The Church, the Schools and Evolution — John Shaqi
The Church, the Schools and EvolutionConant, J. E. (Judson Eber)
Religion
The Church, the Schools and Evolution
Conant, J. E. (Judson Eber)
Evolution; Religion and science
Humanly determined programs are being substituted for
dogmatic decrees in the work of the churches. This is genuine
democracy. The missionary enterprise is rapidly being
conceived as a democratic social program rather than as the
rescue of a few individuals from the divine wrath....
Education is coming to be a primary means of accomplishing
the missionary task.
Such a mission to the lost would be altogether unthinkable if men were
believed to be spiritually dead. For dead men are helpless to adopt
principles and strive after ideals. Dead men do not need education, they
need life.
Any one of average intelligence can see at a glance that these two programs
of salvation are headed in opposite directions. By one we strive after an
ideal; by the other we quit all striving and surrender to a Person. One is
salvation by a human resolution to press toward the pattern set before us
by the "Flower of the Race"; the other is salvation by a divine rescue from
that natural hatred of purity and holiness which made possible the murder
of the Son of God. By one program we adopt the principles and follow the
spirit of the life of Christ; by the other we trust in the merits of the
shed blood and substitutionary death of Christ.
These two programs are mutually exclusive. Thus the evolutionary philosophy
utterly destroys the doctrine of the new birth.
7. The logic of evolution destroys the doctrine of the =holiness of God=,
for it makes God the =author of sin=.
Le Conte says:
If evolution be true, and especially if man be indeed a
product of evolution, then what we call evil is not a unique
phenomenon confined to man and the result of an accident [the
fall], but must be a great fact pervading all nature and a
part of its very constitution.
No thinking man can get away from that conclusion. For if evolution in any
form is a fact, then the thing the Bible calls sin was either somehow
embedded, by a competent and responsible Creator, in man's very
constitution as a necessary process of his evolution, or else it slipped
into the race through the bungling and unwatchful incompetence of an
impotent Creator. Thus in either case God becomes the author of sin!
This puts evolution almost, if not altogether, on the ground of blasphemy!
God responsible for the unspeakable woe and the unmeasured suffering of
man? God the author of that inherent force in man's nature which has filled
the earth with hatred, violence, bloodshed, and death? Let him think so who
can!
After these doctrines of the Word are set beside the evolutionary
philosophy, and after it begins to dawn on the thinking mind how utterly
irreconcilable they are, the absolute impossibility of a consistent
evolutionist believing in an inspired, inerrant, and infallible Bible
becomes well nigh an axiom. It is no wonder that Dr. W. B. Riley exclaims:
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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