A Christian Standard to Quell the Chaos
By Al Cronkrite The Covenant News ~ November 12, 2007
The last major attempt to bring doctrinal unity to the Protestant Christian church was made in England from 1643 to 1646 when over the objections of King Charles, Presbyterians, Episcopalians, and Congregationalists, one hundred and fifty individuals, ordained by Parliament, Lords, Commoners, and Divines, from England and Scotland, produced the Westminster Confessions of Faith. An unprecedented amount of labor and Godly consideration went into these Calvinist based documents. Read an extensive and detailed report on this and other Historic Creeds and Confessions here.
Benjamin Breckenridge Warfield, principal of Princeton Seminary, was a late defender of the Confessions. He wrote "As truly as in the cases of the Nicene and Chalcedonian formularies, the Westminster Standards mark an epoch in the history of human reflection on the truths of the gospel--an epoch in the attainment and registry of doctrinal truth; and as truly in the one case as in the other the statements they give of the truths that fall in their sphere are scientifically final. All attempts at restatement must either repeat their definitions or fall away from the purity of their conceptions or the justness of their language."
Even later, John Murray, a Princeton graduate and lecturer at Westminster Theological Seminary, continued the affirmation, “The work produced by the Westminster Assembly has lived and will permanently live. The reason is obvious. The work was wrought with superb care, patience, precision, and above all with earnest and intelligent devotion to the Word of God and zeal for His glory. Sanctified theological learning has never been brought to bear with greater effect upon the formulation of the Christian Faith. While it would be dishonoring to the Holy Spirit to accord to these documents a place in any way equal to the Word of God either in principle or in practical effect, yet it would also be dishonoring to the Holy Spirit, who has promised to be with His church to the end, to undervalue or neglect what is the product of His illumination and direction in the hearts and minds of His faithful servants. Other men laboured and we have entered into their labours.”
Sin is always deceptive. It always seems to offer a benefit to the mind or to the senses. To Eve it was knowing both “good” and “evil”. The tree was a delight to the “eyes” good for “food” and would “make one wise”.
The deterioration of the Christian Faith follows the Genesis pattern.
The Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries saw scores of prominent detractors from the orthodox tenets of the Christian religion, both in Europe and United States. Most of them were eagerly received by laymen seeking to evade religious responsibility. In this essay I will mention only two.
Benjamin Franklin is famous for his prayer for agreement near the end of the Constitutional convention. Born in a Reformed Christian home Benjamin was a religious rebel who spent his life attempting to denigrate the teachings of his father. He hated Calvinism and Reformed Christianity. In his youth he wrote that Harvard educated New England pastors were, "little better than dunces and blockheads". In the early Eighteenth Century Scottish immigrant Pastor Samuel Hemphill joined the Philadelphia Presbyterian Synod, began preaching blasphemous messages from the pulpit, and was brought before the Synod for trial. Franklin, seeing an opportunity to publicize his religious opinions by attacking Calvinism, Presbyterianism, and the authority of the clergy, took up his defense. He accused the church of "bigotry and utter lack of charity toward any who disagree with them" and affirmed the goodness of men and the laws of nature. He said the church was “smug and tyrannical” denying truth to itself and others. Hemphill was drummed out of the church and Franklin was able to air his erroneous views on Christianity in a public forum.
Benjamin Franklin held himself in high esteem. He failed to consider the limits of the human brain thinking himself wiser than God. Read the details of Franklin’s apostasy here.
Another major contributor to the denigration of the Westminster Standards was Charles Finney, the famous early Nineteenth Century Evangelist. He called it a “paper Pope” and said “That the instrument framed by that assembly should in the nineteenth century be recognized as the standard of the church, or of any intelligent branch of it, is not only amazing, but I must say that it is highly ridiculous. It is as absurd in theology as it would be in any other branch of science.”
Finney’s revival, like the mid-Twentieth Century Charismatic Movement, was characterized by physical manifestations. “They laughed senselessly, 'holy laughs,' they called them. And then they jumped around like dogs on all fours and, still barking, 'treed the devil' like dogs chasing a squirrel. When all else failed, they spoke in a gibberish which they believed to be the 'other tongues' used by the apostles in the Bible.”
Finney was pragmatic and Pelagian, he denied the sovereignty and Grace of God by attributing conversion to the human will and crafted his ministry after what worked rather than what was lawful and theologically correct. He denied the doctrine of original sin and was disdainful and critical of those who labored before him.
As it often does, history repeated itself in the Twentieth Century when many Evangelical and Charismatic churches duplicated the rogue Christianity of Charles Finney producing a similar abundance of useless followers.
Read the details of Charles Finney’s ministry here.
We seldom think about the tremendous debt we owe to our forbearers. Not only our Christian heritage but almost all the physical things that surround us were enhanced and made possible by those that preceded us. The food we eat was culled from a selection that contained poisons that killed or maimed those who ate them. We can enjoy our meals because our ancestors bore the sicknesses we now avoid. Though it is dying, we live in the embers of a Christian social order that still imparts an element of peace and justice. Modern medicine owes a debt to previous generations that have passed along knowledge on which better techniques were developed. None of us had anything to do with our birth. We are gifted with life because of a conception that resulted from a God given urge to cohabitate that was born in our parents. We owe our existence to the care given us when we were tiny helpless babies and insolent maturing youths.
God ordered us to honor our parents partially because we need their wisdom but also because they were to us a godly shadow that sustained and nourished our tiny bodies and souls. His government is centered in the family because it is the family that is responsible for seeing us through the lengthy process of becoming mature Christian adults.
Protestant leaders in United States have not only ignored their inheritance but on the few occasions when it was remembered, thoroughly trashed it. God holds them to a higher standard because they bear responsibility for the welfare of their followers. Notice church members who fail to attend services when the regular minister is not in the pulpit. God will hold leaders responsible for this apostasy.
Laymen are also culpable. It is our itchy ears that direct us to churches that are entertaining, emotionally stimulating, and offer personal benefits. It is our own presumptuous greed that seeks personal fulfillment rather than the pursuit of an obedience and service that would further the quest for Godly dominion. Christians who seek to be “fed” rather than seeking to serve have not graduated to a meat diet. They are useless in the battle to bring the nation under God’s wise and immutable legal system. Theirs is a selfish religion that pines for personal benefit without the sacrifice of service. Mega-churches are a testament to the pervasive self-centeredness that afflicts us.
In our time there are very few Christian leaders who understand the Biblical doctrine R. J. Rushdoony so clearly stated, “there can be no tolerance for the law-system of another religion.”
Even stalwart heroes of the Faith are not immune to breaching this maxim. B. B. Warfield’s remarkable support for the unpopular doctrines of the Reformed Faith was sullied by an endorsement of Darwinism as a process controlled by God. It was a sin involving the mind and its love of intellectualism. This endorsement was a major leak in the dam of solid Reformed Theology. There can be no tolerance for the law-systems of other religions!
Antinomianism, disregard for God’s Laws, leads us into aimless sinful behavior. Pelagianism, the heresy of freewill, strikes at the root of God’s sovereign choices, detracting from the unique position of Christians as God‘s Chosen People, and opening the door to the alien religion of humanism.
The Bible is the sole authority for Christian verity but every reader of God’s Word is marred by sin and unable to join in a uniform interpretation of the Wisdom it contains. When we fail to rally around the best available exegesis and allow our leaders to reject it or distort it at will, we contribute to the effete anarchy in the Christian Church that allows it, our culture, and our government to deteriorate as it has today.
If Protestant Christianity is ever to regain the power of the Reformation, orthodox guidelines inherited from our forefathers must again become the standard for our churches.
Protestant Christian leaders in the United States have treated the Bible the same way our government has treated the Constitution. They read into God’s Word their individual human opinions, distorting its mandates and ignoring its wisdom.
As treason, tyranny, and terror overtake the former land of the free, we can look to the judgment of Almighty God as the probable source!
Now, a few short paragraphs concerning some of my previous essays.
My writings against Zionism have been shunned, criticized, and often condemned. It is a topic that begs for Truth but remains cloaked in falsehood because those who have the temerity to discuss it in public are thoroughly trashed.
John Hagee, popular Pastor of the mega-Cornerstone Church in San Antonio, Texas, an outspoken Zionist, is now denying that Christ was the Messiah. Detached from a sound theological base and surrounded by Pharisaical Jews, Hagee succumbed to the tenets of another religion articulating publicly what has been the practice of hundreds of thousands of Evangelical Christians across our nation for decades. Hear it here. Read about it here. When will United States Christians understand the evil fruits of Zionist Jewish worship in the United States?
When a solid standard like the Westminster Confessions is removed from the church members are left without theological guidelines and are vulnerable to heresy and serious error.
Now, dear reader, before you start the next project, take a moment and reflect on the abject insolence involved when past and present Christian leaders individually or in small groups ignored the “superb care, patience, (and) precision“ and the “earnest and intelligent devotion to the Word of God and zeal for His glory” that went into crafting the Westminster documents, dispute their verity, replace it with their own opinions, and lead their flocks into heterodoxy and heresy. It is a sin of great magnitude.
“My people have become lost sheep; their shepherds have led them astray. They have made them turn aside on the mountains; they have gone along from mountain to hill and have forgotten their resting place. All who come upon them have devoured them; and their adversaries have said ’we are not guilty, inasmuch as they have sinned against the Lord who is the habitation of righteousness, even the Lord, the hope of their fathers.’”