WE have often thought that it was time something should be written on the treatment meted out to the Lord Jesus Christ by many of his so-called followers. We believe that many who are readers of modern theological treatises and periodicals would be astonished and shocked at what some of Christ’s professed followers have to say about the constitution of His person and the marvellous works He wrought. There can be little doubt that the Holy Spirit, who came not to glorify Himself but the Son, is grieved by the attitude of professing Churches towards those who speak of Christ and what is recorded of Him in the Scriptures in such a dishonouring way. The subject to be dealt with thoroughly would require a volume, but recent utterances may be dealt with at present. At the opening of the Theological Society of the New College, Edinburgh, last year, Emeritus-Professor Pringle-Pattison, formerly Professor of Logic and Metaphysics in the University of Edinburgh, delivered his presidential address on The Duty of Candour in Religious Teaching. This address has recently been printed. We have read it with a pained feeling. That such a blind leader (we mean in the things of God) should ever have been appointed President of the New College Theological Society is a sign of the times. And that the young divinity students training for the ministry of the United Free Church should have listened to such a lecture without protest—at least as far as we know—fills one with ominous forebodings for the future. That such a lecture should be delivered to the students of the College where such powerful theologians and saintly men as Cunningham, Duncan, Smeaton, etc., taught reveals the extraordinary drift there has been in the United Free Church. Professor Pringle-Pattison is deeply concerned at the wide gulf between the current beliefs of people generally and the truths taught in the Bible, and his method of bridging the gulf is set forth in his address. Simply stated, it is advice to the young candidates for the ministry to exercise candour, by which he means that rather than declare the truths of Scripture such as the Fall, the Atonement, the Virgin Birth, and the physical resurrection of Christ, they should tell the people plainly that they do not believe these. But as these young men had to sign documents and answer questions which, in the United Free Church, are not of the strictest, he felt himself pulled up. But it is only for a moment, and for the person who hazards the opinion that at least the same honesty is expected of the man who before God says that he believes certain doctrines to be true, as is expected of a business man in a commercial transaction, he has nothing but sneering contempt. “In spite,” he says, “of the unconscious vulgarity of mind evinced in assimilating a religious creed or conference to a business contract or a set of articles of association the man is not altogether to blame.” We have no hesitation in saying that the learned professor ought to be thoroughly ashamed of himself in insinuating anything of the kind to young men preparing for the ministry.
We shall now briefly notice what he has to say about (1) Inspiration, (2) the Atonement, (3) the Virgin Birth, and (4) the Resurrection of Jesus Christ. As far as Inspiration is concerned, he says to the students that the Churches should “cut themselves loose in the plainest terms from the old doctrine of inspiration and inerrancy. Its manifest falsehood should be frankly and fearlessly expounded.” He is deeply concerned at the gibes flung at religion by men in the trenches, but we would seek to remind him and others that neither the Bible nor Christianity was built up on a foundation laid by sneering unbelievers. Few people now, he thinks, believe the Creation stories in Genesis, the Garden of Eden, the apple, the serpent, and the Fall as actual history. The Song of Solomon is described as an exquisite love lyric “which a happy chance has included in the canon.”
In regard to the Atonement, his teaching is on the same erring, unscriptural lines as the foregoing. “The Atonement,” he says, “in a forensic sense, or in anything approaching that sense, is counterfeit Christianity,” for the only redemption that has religious meaning “is salvation or redemption from sin and the power of sin, not from its penal consequences, real or supposed.” With such views it is not to be wondered that he rejects the Anselmic doctrine of satisfaction as repugnant to the moral sense. He ridicules the doctrine of the Fall which has such a prominent place in the Pauline teaching, and attributes to later theologians the tracing of the whole “estate of sin and misery into which man fell, the burden of original sin and all its consequences, to the unhappy curiosity of the eponymous mother of mankind, not unnaturally excited by a wholly unintelligible taboo.” Or, in other words, Eve was wholly a mythical person invented to account for the human race, and she is credited with doing what she is said to have done by a prohibition the import of which was quite unintelligible.
The Virgin Birth is to be thrown overboard because Professor Pringle-Pattison’s theory of miracles renders it impossible that such an event could have happened. When will men recognise that this is only one miracle in the most miraculous life that ever was known to men. Why should it be thought a thing incredible in such a marvellous life? As to the Resurrection of the Lord Jesus, he makes a distinction between the belief in His continued existence and “the account of the Resurrection as it stands in the Gospel.” The latter is regarded as unworthy of belief.
These are some of the leading points dealt with by the professor, and instead of exhorting the young divinity students of the New College to adhere more firmly to the Bible and the truths taught therein, so that there might be a becoming consistency between their profession as followers of Christ and their teaching, he coolly advises them in the name of candour to throw overboard the doctrines referred to. The New College has no need of such destructive teaching; some of its theological professors are quite good enough exponents of advanced theology without having the assistance of an outsider. It is painful to think that such advice would be given to students of theology in the name of candour. And we are sure that our readers will agree with us in saying that a stronger though much less honourable word would more fitfully describe the conduct of those who would follow the advice of the lecturer.
Professor Pringle-Pattison shelters himself behind Deans and Canons who have publicly rejected the doctrines of the Virgin Birth and Physical Resurrection. These dignitaries, however exalted their position be, are not to be followed if they lead in the way of error. At meetings of the Modern Churchmen’s Congress, held in the month of August, there was an open, unashamed attack on the great fundamental doctrine of Christ’s true deity. The Dean of Carlisle was one of the chief transgressors. The Dean (Dr. Rashdall) has managed to crowd into a short paper as much heresy on the Deity of Christ as would shake any Church to its foundations. He asserts that the Lord did not claim divinity for Himself. If we quote the Lord’s own words—”I and my Father are one”—he calmly answers us: “The speeches of the Fourth Gospel, where they go beyond the Synoptic conception, cannot be regarded as history.” In speaking of the “divinity” of Christ, the Dean, in common with “liberal theologians,” does not mean that Christ was omniscient. And, in support of his view, falls back on the Kenosis doctrine advocated by Bishop Gore in his Bampton Lectures. What that means to Dr. Rashdall is very plainly indicated in this utterance of his:—”There is no more reason for supposing that Jesus of Nazareth knew more than His contemporaries about the true scientific explanation of the mental diseases which current belief attributed to diabolic possession than that He knew more about the authorship of the Pentateuch or the Psalms. And even if we reduce (as I personally am disposed to do) the genuine eschatological sayings to a minimum, it is difficult to deny that our Lord entertained some expectations about the future which history has not verified.” These sentiments are sufficiently daring to shock all who love the Lord Jesus; but this is not the end of the matter. In speaking of the “divinity” of Jesus, what does Dr. Rashdall and his school mean? Here, again, he is quite frank in telling us that “there is a certain community of nature between God and man, that all human minds are reproductions in limited modes of the Divine Mind.” And in support of this he quotes from Professor Pringle-Pattison’s Idea of God, and agrees “with him that it is impossible to maintain that God is fully incarnate in Christ, and not incarnate at all in any one else.” We have quoted more than enough of this, but we are anxious to give our readers a fair idea of the rumours and Christ-dishonouring teaching of men in high ecclesiastic positions. When the Glasgow Herald considered it necessary to administer a sharp rebuke to these radical theologians it was remonstrated with by a Rev. Mr. Spark, a minister of the Church of Scotland, who counselled those who were perturbed to wait until the papers would appear in full. These have been reprinted in the Modern Churchman for September, and the views are even worse than one would have gathered from the short newspaper reports.
Dr. Rashdall was followed by Dr. Bethune-Baker, Lady Margaret Professor of Divinity, Cambridge. The personality of Jesus, he maintained, was human. The Virgin Birth was an attempt to explain the experience of which Jesus was the centre, and which was natural and reasonable in those days, but altogether irrational and unnatural in our enlightened days. Dr. Bethune-Baker did not for a moment suppose that the Lord Jesus ever thought of Himself as God. Others spoke in the same dishonouring strain. The sooner these professors and dignitaries are turned out of their chairs and benefices the better for the Church of England. We have no doubt many of our readers will be amazed and deeply pained in reading these utterances, and while we feel our space might be used for more instructive and edifying matter, yet a sense of duty calls us to expose teaching that is proving so ruinous to thousands. Satan has certainly gained much when he manages to get deans and professors of theology to help him in attacking the doctrine of the true deity of the Son of God.
SWEETNESS in temporal matters is deceitful. It is a labour and a perpetual fear; it is a dangerous pleasure whose beginning is without Providence, and whose end is not without repentance.—Augustine.
PETER stood more firmly after he had lamented his fall than before he fell: inasmuch that he found more grace than he lost grace.—Ambrose, one of the Early Fathers.
THE cross is the invincible sanctuary of the humble, the dejection of the proud, the victory of Christ, the destruction of the devil, the confirmation of the faithful, the death of the unbeliever, the life of the just.—An Old Writer.