You will have a battle, too, when you go forth as ministers into the church. The church is now in a period of deadly conflict. The redemptive religion known as Christianity is contending, in our own Presbyterian Church and in all the larger churches in the world, against a totally alien type of religion. As always, the enemy conceals his most dangerous assaults under pious phrases and half truths. The shibboleths of the adversary have sometimes a very deceptive sound. “Let us propagate Christianity,” the adversary says, “but let us not always be engaged in arguing in defense of it; let us make our preaching positive, and not negative; let us avoid controversy; let us hold to a Person and not to dogma; let us sink small doctrinal differences and seek the unity of the church of Christ; let us drop doctrinal accretions and interpret Christ for ourselves; let us look for our knowledge of Christ in our hearts; let us not impose Western creeds on the Eastern mind; let us be tolerant of opposing views.” Such are some of the shibboleths of that agnostic Modernism which is the deadliest enemy of the Christian religion to-day. They deceive some of God’s people some of the time; they are heard sometimes from the lips of good Christian people, who have not the slightest inkling of what they mean. But their true meaning, to thinking men, is becoming increasingly clear. Increasingly it is becoming necessary for a man to decide whether he is going to stand or not to stand for the Lord Jesus Christ as he is presented to us in the Word of God.
J. Gresham Machen | “The Good Fight of Faith” | (1929)
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- Preaching To Soil
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- Pushing Back Against The Fashionable Narrative
- Another “Idol Of The Heart” To Be Mortified: Placing Culture Over Christ
- With Presbycast And D. G. Hart: Re-Framing Machen’s Warrior Children
- Machen’s Warning To MDiv Students
- Mark Driscoll And The Danger Of “God Told Me”
I’m pretty sure that if Mr. Machen were to survey the PCA’s landscape at present, he would have much to say. It’s all too often that a denomination must to wait a century for one man’s wisdom to come full circle.