Truth Magazine

By Ron Halbrook

For we have not followed cunningly devised fables, when we made known unto you the power and coming of our Lord Jesus Christ, but were eyewitnesses of his majesty (2 Pet. 1:16).

But there were false prophets also among the people, even as there shall be false teachers among you, who privily shall bring in damnable heresies, even denying the Lord that bought them, and bring upon themselves swift destruction. And many shall follow their pernicious ways; by reason of whom the way of truth shall be evil spoken of (2:1-2).

Ye therefore, beloved, seeing ye know these things before, beware lest ye also, being led away with the error of the wicked, fall from your own steadfastness. But grow in grace, and in the knowledge of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. To him be glory both now and for ever. Amen (3:17-18).

The gospel of Jesus Christ includes facts (1 Cor. 15:1-3), commands (Rom. 10:16), and promises (Col. 1:23). Any teaching which rejects any facts, commands, or promises in the gospel is heresy. No matter how popular or persuasive heresy may be, it is a betrayal of truth and a harbinger of eternal destruction. If we are to escape this destruction, if we are to be loyal to Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior, we must grow in him and oppose the error of the wicked. The purpose of this study is to contrast the gospel of Jesus Christ to a system of religious thought known as Liberalism or Modernism.

Modernism undermines the commands and promises of the gospel by calling the facts of the gospel in question, especially in regard to miracles. The facts of the gospel are held in perpetual doubt by Modernists. They allege an admixture of fables in the gospel story and complain about the foibles of both those who wrote and those who hear the message. Liberalism is in many ways a negative religion: internally in disarray when viewed as a movement, but united in opposition to the gospel as recorded in the New Testament. It is our plan to show that the miraculous is found throughout God’s Word but that Modernism assaults the miraculous element as false or at least nonessential. After discussing the nature and ultimate results of Liberalism, we shall make an appeal for gospel preaching.

Miracles In The Gospel

Miracles are supernatural acts of supernatural power and origin. God is the creator of the natural order and therefore is not limited by it. The power which He exercised in creation may be exercised at other times according to His will. The word often translated “miracle” (dunamis) in the New Testament is the word for “power, inherent ability . . . used of works of a supernatural origin and character, such as could not be produced by natural agents and means” (Vine’s Dictionary of New Testament Words, 111, p. 75). Another term (semeion) used means “a sign, mark, token . . . used of miracles and wonders as signs of Divine authority” (ibid.)-“an unusual occurrence, transcending the common course of nature” (Thayer’s Lexicon, p. 573)-“an event that is contrary to the usual course of nature” (Arndt & Gingrich, Lexicon,p. 755). Often with the word “sign” appears the synonym “wonder” (teras), meaning “something strange, causing the beholder to marvel” (Vine, IV, p. 228). Each of the three words used tells us something about the nature and purpose of miracles: “A sign is intended to appeal to the understanding, a wonder appeals to the imagination, a power . . . indicates its source as supernatural” (ibid.). As J. Gresham Machen so clearly put it, “A supernatural event is one that takes place by the immediate, as distinguished from the mediate power of God . . . in the events called natural, God uses means, whereas in the events called supernatural He uses no means, but puts forth His creative power” (Christianity and Liberalism, p. 99).

God has acted above the limits we call natural in order to create that which did not exist, to reveal messages to men, and to authenticate those messages as Divine. Jesus said that God literally and directly created mankind “at the beginning” as is recorded in Genesis 1-3 (Matt. 19:1-5). Jesus believed that God had spoken through His Spirit to prophets such as Moses and Isaiah, and that such messages at times predicted the future (Matt. 22:31, 43; Lk. 4:1721). Specific miracles recorded in the Old Testament-supply of manna, the brass serpent, God’s gift of wisdom to Solomon, Jonah and the great fish (Jn. 6:31-32, 58; 4:1415; Matt. 12:38-42)-were accredited as true by Jesus in every case. He authenticated His own mission and message with miraculous signs, and provided the same authentication for personal ambassadors whom He sent out preaching (Jn. 20:31-32; Matt. 10:1-15; Mk. 16:15-20). Thus were the Apostles empowered to preach salvation in Jesus’ name, “God also bearing them witness, both with signs and wonders, and with divers miracles” (Heb. 2:4).

The gospel of Jesus Christ cannot be preached without treating as literal facts the creation, prophecy, the Old Testament miracles, the virgin birth of Jesus, His personal miracles, the miracles which He performed through His Apostles, the inspiration of Scripture in a supernatural sense, the forgiveness of sins, miraculous power exercised in the establishment and spread of the church, and both the hope of heaven and dread of hell. The God revealed by Jesus Christ is above nature as its creator and sustainer; by the very nature of his being, God can act above and beyond natural limits. This is the God of the gospel. To change Him in an effort to preach Him is to have another God, another gospel, and another religion.

Modernism’s Assault on Miracles

Centuries of apostasy from New Testament teaching prepared fertile ground for infidelity. The monolithic corruption and stagnation of the monolithic church-state known as Roman Catholicism spawned not only religious reformation in the 1500-1600s but also revolution in the 1700-1800s. In rejecting the supernatural superstitions perpetuated by Catholicism, and in embarking on the age of reason, many people dismissed the Bible teaching on miracles as a part of the evil to be escaped. Men failed to see that New Testament Christianity and its miracles were distinct from Roman Catholicism and its superstitions. The ebb and flow of these religious reactionary movements, increased in force by the strong currents of scientific and industrial advances, produced a tidal wave of naturalism between 1875 and 1925. The twentieth century has never recovered from the wreckage of the flood. Naturalism made twentieth-century man self-confident to the point of arrogance and self-sufficient to the point of infidelity. This naturalism was evidenced in the rise of evolution, applied to every phase of man’s thought including religion, and the rise of so-called higher critical studies applied to Scripture, treating it as of human origin. To this day, the assumptions of Liberalism or Modernism persist in much of American religious faith and practice.

Machen identified the root idea of Modernism as “the denial of any entrance of the creative power of God (as distinguished from the ordinary course of nature) in connection with the origin of Christianity.” Modernism claims to mediate Christianity to the modern world but relinquishes “everything distinctive of Christianity, so that what remains is in essentials only that same indefinite type of religious aspiration which was in the world before Christianity came upon the scene” (Christianity and Liberalism, p. 7). In other words, what remains is the same sin, unbelief, guilt, despair, and hopelessness, the same rebellion and confusion, to which is “attached the terminology of traditional Christianity” (John Warwick Montgomery, The Suicide of Christian Theology, p. 28). Carl Henry clearly identified the major assumption of modern thought which makes all miracles suspect if not incomprehensible: “the space-time universe is viewed as ultimate and only within that broader context can room be made for a deity” (Remaking the Modern Mind, p. 208). This is immediately seen in a classical definition of Modernism given by spokesman Shailer Mathews in The Faith of Modernism: “It is the use of the methods of modern science to find, state and use the permanent and central values of inherited orthodoxy in meeting the needs of a modern world” (pp. 22-24). God must pardon the inconvenience, but His friends must put Him under the microscope and analyze His Word by the canons of Science! If He and His revelations do not seem to fit into the laboratory where the whole natural universe is studied, they can be made to fit.

Once Modernism starts its work, there is no stopping place until God Himself has been remade to order to fit the assumptions of Liberal research. The avowed atheist replaces God Himself with evolution; in order to make the gospel believable to modern man, the Liberal retains God but replaces the Genesis account of creation with the theory of evolution. In discussing the foundations of Liberal theology, proponent W. P. Montague pointed out how the acids of Modernism must eat deeper and deeper into Scripture:

When once the nose of the camel of doubt is permitted to enter the tent of faith there is no assurance as to where the invasion will stop. If any of the miracles of the Bible are rejected, the others become open to question (David E. Roberts and Henry Pitney Van Dusen (eds.), Liberal Theology, An Appraisal, p. 155).

Professor D. R. Dungan confided to J. W. McGarvey in 1908 and 1909 that at Drake University the faculty no longer believed “that Genesis represents the beginning of things correctly” and was ready to approve a B.D. thesis on the Messianism of Isaiah which denied all predictive prophecy in the book. Old Testament miracles such as Jonah and the whale are smiled upon as fables or parables. Jesus is made not an object of faith but an example, a “symbol,” an “illustration of the essence of religion” (Lyman Van Law Cady in Liberal Theology, An Appraisal, p. 147). His virgin birth and other miracles are explained away on naturalistic principles. His death for our sins and his bodily resurrection are given figurative meanings-they simply cannot be events beyond the meaning of the natural order of things. Miracles in connection with the establishment of the church and both the hope of heaven and dread of hell in a literal sense, all must be dismissed.

The center of Modernism’s assault is the verbal inspiration of Scripture, such as is affirmed in 1 Corinthians 2:13 (“things” and “words” which “the Holy Spirit teacheth”) and 2 Timothy 3:16 (“all scripture is given by inspiration of God” or breathed out from God). Such an authenticated and guarded text in the original manuscripts would guarantee the historical reality of each recorded miracle! The one unifying hope for different branches of Liberalism is “that tomorrow some fresh evidence of the unreliability of the Scriptures may be found” (I. M. Haldeman, A King’s Penknife or Why I Am Opposed to Modernism, p. 163). In one of the most celebrated blasts of Modernist warfare, Charles A. Briggs delivered The Authority of Holy Scripture: An Inaugural Address, castigating “Superstition” in the form of “Bibliolatry, ” “Verbal Inspiration, ” the “Authenticity” of Scripture, its “Inerrancy, ” “Violation of the Laws of Nature” (i.e. miracles), and “Minute Prediction” or “Predictive Prophecy. “

Ultimately, the God of the Bible and the God of Liberalism are two different deities. Infidelity is unbelief in the God of the Bible and Modernism is one form of infidelity. It denies the supernatural in Scripture, or dismisses the supernatural as non-essential, or explains the supernatural away. Modernists have a god but not the God of Scripture. Like the infidels of ancient times, they have “changed the glory of the uncorruptible God into an image made like to corruptible man” (Rom. 1:23) and are therefore “without God” (atheoi, Eph. 2:12). Liberal advocate and editor C. C. Morrison admitted as much in his 3 January, 1924 Christian Century article “Fundamentalism and Modernism: Two Religions.” He might as well have been a prophet of Baal distinguishing himself from Elijah, in the following barrage:

There is a clash here as profound and as grim as that between Christianity and Confuscianism. Amiable words can not hide the differences. “Blest be the tie” may be sung till doomsday but it can not bind these two worlds together. The God of fundamentalism is one God. The God of the modernist is another. The Christ of the fundamentalist is one Christ; the Christ of modernism is another. The Bible of fundamentalism is one Bible; and the Bible of modernism is another. The church, the kingdom, the salvation, the consummation of all things-these are one thing to fundamentalists and another thing to modernists.

In like manner, Modernist educator W. C. Morro found J. W. McGarvey’s literal approach to the restoration of New Testament Christianity difficult to adjust “to reality or to a reasonable conception of God” (Brother McGarvey, pp. 133-34).

Gospel Preaching: The “Foolishness” of God

Modernism is the practical repudiation of God’s grace, while speaking much of grace. Everywhere miracles appear in connection with Christ, the Bible, the church, heaven, or even the Father Himself, doubt and denial reign supreme in naturalistic Liberalism. Like those who rejected Christ in the first century, Modernists discount the gospel as “foolishness,” label its miracles as insufficient for faith, and proceed as if human wisdom were all sufficient. Modernism is Ancientism: the world seeking God by means of its own wisdom, an experiment doomed by past attempts!

For the preaching of the cross is to them that perish foolishness; but unto us which are saved it is the power of God …. For after that in the wisdom of God the world by wisdom knew not God, it pleased God by the foolishness of preaching to save them that believe (1 Cor. 1:18, 21).

Let us not lose confidence in the New Testament message, but preach it, preach it, preach it.

When we preach the facts of the gospel as true, we certify its commands and promises as true. Pressing the demands of the gospel in contrast to the doubts of Liberalism, W. W.Otey said in his Christ orModernism,

For three days the hope of the world hung on three words: I will arise.

For nineteen hundred years the hope of the world has hung on three words: He is risen (p. 72).

Because he arose, the gospel commands and promises are true. Knowing the gospel is true, we preach it with confidence that it will accomplish God’s purpose and satisfy man’s need. “There is no more perfect adaptation of light to the eye, food to hunger, water to thirst than the adaptation of Christ and the gospel to satisfy every need and desire of man’s spirit” (Otey, p. 13). Preach the gospel of Christ because it is eternal truth. Preach it because it heals the broken-hearted, delivers the captives, gives sight to the blind, frees the oppressed, and proclaims the acceptable year of the Lord (Lk. 4:16-21). Preach it without fear. Preach it without compromise. Preach it till death stills the tongue.

Truth Magazine XXII: 42, pp. 676-679
October 26, 1978

By Daniel H. King

The Nature of Contemporary Opinion

In order to dramatize the nature of the question with which we will be wrestling in the present article, at least for the sake of those who are uninitiated with regard to contemporary New Testament theology, we would like to quote from three thinkers who have been prominent in formulating the current debate:

Albert Schweitzer. “The Jesus of Nazareth who came forward publicly as the Messiah, who preached the ethic of the Kingdom of God, who founded the Kingdom of Heaven on earth, and died to give his work its final consecration never had any existence …. He comes to us as one unknown, without a name, as of old by the lakeside He came to those men who knew him not.”

Rudolf Bultmann: “It seems then that the form of the earthly no less than the heavenly Christ is for the most part hidden from us. For all the inestimable value of the gospels they yield us little more than a whisper of his voice: We trace in them but the outskirts of his ways.”

R. H. Lightfoot: “I do indeed think that we can now know nothing concerning the life and personality of Jesus, since early Christian sources show no interest in either, are moreover fragmentary and often legendary, and other sources about Jesus do not exist.”

Doubtless the foregoing statements are shocking to you, if (as I am sure is the case with the bulk of our readership) you have not kept up with the writings of modern New Testament scholarship. Yet, they do not flow from the pens of avowed infidels or atheists as you might have thought but rather from professed “Christian” thinkers. What is more, their thinking represents the thinking of men who hold the most important posts in some of the most prestigious universities, colleges, and seminaries the world over. There is little wonder, therefore, that theological schools have generally come to be dubbed “theological cemeteries,” since “the faith once delivered” is now long dead and buried insofar as they are concerned. Theological study increasingly has taken on a resemblance to an autopsy performed on a corpse.

Bible scholars once read and devoutly analyzed the text of Scripture, asking, “What did it mean then and how does this apply to us today?” But contemporary writers and teachers spend their time asking “What did they (the early church) believe?” and see no connection whatever between this and the question, “What shall we believe?” The issue has come to be one of historical interest entirely. It has no relevance for us today.

But what brought about this change in terms of relevance? Naturally there are many factors that could be explored, as there are many streams that flow into the sea, howbeit the primacy of one in particular stands out above the rest. That is the so-called “Quest of the Historical Jesus.” And we would like to begin by attempting to trace out its origins.

History of the “Quest”

As Joachim Jeremias has said, “No one in the early church, no one in the Reformation and the two succeeding centuries thought of asking the question whether the historical Jesus and His message had any relevance for the Christian.” Whence then, did this problem arise? Well, as a matter of fact, the date of its birth can be precisely fixed at 1778. The question was a child of the Enlightenment. The earlier ages held fast to the position that the. Gospels give us absolutely reliable information about Jesus; they saw no problem here.

However, Herman Samuel Reimarus (1694-1768), professor of Oriental Languages in Germany, left a manuscript which after his death was published by G. E. Lessing. The last excerpt (of seven) was entitled – Concerning the Aim of Jesus and His Disciples. In it Reimarus distinguished between the aim of Jesus, which he claimed was to set up an earthly kingdom and deliver the Jews from the yoke of the Romans, and that of the disciples. Reimarus alleged that the purpose of Jesus had been thwarted and that the disciples (too lazy to go back to their jobs) stole the body of Jesus and invented the message of His resurrection. Hence, it was the disciples who invented the Jesus of the Gospels. This was the significant aspect of the thesis put forward by Reimarus, i.e. that the Jesus of history and the Christ preached by the church were not the same. Now, the representation of the historical Jesus as constructed by the eighteenth-century professor is seen today by all as absurd and amateurish. Jesus was no political revolutionary. Moreover, the sources bear unambiguous and trustworthy testimony that He was strongly opposed to the nationalistic zealot leanings of His environment. Additionally, Reimarus’ work was obviously an anti-Christian diatribe or hate-pamphlet and deserved little attention for that reason. Nevertheless he must be credited with the first attempt at distinguishing between the “historical Jesus” and the “Christ of faith.”

After Reimarus several rationalistic “lives of Jesus” were written, most of which to a greater or lesser extent denied the miraculous incidents in the Gospels. Usually they attempted to explain the accounts as having resulted from natural causes, Johann Hess (1741-1828) of Zurich, Franz Reinhard (1753-1812) of Wittenberg, Johann Jakobi of Walterhausen (1816), Johannes Herder (1744-1803) of Weimar, Heinrich Paulus (1761-1851) of Heidelberg, Karl Hase (1800-1890) of Jena, and Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768-1834) of Berlin. As an example of this tendency, we might offer the method of handling the resurrection in the case of both Hase and Schleiermacher. Both men said that he was raised but that it could have been a return to consciousness from a trance instead of an actual resurrection from death. He merely “swooned” for a time and awoke.

David Strauss (1808-1874) shocked the world in 1835 with his Life of Jesus which was even more radical still. Strauss said that the church created the miracles of the Gospel through its “legend-creating faith.” But he stopped at the miracles and accepted the fact that Jesus had lived and that the Gospels told his story in a general way. However, Bruno Bauer (1809-1882) of Berlin and Bonn, went so far as to assert that everything that is known about Jesus is a product of the imagination of the early church, and as a consequence the conception that developed had no connection with any concrete personality called Jesus in the history of the world. Or to put it more succinctly, the historical Jesus never existed. This period came to be known as that of the “Christ-myth.”

Following up on the researches of Bauer, Arthur Drews in The Christ Myth and J. M. Robertson in Pagan Christs and Christianity and Mythology both argued that there was no historical proof whatever that the Jesus of the Gospels ever lived. The studies in comparative religion by Frazier, Gunkel, and Pfeiderer were drawn upon by them, especially with reference to Vegetation and Solar Myths, which formed the basis of the religions prevalent in the first century. This was surely the lowest ebb of the discussion and only a few were drawn into this radical position.

The next important era in the “quest” was the period which covers the first third of the twentieth century. This was the period of the “liberal lives of Jesus.” At this point the geographical picture changes slightly. For, up to this point all of the writers were from Germany. And, although German writers would still be the “cutting edge” in the debate, yet the scope became more international. Adolf Harnack (1901) the German, presented the most important and influential volume of this time. What is Christianity? — was its title and between its covers appeared the classic statement of the liberal theological position as to the significance of Jesus. For him, Jesus’ primary importance is seen in his message as it is included in his teaching: “If, however, we take a general view of Jesus’ teaching, we shall see that it may be grouped under three heads. They are each of such a nature as to contain the whole, and hence it can be exhibited in its entirety under any one of them. Firstly, the kingdom of God and its coming. Secondly, God the Father and the infinite value of the human soul. Thirdly, the higher righteousness and the commandment of love.” You will note that this liberal credo is singularly silent with reference to the miraculous, the deity of Christ, and matters of dogma or doctrine. This was intentional since all of such particulars had been abandoned by liberalism at this juncture. Other writers of this time who made their mark were Goguel of France, Mackinnon of Great Britain, Case of America, and the Jewish scholar Klausner. All of them denied that Jesus was the metaphysical Son of God; all agreed that a resurrection did not occur; all assumed the miraculous to be impossible; and furthermore, they all denied the possibility of writing a biography or history of the real Jesus by examining our Gospels.

As so often happens in critical scholarship, however, the entire nature of this debate changed with the entrance of a new generation of scholars upon the scene. Three names are connected with the downfall of the old liberal school: William Wrede who in 1901 published The Messianic Secret in the Gospels; Albert Schweitzer, whose work Quest of the Historical Jesus appeared in 1906; and Martin Kahler who authored The So-Called Historical Jesus and the Historic Biblical Christ, which came off the presses in 1892 but did not have its effect until much later. Wrede argued that it was no longer possible to obtain from the Gospels a real picture of the historical Jesus. Schweitzer made the same point, then constructed his own portrait of Christ. He said Jesus of Nazareth was a fanatical futurist who died in vain for his hope in the Second coming. Kahler on the other hand, distinguished between “Jesus” and “Christ”, intending by “Jesus” to describe the man of Nazareth; by “Christ” he understood the Savior proclaimed by the church. The two words for `historical’ also brought about a second distinction in the original German edition. For the term historisch meant for him the bare facts of the past, while geschichtlich meant that which possesses permanent significance. So, he placed in opposition to one another the so-called `historical Jesus’, as the lives of Jesus had sought to reconstruct him, and the geschichtlich, Biblical Christ, as the apostles proclaimed Him. This last figure was the one who concerned Kahler the most in terms of an existential appreciation of him. At first, however, Kahlar’s thesis went unheard; only in our time, when Rudolf Bultmann took it up, did it receive attention.

A single quotation from one of the scholarly journals of that day will reflect the condition of the Gospels in the minds of scholars as the result of the theories they had spun:

“As a result of the work of the Higher criticism the Four Gospels are a complete wreck as historical records . . . It can never be proved that an historical person uttered the great teachings of the Fourth Gospel . . . . As authorities for a life of Jesus they (the Synoptic Gospels) are hopelessly shattered by the assaults of the Higher Criticism. How little they tell us of an historic Jesus” (Hibbert Journal, Jan., 1911, pp. 346-347).

The introduction of form-critical techniques into this discussion gave the venture a slightly different twist, although writers were still dependent upon what had gone before. Hermann Gunkel, an Old Testament critic, first authored the method in that area, but it was left to Martin Dibelius to apply this system to New Testament literary documents. Rudolf Bultmann followed upon the heels of these men with a form-critical analysis which offered a fully developed existentialist philosophical approach. The History of the Synoptic Tradition was the title of the first of many books by him. His studies promoted the view that a quest for the historical Jesus is an impossible assignment, and his existential theology carried through the thesis that such a quest is illegitimate. He held that only a minimal knowledge about the earthly Jesus is necessary for faith: the fact of his existence and his death. Christian faith requires no historical foundation beyond the mere “thatness” of Jesus’ existence. Further, he claimed that Christian relevance and acceptance in the modern scientific age require reinterpretation of the New Testament in terms of an “existentialist non-miraculous prephilosophy.” In other words, the New Testament must be “demythologized” of its miraculous content. It is not hard to see in Bultmann the influence of M. Heidegger, an avowed atheist who said that Bultmann was “making theology out of my philosophy.” Two of his most influential disciples are Hans Conzelmann and Erich Dinkler of Gottingen and Heidelberg respectively.

After Bultmann it was left for others to justify a “quest” at all, since he had denied the need. The apology for the “New Quest” came originally from James M. Robinson in an article in The Christian Century. But it was followed by numerous efforts: Ernst Kasemann, Gunther Bornkamm, Ernst Fuchs, and Gerhard Ebeling, have all attempted to argue the validity of the historical element for faith. And this is fundamentally the way that things stand at this point in the discussion. There has been a movement away .from the thinking of Bultmann on the part of three schools of thought in scholarship: the post-Bultmannians, the “Heilsgeschichte” scholars, and the Pannenberg school. Conservative scholars have never shared his convictions, but they along with the aforementioned three groups are demanding a starting-point in the life and teaching of the historical Jesus.

Truth Magazine XXII: 40, pp. 649-651
October 12, 1978

By Mike Willis

I took a course in graduate work in which we studied the book of Psalms. Unlike some of the other work which I had in the book, this course selected several Psalms for special study which the professor described as the “Royal Psalms.” What this turned out to be was a study of the Messianic Psalms by a professor who did not believe that the Old Testament contained any prophecies of Jesus. As you might guess, I was in constant conflict with my professor and other students while in that class. Toward the end of the session, each student was requested to present a paper for class discussion regarding what he had gotten from the class. One student presented a paper on studying the psalms with presuppositions which prevented that person from seeing what the psalm actually said. The paper was obviously aimed at my presupposition that the messianic psalms had application to Jesus Christ and were prophecies of His life, work, death, arid resurrection. When the student finished his presentation, I immediately responded with a request that he consider his own presuppositions. He approached the psalms, with a presupposition that there was no such thing as predictive prophecy in the Bible, the acceptance of the evolutionary concept of the development of religion, the inherent goodness of man, etc. Our differences could not be ironed out until our presuppositions were the same. Hence, I called for a discussion of these presuppositions.

Though I got nowhere in class for making this statement, I am still convinced that modernism has a set of presuppositions all its own. We need to become aware of those presuppositions and how they affect where a man comes out with reference to what he believes. Hence, let us consider some of the presuppositions of modernism.

Naturalism

J. Gresham Machen stated that “the many varieties of modern liberal religions are; rooted in naturalism” (Christianity and Liberalism, p. 2). In religion, naturalism refers to the idea that “religion does not depend on supernatural experience, divine revelation, etc., and that all religious truth may be derived from the natural world.” Hence, one of the foundation presuppositions of modernism is that man does not have a divine revelation from God and that no supernatural phenomena have occurred ins this world.

Commenting about modernism’s acceptance of naturalism, James D. Bales wrote, “To the extent than modernism is consistent in its naturalism, and anti-supernaturalism, to that extent it pushes God away from man and silences His voice through undermining faith in the Bible. When it is fully consistent, in its anti-supernaturalism, it denies the existence of God. Consistent naturalism and evolutionism maintain that not only man but also his religious ideas have evolved. If this is true, man evolved the idea of God, and man created God instead of God creating, and revealing Himself to, man” (Modernism: Trojan Horse in the Church, pp. 28-29). Accepting this point of view, there are several other logical conclusions which modernism must accept as presuppositions.

Uniformity of Nature

If there has been no supernatural intervention in nature, nature has been uniform. By accepting the doctrine of the uniformity of nature, all of the miracles recorded in the Bible are neatly eliminated. This doctrine is based on the assumption that this world has always operated as it is presently operating. Inasmuch as men do not witness a creation of man from dust, a universal flood, a resurrection of a body from the dead, etc. today, they assume that these things never happened. Indeed, things which are extraordinary have such a presupposition against them that they could not ever have occurred.

Hume argued that a miracle was a violation of natural law. He said that no testimony was sufficient to establish a miracle, unless the testimony be of such a kind that its falsehood would be more miraculous than the fact which it endeavors to establish. Hence, there is a predisposition to disbelieve anything miraculous. With this predisposition to eliminate the miraculous, modernists proceed through their Bibles with a penknife to eradicate anything miraculous from its pages. Accounts of miracles are reinterpreted as myths or folklore. At any rate, they cannot be considered historical accounts of what actually happened on any given occasion. The adoption of the belief in the uniformity of nature is, consequently, one of the important presuppositions of modernism.

Evolution

Having rejected the Bible’s account of the origin of man and replaced it with naturalism, modernism accepts evolution as the explanation of the natural order of things. The acceptance of biological evolution is obviously in opposition to the Genesis account of creation. Genesis 1-3 cannot be true if biological evolution is accepted. When modernists accept the doctrine of evolution, they are forced to treat the account of creation as unhistorical and the story of Adam and Eve as some sort of mythological interpretation of the origin of man and the beginning of sin. All of this has ramifications for other doctrine of divine revelation.

Yet, evolution is not confined simply to the biological evolution of man; evolution has infiltrated nearly every field of study known to man. We should not be surprised, therefore, that there would be an evolutionary explanation of religion. The doctrine of the evolutionary development of religion conceives of religion as going through a number of stages of development. Rather than religion being conceived as God’s revelation of Himself to man, religion is looked upon as man’s desperate attempts to come to know a god who was probably his own invention in the first place (modernism’s concept of God depends upon how consistently the individual modernist applies his presupposition of naturalism). According to the evolutionary explanation of religion, man’s religion evolved through the stages of animism, totemism, polytheism, and finally arrived at monotheism.

Christianity is accepted by modernists as the highest development of man’s religion. (This reflects more of one’s bias than his ability to prove that one form of religion is better than another since the modernist also accepts relativism.) Christianity is by no means considered the only acceptable religion. Hence, the modernist would consider all religions to be acceptable but Christianity is just the. best religion of all of those which are available. All religions shed some light but Christianity sheds the most light. The Buddhist and Hindu can find access to God through their religions just as certainly as can the Christian.

The ramifications of this presupposition of modernism are so extensive that the very heart is removed from Christianity when these presuppositions are followed to their logical conclusions. Most modernists decide to abide in inconsistency and stop at some point less than total denial of Christianity. What they have left is not New Testament Christianity; it is twentieth century paganism disguised as Christianity.

Inevitability of Progress

Having accepted evolution, modernists looked upon the historical development of the world as one of progression. Human progress is inevitable if the doctrine of evolution is accepted. Man is evolving constantly and always improving. What was acceptable for men of the tenth century before Christ was not acceptable for Christ; what was acceptable for Christ is not acceptable for modern man. “The implicative of inevitable advance was drawn widely from the views both of Hegel, who fathered the modern idealistic movement which has insisted so strenuously on a spiritualistic explanation of the universe, and of Darwin, who stands as the fountain-head of most evolutionary naturalism” (Henry, op. cit., p. 39). Anything which was of the past was obsolete and outdated. It had to be cast aside as the useless refuse of by-gone ages. Even as outdated concepts of science, math, and philosophy had to be cast aside and replaced with new ideas, the religion of the Bible had to be updated. The idea of a blood atonement, hell, and sin had to be re-defined. Men no longer based their religion upon a revelation given once for all times; religion was thought to be in a state of flux. What was true for the past is not true for today.

I think that you can see what implications this had for any concept of authority. With these presuppositions, there could not exist any ethical or doctrinal absolutes. Everything is relative. What was sin for someone in the past may or may not be sin for me today. What was believed as factual for someone in the past may or may not be accepted as factual by me today. As a matter of fact, the modernist absolutely believes that there are no absolutes. To him there are no absolute truths!

Fosdick, for example, plainly states, “Of course there are outgrown elements in Scripture” (The Modern Use of the Bible, p. 94). He continued, “Here, then, is the first essential of intelligent Biblical preaching in our day: a man must be able to recognize the abiding messages of the Book, and sometimes he must recognize them in a transient setting” (p. 95). “It is impossible that a Book written two to three thousand years ago should be used in the twentieth century A.D. without having some of its form of thought and speech translated into modern categories. When, therefore, a man says, I believe in the immortality of the soul but not in the resurrection of the flesh, I believe in the victory of God on earth but not in the physical return of Jesus, I believe in the reality of sin and evil but not in the visitation of demons, I believe in the nearness and friendship of the divine Spirit but I do not think of that experience in terms of individual angels, only superficial dogmatism can deny that that man believes the Bible” (p. 129). 1 think you can see, from reading these quotations, Fosdick’s method of updating the Bible-he simply eliminates those parts of it which he chooses not to believe by reinterpreting them. He justifies this in the name of progress.

Conclusion

Modernism, my brethren, is a form of worldliness which tries to make Christianity acceptable through deleting those things which are offensive to the modern mind. If the belief in miracles is contrary to twentieth century thought, the modernist removes the belief in miracles. If belief in the blood atonement of Jesus Christ is offensive to modern thought, the modernist reinterprets the atonement. Modernism is conformity to this world rather than being transformed from it. Christians will be different when they reject the presuppositions of modernism in favor of the belief and acceptance of the divine revelation of God as found in the Scriptures.

Truth Magazine XXII: 42, pp. 674-675
October 26, 1978

By L. A. Stauffer

Harry Emerson Fosdick, a twentieth-century preacher, could have lived at no other time in history. A product of eighteenth and nineteenth-century thought, Fosdick, a popular spokesman for modernism, was a thoroughly modern theologian. Some preachers cloaked modernism in Biblical terminology to conceal certain aspects of the new view, but Fosdick took the new theology outside the seminary and shouted it from the rooftop to the man on the street. The New York pastor openly admitted that modernism called for a new use of the Scriptures.

Fosdick, in fact, entitled a book he published in 1924: “The Modern Use of the Bible. ” The author displayed no reticence at all when he wrote of the Bible. “What once was said of Jehovah,” he declared, “can in a different sense be said of the Book-its thoughts are not our thoughts, neither are its ways our ways” (p. 36).

Known also as “Liberals” and “Neo-protestants,” the modernistic theologians showed no hesitancy in denouncing a number of unique Bible qualities. No Place, for example, could be found in modernism for miracles, a literal second coming of Christ, verbal inspiration or predictive prophecy. But did not God, according to the writer of Hebrews, speak “in times past unto the fathers by the prophets” (1:1)? Yes, the modernists admit. A wide gulf, however, separates the modernists’ and the Bible’s concept of a prophet.

The Meaning of Prophet

On one side the echoing shouts of the modernists stress their belief that a prophet is a mere moral and social philosopher. They emphasize this by demonstrating that the word prophet means a “forthteller” not a “foreteller.” In harmony with Thayer’s definition-“to speak forth, speak out,” Albert C. Knudson observes: “The prefix `pro’ in the word `prophet’ does not mean `beforehand,’ as in such words as `progress’ and `procession,’ but `instead of,’ as in the word `pronoun.’ The prophet, then, was not primarily one who foretold events, but one who spoke in God’s stead” (The Beacon Lights of Prophecy, p. 30).

On the other side the reverberating response of the Bible announces both its agreement and disagreement. A prophet is indeed a “forthteller,” a spokesman for God. Jehovah says of the prophet: “I will put my words in his mouth: and he shall speak unto them all that I shall command him” (Deut. 18:18). Prophets, accordingly, often prefaced their words with: “Thus saith the Lord” (Amos 1:3, 6, 9, 11, 13), “the word of the Lord came unto me saying” (Hos. 1:1; Joel 1:1), “Jehovah hath spoken” (Isa. 1:2), or “the mouth of Jehovah hath spoken” (Isa. 1:20). These and similar expressions occur more than 2500 times in the Old Testament. “No prophecy ever came by the will of man: but men spake from God, being moved by the Holy Spirit” (2 Peter 1:20, 21).

The Bible likewise agrees that Jehovah through the prophets addressed Himself to the moral and social issues of the time (Cf. Amos 5:5-10; 6:lff). The Bible, though,’ says more. The prophets also used common phrases such as “it shall come to pass” (Isa. 2:2; Joel 2:28) or “behold, the days cometh” (Amos 9:13), signifying that Jehovah enabled them to look into the future.

Jehovah, therefore, according to the Biblical view of prophecy, is a personal, omniscient God above nature who, concerning either present or future events, entered the natural process to inspire His spokesman with verbal or propositional truth. Is there any reason to doubt these qualities of God and, as a result, deny the Biblical phenomena of verbal inspiration and predictive prophecy? The modernists believe there is and begin their assault on predictive prophecy by an attack on the very nature of God. If the neo-theologians are correct about God, they open to question all claims to supernatural manifestations.

The Immanence of God

J. Gresham Machen, an important and staunch opponent of modernism in the twentieth century, wrote concerning the basis of the new theology: “The many varieties of modern liberal religion are rooted in naturalism-that is the denial of any entrance of the creative power of God (as distinguished from the ordinary course of nature) in connection with the origin of Christianity (Christianity and Liberalism, p. 2). Modernists, as Machen observes, do not believe in a transcendent God-one who is over nature. The new theologians speak of the immanence of God-one who is in nature.

Modernists are spiritual evolutionists. They combine Hegel’s idealistic philosophy of historical progress with Darwin’s hypothesis of natural evolution and conclude, in Fosdick’s words, that God is an “ideal-realizing Capacity in the universe or the Creative Spirit at the heart of it” (op. cit., p. 161). A spiritual analysis of history convinces modernists that God is an ethical or moral process which constitutes the soul of the universe. This process, their analysis indicates, will inevitably guide mankind onward and upward to the perfect society.

God, the modernists affirm, is not a person with a voice uttering words and phrases and sentences. The semipantheistic theologians, therefore, find no place in their theology for the supernatural, especially verbal inspiration and predictive prophecy. Supernatural events, to their way of thinking, would be freaks of nature much like the birth of a two-headed cow.

Knudsons puts it almost that way. “The clairvoyant quality of the prophetic mind has no special interest for us today. What we look to the prophets for is moral instruction and inspiration. That they had a peculiar psychological endowment which enabled them to hear voices and to peer into the future does not especially concern us. Perhaps it would be somewhat of a relief to us if it should be proven that they were not so endowed. In any case, we are disposed to look upon this feature of their life and work as wholly incidental, if not accidental” (op. cit., p. 42). Fosdick says the same of miracles (op. cit., p. 155).

Knudson and his modernistic cohorts seek relief from predictive prophecy because they know the immanence of God must fall if any evidence of supernaturalism stands. Predictive prophecy, since human wisdom has no vision of the future, argues for the existence in the universe of a transcendent God who is personal and omniscient. Jehovah Himself said as much when he challenged impersonal and dumb idols. “Declare the things that are to come to pass hereafter,” He chided, “that we may know that ye are gods” (Isa. 41:23; Cf. Deut. 18:18; Ezek. 33:33).

A Formidable Task

Disposing of predictive prophecy is no easy task for the modernists. The prophetic vision into the future is no isolated phenomenon in Scriptures. The Old Testament-whether books of law, history, poetry or prophecy-is literally saturated with descriptions of coming events. More than 600 illusions to the Old Testament, much of which was predictive, are found in the New Testament. Modernists must not be allowed to forget this.

Consider, for example, the words “forseeing” and “beforehand” in Galatians 3:8 where the apostle Paul referred to a prophecy in Genesis 12:3. “And the scripture, foreseeing that God would justify the Gentiles by faith, preached the gospel beforehand unto Abraham, saying, In thee shall all the nations be blessed.” Moses likewise foresaw the raising up of a prophet like unto himself to whom men must hearken in all things (Deut. 18:15-19; Acts 3:22, 23). Nathan announced beforehand the coming of a king who would establish his throne forever (2 Sam. 7:12, 13, 16; Hebrews 1:5) and David prophesied that this king would have “the uttermost parts of the earth for his possession” (Ps. 2:8; Eph. 1:20, 21).

Consisting of Jews and Gentiles (Isa. 2:2; Eph. 2:13-18), the kingdom, as envisioned by other prophets, was to begin at Jerusalem (Isa. 2:3; Acts 2:lff) in the days of the Roman empire (Dan. 2:44, 45; Mk. 1:15; Col. 1:13). The king would be born of a virgin (Isa. 7:14; Mt. 1:22, 23) at Bethlehem (Mic. 5:2; Mt. 2:1, 5, 6) and live among men without sin (Isa. 53:9, 11, 12; 1 Pet. 2:22). The mighty ruler was to govern the kingdom in a glorious reign, be a priest on his throne (Zech. 6:13; Ps. 110:1, 2) and suffer as God’s servant for the iniquities of his subjects (Isa. 53:4-6, 10-12; 1 Pet. 2:24).

Arlie Hoover, in discussing the fulfillment of Isaiah 53, notes its detailed portrait of Jesus’ life. “Jesus,” he says, “was lowly in origin, he had God’s Spirit, he encountered opposition, he was unjustly convicted, he didn’t protest his mistreatment, he was executed with criminals, he died an atoning death, he was raised by God and he became a light to the gentiles. Can anyone else in history fit the picture so well?” (Dear Agnos, pp. 219, 220).

Hoover also notes that “Ps. 22 reads as if David wrote it at the foot of the cross. Jesus uttered the first verse from the cross: `My God, my God why hast thou forsaken me?’ (Matt. 27:46). I can count at least twelve clear reference to Christ in this short passage: (1) he was scorned and despised by men (v. 6); (2) people mocked his faith in God (vv. 7, 8); (3) his birth had been in God’s plan (v. 9); (4) he was surrounded by evil men `bulls,’ a `lion’ and `dogs’ (vv. 12, 13, 16); (5) his bones were out of joint and clearly visible-a standard result of crucifixion (vv. 14, 17); (6) his heart was collapsed within him (v. 14); (7) he had terrible thirst (v. 15); (8) his enemies pierced his hands and feet (v. 16); (9) they divided his garments among them (v. 18); nevertheless (10) God delivers him from this situation (vv. 22, 24); (11) he lives to tell future generations of God’s greatness (vv. 22, 31); and finally (12) `all the ends of the earth’ and `all the families of nations’ (v. 27) shall honor God for his deliverance” (Ibid., p. 221).

To these can be added the specific prophecy of Christ’s resurrection-that “neither was he left in Hades, nor did his flesh see corruption” (Ps. 16:9-11; Acts 2:25-32)-and his ascension in the clouds to God’s right hand (Dan. 7:13, 14; Acts 1:9-11). Time will fail if all the prophecies of Christ are mentioned-his betrayal for thirty pieces of silver (tech. 11:12; Matt. 26:14, 15), the work of His harbinger, John the Baptist (Isa. 40:3; Matt. 3:3; Mal. 4:5; Lk. 1:17; Mt. 11:14), His entry into Jerusalem riding on a colt the foal of an ass (tech. 9:9; Matt. 21:5), His new covenant (Jer. 31:34; Heb. 8:8-12), etc. Peter exaggerated none at all when he wrote: “Yea and all the prophets from Samuel and them that followed after, as many as have spoke, they also told of these days” (Acts 3:24).

The examples cited touch only the hem of the vast garment of prophecy, and yet they r; Elect the challenge the modernists face. Added to this challenge is the modernists’ dilemma of not being able to win for losing. If they meet the challenge and eliminate predictive prophecy, the evidence that God has spoken is gone. If God has not spoken, the moral and social teaching of the Bible, which the modernists want, are reduced to the level of humanistic philosophy. And yet the modernists cannot have predictive prophecy if their theory of immanence is to remain.

The Modernists’ Assault

The modernists, therefore, must be on with the task of cutting their own throats. To do this they attack prophecy in four ways: one, they challenge the date of prophecy; two, the clarity; three, the fulfillment; four, the interpretation. The chief problem with any one or all of these assaults is their failure to explain away all predictive prophecy. What Bernard Ramm says of their claim that prophecy is unclear applies equally to all their criticisms. “If the critic is to make his case he must show that all fulfilled prophecies.are vague in nature. Showing that two or three or twenty are vague is not sufficient” (Protestand Christian Evidences, p. 87, 88). The modernists, as Ramm notes concerning another point, “must silence all of our guns: we need to fire only one of them” (Ibid., p. 88).

Prophecy is history. Notice, for example, the modernists’ argument from Daniel that prophecy is really history in disguise. Daniel claims his prophecies were delivered during the Babylonian captivity (606-536 B.C.). The modernists, admitting the book contains an accurate history of the period between 536 and 165 B.C., arbitrarily, on the basis of antisupernatural bias, assign the date of the book at 165 B.C. They then challenge the opposition to prove them wrong.

In the first place, no evidence can be cited for the modernists’ date. Secondly, this date is meaningless since Daniel looked beyond 165 B.C. and saw the rise of the Roman empire (Dan. 2 and 7). He also saw the coming of the anointed one, his death, his ascension and the establishment of the unshakeable kingdom in the days of Rome (9:25-27; 7:13, 14; 2:44, 45). Finally, this argument does not account for the vast body of prophecy, known to’ exist before the first century, outlining step by step the life of Christ from his birth of the virgin at Bethlehem unto the ascension in the clouds to God’s right hand.

Prophecy is vague. Granted, as the modernists also argue, some prophecy is vague. But can that be said of all prophecy? Before answering, one should reread those cited above. The charge, furthermore, fails to consider that prophecy, as a riddle when the solution is given, is clarified by fulfillment. “There is a measure of detail in a prophecy that is not apparent at the time of its utterance which is sharpened by fulfillment. Further, several such examples would indicate that more than human factors are at work. The calculus of probability starts to pile up in advantage for the Christian” (Ramm, op. cit., p. 87).

Fulfillment is contrived, Again, one must partly agree with modernists. Some prophecies, it must be admitted, are open to fulfillment by the power and contrivance of man. One, nonetheless, would have difficulty explaining by this method the taxation and enrollment which brought about the birth of Jesus at Bethlehem or the happenings at the foot of the cross foreseen in Psalms 22. And certainly this argument fails to dispose of prophetic utterances announcing the permanent downfall of cities and nations, such as Babylon, Edom and Tyre (Isa. 13:10; Mal. 1:2-5; Ezek. 26:14).

Prophecy is misinterpreted. It is needless to pursue modernism’s argument that prophecy is misinterpreted. It, like the others, offers no rebuttal to all prophecy. The biggest barrier to this assault is that the Jews, even before Christ, understood many prophecies in the same way Christ and the apostles interpreted them. Hoover points out that “long before Christ the Jews had a body of messianic literature that agrees substantially with what Christian said of Christ” (op. cit. p. 210).

After attempting to eliminate specific and clear prophecies, the modernists still have not met their most serious challenge. Prophecy is full of surprises and paradoxes which defy humanistic explanations.

Why, for example, would Jewish prophets, of their own wisdom, announce the coming of a kingdom that would include Gentiles alongside Jews? Or, why would they declare that the king would also be the priest of the new kingdom? Why, would they proclaim that the Messiah would be both a conquering king, the mighty God, and a suffering servant, the dying lamb? And why would they herald Bethlehem as the birthplace of this world-conquering king rather than, say, Jerusalem? The more one reads the Old Testament prophets the more irrational some aspects of their prophecies sound.

Old Testament prophecy, as Hoover notes, forms “a mysterious tangled web that puzzled many Jewish commentators. How could the Messiah be so many things at once: King, Priest, Prophet, Shepherd, Suffering-Servant, Sin-offering, Vicarious victim? Perhaps this was God’s way of making sure that no one could artificially fulfill all these vision until he should come who had the key” (op. cit., p. 221, 222).

Conclusion

Ramm’s conclusion, to the chagrin of the modernists, offers the Scriptural and only satisfactorily explanation for the Biblical phenomenon of predictive prophecy. “The very fact that the threads of the Old Testament seem hopelessly tangled and yet are so beautifully untangled in the life of Christ is further proof that beneath the letter of Scripture is the unerring guidance of the Holy Spirit” (op. cit., p. 119).

Truth Magazine XXII: 41, pp. 667-670
October 19, 1978