2 Timothy 4

2 Timothy 4:1-5

WHY THE BAPTIST BIBLE UNION! 2 Timothy 4:1-5. Sermon preached before the First Annual Convention of the Baptist Bible Union of America, Kansas City, Kansas, May 15, 1923. OF making “movements” there is no end. The most marked characteristic of the twentieth century is organization. Efficiency is its watchword, and organization its theoretical method. The consequence is that every day gives birth to some new movement, commercial, social, political or religious. The century is cluttered with machinery. Men have ceased to work; they sit and watch the wheels go round. Walking is rapidly passing out of style; even running is now little better than a burlesque locomotion. We ride and drive and fly, and Jehu looks like a well-planted mile post as we pass him.The most of my life has been spent in building institutions rather than creating organizations.

I have reckoned my mission construction, not invention. Organization has never meant to me anything more than a means to an end; a scaffolding by the aid of which to lay bricks and mortar, rather than an airy outline erected for pleasure in its appearance or for pride in its existence. If six years ago, one had suggested to me that in so short a time I would be vitally involved in two brand “new movements” destined each to become world-wide in extent, I should have laughed at his prophecy as a vagary that would never be transmuted into a verity; but The World’s Christian Fundamentals Association is now an established organization, making good in its name. Christian Fundamentalism has become a world-topic, and more newspapers, magazines and pulpits are discussing it than unite in the consideration of any other single religious theme. The Baptist Bible Union of America is a babe in the morning, but there are reasons to believe that when this youngest movement of the century is a bit grown, and smiling across the sea, joins the right hand with the “Baptist Bible Union of England”, it is just possible that by uniting their left hands they may girdle the world. At any rate, we are here in the interest of the greatest Protestant denomination the world knows, and concerned with the greatest subject that ever appealed to mortal men, namely, Christianity. The Bible enjoins believers to be ready to give a reason for the hope that is in them, and if we are asked, “Why the Baptist Bible Union?” our answers are at hand.IN DEFENSE OF THE FAITH The newest thing under the sun is the denial of creed, as that word relates itself to Baptist history. To attempt to prove that our people have always opposed creeds and confessions, is a vain endeavor at blotting out recorded facts with new philosophies, and a sort of last resort of new and untrue theologians.Baptists have always had a well defined faith. In the Buffalo address on “Modernism in Baptist Schools” I provided abundant history to prove that contention. (See Fundamentals of Baptist Faith.) I called attention to the seven Articles drawn up in the year 1527, and universally adopted by the Baptists of that day, to a great declaration made by John Bunyan, forty elders and deacons, and approved by more than 20,000 Baptists in his day, and presented to King Charles II. in 1660; to the New Hampshire, Philadelphia, and other Confessions. In that address I overlooked the confession of Faith issued by seven English Baptist churches in 1644, a confession which even Professor Vedder has described as “a shining landmark, not only of Baptist history, but of the progress of enlightened Christianity”.The language in these separate documents was not the same, but the fundamental truths, for which they declare, were in such consonance one with another that they formed a consecutive and consistent series of documents, defining and determining the historic Baptist faith, a faith which our folk had held and preached with great unanimity of opinion through the major part of Christian history. After carefully examining a number of these historic documents, the Baptist Bible Union presents a Confession of Faith which amounts to the conservation of the great and essential points of this Baptist series. We challenge the man who denies this statement to bring from Baptist history sufficient proofs of his opposition.

The Confession has elicited the warmest praises; one of the world’s most widely known statesmen says, “It will rank with the Augsburg Confession.”As heirs, we have an obligation to preserve our inheritance. It is a goodly inheritance.

It holds among its honored names John the Baptist, Peter the baptizer, Paul the Apostle, Polycarp the immersed preacher, and practically every Church History father to the rise of Rome. The men who most ardently disputed the power and program of the papacy were the Ana-Baptists. The subjects of early and bitter persecution were men like Hubmaier of Germany, who exposed his body to the torture of red hot pinchers and laid his hand on the block of the murderous axe-man, rather than decline from the faith that was in him. Thirty thousand men, under Charles V. died by water and fire because they dared to be Biblically baptized— men, who like Hendrick Terwoort, fled from Flanders to England, only to find that he could make a choice between ceasing altogether from his testimony, or suffering being roasted alive, and whose soul drew not back from the latter; men, who like our own American forefathers, Roger Williams of Rhode Island, John Clark, Obadiah Holmes, and John Crandall, suffered arrest, imprisonment, and many stripes for what one calls the atrocious crime of preaching the Gospel and denying infant baptism; men, who like our Virginia forefathers revolted against episcopacy, paid their fines, took their imprisonments, suffered their stripes. When I see the children of such progenitors playing the coward in the presence of the boastful Goliaths of modernism, and either making haste to sell their swords to this enemy, or silencing their lips against his strutting assumptions, I feel like exclaiming again with Patrick Henry, who, as he took from the Virginia prosecutor the indictment against our forefathers for having preached the Gospel, exclaimed, “Great God! Great God!

Great God!”I was not born to this Baptist inheritance. Possibly I appreciate it the more on that account.

The natural heirs are sometimes unappreciative of their patrimony. I came to this honored circle from a profound conviction that it held the Truth as it is in Christ, clearly revealed through the Word, and I appeal to my foster brothers and sisters through-out the length and breadth of the land to protect this spiritual fortune against the pillaging of all false prophets, the sneers and scoffs of all pseudoscientists, and all the smooth words of designing modernists.My great and good friend, Dr. T. J. Villers, in his address on “Fidelity to our Baptist Heritage”, truly said of Baptists, “We are the heirs of other and better things than acres or dollars. Our heritage is of priceless convictions, institutions and laws—the heritage of soul liberty, the new world’s distinct and priceless contribution to political science; the heritage of a regenerate church-member-ship; the heritage of culture; the heritage of world-evangelism, for to us belongs the inextinguishable glory of Carey, the father of modern missions, and Judson, the first missionary in these latter days to set foot on an unmixed heathen soil.” Without passing any judgment whatever upon other Baptist bodies, let us declare our determination to defend that heritage against every open enemy, and every professed, yet false, friend; against materialists, against rationalists, against evolutionists, against the devil, and against hell!The present apostasy calls for our organized resistance.

That defection from the Faith which characterizes the Twentieth Century, is not a novelty. The Church was yet in its infancy when John had to write an Epistle against those who were denying “that Jesus [was] the Christ” (1 John 2:22), and had to remind them that they could not deny the Son and retain the Father (1 John 2:23).

John had to warn his brethren to “believe not every spirit, but try the spirits whether they are of God” (1 John 4:1); because many false prophets are gone out into the world. John even went so far as to advise his brethren against them who abode not in the doctrine of Christ, saying, “If there come any unto you, and bring not this doctrine, receive him not into your house, neither bid him God speed; for he that biddeth him God speed is partaker of his evil deeds” (2 John 1:10-11). And from the days of John until now, every century has been cursed with such professed Christian teachers. A candid review of history, however, will reveal the fact that no apostasy of the past has been as world-wide, as well organized, as doggedly determined against the Faith once delivered, as surreptitious in methods and adroit in messages as our modernism. While creating nothing, it has sought to capture everything.In the language of our own great Dr. Carroll of Texas, “Modernism, like another cuckoo, laid its eggs in our school nests, deceiving the conservative, not only into incubating for it, but into feeding its young; fooled by the notion that it was caring for its very own. “The most notable instance of shocking insincerity and lying instruction that has shaken the sangfroid of our Southern schools is a case in point.

The discovered and dislodged Professor was himself a product of the very school in which he propagated his anti-Christian theories, and some of us who visited that School in the days of his student life, were apprised at that time, of the cuckoo process, and were not in the least amazed to find that the egg laid by the evolutionist teacher had hatched, and developed into a full-fledged Unitarian or Atheist Professor. If this were the only school in which the imposition was being practiced, it would hardly be an occasion of grief, but when it is remembered that in the entire northland scarce a Baptist School is exempt from the same, and that half of the States of the South have been more or less shaken, in late years, through similar discoveries, rude awakenings await other states upon the same subject.

Only recently a leading editor in the South declared for his State that it was absolutely undisturbed by the evolution discussion, and yet a few months since X visited with two students from one of the leading Baptist schools of that very State, and they told me that Evolution was being taught them, not as a theory, but as a fact.Thirteen years ago I delivered a series of five addresses in the most conspicuous of our Southern Baptist Universities on “The Finality of Higher Criticism”, or “The Theory of Evolution, and False Theology”, and found my messages the subject of fury on the part of the Dean of that School, and certain of his associates. The majority of the Faculty and the great body of students had cheered these addresses to the echo, but at least three members of the faculty endured with silence, and resentful emotions. In the weeks following, letter after letter came from students, weighted with gratitude for Faith confirmed. The president of the Class wrote me in the following words: “I am taking the liberty of writing you to express my deep gratitude for your words in support of the creative theory. Our Professor of Biology has denied the super naturalism of the Old Testament events. Our Professor of Philosophy unqualifiedly pronounces his adherence to the Evolution theory.

Our Professor in Political Science and Sociology has taken us through Gidding’s work without the slightest attempt to repudiate it. My father was a preacher, and he died seven years ago, but he had instilled into me a simple faith in the Scriptures, and I was loath to even consider such reversal of his teaching; but course after course made their impression, and I found in me two irreconcilable doctrines, with the result that I discredited both; but your arguments have led me back into the simple faith in which I was formerly instructed, and they have made a lasting impression in my life, for which I shall ever be grateful.

I am President of the Senior Class and speak not alone for myself, but for many of my associates as well.”Four years ago I was a bit troubled by the statement that appeared in Dr. Geo. McPherson’s volume, “Crisis in School and Church”, over the signature of a great theological Seminary President. The question was, “Have the students in your Institution generally accepted as a fact the philosophy of evolution?” The answer, “In a general sense, yes, as it applied to the physical world, but we do not accept it in its extreme application.” In justice to that president it should be said that a second question, “Do they reject the teachings of Genesis as to the creative and the miraculous element generally in the Bible as historic?” was answered, “No. The faculty and students of this Institution accept the Genesis record of creative and miraculous element in the Bible. We would not cut out one syllable in God’s Book.” However, my comfort is not increased when I find that in my own Alma Mater, perhaps the greatest theological Seminary in the world, one Professor says, “If on the animal side one wishes to work out a connection between man and ape, we have no word of revelation to bar him, or disturb us.” While another, widely known and much loved teacher, in the same school in “Syllabus for Old Testament Study”, says, “The method of creation is not explained in Genesis.

Science may pursue its research on this subject without hindrance from the Bible. Whether God took a million years to make man or only a second matters little—if only God made him.” It is a well known fact that certain, most notable pastors in the South have either lost their positions or been rendered uncomfortable in them, because of their recent fight against the Darwin Philosophy, and it is a fact that becomes increasingly) known that several of our Baptist Schools in the South are surreptitiously teaching the doctrines of Darwin in essence.The South is fortunate in that it has certain other Baptist Schools that stand four-square for the Faith once delivered, whose Science Departments do not question or compromise Scriptural statements; but it should not be forgotten that the very institutions from which a large proportion of the southern teaching force is being graduated, are smitten with the gangrene of Darwinian unbelief.

The past year has seen honest, and in certain instances partially successful efforts at school cleansing. If that endeavor is carried out without a compromise, the shaken confidence of the southern people will immediately be steadied, and the great schools founded and fostered by faithful men, will continue to fruit for God, the Gospel, Christ, and His Church.IN THE OF A TRUE The foreword of our Confession of Faith concerning the Union—we send this forth not as a separatist document, but as a rallying center for all true Baptists North and South, at home and abroad. We believe that our common faith will suffice to obliterate sectional and national lines, and bring into a beautiful fellowship all those Christians who hold with us this great body of truth. That is no mean objective!Christian fellowship is not subject to sectional lines. That discovery I did not make until I became a man. In youth I supposed that the Mason and Dixon line was as far north as true fraternity ought ever to extend, and that the Baptist denomination South determined once and forever the boundaries of Christian brotherhood. “When I became a man, I put away childish things”. Of that childish conception I was cured when I crossed the Ohio, and from that narrowness I was forever recovered by marrying in the North, and a Methodist at that.

When I approached my prospective father-in-law to ask his daughter’s hand (which, by the way, I already had), he showed that he too had long looked to the Ohio River as the terminus of northern fellowship, for he said, “Well, isn’t that interesting! In the days of the Civil War I went south and fought and bled, and well-nigh died, in my determination to whip the southerners; and now to be asked to deliberately give over, once and for all, the only child I have to one of them, is perturbing.” But he yielded!

A Mason and Dixon line is not an inseparable barrier; even the Canadian line can be crossed; in fact while bird-hunting in that region, I often unconsciously cross it.From the first, Christianity has proven itself a traveling religion, and capable of leveling every conceivable barrier. It broke down the middle wall of partition between Jew and Gentile and made them brethren. If we have the right sort it will stride across sectional and national lines, not only ignoring them as it goes, but perfectly obliterating them as it passes. It has conquered against class, race, climate, and taught men the eternal truth that God “hath made of one blood all nations of men for to dwell” together, and that true believers in Christ are “brethren”. Mark the phrase, I mean it,—“True believers in Christ are brethren”. That relation was not determined by locality, not determined by nationality.

It exists in the new nature. Why, then, should not the Baptist believers of the North American Continent recognize a fraternity already determined by the saving grace of God, and enjoy the fellowship incidental only to the confines of this entire continent?

The Baptist Bible Union believes they should. This First Convention provides an opportunity. Our only marvel is that the conception was so long in coming, and the Convention so long in forming.The coercion of a common name is not the creation of a comity. We are not asking that all Baptists in North America come into this Union. We do not desire it. We shall not permit it. Union is one thing; harmony is another. Futile are all the efforts to effect the first, while men neglect the fundamentals of the second.

Tie two cats’ tails together and hang them across a clothes line, and you have unity, but no harmony. The circumstance that they have the same name, members of one family, will not keep the peace. In fact it makes the fight the more furious. Even so is it with Unitarian and Trinitarian Baptists, bound together by the cords of a denominational name, but forever compelled to fight by the very pains of their respective positions. It used to be that the howling was mainly in the North. Now it is heard from Mexico to remotest Canada, and from Maine to California.

The liberals think that conservatism forces and continues the fight. So men thought when Roger Williams protested impossible conditions, and was denounced as “a disturber of peace, and a disseminator of pestilential opinions”.So men regarded John Clark, Obadiah Holmes and John Crandall; so certain English Baptists regarded Charles Spurgeon and proceeded to make it so pleasant for him as to force him and his church forever from their fellowship.

Let it be remembered that the present “disturbers” are successors to noble souls, and that an uncompromising stand for God and Truth has never in history past, and can never, in times to come, be less than a disturbance of the peace, and result other than in conflict and strife.This very fact creates the necessity of a closer fellowship on the part of them that believe. We are to fight the good fight of faith”; we are to “earnestly contend for the faith which was once delivered”, and in so doing we are not to deny ourselves the fellowship of them that fight with us, nor the recuperating power of peaceful assemblies on the part of people who walk together in the Word.In fact, the truest fellowship is born of a common faith in God and His Word. That is why it is possible for men of different denominational labels to find themselves in closer and more Christian fellowship than men who wear the same name, but entertain opposing faiths. However, when the family relationship is right, it represents the sweetest fellowship on earth. Blood is thicker than water. The binding influences of a history baptized in the blood of believers who held our identical views, imparts to their true successors a sense of unity, a centripetal force as sweet as the influences of a Pleiades.

In the Baptist denomination, as in all other Christian history, men who are opposed for entertaining a Biblical faith and persecuted in proportion to their loyalty, are by that very outward pressure bound into the best brotherhood known to the Centuries. The creation of “steam-rolling machines” for the purpose of crushing immediately the weaker men among us makes the life and interest of those men to mean more to some brethren than ever before, and rouses in every true believer in God’s Book a determination to offer whatever strength he has, not so much as a shield for self, but as an expression of fraternity and strength to his endangered fellow-believer.However, in my judgment, the Baptist Bible Union of North America, has another reason for its rise, and another occasion for organization.IN THE OF Time wanes! The end of the age approaches! The Christian’s opportunity not only increases in bulk, but in consequence of that very fact adds to his responsibility.To preach this Gospel of the Kingdom to all the world for a witness (Matthew 24:14). This very reference to one of the prophecies of Scripture, involves a point of attack upon our Confession. To the present moment the chief objection raised relates itself to “the Return of the Lord”, and to the events incidental to the end of this age. Our answer is “to the law and to the testimony.

If we speak not according to this Word, it is because there is no light in us.” “This Gospel of the Kingdom” is not the Gospel of Grace. The Gospel of Grace has to do with the Church, and to preach it is the obligation of every Christian, and to prove it by living a more serious obligation still. “Living epistles” are more powerful than verbal orations; but the prophecy is “this Gospel of the Kingdom shall be preached in all the world for a witness unto all nations; and then shall the end come”.

This prophecy is being literally fulfilled today. The Kingdom Truth, long left in neglect, now looms large in pulpit and printed page. Rationalism is disturbed by it; world improvers are perturbed by it; advance agents of an “improved civilization” are pestered and angry. The Daniel Whitby defection from the Faith is fruiting. The very doctrine used by the great Baptist, John Bunyan, and held by our entire denomination in his day, is now denounced. We are asked to either deny it altogether, as some professed Baptists do, or soft-pedal about it, or else select concerning it some middle road opposition, to which nobody either consents or objects, and the argument in that we thereby “escape contention”.

I speak for myself, but I believe I represent men who will finally make up the Baptist Bible Union of America, when I say, that I am not willing to yield my view on Baptism because not all my brethren believe in immersion. I have refused to be silenced concerning the subject, lest good men should refuse me fellowship if I spoke; and as for taking a middle position between it and sprinkling, I have never discovered any that looked like a safe standing ground, and I apply the same principles in proclaiming the approaching event of the ages, namely, the Coming of Christ; an event more often referred to in Scripture than any other single event of all the centuries; an event as clearly set forth by prophecy as language is capable of expressing thought; an event that is made, by the pen of Prophet and Apostle, the chief objective of the Church and Christian is one blessed hope.

Whoever expected “this Gospel of the Kingdom shall be preached in all the world for a witness”, without a protest, and when did a true Baptist ever desist from a Bible obligation because somebody objected to his belief in, or proclamation of the same? If we are worthy of existence at all, if in our Union there is strength, it will only be in proportion as we prove ourselves fully ready to. take our place and perform our part in the fulfilling prophecy of preaching this Gospel of the Kingdom in all the world for a witness.To gather out of the Gentiles a people for His Name (Acts 15:14). From the day of Pentecost till now, that has been the one obligation of the Christian Church, and so long as time remains, that must remain the inspiration of Missions. It is no mere incident that the great missionaries of the ages have been men who did not believe that “civilization” was, in itself, the sufficient objective for the Church of Christ. Paul never so thought; Polycarp never so indicated; Justin Martyr never so imagined. Carey, Judson, Morrison, these mighty missionaries, were in India and China with no message of civilization, but with the Gospel of salvation.

They were not there to introduce occidental ideas of government. They were there to make known the Christian’s God.

They were not there to improve civilization, save as that took place incidentally, but to preach Christ and Him crucified. Great men of England and America, whose missionary influence was felt upon foreign shores, as positively as in so-called Christian lands; men like Spurgeon, Guinness, and Brown of the Old Country, and like Pierson and Gordon and Blackstone of this land, have never concerned themselves with Americanizing Asia, or Anglosizing Europe. They did not make their gifts, edit their magazines, publish their sermons with that as the objective. They had learned from experience upon the foreign fields that education should follow evangelization, rather than precede and supplant it; and our great advocates of missionary work in England and America by keen and careful study of work in the regions beyond, were convinced to a man that the methods of Carey, Judson and Clough were Spirit-guided and Scripturally confirmed.It is only another sign of an utter defection from the Faith, that we have fallen upon a time when a great denomination will declare its objective to be “civilization” instead of evangelization; an unscriptural attempt at a wholesale saving of nations, as such, instead of that election of grace by which God proposed to gather out of the nations “a people for His Name”.Perhaps the greatest single occasion for the protest against our Northern Baptist Convention is at this very point. The most ruinous heresy of the hour is the deliberate attempt to turn the objective of the Church from soul-winning to social improvement, and from Christianizing to civilizing peoples. It is a philosophy that can but fruit in cultured infidelity, the most church-destroying and Christ-opposing product of the apostasy. Never in the history of the Christian Church has the evangelization of a people failed to put into civilization itself the very powers that can alone exalt and redeem the same.We invite every interested Baptist in America to give candid consideration to our Declaration concerning the Missions of the Church. “We believe the true mission in the Church is found in the great command:To make individual disciples; To build up the Church; To teach and instruct as He has commanded. We do not believe in the reversal of this order.” FINALLY To prepare ourselves and the Church for Christ’s soon Coming. Please mark the phrase, “for Christ’s soon Coming!” I do not say that He will be here tomorrow. I do not set any time for His Coming; no intelligent man does, unless he be a designing deceiver, “of that day and hour knoweth no man”. We have not attempted to work out in detail everything that will take place when He comes. We have no intent of divorcing from our fellowship the man who does not see eye to eye with us in the last minutia on this matter. We have not made this subject an issue of fellowship; but we have made a statement that covers and compasses what the Scriptures have to say upon the same.

We have made it, not only because we find it in the Bible, but because we find that the Scriptures themselves declare that to be indifferent to this is to be suddenly overtaken (Matthew 25:13); that to be neglectful here is to be shamed in His final presence (1 John 2:28); that to sleep at the very hour the bridegroom is approaching might be to find oneself facing a fast closed door (Matthew 25:10). We do not hold that “the Coming of the Lord draweth nigh” (James 5:8). We do believe that He comes a King to reign in righteousness (Isaiah 32:1). We do believe that “He shall have dominion also from sea to sea, and from the river unto the ends of the earth” (Psalms 72:8), We do believe that at His Appearance the first Resurrection will take place (Revelation 20:6). We do believe that the rest of the dead will live not again till the thousand years are finished (Revelation 20:5). We do believe that when He has concluded His reign He will deliver up the Kingdom to God, the Father, that God may be all in all (1 Corinthians 15:28).Ask me again, “Why the Baptist Bible Union?” and I will answer in recapitulation: In defense of the historic faith, in the interest of a true fellowship, and in the furtherance of fulfilling prophecy.