By the REV. J. P. MACQUEEN.
IN these days of widespread confusion, upheaval, and unsettlement in the international sphere, it does not require outstanding penetrating spiritual discernment on the part of any truly-exercised Christian to perceive that Satan, through human agency, is actively engaged, as never perhaps before, in trying to blur, and ultimately obliterate, all distinction between the eternal truth as it is in Jesus on the one hand, and every species of heretical religious falsehood on the other. He is effecting his undermining purpose all too successfully by means of the propagation of a false, spurious, indiscriminate charity. One outstanding ecclesiastical instrument he has evolved for his satanic purpose, in this connection, is the organisation known as the World Council of Churches. The majority of the personnel of this ecclesiastical society are notorious intellectually—brilliant and scholarly Modernists, who are experts in seeking to disprove the supernatural origin and nature of the Bible by exactly the same methods as characterised the atheistical attacks on the Word of God by such professed infidels as Voltaire, Tom Paine, Ingersoll, and George Bernard Shaw. This satanic enterprise would not be half as successful, however, if all who composed the personnel of the society were labelled Modernist, so the great adversary has succeeded in getting those to become members who would scorn and resent to be called anything else than evangelical. Modernism itself, as baptized infidelity, is blatant enough in its hypocrisy and deception, but what are honest men to think of so-called evangelicals who join their ranks? What have evangelicals to do with this un-Christian Modernist Council? The Modernist is an unregenerate unbeliever, hypocritically masquerading as a Christian.
To come as near home as our native Scotland, for instance, it was amazing enough to find Rev. Prof. Renwick, in the Free Church General Assembly for 1950, actually rebuking the Rev. K. A. MacRae, M.A., Stornoway, and the Lewis Presbytery generally, for opposing and exposing the Arminianism of the Faith Mission, but it was still more astonishing to find him taking up a somewhat similar attitude to the same person, and people, relative to the notoriously un-Scriptural World Council of Churches. The Faith Mission people have never attempted to disguise the fact that their testimony is Arminian, and their practice Antinomian, yet we find Prof. Renwick at the Assembly declaring that the testimony of the Faith Mission is also the testimony of the Free Church, and be it noted that Prof. Renwick is a theological teacher of the future ministers of the Free Church of Scotland.
The Faith Mission preachers are in the line of the Wesley brothers, doctrinally, yet John and Charles Wesley did not hesitate to stigmatise the doctrines of Divine election, predestination, and particular redemption as “the horrible decrees of Calvinism,” evidently not having the moral courage, or even the common honesty, to blame the Bible for these decrees.
One does not expect much discernment from a theological professor who could say at this time of day that “the two parts of the world in which the Roman Church is not making much progress are the democratic nations of the British Commonwealth and the United States,” whereas recent statistics released in both countries, relative to the multiplication of nunneries, monasteries, priests, nuns, and so on, reveal the exact opposite, apart from the fact that the British and United States newspaper press, generally, dare not criticise adversely, or offend, the Vatican in any way, even when, under the Franco régime in Spain, human beings are burnt alive after being soaked in petrol; despite the fact that this is in black and white in Hansard’s, after being discussed in the British House of Commons. Dr. Rattenbury, in his Wesley’s Legacy to the World, page 95, is gleeful in recording that “it was these grand hymns (of the Wesleys) rather than their seathing satires that did most to destroy Calvinism in England and to deliver religion from the nightmare of the ‘horrible decrees.’” Yet Wesleyanism and the Faith Mission are lauded to the skies by certain writers in the pages of the Free Church Monthly Record, while Free Church ministers have subscribed the Calvinistic Westminster Confession of Faith as their confession of faith. We hear a great deal to-day about the Free Church Testimony, and I wonder if anybody knows what it is, or what doctrines it testifies to. Present-day ecclesiastical history in Scotland is vindicating the truth that the Calvinistic constitution of the historic Presbyterian Church in Scotland was continued unimpaired and unequivocal in the Free Presbyterian Church of Scotland, and no where else, despite loud professions to the contrary. The formation and perpetuation of the Free Presbyterian Church of Scotland are thus not an ecclesiastical crime, nor the outcome of rash precipitancy and schism, as some Free Church propagandists would have us believe, but a Scriptural testimony initiated and continued by the Holy Spirit, deny who dare. The Church of Scotland, through the Faith Mission in Lewis, is sweeping Free Church people within its pale; a Divine chastisement for telling their people to avoid our Church. When certain Free Church ministers and missionaries urge their people to attend the services of the Modernist Church of Scotland, when they cannot be in that part themselves, but to avoid the Scriptural services of the Free Presbyterian Church of Scotland as they would the plague, need anybody be surprised at Divine chastisements upon them.
In all the present-day ecclesiastical movements, conferences, and conventions, to obliterate all distinction between Divinely-authoritative Biblical Christianity (or evangelical Calvinism), and every heretical imitation of true religion, Satan has undoubtedly in view the forestalling of the Holy Spirit in building again Zion, by organising a world church of his own invention labelled, “The Re-United Church of Christendom,” with the Pope of Rome as the ecclesiastical head of this modern Tower of Babel. Part of his method, in this connection, is the initiating of spurious religious revivals, through the instrumentality of false doctrine, swelling the ranks of the enthusiasts for external ecclesiastical union at any price, each individual believing, doctrinally, what suits his, or her, own notions of propriety. This is by far one of the most dangerous movements of our day, to undermine true Christianity. We all need to be prayerfully on guard against its subtle sophistry. As Matthew Henry said: “Peace is such a precious jewel that I would give anything for it, but truth.” “Buy the truth, and sell it not.” Yet some Free Church theological professors seem to have a benign tolerance of other religions, while cherishing prejudice against the Scriptural religion of the Free Presbyterian Church of Scotland. Is this the fruit of supernatural grace? Let conscience answer, as it must on the great Day.
We also need to warn our readers, in this connection, against the plausible fiction and sophistry that earnestness and sincerity in those disseminating religious falsehoods must claim our admiration, and actually save the propagators themselves. They certainly have a claim on our pity and our prayers, but none on our admiration, nor will their earnestness and sincerity save them, any more than the delusion that a certain bottle of poison contained a most salutary restorative tonic would save the mistaken partaker from the fatal consequences of his error. In the same category is the false view that a life-long active devotion to a so-called religious ideal is sure proof of the approval of Heaven. For instance, there are those who quote the ceaseless life-long labours of John Wesley as a sure proof of the righteousness of his cause, whereas we would like to know who required at his hands his activities with regard to the propagating of such false doctrines as baptismal regeneration, prayers for the dead, and the exclusive validity of episcopal ordination and baptism. As well might one praise the so-called “Jehovah’s Witnesses” for their self-sacrificing, self-denying, ceaseless activities in propagating their blasphemous errors. The present writer knows of an Anglo-Catholic vicar who, though a healthy powerful man in the very prime of life, brought himself to a state of nervous breakdown through sleepless overwork, in Romanizing his church; each step in this devoted activity being a step of disobedience to his own ordination vows. Is such conduct admirable, or praiseworthy, and when and where is the present-day religious world going to draw the definite Scriptural line of demarcation between a spurious counterfeit religion, however ardently and earnestly embraced, and true genuine Christian doctrine?
Let the deluded victims of the present-day spurious indiscriminate charity lay seriously and prayerfully to heart that there is one thing that the Most High will never sacrifice, even for the sake of the salvation of precious immortal souls, and that is His own inspired and infallible Word, for “Thou hast magnified thy word above all thy name” (Ps. cxxxviii, 2). There is a Gaelic proverbial saying, “Generous at the expense of other people’s leather,” but dare we be generous and broadmindedly hospitable to false doctrine at the expense of God’s Holy Word, that liveth and abideth forever. Let us, who are Free Presbyterians, always remember that to compromise one iota, or to cease to perpetuate our distinctive Scriptural denominational testimony, for the sake of mere external union, in these days of spurious charity, is to be guilty of treacherous betrayal and sin against God. May we earnestly plead, like Rev. R. M. McCheyne, to be made as holy in heart, lip, and life, as it is possible for a human being to be on this side of Heaven, while at the same time praying for a world-wide outpouring of the Holy Spirit for the building again of Zion on the basis of eternal truth. The chief cause of this present-day indiscriminate charity is undoubtedly lack of a definite personal experience of supernatural conviction of sin and regeneration, with the consequent lack of an abiding sense of the exceeding sinfulness of sin as committed against an infinitely holy, omniscient and omnipresent God. Let us guard against sanctimonious religiosity, as Satan’s counterfeit of true religion!
Let us conclude with the words of the late godly and scholarly Rev. Prof. J. Gresham Machen, D.D., Litt.D.:—”The really serious attack upon Christianity has not been the attack carried on by fire and sword, by the threats of bonds and death, but it has been the more subtle attack that has been masked by friendly words; it has not been the attack from without, but the attack from within. The enemy has done its deadliest work when he has come with words of love, and compromise, and peace.”