Posted on 09/05/2013 7:44:18 AM PDT by Gamecock
On October 29, 1929, the Roaring Twenties came to a screeching halt. The stock market crashed, sending these United States of America into the Great Depression, which in turn affected much of the industrialized world. On September 25, 1929, in God’s sovereign timing, just one month before the Wall Street Crash, fifty-two students began their fall semester at Westminster Theological Seminary in Philadelphia. Only a few months prior, J. Gresham Machen (1881–1937) resigned from Princeton Theological Seminary and founded Westminster Theological Seminary. Machen, along with Robert Dick Wilson, Oswald T. Allis, and Cornelius Van Til (and later John Murray), resigned their faculty positions at Princeton not only on account of its outright denial of certain essential doctrines of the faith but on account of its increasing lack of regard for doctrine itself. What was once a bastion of doctrinal orthodoxy, Princeton, America’s second-oldest seminary, gradually became not only a stronghold of false doctrine but a cesspool of apathy toward doctrine itself. The seminary, and its parent denomination, attempted to place the unity of the church above the doctrinal purity of the church and the result was neither purity nor unity, but outright heresy. The gradual disregard for doctrine itself and the complacent attitude towards confessional orthodoxy naturally led to wholesale disinterest in contending for the faith once delivered to the saints. Fundamentally, the seminary’s heresy was indifferentism about doctrine. And as Machen wrote in his now-classic book Christianity and Liberalism years prior to his resignation at Princeton, “Indifferentism about doctrine makes no heroes of the faith” (p. 42).
Currently in the church, we are facing much the same thing that Machen and his colleagues faced, only with more subtlety—lip-service to confessional orthodoxy but complacency in preaching and defending it. Today, the only thing not tolerated is intolerance of doctrinal tolerance, the only evil is calling out evil, and the only heresy is calling anything heresy. And although we cannot by any means condone any of the unbiblical tactics of the thirteenth-century church in her wrong-headed attempts to root out and kill heretics, particularly the crusade against the Waldensians and Albigensians and the Inquisition, we must nevertheless appreciate and recapture the church’s zealous fight to guard doctrinal truth against all error and heresy. With all of its ecclesiastical problems and abuses, the thirteenth-century church gave us Thomas Aquinas’ robust systematic theology Summa Theologica, scholasticism, and a developing reformation that, in centuries to come and in God’s sovereign timing, gave us heroes of the orthodox biblical faith once delivered to the saints.
Thanks for the ping!
That really defines the heresy of Protestantism!
Yep. Churchianity Incorporated has to make its money. Pastor Osteen at Central Churchian Church needs phat loots, and he will tell whatever lies necessary to tickle the ears of the unregenerate and get them to drop some money in the offering plate. Oh, and buy his newest book, "Everything you want now, plus heaven, with no sacrifice or repentance on your part!"
Would you add me to the ping list. BTW, Burke is my pastor.
I guess I am a heretic, then. When do the burnings begin?
As in many things, it's both/and, not either/or.
i want to be added to the ping list too. I have emailed about it before, but apparently I was never added to the list.
Please contact nobdysfool (note the spelling)
He is the keeper of the list.
Odd that he singles out the 13th century and not, say, the 16th or 17th when the heretic hunters were in Geneva, London, or Boston.
On the whole though, he is right about this: we have seen a complete collapse in the notion of theological truth. And actually, among all groups under the Protestant umbrella, I have to really credit you Calvinists for really defending creeds and being not shy about slapping down this asinine denial of theology because “me and Jesus is all that matters.”
Ask almost anyone and they will agree that “God is Love.” But how many realize you can’t say that unless you hold the orthodox belief in the Trinity? A Unitarian God can have love as an accidental property. But He cannot BE love—because love is a relationship between persons, and if there is only one person in the Godhead then it is impossible to say that God IS Love by nature and essence.
Please add me to your ping list. I have always wanted to go to Westminster.
I would post Revelation 2 and 3 here but I believe we all have our own Bibles to read. The letters are soon to be fulfilled. There will be persecution, not rapture.
It is not an either/or thing.
Here are some facts:
- The Christian faith existed and grew years before the first book of the New Testament was written.
- The New Testament was written decades after Christ ascended into heaven. It took centuries for the Church to establish the Cannon of the New Testament. The early Church existed without a Bible.
- Christ never told anyone to write a Bible.
The Apostles never told anyone that Christianity would be based on a book.
A few questions:
1. Where in the New Testament do the apostles tell future generations that the Christian faith will be based solely on a book?
2. Where did the table of contents of the Bible come from?
3. What do you think happened to all the “stuff” in John 21:25? “Jesus did many other things as well. If every one of them were written down, I suppose that even the whole world would not have room for the books that would be written.
No burnings. Conversions.
Sacred Scripture itself rather defines Tradition. Recall that it was the Church who gave us the the Holy Bible, not the Bible that gave us the Church. Seems to me anyway that there was plenty of Church before the Holy Bible.
It wasn’t the Church who deleted her own writings, contained in the seven now missing Books, that didn’t pass muster with the heretics, exchanged for a “form of Godliness, but....”.
BWA HAHAHAHAHAHA
There is One known as a “consuming fire”. Perhaps we should all take up your question up with Him, with pious humility and fear of the Lord.
I had posted to another thread about the human reaction to reaching a goal. When it is easy, we do not think it worthy of honor and it is not important to us. When it is difficult (like Marine boot camp or an initiation) we value it for life. I believe that would be why the church becomes lukewarm. It gets too easy. There has to be sacrifice. Learned about it in one of my psych classes.
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