I've listened to John Pipers sermon about J. Gresham Machen twice now and I am amazed and astonished that although Machen died in 1937, the things that he taught about modernism and liberalism are as relevant today as they were in the 1920's.
John Piper has a list of 12 lessons we might learn from J. Gresham Machen at the end of the sermon. The one that I thought was so fitting for what's happening in the Emergent/Emerging movement is lesson one. The philosophy of "Everything Must Change" and pretty well all the Historic Christian Doctrines must be re-defined is nothing new. The Devil himself said to Adam and Eve in Genesis 3:1 (ESV) "Now the serpent was more crafty than any other beast of the field that the Lord God had made. He said to the woman, "Did God actually say...".
Take a look at what is said below about the dangers of the utilitarian uses of moral and religious language.
Lessons We Might Learn from Machen
1. Machen’s life and thought issue a call for all of us to be honest, open, clear, straightforward and guileless in our use of language.
He challenges us, as does the apostle Paul (2 Corinthians 2:17; 4:2; Ephesians 4:25; 1 Thessalonians 2:3-4), to say what we mean and mean what we say, and repudiate duplicity and trickery and shame and verbal manipulating and sidestepping and evasion.
Machen alerts us to the dangers of the utilitarian uses of moral and religious language. For example (in Christianity Today, Nov. 9, 1992, (36/13) p. 21), Roy Beck quotes Gregory King, spokesman for the Human Rights Campaign Fund, the nation’s largest homosexual advocacy group, who told the Washington Times in August, “I personally think that most lesbian and gay Americans support traditional family and American values,” which he defined as “tolerance, concern, support, and a sense of community.”
This is an example of how words with moral connotations have been co-opted by special interest groups to gain the moral high ground without moral content. They sound like values, but they are empty. “Tolerance” toward what? - all things? - which things? The standards are not defined. “Concern” for what? - expressed in what way? - redemptive opposition, or sympathetic endorsement? The standard is not defined. “Support” for what? - for behavior that is destructive and wrong? - for the person who admits the behavior is wrong and is struggling valiantly to overcome it? The object is not defined. “Community” with what standards of unification? - common endorsements of behavior? - common vision of what is right and wrong? - common indifference to what is right and wrong? Again the standards are not defined.
Yet the opposite of each of these four family values (intolerance, unconcerned, oppressive, self-centered) all carry such negative connotations that it is hard in soundbites to show why the four “values” asserted by the homosexual community are inadequate and even may be wrong as they use them.
Where honesty and truth are not paramount, all you have is words driven by a utilitarian view of language. Machen shows us that this is not new and that it is destructive to the church and the cause of Christ.
Read or listen to John Pipers sermon HERE
See Also - Reformed Forum re: J. Gresham Machen
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