy Spirit can arouse her. But the Bible, you say, teaches the deity of Christ; and He said of His own words, "Heaven and earth shall pass away, but My words shall not pass away." Matthew 24:35. True; but "one of the greatest stumblingblocks in the way of many devout and intelligent minds to-day is that of the supposed binding authority of the letter of Scripture." -The Rev. R. J. Campbell, "New Theology," page 176.
Then in order to excuse themselves for casting overboard the Bible, this new theology solemnly informs us that Christ was the first to do it, and that they are only piously following the example consecrated by Him.
"The official teachers began everything with `It is written,’ and then followed elaborate expositions. . . . Jesus simply ignored this whole method. He did not need it for Himself; and what is more remarkable, He took it for granted that His hearers did not need it. . . . One would have difficulty to find more complete emancipation from authority than He represented in His own person. . In point of method, then, Jesus made as complete a break with Scriptural authority as could well be."-G. A. Coe, "Religion of a Mature Mind," page 97. In like manner says Prof. G. W. Knox : "No book, however sacred, no law, though written by the finger of God on tablets of stone, no temple, though in its most holy place Jehovah had His dwelling, could command or silence Him."-"The Gospel of Jesus," Page 82.
Yet God opened the heavens to say, "This is My beloved Son: hear Him," Mark 9:7. And Christ said, "The word which ye hear is not Mine, but the Father’s who sent Me;" and : "The word that I spake, the same shall judge him in the last day. For I spake not from Myself; but the Father that sent Me, He hath given Me a commandment, what I should say, and what I should speak. And I know that His commandment is life eternal; the things therefore which I speak, even as the Father hath said unto Me, so I speak." John 14:24; John 12:48-50. Again and again He meets the arch tempter and his subtleties with "It is written."
Open your Gospels almost at random, and you will find that if one doctrine is more prominent than another, it is that Christ was absolutely subject, in the most minute particular, to the will of His Father as revealed in the Old Testament, and as revealed to Him from day to day in those lonely watches on the mountain, while His disciples lay wrapped in slumber. Is it any wonder, when one reads such open, barefaced contradictions of the Bible as just quoted, that one is led to doubt if the higher critics read the Bible at all?
While claiming to return to the historical Christ, this new theology disbelieves His most explicit utterances, disowns His lordship over them, repudiates His claims to deity, calls His belief in the Old Testament a snare and a delusion, rejects completely His authenticated miracles, criticizes, discards, and even spurns much of the Gospel accounts of Him as largely fiction, and always wholly subject to any man’s ignorant caprice. In fact, these higher critics not only exclude the supernatural, and deny and ridicule prophecy, but hand over nature to science, relegate history to secular writers, abandon truth to philosophy, and leave only feeling, imagination, and illusion, deception, fraud, and legends, to religion.
We are roundly told that the words of Christ recorded in the Gospel of John "are wholly unhistorical, and existed only in the imagination of the unknown writer, who considered them necessary to elucidate his idea of the Logos-Messiah."- Picton, "Man and the Bible," page 225. And other eminent divines assert, in similar uncompromising ways, the utterly unhistorical character of the rest of the New Testament.
What emerges from this man-made chaos is not the Christianity of the apostles, nor the "mind of the Master," but a perversion, a miserable mongrel, that is, another gospel, which indeed is not another. In order to evade the damaging force of their open denial of the authority of Christ, the claim is made that while much of the Gospels is myth and legend, this is really better than if they were true history! Says the Rev. R. J. Campbell, "Myth and legend are truer than history, for they take us to the inside of things, whereas history only shows us the outside."-"New Theology," page 255. This is a most astonishing statement. Lies and error truer than truth! Deception the core and center, and truth only the useless outside or husk! Such a vain imagination refutes itself; but it shows to what illogical, unspeakable makeshifts the new theologians are driven in order to defend their actual infidelity. But with it all, and through it all, higher critics doggedly affirm that they at least have saved enough out of the wreck for salvation; that the kernel of God’s truth imbedded in the Bible myths and legends remains untouched by their scorching fires of criticism. But who shall say what and how much is essential to salvation? And what agreement could be expected among the critics as to these essentials? What would be considered essential by one is rejected by another, until the whole Bible is set aside. Their sweeping declarations of Bible imperfections, and their constant disagreements save only in the errancy of the Scriptures, would lead to the unavoidable but unwelcome conclusion that it is not trustworthy in anything, is not needful, and may be a superfluity. Why bother, then, to cut out parts of the Bible- why not be consistent, and pitch the whole discredited Bible away? That this is not a far-fetched conclusion deduced from their theories, is evident from the bold declaration of one of the higher critical preachers already extensively quoted, the Rev. R. J. Campbell: "I close by solemnly adding: Never mind what the Bible says, if you, are in search for truth, but trust the voice of God within you."-"New Theology," page 199. As if the truth which came direct from God through Jesus (John 12:49-50), who is "the Way, the Truth, and the Life" (John 14:6), and who is "full of grace and truth" (John 1:14), and who said of the Bible, "Thy word is truth" (John 17:1-26)- as if this truth contained in the Scriptures, which "cannot he broken," could be contradicted by the God of truth speaking in the heart!
Thus are opened the floodgates for the deluge of every kind of unsanctified delusion, based upon the "voice of God" in the heart, regardless of its agreement or disagreement with the most solemn teachings of prophets, apostles, and Christ, who sealed their testimony with their blood. Even though "the heart is deceitful above all things" (Jeremiah 17:9), still this deceitful heart is to be exalted above the sublime words of Christ, which He tells us are every one given Him by the almighty Father. Surely higher critics "rush in where angels fear to tread."
What, then, is Christ to this new theology, which demands, in so arrogant a manner, the obedience of the Christian church? Let one of the greatest of the "liberal Christians" in America, the Rev. G. A. Gordon, tell us: "We have the record of His life and teaching, the record of what He said, of what He did, of what He suffered, of what He was. But the record is simply a symbol, a sublime memory."-"Religion and Miracle," page 119.
That’s all - only a memory, just a mystic symbol, merely a vague finger pointing upward! Why, Voltaire, Rousseau, Gibbon, proclaim Him to be more than that! We have at last reached the astounding period in the world’s history when infidels and skeptics, who have spent their lives in deriding the Bible, and before whose scathing scorn many a Christian had shuddered and fallen, actually have a higher regard for Christ than have the leaders of His own professed church. But this is by no means all. Fred Cornwallis Conybeare, doctor of theology in Oxford, in his book "Myth, Magic, and Morals" (1910), page 357, says: "The very idea of a chosen people belongs to a forgotten mythology, and so do other cardinal notions on which Christianity reposes, such as the fall of man, original sin, and redemption. We begin to realize that, if any one needed redemption, it was Jehovah, and not Adam, nor even Satan. Thus the entire circle of ideas entertained by Christ and Paul are alien and strange to us to-day, and have lost all actuality and living interest. . . . Jesus Himself is seen to have lived and died for an illusion, which Paul and the apostles shared."
While the most rabid skeptics of all the ages, from Celsus to Bradlaugh, bare their heads before the mighty, lovable presence of Jesus, the "doctors of divinity" are ruthlessly stripping from Christ His kingly robes, trampling them in the mire of impious doubt. Still the church has not aroused from its lethargy. What would the dauntless Luther say of such sacrilege? What the gentle-souled Melanchthon? Nay, what would Christ Himself say to these modern disciples, who, like Peter of old, repeatedly deny Him? Oh that they, like Peter, would repent, and be converted, and strengthen the brethren! What a glorious Pentecost would follow!
It is well to mine and search, but woe to him who breaks down the supporting pillars. If the work of the higher critic is true, Genesis and Deuteronomy are demolished, and others will follow. They are destroying the very pillars of protection and stability, and do not know it.