Systematic Theology (Volume 1 of 3)Strong, Augustus Hopkins
Religion
Systematic Theology (Volume 1 of 3)
Strong, Augustus Hopkins
Baptists -- Doctrines; Theology, Doctrinal
Neither evolution nor the higher criticism has any terrors to one who
regards them as parts of Christ’s creating and educating process. The
Christ in whom are hid all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge himself
furnishes all the needed safeguards and limitations. It is only because
Christ has been forgotten that nature and law have been personified, that
history has been regarded as unpurposed development, that Judaism has been
referred to a merely human origin, that Paul has been thought to have
switched the church off from its proper track even before it had gotten
fairly started on its course, that superstition and illusion have come to
seem the only foundation for the sacrifices of the martyrs and the
triumphs of modern missions. I believe in no such irrational and atheistic
evolution as this. I believe rather in him in whom all things consist, who
is with his people even to the end of the world, and who has promised to
lead them into all the truth.
Philosophy and science are good servants of Christ, but they are poor
guides when they rule out the Son of God. As I reach my seventieth year
and write these words on my birthday, I am thankful for that personal
experience of union with Christ which has enabled me to see in science and
philosophy the teaching of my Lord. But this same personal experience has
made me even more alive to Christ’s teaching in Scripture, has made me
recognize in Paul and John a truth profounder than that disclosed by any
secular writers, truth with regard to sin and atonement for sin, that
satisfies the deepest wants of my nature and that is self-evidencing and
divine.
I am distressed by some common theological tendencies of our time, because
I believe them to be false to both science and religion. How men who have
ever felt themselves to be lost sinners and who have once received pardon
from their crucified Lord and Savior can thereafter seek to pare down his
attributes, deny his deity and atonement, tear from his brow the crown of
miracle and sovereignty, relegate him to the place of a merely moral
teacher who influences us only as does Socrates by words spoken across a
stretch of ages, passes my comprehension. Here is my test of orthodoxy: Do
we pray to Jesus? Do we call upon the name of Christ, as did Stephen and
all the early church? Is he our living Lord, omnipresent, omniscient,
omnipotent? Is he divine only in the sense in which we are divine, or is
he the only-begotten Son, God manifest in the flesh, in whom is all the
fulness of the Godhead bodily? What think ye of the Christ? is still the
critical question, and none are entitled to the name of Christian who, in
the face of the evidence he has furnished us, cannot answer the question
aright.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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