White Flag Christianity Losing Battle By Battle
By Al Cronkrite The Covenant News ~ November 29, 2005
"Truth indeed came once into the world with her Divine Master, and was a perfect shape most glorious to look on: but when he ascended, and his apostles after him were laid asleep, then straight arose a wicked race of deceivers, who, ... took the virgin Truth, hewed her lovely form into a thousand pieces, and scattered them to the four winds." John Milton, Areopagitica, a pamphlet published on November 24, 1644
On May 27th, 1880 Noah Porter, President of Yale, spoke at Wellesley College. His topic was "The Christian College".
To aid in understanding Noah Porter's address at Wellesley I hope the reader will find the following synopsis helpful.
Wellesley was chartered in 1870 by Henry and Pauline Durant and when it opened its doors in 1875 imbedding in its cornerstone was a handwritten notice by Pauline Durant later unearthed, it read:
"This building is humbly dedicated to our Heavenly Father with the hope and prayer that He may always be first in everything in this institution; that His word may be faithfully taught here; and that He will use it as a means of leading precious souls to the Lord Jesus Christ."
Henry Durant said of the mission of Wellesley, "The Institution will be Christian in its influence, discipline, and course of instruction."
On October 3rd, 1881 Henry Durant died, he was fifty nine years old. His leadership was replaced by a much beloved lady named Alice Freeman who in November, 1881 became President of Wellesley. She was twenty six years old, and a "devoted Christian", softened in her approach by "the late-nineteenth-century winds of tolerance. When it came to religion, she did not believe it right to impose; she could only convince, and that she did gently." In 1887 she was replaced by Helen Schafer who established a psychological laboratory. In 1894 Helen Schafer was replaced by Julia Irvine who rescinded "mandatory Chapel attendance, domestic work, silent time, and the prohibition on Sunday library hours -- rules which had a "seminary" air".
Harvard College was the genesis of both Wellesley and Yale. It got its name from Puritan Pastor John Harvard who upon his death bequeathed his library and a sum of money to the new school. Named in 1638 its first student was graduated in 1642.
Increase Mather, a Puritan preacher, became President of Harvard in 1685. He re-instituted Christian programs, revised the curriculum and restored the college to an orderly pattern. In 1688 he left the school in the hands of two tutors, John Leverett and William Brattle, and embarked on a four year trip to London seeking favors from England. In Mather's absence these men openly advocated the acceptance of a system of broad based forms of worship and religious doctrines called Latitudinarianism. Mather forced Leverett and Brattle out in 1698 but by 1701 they turned the tables and with Mather out they installed Leverett as president in 1708.
In 1785, Anglican James Freeman, Harvard-educated preacher at Kings Chapel in Boston, established the first Unitarian church by removing the doctrine of the Trinity from all church literature. Unitarianism became popular with Boston's elite and by 1805 Harvard College became a Unitarian institution.
"The rise of Unitarianism among the academic and merchant elite in Puritan New England might seem at first a highly unlikely occurrence. But universities, as we so well know, seem to attract men of intellectual pride who gaze longingly on the tree of knowledge of good and evil, thinking that if they eat of its fruit they will be as gods".
Yale College was founded by a group of Congregational ministers as the Collegiate School of Connecticut in 1701. Due to the liberal policies developed in the power structure of Harvard College that denied Increase Mather's son Cotton a succession to the Presidency, both left the school and in a quest to preserve the Puritan ethic lent their support to the Collegiate school. On behalf of the school, Cotton Mather contacted wealthy Elihu Yale who donated heavily to the fledgling institution and in return the name was changed to Yale College. The Mathers remained in Boston and as Harvard became heretical, for a period Yale benefited by maintaining allegiance to the Westminster Confessions.
As far back as 1832, when class valedictorian William Russell returned for his senior year at Yale after studying in Germany under the influence of famous German skeptic Friedrich Hegel, he along with another senior Alphonso Taft formed The Order of Scull and Bones with thirteen other selected seniors. Influenced by Hegel, The Order considered "left" and "right" to be artificial devices to obtain change. Politically its members came from both camps. Scull and Bones (later named Skull and Bones) intention, which has been eminently successful, was to exert great influence on American society by placing its members in powerful positions.
Now back to Noah Porter's speech.
Noah Porter's 1880 speech cautioned, "Christians should recognize that they were in a battle with the 'secular' view of education that claimed it 'must be free of all alliances with religion.'" He understood the problem. He further claimed that Atheism and newly defined agnosticism "are religious creeds as truly as theism and dogmatic Christianity". Yet at the beginning of his presidency, he eschewed formal religious tests and claimed to himself the informal power to make a final decision. He said a teacher with honest doubts would be better than an "overbearing orthodox dogmatist" and that in some courses religious views were irrelevant. He was not comfortable with strict creedal requirements.
President Porter was in a position similar to that of today's Christians. He intoned the proper course. He announced that Christianity was fighting for its life and that "Christianity must control the college in order to exclude its antagonist, or rival, in the form of some false religion".
Shortly before Noah Porter's speech at Wellesley an article in the New York Times had breached Yale's cherished privacy and created a furor. President Porter had attempted to stop a popular young professor from using as a classroom text The Study of Sociology written by Herbert Spencer whom the Times described as the "White Czar of Agnosticism". The Times piece said the book classed Christianity with "the superstitions of the Mohammadans and South Sea Islanders" and claimed the article divided Yale's faculty down the middle over the clash between science and religion.
The popular young professor was William Graham Sumner; he had arrived at Yale following a stint as an Episcopalian Rector in Morristown, New Jersey. His humanistic Christian past quickly dissolved in the soapy water of Yale's academia and he put his "beliefs into a drawer, and when I opened it, there was nothing there at all".
Faced with Porter's steady resistance, Sumner threatened to resign, but he was an important asset to the school and many urged him to recant which he did. He stopped using the Spencer text but the issue was never brought to a definitive conclusion.
Noah Porter graduated from Yale in 1831 and became President in 1871. Formerly a Congregational minister from Farmington, Connecticut he began his tenure with a meager leniency.
As we live with the virulent anti-Christian bias that has invaded America we need to find the actions or lack of actions that contributed to the decline.
Dr. Rousas Rushdoony wrote, "Toleration is a device used to introduce a new law-system as a prelude to a new intolerance". Noah Porter and his predecessors may have understood the challenge but failed to comprehend the urgent need for belligerent resistance.
Harvard College retained its Christian character for little more than half a century. It descended into paganism at the beginning of the Eighteenth Century. Jay Rogers has touched the spiritual reason as an intellectual pride that makes an idol of intellect and covets the knowledge of good and evil as a god-like endeavor.
At Harvard, Mather's retention of Leverette and Brattle as tutors and then allowing men of this caliber to attain control of the school was a serious breach of his Christian responsibility and a pivotal error. Mather had become complacent and had failed to maintain the armor necessary to prevent evil incursions.
The deterioration of Yale College had begun long before Noah Porter became president but his failure to take a firm stand against flagrant heresy failed to stem the tide. The necessary stand would have created great turmoil and conflict. It might have cost President Porter his job or he might have won the battle and gained the right to cleanse the institution of pagan forces.
In Ephesians the Apostle Paul admonished Christians when they had done all possible to "stand". Christians need to note that the Apostle did not recommend taking a step back but rather recommended that we "stand" - offering no compromise!
Christianity cannot be maintained without conflict. Christians who seek peace at the cost of purity can never be trusted with the Gospel of Jesus Christ.
It is significant that major abasement of Christian influence occurred during the evangelical crusades of John Wesley (1703-1791) Charles Finney (1792-1875, Dwight L. Moody (1837-1899)
John Wesley was Arminian. He had forsaken the God centered theology of John Calvin in favor of a seeker friendly evangelism. Neither Dwight L. Moody nor Charles Finney were mentored or educated in orthodox Christian theology. One writer said of Moody "His message was the love of God. His theology, though basically orthodox, was eclectic and ambiguous. Moody hated controversy. He had no formal denominational connections, choosing, rather, to build his evangelistic empire through extra-ecclesiastical organizations." Finney was similar in some ways. He had no formal denominational connections, he was eclectic, and his theology was home gown and unorthodox.
The evangelical ethic is intrinsically Pelagian, assuming freedom of will thereby denying Grace. In addition, the overwhelming emphasis on conversion coupled with the Arminian lack of legal foundations creates a flimsy doctrine easily subject to real or inadvertent compromise.
To further complicate and inflame, John Nelson Darby (1800-1882) and Cyrus Scholfield (1843-1921) promoted the heretical antinomian gospel of Dispensationalism that has diverted Christianity from its mandate to obey God's Commandments to supporting a group of Zionists that are busily engaged in doing the opposite.
American Christians have sustained this unorthodox brand of Christianity creating the untenable situation of having the number of individual Christian citizens inversely proportional to a righteous social order.
"Henry and Pauline Durant founded Wellesley College after losing both of their children to infectious disease, baby Pauline only 6 months after her birth, and young Harry, their first-born, at the age of eight in 1863. In 1870, they secured a charter for their college and opened its doors in 1875 with an all-women faculty and a curriculum intended to match in rigor Mr. Durant's alma mater, Harvard College. He was determined to prove that, as he proclaimed, "women can do the work; I give them the chance."
Chapman replaced Christianity with the idol of womanhood. Humanism is now the universal emphasis of a host of formerly Christian institutions.
Our Christian God does not tolerate freedom of religion. He commands us to have no other Gods before Him and follows that command with another forbidding the worship of idols. He seeks exclusive obedience, exclusive worship and has provided an exclusive entrance into His presence in His Son, Jesus, The Christ.
When our naïve American President ends his prayer with an amen, leaving out the Name of Jesus or claims that Jews or Muslims worship the same god as Christians, his prayers fail to reach the ears of The One True God. Those who arrogantly seek Him directly or through any of the mélange of different deities conjured in American minds are an abomination in His sight.
Pagan social orders are mortally dangerous to obedient Christians. God's ancient commands to His Chosen People sought to free them from pagan influences. Their disobedience maligned the social order and contributed greatly to their ultimate displacement.
Many American Christians point with pride to our "religious tolerance". The God of the Bible sees it quite differently; to Him religious tolerance is apostasy!
As fledgling America was populated from abroad, the stalwart Calvinism that characterized its early settlers was diluted by various heretical theologies dividing and weakening its ability to compete with evil social forces; little by little it lost its foothold and gave way to humanist Christianity.
Academic freedom gained broad popularity and like freedom of religion, it was a Trojan horse. Both violate Dr. Rushdoony's warning. Leniency opened the doors of our colleges to the opinions of men and closed them to the dictates of the One True God. Our Christian God is merciful but vehemently intolerant!
"It is a great thing to begin the Christian life by believing good solid doctrine. Some people have received twenty different "gospels" in as many years; how many more they will accept before they get to their journey's end, it would be difficult to predict.
Nothing makes a man so virtuous as belief of the truth. A lying doctrine will soon beget a lying practice. A man cannot have an erroneous belief without by-and-by having an erroneous life". C. H. SPURGEON, a Calvinist, emphasis mine.