Christ, Christianity and the BibleHaldeman, Isaac Massey
Religion
Christ, Christianity and the Bible
Haldeman, Isaac Massey
Christianity -- 20th century; Jesus Christ -- Divinity
Let the preacher preach a Christianity of doctrine.
There are three important things every preacher should preach. The
first thing is doctrine. The second thing is doctrine. The third and
pre-eminent thing is doctrine. The church is starving to death for
the want of it, the preachers are becoming emasculated apologists
for lack of it, and the world, looking on, is laughing at a limp,
genuflecting thing calling itself modern Christianity and for want
of vertebrate strength, unable to stand alone.
It was doctrine believed in and preached which sustained the martyrs
and gave courage to missionaries. He who believed in the sovereignty
of a redeeming God, the certainty that God would get his elect, the
Coming of Christ, the millennial triumph, and a rebel world
surrendered at the feet of God, could endure the agony of the stake,
the privation of the wilderness, and all the discomforts and all the
discouragements of fields of endeavor well sowed but scantily
reaped.
Let the preacher preach the supernatural--the things that are
miraculous, and be unafraid.
He need not be afraid. The world wants that sort of preaching. It is
growing tired at heart of mere machinery and this eternally running
up against a formula of the laboratory or a mathematical calculation
and analyzed force, as explanatory of everything in heaven and in
earth. It would like, if it were possible, to believe in something a
little beyond the length of its eyelashes and the touch of its
finger tips; something that cannot be summed up always in
avoirdupois; something, indeed, beyond the ability of man.
Let the church get back to the old-fashioned doctrinal,
supernatural, miraculous Christianity that underwrites itself with
the name of God. Let it be boldly proclaimed that Christianity is
miraculous, because it is, first and last, the Christianity of that
God who is himself--the eternal miracle.
The very salvation of the church as a church depends upon this
retrograde.
If the church hesitates, compromises, seeks to accommodate its
formulas to modern nomenclature. If it is willing to carry its
baggage at half weight; if it is willing to make its proclamation a
continual denial of all that it has heretofore professed as
fundamental; if it believes the twentieth century has the call on
the first, and that modernism outranks primitivism; if, in short, it
looks upon primitive and apostolic Christianity as the feeble hint
which the modern thinker has known how to modify and improve, then,
as already suggested, the days of its spiritual and moral bankruptcy
are in sight, and the sooner good business arrangements are made to
hire out its meeting houses for ethical and social culture the
better.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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