Abraham Kuyper Was a Heretic Too

Over the last few years I’ve been saddened to see a number of teachers and preachers of the Word of God, along with friends in the pews, begin a dubious doctrinal decline, wandering into either questionable teaching or even outright heresy. And believe me, I don’t use the term heresy lightly. The narratives are diverse, and the motivations multifarious, but in all, their tragic departure brings me distress for their spiritual lives and for the churches they serve.

What should we do in these cases? What should we think when someone we know departs from the truth of the faith “once for all delivered” and veers into what we believe to be serious, dangerous error? While I don’t have an exhaustive answer, we should at least rule out completely writing them off as lost and beyond hope.

Heretic to Hero

 

G. C. Berkouwer tells this story of theological giant Abraham Kuyper:

When Kuyper referred to Modernism as “bewitchingly beautiful,” he doubtlessly recalled the fascination which the modernism of Scholten had exerted on him as a student. He acknowledges in 1871 that he too had once dreamed the dream of Modernism. And when at the age of eighty he addressed the students of the Free University, he harked back to the “unspiritual presumption” which had caused him to slip. “At Leiden I joined, with great enthusiasm, in the applause given Professor Rauwenhoff when he, in his public lectures, broke with all belief in the Resurrection of Jesus.” “Now when I look back,” he writes, “my soul still shudders at times over the opprobrium I then loaded on my Savior.” (The Person of Christ, 9-10)   Continue at Derek Rishmawy

Christian Scholarship and the Defense of the Faith

This Address was originally delivered in London on June 17, 1932. 

There are, indeed, those who tell us that no defense of the faith is necessary. "The Bible needs no defense," they say; "let us not be forever defending Christianity, but instead let us go forth joyously to propagate Christianity." But I have observed one curious fact -- when men talk thus about propagating Christianity without defending it, the thing that they are propagating is pretty sure not to be Christianity at all. They are propagating an anti-intellectualistic, non-doctrinal Modernism; and the reason why it requires no defense is simply that it is so completely in accord with the current of the age. It causes no more disturbance than does a chip that floats downward with a stream. In order to be an adherent of it, a man does not need to resist anything at all; he needs only to drift, and automatically his Modernism will be of the most approved and popular kind. One thing need always be remembered in the Christian Church -- true Christianity, now as always, is radically contrary to the natural man, and it cannot possibly be maintained without a constant struggle. A chip that floats downwards with the current is always at peace; but around every rock the waters foam and rage. Show me a professing Christian of whom all men speak well, and I will show you a man who is probably unfaithful to His Lord.

Certainly a Christianity that avoids argument is not the Christianity of the New Testament. The New Testament is full of argument in defense of the faith. The Epistles of Paul are full of argument -- no one can doubt that. But even the words of Jesus are full of argument in defense of the truth of what Jesus was saying. "If ye then, being evil, know how to give good gifts unto your children, how much more shall your Father which is in heaven give good things to them that ask him?" Is not that a well-known form of reasoning, which the logicians would put in its proper category? Many of the parables of Jesus are argumentative in character. Even our Lord, who spoke in the plenitude of divine authority, did condescend to reason with men. Everywhere the New Testament meets objections fairly, and presents the gospel as a thoroughly reasonable thing.    Continue at Modern Reformation

Christianity & Liberalism

Here is how Machen later described his purpose in writing this book:

I tried to show that the issue in the Church of the present day is not between two varieties of the same religion, but, at bottom, between two essentially different types of thought and life. There is much interlocking of the branches, but the two tendencies, Modernism and supernaturalism, or (otherwise designated) non-doctrinal religion and historic Christianity, spring from different roots. In particular, I tried to show that Christianity is not a “life,” as distinguished from a doctrine, and not a life that has doctrine as its changing symbolic expression, but that—exactly the other way around—it is a life founded on a doctrine. Read the rest HERE

Another Word Concerning the Down-Grade

A lover of the gospel can conceal from himself the fact that the days are evil. We are willing to make a large discount from our apprehensions on the score of natural timidity, the caution of age, and the weakness produced by pain; but yet our solemn conviction is that things are much worse in many churches than they seem to be, and are rapidly tending downward. Read those newspapers which represent the Broad School of Dissent, and ask yourself, How much farther could they go? What doctrine remains to be abandoned? What other truth to be the object of contempt? A new religion has been initiated, which is no more Christianity than chalk is cheese; and this religion, being destitute of moral honesty, palms itself off as the old faith with slight improvements, and on this plea usurps pulpits which were erected for gospel preaching. The Atonement is scouted, the inspiration of Scripture is derided, the Holy Spirit is degraded into an influence, the punishment of sin is turned into fiction, and the resurrection into a myth, and yet these enemies of our faith expect us to call them brethren, and maintain a confederacy with them! Read the rest HERE

An Excellent Jeremiad from Mr. Spurgeon

Pragmatism: Modernism Recycled

J. Gresham Machen's Response to Modernism

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

J. Gresham Machen's Response to Modernism