All Articles For Trying The Spirits

Modern liberal religion is a philosophy of ethics and morality. In fact, liberal interpretation makes ethics and morals of central importance in the shade of which stands religion, faith and practice. The biblical and theological religion of redemption is reduced to a social ethic, with Jesus Christ the paragon of ethicists. Not the saving power of God, but the spiritual competence of man is the important element in the modern gospel. It propagates a social gospel which concerns itself with the ethical problems of the present life. God and the world to come are matters of personal opinion.

A philosopher is supposed to have said, “Let me write the songs of a people, and I care not who makes their laws.” Most of the songs of the people of today are inspired of the devil. With his songs so popular, what does he care about “their laws?” They are completely his captives. Suppose the above quotation had been made by Pete Seeger, folk singer, identified as a member of the Communist Party by the House Committee on Un-American Activities, Annual Report for the Year 1961, p. 43. We would in that event have no trouble getting his drift.

The rationalistic school of biblical criticism claims that in and after the Protestant Reformation the development of biblical textual, literary and historical studies was not possible because of the doctrinal bias and intolerance of the Protestant theologians. Romanism also hampered advance in this direction with its canons of the Council of Trent (1546), which prohibited not only other shades of interpretation, but thought other than that already imposed by the church. So, both Romanism and Protestantism had contributed to intellectual stagnation.

2. Its Method and Result (cont’d). The facts available in the study of Scripture manuscripts do not warrant more than one author of Genesis. Nor does single authorship necessarily demand one single style of writing throughout. One author treating different subjects may very well reveal different styles appropriate to his themes. A university professor preparing a manuscript of a philosophy text-book writes in a style different from his successful efforts it poetry. A preacher’s pulpit style may be generally rhetorical, but his colloquial style, humorously practical.

Recently many of us read an editorial in a “Reformed” publication concerning the preaching of Billy Graham. The article surprised, even shocked many of us, since it slighted a man thoroughly Reformed and came to the defense of one whose true colors are anything but of a Reformed hue. The item referred to did what is so commonly done with this modern prophet in religious circles today, namely, it sugarcoated him as a Fundamentalist next to whom any good Reformed man could be proud to stand. But it is at least extremely inaccurate, if not, false, to portray Billy Graham...

The Holy Scripture provides for a very clear and plain interpretation of itself. Difficulty, however, will arise if we do not observe that there are words and terms employed in Scripture which have variant shades of meaning. It may not therefore be insisted that each word in every instance of its occurrence has the same single meaning. Such a method of interpretation could easily produce false doctrine. Error would obtain, for example, if we invariably referred the word “flesh” to the physical body. Objectionable it would be also to translate the N.T.

What we have been maintaining, according to Scripture, is that God has but one people in all dispensations, and that therefore, O. and N.T. saints are identified by the same name. This is borne out in the following. “One shall say, ‘I am the Lord’s’; and another shall call himself by the name of Jacob, and another shall subscribe with his hand unto the Lord, and surname himself by the name of Israel.” (Isa.

The undersigned was born, baptized and raised in a Presbyterian church where Dispensationalism had crept in and imbued him with its teaching. By it he became acquainted with a certain class of “Bible teachers” who boast that they understand, interpret and teach the Bible literally. They emphasize this in such a way as to give the impression that they especially for this reason meet one of the principal tests of orthodoxy.

Our last installment provided evidence that Billy Graham loves to be a great mixer with modernists and ecclesiastical liberals, in fact, that he himself disclaims. Fundamentalism and insists he is a Liberal. The emphasis of the previous article was primarily on the ministry of Graham, while his doctrine was not particularly pin-pointed. Most of Graham’s’ critics take him to task chiefly for his methods, rather than for his teaching: Fundamentalists contend that Graham is wrong in the former; but right in the latter. He is basically right and scriptural in doctrine, they say.

“Verbal inspiration of Scripture is only a theory and not a matter of great importance for the Christian faith.” That statement was not made by Karl Barth, Martin Luther King, James A. Pike or some other modernist-liberalist freethinker of the day. It was uttered by none other than Billy Graham, ostensible champion of the cause of orthodox, evangelical Christianity. But those same modernists are telling us that there is much in the Bible that is unacceptable historically, that therefore it must be interpreted mythologically in order to distil any relevant meaning from it.