In Defense of Orthodoxy

My defense of orthodoxy is threefold. First there is the argument from history. I can prove from the historical documents that orthodoxy is bona fide Christianity. Dr. J. G. Machen did this in his little classic, Christianity and Liberalism, and in his more elaborate scientific work, The Origin of Paul’s Religion, which the liberals have been unable to answer even to this day. Over against Harry Emerson Fosdick’s evolutionary naturalism—with its dogma of progress and its naïve assumption of the thing to be proved, namely, that the religion of Israel moved from a primitive conception of God to the grandeur of ethical monotheism—Dr. Machen shows that in order to subscribe to the tenets of modern liberalism, one has to get rid not only of the supernatural in Scripture, but of the teachings of Paul concerning Christ and of the Jesus of history altogether. As a case in point there is Rudolf Bultmann who started out to remove the miraculous and now has nothing left of the Gospel. Dr. Machen has plainly proved that the supernatural character of the Person and Work of Christ cannot be eliminated from Scripture without giving up the whole of the Christian message.

The late literary critic, H. L. Mencken, a humanist, wrote of Dr. Machen in the Baltimore Evening Sun:

He saw clearly that the only effects that could follow diluting and polluting Christianity in the modernist manner would be its complete abandonment and ruin. Either it was true or it was not true. If, as he believed, it was true, then there could be no compromise with persons who sought to whittle away its essential postulates, however respectable their lives. Thus he fell out with the reformers who have been trying, in late years, to convert the Presbyterian Church into a kind of literary and social club, devoted vaguely to good works.…

Speaking of the basic postulates of the faith, Mencken continued:

These assumptions were also made, at least in theory, by his opponents, and thereby he had them by the ear. Claiming to be Christians as he was, and of Calvinistic persuasion, they endeavored fatuously to get rid of all the inescapable implications of their position. On the one hand they sought to retain their membership in the fellowship of the faithful, but on the other hand they presumed to repeal and re-enact with amendments the body of doctrine on which the fellowship rested. In particular, they essayed to overhaul the scriptural authority which lay at the bottom of the whole matter, retaining what coincided with their private notions and rejecting whatever upset them.…

It is my belief as a friendly neutral in all such high and ghostly matters, that the body of doctrine known as Modernism is completely incompatible not only with anything rationally describable as Christianity, but also with anything deserving to pass as religion in general.… It is one thing to reject religion altogether, and quite another to try to save it by pumping out of it all its essential substance, leaving it in the equivocal position of a sort of pseudo-science comparable to graphology, ‘education,’ or osteopathy. That, it seems to me, is what the Modernists have done.… They have tried to get rid of all the logical difficulties of religion, and vet preserve a generally pious cast of mind. It is a vain enterprise.

I have used the words of an eminent critic at some length to clarify the fundamental opposition between orthodoxy and modernism. The latter is a total reinterpretation of Christianity in that it rejects all those elements which make Christianity an historical phenomenon on the ground that the supernatural and the historical are incompatible with science. As Machen proved, modernists have a different concept of the doctrine of God, of man, of Christ, of salvation, and of the Church. Therefore, orthodoxy alone has the right to call itself Christian from any historical or logical consideration. It is the only continuation of the religion of the apostles and the primitive New Testament Church.

THE SCRIPTURAL PRESUPPOSITION

However, I am not so naive as to think that I can convince the liberals with an appeal to history. For the real issue between orthodox Christianity and its enemies is the factness of a fact. What constitutes a fact? My opponents will not accept the facts I marshal. They bridle at the mention of an infallible Scripture or the fact of the Virgin Birth or the Resurrection. And behind the facts are laws. Who is author of these laws of nature and of laws of thought? Is it God or the void of irrationalism? Is nature the whole show, as the naturalist presupposes? Can we tear the sacred robe of truth and allow a nature independent of God, operating through blind irrational forces beyond the control of the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ? Is religion a sphere by itself, in the realm of value and of personality, in which God has some squatting claims—but divorced from nature and science? Is man a creature of God depending for his being and for his knowledge on the self-revelation of God, or is he autonomous in his being, and the final reference-point for truth and experience? These are some of the crucial issues.

GOD AND HIS CREATION

Orthodoxy treats seriously the doctrine of a literal divine creation, which implies that all the facts as well as the laws of the universe are God-created. But the facts were also God-planned, they are God-controlled, and they are God-glorifying. It is our contention that this biblical presupposition is the only ground for meaningful human predication. Those who reject this basis for meaning and knowledge must ultimately land in irrationalism. They indeed defend their position with an appeal to man’s reason, but they have assumed an ultimate reality which shuts God out. Or, if God is enclosed within the system, he becomes finite so that the same categories that are applied to the things of time and space are applied to God. Man becomes the judge of truth and of being. Man becomes autonomous.

But what of human reason? If nature is the whole show, what guarantee is there that man can transcend his environment? No account of the universe can be true unless that account leaves it possible for our thinking to be real and valid, says C. S. Lewis; and, “no thought is valid if it can be fully explained by irrational causes.… Obviously then, the whole process of human thought, what we call Reason, is equally valueless if it is the result of irrational causes. Hence every theory of the universe which makes the human mind the result of irrational causes is inadmissible, for it would be a proof that there are no such things as proofs” (Miracles, New York, 1947, p. 28). Naturalism, like skepticism, cancels itself out. If we say that man cannot know, then how can he arrive at such a conclusion? If nature or reality is ultimate, how can we arrive at a rational person out of irrationality?

The point of all this is that one either begins with the scriptural presupposition that God is the ground of being and of knowledge, namely, that he is Creator, Provider, Redeemer, and Judge of his universe, or one is, willy-nilly, reduced to some form of irrationalism. Paul said, “Other foundation can no man lay, than that is laid, which is Jesus Christ” (1 Cor. 3:11). I believe this not only applies to salvation, but also to the knowledge situation, for in Christ all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge are hidden (Col. 2:3). As Christians, we gladly admit that our reasoning is circular—we begin with God and we thereby have assumed the whole case, for if one seriously says “I believe in God, Creator of heaven and earth,” he cannot back down at the question of miracle or the inspiration of Scripture or the deity and sacrificial death of Christ. It is all involved in the starting point. This is something the liberal does not see. He wants to begin neutrally. He wants to keep the mind of man autonomous. He wants to be judge of the facts. His appeal is to reason. It is a vain enterprise! If God does not enter at the level of human consciousness he has no place at all in man’s thought. The starting point method, and conclusion are involved in one another If one starts with the assumption of modern science that man’s mind is autonomous and has the power to interpret the brute facts of the universe, one is actually starting with a naturalistic assumption. Es gibt keine Voraussetzungslosigkeit, as the Germans say. There is no such thing as starting without a presupposition, there is no neutral mind in science or religion. Emil Brunner has remarked in his Gifford Lectures, “The metaphysical dimension of the mind never remains empty, but must always have a content.… Metaphysical neutrality simply does not exist, because neutrality in itself is a kind of skeptical metaphysics” (Christianity and Civilization, II, p. 24).

Now the point is simply that if we are to have human science and history at all, in the sense of meaningful knowledge, interpretation, and control of nature we need the Christian presupposition, namely, of personality and law and fact. On any other presupposition, we fall into the void of irrationalism. My contention, therefore, is that human predication is impossible and meaningless except on the presupposition of the truth of the Bible. It is only within a God-created, God-controlled universe that science and history can operate. In other words, every form of denial of orthodoxy is implicitly operating with a borrowed capital. A world without the God of Scripture is impossible, for it would have no plan, no structure, no meaning—it would have to be accounted for from the void, the contradiction of irrationality producing Reason.

THE GOSPEL AND CULTURE

Finally, there is the ethical-moral consideration. When Christianity came upon the scene, human culture was at a low ebb. Ichabod was written across the gates of the Academy and the Lyceum. Men said, “Let us eat and drink for tomorrow we die”; or they resigned themselves to the outrageous pangs of fortune; or drained the blood from their veins in despair and hopelessness. Then, in the fullness of time, God sent his Son.… The Gospel spread over Europe and brought new hope and vision. Later, the Reformation gave a new impetus to culture and to every human endeavor by a return to the purity of the Gospel.

However, the evil fruit of the Renaissance with its paganism and the principle of nature and freedom could not be contained. In the French Revolution it broke forth with its cry, “No god, no master!” and in the nineteenth century in Nietzschean nihilism the cry was, “God is dead!” As a result the world is today at the end of its tether. We are groping in a Götterdämmerung, resulting in the decline of the West. Cochrane suggests that we have been robbed of our man-made idols by the Russians, just as Micah of old was by the Danites. We have nothing left. Our gods of power and science have been taken over by our foes, and our great spiritual heritage is eroded.

ART AND DESPAIR

This despair of modern man, cut loose from God, is apparent especially in his art. The loss of religion results in loss of depth; with man’s ladder to heaven gone, the movement of the spirit is no longer vertical but only horizontal; all surfaces are flattened, all values are removed. As Brunner says, art has become barbarous and crude, dehumanized, and irrational. And Paul Tillich tells us, “The decisive event which underlies the search for meaning and the despair of it in the 20th century is the loss of God in the 19th century.… It drives one either to nihilism or to the courage which takes non-being into itself” (The Courage To Be, p. 139).

This courage of despair, which is said to be our only hope in an age of anxiety, is like the whistling of a boy in the dark, man pulling himself up by his own bootstraps out of the mire. This is truly the sickness unto death. In this world of anxiety, says Tillich, the ordinary categories, the structures of reality, have lost their validity. Thus modern art saw the meaninglessness of existence and participated in it.

Now, that is exactly my point. The anxiety of modern man is real. Why? Because he has lost his faith in God! To all intents and purposes, so far as man’s culture today is concerned, God is dead! Man is without God, hence without hope. Paul used those very words of his contemporaries. But Paul preached the power of God to such men, the Gospel of salvation by Grace. Without the Gospel, man’s only comfort is some sort of idealistic pantheism as reflected in Bryant’s Thanatopsis, or the defiant stoic humanism of Henley’s Invictus, or the sad, plaintive anguish of Russell’s naturalism:

The life of Man is a long march through the night, surrounded by invisible foes, tortured by weariness and pain, towards a goal that few can hope to reach and where none may tarry long. One by one, as they march, our comrades vanish from our sight, seized by the silent orders of omnipotent Death.

Brief and powerless is Man’s life; on him and all his race the slow, sure doom falls pitiless and dark. Blind to good and evil, reckless of destruction, omnipotent matter rolls on its relentless way; for Man, condemned today to lose his dearest, tomorrow himself to pass through the gate of darkness, it remains only to cherish, ere yet the blow falls, the lofty thoughts that ennoble his little day; disdaining the coward terrors of the slave of fate, to worship at the shrine that his own hands have built; undismayed by the empire of chance, to preserve a mind free from the wanton tyranny that rules his outward life; proudly defiant of the irresistible forces that tolerate, for a moment, his knowledge and his condemnation, to sustain alone, a weary but unyielding Atlas, the world that his own ideals have fashioned despite the trampling march of unconscious power” (“A Free Man’s Worship,” in Mysticism and Logic, London, 1950, pp. 46 ff.).

Over against these utterances of man’s heroic despair, of his whistling in the dark, let us take our stand with the saints of God throughout the ages who have spoken with assurance of faith. Let us say with Job: “For I know that my redeemer liveth, and that he shall stand at the latter day upon the earth: And though after my skin worms destroy this body, yet in my flesh shall I see God” (Job 19:25, 26).

Let us jubilate with Paul: “Who shall lay anything to the charge of God’s elect? It is God that justifieth. Who is he that condemneth? It is Christ that died, yea, rather that is risen again, who is even at the right hand of God, who also maketh intercession for us” (Rom. 8:33, 34).

Sunrise

Malachi 4:2

The sun comes up and all the dark earth yields

Itself in dedication to the light.

Gray shadows scuttle through the waking fields

And slink away. Forgotten is the night.

Each tree on tiptoe now awaits the kiss

Of warmth and beauty in the green-gold way

Of light with leaf. All night is but for this:

The glorious appearing of the day.

Burst on my soul, O Sun of Righteousness,

With healing in Thy wings! The night is long

Indeed; but after darkness and distress

Earth-shadows flee away. There will be song,

There will be warmth and light, and love and grace,

Eternal sunrise—in Thy blessed face.

HELEN FRAZEE-BOWER

Samuel M. Shoemaker is the author of a number of popular books and the gifted Rector of Calvary Episcopal Church in Pittsburgh. He is known for his effective leadership of laymen and his deeply spiritual approach to all vital issues.

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