All Articles For Harbach Robert C

The World Council of Churches and the National Council of Churches go to no trouble to appear thoroughly orthodox in theology and point of view. In this regard they make no claim to being anything but ecumenical machines of modernism and liberalism. But to day liberalism is practically synonymous with leftism. Why then do these councils occasionally bother to make a feeble attempt to leave the impression that either one or both of them are opposed by the communists?

The founder of this chimerical cult was Emanuel Swedberg, a name which he later changed to the more resonant Swedenborg. Born in Stockholm in 1688, he was said to have lived and died a Lutheran. If so, one wonders whether his denomination, not far past the mighty Reformation, made any efforts to correct or discipline the pedantic heretic. Early he claimed the ability to see and converse with spirits and angels. Thus the religion he schematized became a predecessor to the Spiritism of today. Contact with the spirit-world is fundamental to the cult.

Christ is King in a double sense. As God, the second Person of the trinity, as God equal with God, He has an absolute, inherent sovereignty over the entire universe. This dominion is natural, independent underived. As the Mediator He was appointed a King by the authority of the triune Godhead. His mediatorial dominion is official, derived, given Him as a reward for the faithful accomplishment of His redemptive work (Phil. 2:7-11).

We not only believe that God foreknows all things, but that He does not and cannot foreknow without foreordaining. For not only is God’s omniscience all-comprehensive and all embracing, but so is His foreordination. He foreordains whatsoever comes to pass (Acts 4:27f). Therefore it is impossible that He know beforehand anything that has not been already foreordained. There is nothing that can be the object of divine prescience but that which has been preordained.

A rather recent religious movement is the Campus Crusade for Christ, International, with headquarters in San Bernardino, California. To draw a comparison, the organization is somewhat in the line of Child Evangelism, Youth for Christ or the Billy Graham Crusade. Therefore, while neither in the modernist nor the liberal side of the ecclesiastical field, its proper sphere is not within the Reformed perimeter, much less in that of Fundamentalist circles. It is a branch of Neo-evangelicalism.

Its Connection 

It has always been so, yet our day is still one in which nations and kingdoms are overturned and uprooted. Germany we have seen fall twice in a generation. Then besides France, Italy, Spain, Japan and Poland, we have seen the fall of numerous European countries, many under the Red yoke. With the end of the colonial age, we have seen before our eyes kingdoms become extinct, while nations now are dying away, in many ways, it seems, our own among them. Everywhere there are public rebellions, strikes, revolutions, tumults, civil disobedience and anarchy.

Campus Crusade for Christ believes it has come up with not only a legitimate but a unique way of presenting the biblical truth of the gospel. Continually and everywhere crusaders are raising the question, “Have you heard of the Four Spiritual Laws?” Law One says in part, “God loves you . . .” Law Two states that sinful and separated from God, no one can know and experience His love. Law Three: Anyone can know God’s love through Christ, God’s only provision for man’s sin.

Modernist religion has no place for the exaltation of Christ. A well known advocate of religious liberals and modernist “theology” was Professor George Burman Foster, of the University of Chicago, who later in life was pastor of a Unitarian church. In the preface to a certain volume he openly denied every one of the Christian fundamentals of the faith. On the exaltation of Christ he said, “According to orthodoxy, the Son of God laid aside his divine glory and then took it up again. He alienated from himself certain divine qualities, and then integrated them again.

Originally, Unitarianism was not a movement independent of the Christian churches, nor strictly, a schismatic group, but an intra-church movement apostatizing from Christ, His church and the confessions. Its purpose was not to form another denomination, but to gain control of the churches in the ecclesiastical association. The Calvinist members, rather, had to relinquish their church properties and withdraw. Hundreds of thousands of dollars in buildings, furnishings and funds fell to the Unitarians as a result of litigation.