A DEPLORABLE and despicable fashion appears to be coming into vogue in some sections of the professed Christian Church in our land: that of aged and prominent ministers of religion pouring out in public, at the end of their days in the world, violent attacks upon the Word of God and the verities of “the faith once delivered to the Saints.” The late Reverend Dr. Cox, of the Church of Scotland, Aberdeen, shortly before he died at about the age of eighty years, made a public attack upon belief in the truth of the Virgin Birth and the Resurrection. Now Dr. W. R. Inge, former Dean of St. Paul’s, London, at the age of ninety years, has attacked quite a number of vital truths set forth in the Bible and also outstanding and godly witnesses in the Church of Christ who have long since gone to be with Christ. He did so in a sermon (if it can be called a sermon) which he preached at Cambridge on Monday, the 14th August, 1950, at the opening service of the Modern Churchmen’s Conference, before a congregation of Church of England clergymen. We cannot quote here all that he said even from the abbreviated report published, but just sufficient to reveal the wicked, unscriptural and unchristian character of his utterances.
He said:—”Of one thing we may be thankful: that the hideous hell-fire theology is heard no longer in our churches.” “Many saints have wished that there were no heaven or hell, so that we might love God for Himself alone. Some non-Christians have said the same.” “Though Christ was strict in dealing with the temptations of the flesh, He was gentler with such sinners than with Puritanism.” “If you are a clergyman, do you not hate having to read many of the Old Testament lessons? Some of them are frankly unedifying . . .” “Do you really expect the working man to sing, ‘I will think upon Rahab and Babylon . . .’ or such gibberish as the verse of the 68th Psalm, beginning, ‘Rebuke the company of the spearmen’?”
Dean Inge interspersed his diatribe with bitter, scoffing and unseemly references to Martin Luther, Calvin and others. He said of Martin Luther: “My detestation of that man grows . . .” and referred to the renowned reformer as the spiritual father of Hitler. He described Calvinism as “simply baptised stoicism,” and that as Calvinism “worships a God who is neither just nor merciful, we can hardly call it Christian.” “Think of Whitefield,” he said, “sending a congregation into convulsions by repeating, “O, the wrath to come’.” He deals with the eminent Jonathan Edwards in a similar manner.
Here then we have the outpourings of the heart and mind of an aged man of letters, a doctor of divinity, and professed servant of the Lord Jesus Christ for many years; a man whose office and profession are supposedly derived from and based upon the Word of God, and officially and publicly related to the Thirty-nine Articles of the Church of England. The spectacle which he raises before the eyes of all lovers of the Truth is appalling in the extreme. Many such cases there have been, no doubt, but the Dean has provided a fresh and up-to-date display of active enmity to God and His inspired Word from within the borders of the visible Christian Church. What can we say to these things, in the pure light of God’s Word and as we may deal with them, having in view true Christian experience, practice and history?
Dean Inge is no Christian, judged by his own utterances and opinions. He calls in question and throws overboard the inspiration and inerrancy of the Holy Scriptures. The Bible is not his rule and guide as to doctrine, faith or manners. His own intellect, wisdom and human judgment sit in judgment upon the declarations of the Holy Spirit. This is unspeakably solemn and bold procedure for any man to undertake, and is anti-christian, to put it mildly. He dares to run into direct conflict with the Son of God, the Lord Jesus Christ, who, among other statements, said, “But I will forewarn you whom ye shall fear: Fear him, which after he hath killed hath power to cast into hell; yea, I say unto you, Fear him” (Luke xii, 5). And the holy John the Baptist declared in his preaching as the forerunner of the Saviour, “Who hath warned you to flee from the wrath to come?” The heaven-blest preacher of the Gospel, George Whitefield, was not then the first to warn sinners of the “wrath to come.” But Dean Inge will have none of this now. This modern wrecker of the Christian faith expresses the desirability of eliminating heaven as well as eternal punishment from the world beyond time and the grave. He even cites non-christians, as well as some whom he describes as “saints,” to assist him to inject into the minds of his hearers the view that after all we might love God the more on this earth, as Christians, if we just had in prospect the death of the brute beasts that perish quite. In other words, he strongly hints at the desirability of accepting belief in annihilation, and that for saints. What confusion, hopelessness, darkness! What a prostitution of thought, speech and time, in the presence of Church of England clergymen, in the name of Christianity! The true saint looks forward, by divine grace, to the time when he shall enter into the glory of heaven, where Christ has prepared a place for His people.
Imagine the Apostle Paul wishing there was no heaven and no hell. He declared the whole counsel of God to his fellow men and encouraged the believer and warned the impenitent. The Dean hates reading many passages of the Old Testament, because, to his carnal and self-righteous mind, they are unedifying. We know not the particular passages the Dean has thus ear-marked. But evident it is, that he calls in question the wisdom of the Holy Spirit as the divine author of the Old Testament. These “unedifying” parts he would no doubt cut out and cast away. In fact, he has, for himself at anyrate, done this already in his own mind. The Dean has doubtless read, “That when Jehudi had read three or four leaves, he cut it with the penknife, and cast it into the fire that was on the hearth, until all the roll was consumed in the fire that was on the hearth” (Jeremiah xxxvi, 23). And King Jehoiakim, who witnessed this treatment of the Word of God and opposed it not, had later to listen to what the Lord had to say of him, viz., “He shall have none to sit upon the throne of David: and his dead body shall be cast out in the day to the heat, and in the night to the frost” (Jeremiah xxxvi, 30). Then a part of Psalm lxxviii is described as gibberish. Yes, it may be so to this doctor of divinity who has never walked in the footsteps of the Psalmist. Good it is, that we have a Bible, including a Psalmody, which will survive all the fires of the critics and the loudest declamations of the false prophets. Further, the so-called sermon of this Dean was as the crackling of thorns under a pot, in comparison to the witness of Luther, the crystal-clear doctrine of Calvin, and the soul-saving preaching of George Whitefield. He presumes to scorn these pious giants in the history of the Church of Christ, men who were “mighty in the Scriptures.” But their services for the Lord Jesus Christ and the advancement of His Kingdom shall be remembered long after Dean Inge shall be a forgotten name in the world. They were brilliant stars in the firmament of the Church, and shall shine in the Kingdom of glory for ever; and no marvel if they are still hated by the world, inasmuch as Jesus said to His disciples, “Marvel not if the world hate you.” So the Dean disdains their fellowship, and shall the effect of this be carried over to the great eternity and the judgment of the great day?
In conclusion, let us recognise that these extraordinary utterances by one man, are the views of many others holding office in the Church to-day, who as yet are afraid to utter them openly. The devil is raging against the Truth of God and seeking to blind, more and more, the minds of them that believe not, in our midst as a nation. Those who fear God have need of grace and more grace, to hold fast the precious possession of an inspired and infallible Bible for themselves and generations yet to come. “Watchman, what of the night? Watchman, what of the night?” (Isaiah xxi, 11).