Modernism In The Balance

I speak of rank modernism. There are varying degrees of this heresy. Some so-called modernists, who are in the drift from the truth, but have not landed in the extreme camp of modernism, would deny the following; but if they will keep on drifting in their preaching and teaching they will practically, sooner or later, confirm what is said below:

1. Modernism in the character of Jesus substitutes “divine” for “deity.” This is a Unitarian position. The true Gospel says that Jesus is very God of very God. He who denies the deity of Jesus, and compliments Him with being only divine, does by his very belief, seek to blast the solid rock of the hope of the world. If Jesus is not God, then He was an impostor, and Christianity is a farce on the false foundation.

2. Modernism denies the inspiration of the Scriptures. It says the Bible may contain, in places, the will and revelation of God; and the modernist is the judges of the places. The true Gospel says that the Bible was written by holy men, inbreathed of God, and is the will and revelation of God. It not only contains the will of God, but it is the will of God. A denial of the inspiration of the Scriptures would, if it could, dynamite the hope of Christianity and send it adrift in a real of sin to an eternal destiny of destruction and ruin.

3. Modernism substitutes culture for conversion, reformation for regeneration: and a denial of the new birth, its necessity and power, is to doom man in sin, because the true Gospel says it is our only chance for salvation.

4. Modernism denies the necessity of atonement, and distorts the saving efficacy of the blood of Christ into a gospel of heroic martyrdom-example. True Christianity hangs the hope of the world on the two arms of Calvary, and finds the only cleansing solvent for the world’s salvation in the blood of the Lord Jesus Christ. A denial of the efficacy of Christ’s atoning work on the cross leaves man still under the wrath of God, “condemned already.”

5. Modernism denies the deep-staining guilt of sin, and seeks to palliate and apologize for its power in the destinies of men. The true Gospel makes sin diabolical, deep, inwrought into the very grain of humanity, a cancerous disease eating at the heart of universal humanity, and proclaims that all men are guilt and are totally depraved. That does not mean that all men are as bad as some men, but that every man has in his soul the germs of sin which will make him as bad as the worst of men.

6. Modernism more and more is seeking to emasculate the identity, integrity, divine mission of Christ’s church and ordinances. It would unionize and compromise the churches and the fundamentals involved in their integrity. To make effeminate and consolidate their convictions of the truth as embodied in Christ’s churches would leave the world without a heroic, vitalizing organization and agency of the proclamation of the truth and the preserver of the ordinances.

7. Modernism tends to dethrone man from the high place God gave him in creation by entangling his origin and history with the meanest and most uncomely of God’s animal life, the monkey. Its effort is to take God’s hand out of man’s making, God’s creative work, and put him in the class of wild animals, the very lowest kind of such. Such a position reflects on God; it dethrones man from his place at the head of creation, and dishonors both God and man. The only authoritative word we have on creation of man is that “God created man in His own image, in the image of God created He him; male and female created He them. God created man out of the dust of the earth, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life , and man became a living soul.” This description would not suit the highest type of monkey that man ever saw. If modernism denies and emasculates God’s plain truth in creation, how can we blame infidelity for denying God’s power of regeneration? Hence, evolution in its modernistic form denies the necessity of regeneration, God’s hand in salvation. It is an easy step from this position to salvation by culture. And this is a denial of the essential of our hope in Christ.

All I know about the Bible, and all I believe about Christ and His Gospel, compel me to put myself crosswise with modernism. It is a subtle poison, seeking to inoculate, anesthetize the heart of the world. Lovers of Jesus and Paul, and the Gospel they gave and interpreted to us, had better keep out of the drift and away from the inoculating poison of modernism. Modernism has no evangelism, no saving, constructive, kingdom-building Gospel for a lost world. It has not built any schools or hospitals nor orphanages, nor organized any missionary, evangelistic group yet. It has succeeded in taking some of these away from the promoters of the true Gospel, and will continue to wrest from the true Gospel these institutions if we let it. Truth-lovers everywhere should join in a holy crusade against this distortion of the Gospel, this turning to another gospel whose chief mark is the denial of the essentials of Christ and His truth.

“Other foundation can no man lay than is laid which is Jesus Christ” (1 Corinthians 3:11).