Posted on 11/15/2009 8:49:16 AM PST by Gamecock
No doubt such a program is full of perils. Might it not be safer for our future ministers to close their ears to all modern voices and remain in ignorance of the objections that the gospel faces in the modern world? We reply that of course it might be safer. It is safer to be a good soldier in comfortable barracks than it is on the field of battle. But the great battles are not won in that way.
Thus we encourage our students to be fearless in their examination of the basis of the faith. Let no one say that such a program is unduly negative – that it involves too much examination of opposing views, and too little positive presentation of the gospel that we believe. Nobly do the graduates of Princeton Seminary refute any such accusation. What is it that the Church values in Princeton Seminary? Is it not the positiveness and definiteness for the gospel message that our graduates proclaim; is it not that our former students, amid the vagueness of much modern religious teaching, know so clearly where they stand? No, the teaching of Princeton Seminary is not negative, but positive; all our examination of objections to the gospel is employed only as a means to lead men to a clearer understanding of what the gospel is and to a clearer and more triumphant conviction of its truth.
But the attainment of such conviction leads, for many men, through the pathway of intellectual struggle and perplexity of soul Some of us have been through such struggle ourselves; some of us have known the blankness of doubt, the deadly discouragement, the perplexity of indecision, the vacillation between “faith diversified by doubt,” and “doubt diversified by faith.” If such has been our experience, we think with gratitude of the teachers who helped us in our need; and we in turn try with all our might to help those who are in the struggle now. Nothing can be done, we know, by trying to tyrannize over men’s minds; all that we can do is to present the facts as we see them, to hold out a sympathizing hand to our younger brethren, and to commit them to God in prayer.
We cannot, indeed, seek to win men by false hopes; and we cannot encourage them to think that if they decide to stand for Christ they will have the favor of the modern world or necessarily of the modern Church. On the contrary, if we read the signs of the times aright, both in the Church and in the State, there may soon come a period of genuine persecution for the children of God.
“If I find Him, if I follow,
What his guerdon here?
Many a sorrow, many a labor,
Many a tear.”
Such, we are inclined to think, will be the lot of those who stand against the whole current of the age. It is not an easy thing to oppose a world in arms; nor is it an easy thing to oppose an increasingly hostile church. But when one does so, with full conviction, what a blessed, inward peace!
Such is the peace to which many of our students have attained. Small has been our part in such a result; it has been the work of God. But by the blessing of God’s Spirit, through the use of whatever means, there has been emanating from Princeton during the last few years a current of warm Christian life that has refreshed those hwom it has touched. It has found a noble expression in the new League of Evangelical Students; but it has found an even nobler expression in the experience of individual men. Conviction has issued here truly into Christian life.
What shall be done with this type of warm and vital Christianity that has been issuing from Princeton? It may come squarely into conflict, at some points, with the present leadership of the church. But because the fervent piety of our recent graduates of Princeton Seminary may be opposed at some points to the ecclesiastical machinery, it does not follow that that ecclesiastical machinery should be allowed to crush it out. Long has been the conflict, during nineteen centuries, between ecclesiastical authority and the free and mysterious operation of the Spirit of God. But under our Presbyterian institutions the tyrannical practices to which ecclesiastical authority has elsewhere resorted are an anomaly and a shame. And so we have some hope that the present tyrannical proposal about Princeton Seminary may yet be rejected and that Princeton may yet be saved.
Long has been the conflict, during nineteen centuries, between ecclesiastical authority and the free and mysterious operation of the Spirit of God.
That is the point, my arcane Princeton Seminary friends, of why Martin Luther translated the New Testament into the vernacular German.
There is the Left, of institutionalized authority and dependence, and there is the Right, of individual consciousness and action.
Succinct enough?
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