Why I Am Opposed to the Interchurch World Movement fBy I. M. HALDEMAN, D. D. Pastor, First Baptist Church Broadway and 79th St., New York, N. Y. PRICE 25 CENTS ERRATA Page 4, 4th line — Holy Scriptures should read — Holy Scripture. Page 21, 2nd line — protoe vangelium should read — protevangelium. Page 43, 15th line — robes should read robe. Page 48, 26th line — atnosphere should read— atmosphere. Books may be obtained from H. L. DAY, 4 White Street, New York. Why I Am Opposed to the Interchurch World Mov ement I. M. HALDEMAN, D. D. Pastor, First Baptist Church Broadway and 79th St., New York, N. Y. PRICE 25 CENTS Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2017 with funding from Columbia University Libraries https://archive.org/details/whyiamopposedOOhald Why 1 am Opposed to the Interchurch World Movement BY I. M. HALDEMAN, D.D. Pastor First Baptist Church, New York City, N. Y. I HAVE received inquiries from one end of this country to the other concerning my attitude to the Interchurch World Movement. These letters have been written by pastors of all denomina- tions expressing doubts about it, wishing to know whether it emphasizes the mind of Christ, whether it is loyal to the whole Word of God and asking my advice as to their own action in respect to it. I have endeavored to answer them. I have written letter after letter, but they still come; not a day that my mail is not filled with them, until I find it impossible to respond to all. Since the demand has taken such a universal, insistent and profoundly sincere manner I feel myself under bonds to meet it in this public and printed way. I am unqualifiedly opposed to the Movement and neither I nor my Church will have aught to do with it. I am opposed to the Interchurch World Move- ment for manifold reasons. 3 WHY l AM OPPOSED TO THE The Inter church Movement is purely and simply a Post-millennial drive. Post-millennialism has neither a sane exegesis nor a single suggestion of Holy Scriptures to support it. Post-millennialism stands squarely and offen- sively against the unvarying Scripture doctrine of the Second and Imminent Coming of our Lord Jesus Christ. Post-millennialism ignores dispensational dis- tinctions, mixes truths that differ, deludes the Church with the vain hope of a world’s conversion through the preaching of the Gospel and in the face of our Lord’s solemn declaration that this age will end morally and under swift and divine judgment as in the days of Noah, continually repeats the pleasing refrain that the world is growing better; that the new world movement will make it a decent and safe place to live in; that step by step, slowly but surely, it is being led forward to the purple and gold of millennial days. Post-millennialism is the ignis fatuus of the Church, the false light that shines with its phos- phorescent glow above the morass of an unregenerate world in which regenerate lives must still battle with its ever-ascending, unabated and permeating power of sin. The Interchurch Movement is the combined, aggressive effort of Post-millennialism to render meaningless the last promise of an ascended Lord: “Surely I come quickly.” 4 INTERCHURCH WORLD MOVEMENT The Interchurch Movement substitutes the kingdom of Christ for the Church of Christ, and does so by con- founding the one with the other. The kingdom of Christ is the covenant kingdom promised to the people of Israel and rejected by the Jews in that hour when they blindly rejected the Son of God as their true Messiah and King. The kingdom of Heaven in its original meaning was the kingdom of Christ, having its source in Heaven and its field of display on earth. The kingdom of Heaven eventually will be the establishment of the kingdom of Christ when He shall come a second time to Jerusalem. The kingdom of Heaven in this age is the pro- fession of Christ, not as a King, but as the rejected One, crucified, dead, risen again, ascended to Heaven and seated there as a refugee from earth till God the Father shall make His enemies His footstool. In the meantime He is Redeemer and Saviour of all who call upon Him as such. All who profess the name of Christ, whether they be regenerated or not, are in the kingdom of Heaven of this age, occupying the arena in which it should have been displayed by our Lord Jesus Christ as the accepted King. Any profession of Christ, whether by Unitarian, Christian Scientist or other unscriptural faith, puts that professor in the kingdom (puts him there as an imitation tare; for, the tares do not represent hypocrites or professors in the Church, but coun- terfeit systems of Christianity in the field of the world and as such are distinctively called tares). 5 WHY I AM OPPOSED TO THE The Church is neither the kingdom of Christ nor the kingdom of Heaven in this age. The true Church is a body of persons called out by the Gospel to faith in a crucified and risen Lord, made partakers of the divine nature and joined to Him as one spirit by the indwelling and operative power of the Holy Ghost. Ajl who are in the Church are necessarily in the kingdom of Heaven because they make a profession of Christ. All who are in the kingdom of Heaven of this age are not necessarily in the Church which is the Body of Christ. Only those who have been born twice are in the actual and true Church. The door of the Church is a sacrificial, but risen Christ, and the initial act of entrance is this second birth we call regeneration and is literally a begetting from above. To substitute the kingdom of Christ for the Church of Christ, or to call the Church the kingdom of Christ is, on the one hand, to preach and teach what does not exist and, on the other, to confound things which differ and are as far apart as the east is from the west. The Interchurch Movement substitutes the Gospel of the kingdom of Christ for the Gospel of the grace of God by confounding the one with the other. The Gospel of the kingdom of Christ is the an- nouncement of the Coming of Christ as King, as the 6 INTERCHURCH WORLD MOVEMENT God of the whole earth, and the obligation of the world to receive Him as God and King. The Gospel of grace is the announcement that by His sacrificial death our Lord has reconciled a rebel world to God, obtained a stay in the proceed- ings of divine judgment and on the basis of the satis- faction rendered to the law, the government and being of God, the God of all righteousness is able to deal in forgiving grace with the worst of men, able to be just and yet justify the ungodly, accept- ing the death of the cross as a propitiation for the nature of sin and a complete atonement for the sins and transgressions of all who shall claim it. The Gospel of grace is the good news that this once crucified Christ risen from the dead and now seated in Heaven as the last Adam, the Second Man, is able to give new, spiritual and eternal life to men. The Interchurch Movement is a socialistic, edu- cational and ethical campaign. The Church of Christ, considered as such, is not called upon to labor in these departments of ex- clusively world work. Utilitarianism will furnish social reformation > natural endowment will of itself call aloud for edu- cation, for self-culture, and the law of self-defence will demand (as in the case of prohibition) a certain degree of moral sanitation; but, morality, mere ethics of the natural man and the life of a risen Christ in the soul are as far apart as earth is from heaven. 7 WHY I AM OPPOSED TO THE The Inter church Movement seeks to save society rather than the individual. Our Lord Jesus Christ came into the world to save the individual. His last act was to snatch the thief as “a brand from the burning.” It is He who has said one soul is worth more than a whole world. The Son of God lived in a society full of con- ditions against which the natural man revolts today — war, slavery, profiteering, poverty. He said no word against this social condition. On the con- trary, He affirmed He came into the world to bring a sword and not peace, to produce conflict, not harmony. So far from holding out the hope that He came to set in motion a force that should do away with poverty and abolish the inequality be- tween men, He announced that poverty and the distinction of class would continue during the whole time of His absence from this world. The Interchurch Movement reverses the Commis- sion of Christ. The new world movement does not wish to waste time and energy in plucking a few brands from the burning; it would make the individual necessity secondary, the community claims first. The Church is exhorted to become a commu- nity center, interested in whatever may interest the community, civic righteousness, sanitary hous- ing, pure food supply, healthy amusements, the legitimate (?) drama, the question of capital and 8 INTERCHURCH WORLD MOVEMENT labor, political economy and all humanitarian de- mands. The Church is to deal with the community and its moral and social needs in block, rather than spend capital and effort upon a few stray sheep out- side the fold. The redemption of society is to be the great objective. The community is to be freed from wrong conditions. The Church is to put down secret as well as open immorality, reinforce the vice squad, back up its investigations and malodorous revelations with congregational appeals for stricter legislation. The Church is exhorted to clean up Sodom instead of coming out of it. Establish society on a clean basis and there will be, it is said, no more stray sheep, the rising generation will grow up good and tractable sheep, finding their way logically into the Church. Thus the need of expensive revivals will be at an end and the membership of the Church will be assured in a healthy, legitimate and natural way. The day of soul saving is over. The day of society saving has arrived. This is the logic of the Interchurch Movement. And all this in face of the demand of Holy Scrip- ture that the Church shall come out, be separate from the community and interested in one supreme thing — the preaching of Christ and Him crucified. The Inter church Movement talks primarily of the ethical and secondarily and vaguely of the sacrificial Christ. Christ is set before us as the Exemplar of right- eousness in the life He lived on earth. •9 WHY I AM OPPOSED TO THE I have failed so far, in the literature of the move- ment, to find any description of the righteousness which Scripture declares He wrought by His death on the cross and whereby He became the righteous- ness of God unto all and upon all them that believe. The Interchurch Movement has much to say about the Christ who lived on earth, but not so much about the Christ who died on the cross. The Interchurch Movement speaks frequently of the sacrifice of Christ, but it is the moral, rather than the penal, sacrifice. Throughout the literature of the movement I do not recall any quotation or reference to the terrible cry of the Son of God in the hour of His agony on the cross, “My God, My God, why hast thou forsaken me?” He was actually forsaken because, as a sacrifice for sin — as a substitute— He endured the judgment of God against sin on behalf of all those who should so claim Him. The Interchurch Movement speaks of the “ ideals ” and “ principles ” of Christ. Scripture has nothing to say about His ideals and principles. He did not come to set up ideals nor lay down principles. He came to make Himself the issue of life and death, of salvation or damnation. He came to offer Himself as a ransom for sinners 10 INTERCHURCH WORLD MOVEMENT and by His resurrection give them His own life and nature, making them the Children of God. “What think ye of Christ?” was His question. It is not whether you copy His ideals or follow His principles, but what is your relation to Him? Do you believe in Him and accept Him for all He claims Himself to be?— you are saved. Do you live the most moral life that ever man lived on earth and do not accept Him for all He claims, nor offer Him as your sacrifice for sin? then you miss relation to Him here and hereafter and are lost forever. The Inter church Movement contends our Lord came into the world to be an example to men. Scripture teaches the Son of God did not come into the world to live as an example at all. He did not come to live, He came to die, to lay down His life under the judgment of God against sin. He Himself said: “No man taketh it from me, but I lay it down of myself. I have power to lay it down and I have power to take it again. This commandment have I received from my Father.” This is what Paul means when he says He became obedient unto the death of the cross. Looking forward to His predetermined death, He said: “Father, save me from this hour; but for this cause came I unto this hour.” To die as a sin-offering, that was His purpose. To talk about unregenerate man following the example of Christ, or holding out such an objective 11 WHY I AM OPPOSED TO THE is to expect the crawling worm to rise and soar with the eagle, or a grain of sand to measure itself with Alpine heights. The Interchurch Movement is, to a great degree, based on the idea of evolution as applied to character. Our Lord Jesus Christ struck a death blow at evolution as applied to character when He said that which is born of the flesh is flesh and that which is born of the spirit is spirit, thereby laying down as an unchangeable law that what was born of the flesh would always be flesh, never could become spirit; and that whatever was born of spirit would always be spirit; that between them there was more than a bridgeless Atlantic Ocean difference. Paul corroborated the Lord when he said : “The natural man (that is the soulical man) receiv- eth not the things of the Spirit of God * * * neither can he know them, because they are spiritually discerned . ’ ’ He emphasized this dynamically when he said: “The carnal mind is enmity against God; for it is not subject to the law of God, neither indeed can be.” The Inter church Movement, at times, uses the language of evangelical Christianity, but in its teaching denies it. In its appropriation of Gospel terms, repetition of the name of Christ, its appeals to love Him, serve Him, to make His teachings supreme in our 12 INTERCHURCH WORLD MOVEMENT lives it is in great degree deceptive; for, as already- suggested, when it speaks of His sacrifice, it means His moral sacrifice, His self-denial and not the agony of the cross. When we read of regeneration and pursue it to the end it is not so much regeneration of the individual as the reformation and reorganiza- tion of society. When it speaks of the kingdom of Christ it does not mean the Kingdom He is to come from Heaven to establish, but extension of the present world-stained, infidelity -filled, professing Church. The Interchurch Movement lays down as a funda- mental proposition that the work of the Church is to establish a civilization throughout the world, Christian in passion and spirit. This civilization is to be offered to the world on the basis of the Golden Rule and the general and ethical side of Christianity. This offer of civilization is so stripped of doctrine, so denuded of definition, so applied on the assum- tion that all men are sons of God and need only to develop the ethical characteristic of doing as one would be done by, that a fairly fine and ordered civilization springing up out of merely natural, moral culture and without any intelligent Bible comprehension of Christ might pass for Christianity itself. Indeed, it is a common thing to hear men who do not know Christ as the divine sacrifice, as the risen Man in glory, as our great God and Saviour, confidently asserting: “O, if we practice the Golden Rule, we shall do well enough here and be safe enough hereafter.” 13 WHY I AM OPPOSED TO '1 H E The Inter church Movement insists on the obligation of the Church, as a Church, to be occupied with the interests of American citizenship. It is true Paul recognized his individual obligation as a Roman citizen, claimed its privileges and pro- tection, yet, when writing to the Church in the very place where he first affirmed himself to be a Roman, he testified the Church, as a church, had no work nor responsibility in respect to earthly citizenship, but that as a corporate body its citizenship was in Heaven; nevertheless as Christians they must see that their individual citizenship was in accord with the Gospel of Christ, that it must bring no reproach upon Him and that as citizens they must meet their duties to the government under which they lived. The work of the Church as a whole was to shine as a light in the world and hold forth the Word of life to men. However much the individual may stand for his citizenship and use his personal Christian experience to make it better, the Church in its corporate respon- sibility is not to engage in civic work and righteous- ness. The moment the Church, as the spiritual Body of Christ, attempts that it is met with the rebuke of the Son of God: “Ye are not of the world.” The Inter church Movement does not preach doc- trine, it ignores it, and gives homilies and moral appeals. Paul has a different concept. He writes to Timothy: “Till I come, give 14 INTERCHURCH WORLD MOVEMENT attendance to reading, to exhortation, to doctrine .” Again he says: “Take heed to thyself, and unto the doctrine ” He bids Timothy hold fast the “form of sound doctrine." Doctrine to Christianity is what the backbone is to the body. Christianity without doctrine is a boneless system. It is a meaningless, apparently well-intentioned, good thing without form, force, conviction or power. It is something startling that in giving the marks of the time when the Church would depart from the faith, Paul should declare it would be when the Church should depart from sound doctrine. The Interchurch Movement is enthusiastically supported by all preachers, teachers and theological seminary professors who do not accept a whole Bible, socialistic reformers and all who reject the Second Coming of our Lord Jesus Christ. This, of itself, ought to be sufficient indictment and ought to separate from it all those who accept Paul’s admonition to wait for the Son of God from Heaven. The Inter church Movement draws special attention to Jesus as a Teacher, and talks much of His teachings. This was the blunder made by Nicodemus. He came to Jesus by night, calling Him a teacher sent from God, and seeking from Him a new doctrine. 15 WHY I AM OPPOSED TO THE Our Lord gave him a rebuke that ought to be far-reaching enough to meet the attitude of the Interchurch Movement today. He made it clear what Nicodemus needed was not a new doctrine but a new life; and that He Himself was something more than a teacher, He was the Giver of this needed new life. It is not new doctrine men need, but new and eternal life. They need it in New York. They need it in Africa and the uttermost parts of the earth. They are to get it as the Lord announced to Nicodemus through faith in a Christ lifted up as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, faith in Christ as the crucified substitute under the judgment of God against sin and yet as the unfailing pledge of His infinite love to a perishing world. When the Christian minister is faithful to his commission he will invite men to Jesus, not as a teacher, but as the once crucified but now risen Lord and Life-Giver. The Interchurch Movement exhorts the Church to unite with the world and its best moral and govern- mental agencies in making it a better and more com- fortable place to live in. The Son of God taught that a world spiritually dead must attend to the things of a spiritually dead world. He said, “Let the dead bury their dead: but go thou and preach the kingdom of God;” not the kingdom of Christ, but God; in other words, induct men into that spiritual relation with God 16 INTERCHURCH WORLD MOVEMENT which is not meat and drink, but righteousness and peace, and joy in the Holy Ghost. The Inter church Movement exhorts the churches to organize themselves into family groups under individual leaders with a final cabinet over which the Pastor shall be head. This is simply an exhortation to the Church to multiply wheels within wheels, to extend the system of internal and humanly invented organizations by which the assembly of Christ on its original lines has in some cases almost been organized out of existence. It is creating, on the one side, an ecclesiastical sovietism, and, on the other, a concentrated dicta- torship, a determinator of policy against which indi- vidualism must find itself helpless and reduced to the level of a recalcitrant. The Inter church Movement has little to say of the forgiveness of sins through the redemption by blood. I do not recall reading any pronounced repe- tition of the apostolic statement, “without shedding of blood is no remission.” It may be that back of this movement there is a desire to convict men of sin, lead them to repentance and give them assurance of absolution in the fact that the blood of Jesus Christ, God’s Son, cleanseth from all sin, but it does not appear prominent in the literature of the Interchurch Movement. 17 WHY I AM OPPOSED TO THE The Inter church Movement is taken up with the life that now is and not with the life that is to come. The miseries and woes of this life are so great, the confusion and conflict so widespread and the Interchurch Movement is so conscious of it all that it seems to have no time to speak of Heaven and appears to have forgotten there is a Hell. The Interchurch Movement sounds no warning to the souls of men concerning the woe of eternal punish- ment. The second death of which the Son of God speaks so terrifically, warning men that it would be better to enter the kingdom of God with one eye and one foot, than having both to be cast into the quenchless fire and suffer the gnawing of the death- less worm, does not appear in Interchurch liter- ature. The truth is, as already stated, the Interchurch Movement is too busy with the things of time to think of eternity; too much occupied in righting the wrongs of this world to prepare men for that which is to come. To this modern movement Heaven is al- together beyond the field of the strongest telescope, entirely beyond the measurement of the surveyor’s chain, shut out by intervening distances so great there is neither count of miles nor analysis of kilometres. This world with its multiplying prob- lems, its laughter drowned in tears, its crowding materialism and the noise of riot occupy the new movement, holding it to the level of the days that are and not to those that are to come. 18 INTERCHURCH WORLD MOVEMENT It will spend millions to save men from the swiftly speeding now, but is miserly about wasting it to save men from the equally swift coming here- after. The Inter church Movement seeks to build a new world in which peace and righteousness shall per- manently prevail and over which Christ shall reign as spiritual, invisible and always-absent King. The endeavor to set up a kingdom in which Christ the Lord shall be a spiritual, but never a returning, visible presence is a scheme fertilized by the imagin- ation of men and without a single foundation in Holy Scripture — a dream, but as unsubstantial as a dream — as deceiving as the mirage of a desert that builds golden cities and refreshing oases against the far-off sky, melting into thinnest air while the weary and famishing traveler regards them. The Inter church Movement is deceptive in that it preaches, not a complete, but a partial Christ. Nothing can better illustrate this than the appeal made in one of the circulars to the Christian minister to take the initiative with other denomina- tions in his community for cooperative evangelistic work, assuring him that the passion of Christ should dominate every plan — and by the passion of Christ is not meant the death of Christ, but his intense enthusiasm while in this world. The appeal of the circular approaches almost the region of hysteria. 19 WHY I AM OPPOSED TO THE The text from which it takes its inspiration is this: “He poured out his soul.” The pouring out of His soul is defined as the intensity with which He poured it into His disciples. He “invested,” it is said, “every particle of brain and blood in them,” pushing them forward with His earnestness and enthusiasm to redeem the world. Just as He poured out His soul by pouring His intensity into His disciples, the minister is to pour his soul into his Church. He is to stir them by the communication of his soul intensity and enthusiasm and thus lead them to give themselves to Christ. But I insist on knowing what kind of a Christ. It may be said all this is taken for granted. It is taken for granted that everyone knows. We have no right to take it for granted. Nor, indeed, would the average person know what the text quoted above signifies beyond the explanation given as expressing the earthly enthusiasm of the Lord; nor would the average person with the text in that form go beyond the idea of an earthly Christ. The original text is cut in two. The entire Scripture reads: “He hath poured out his soul unto death: and he was numbered with the transgressors; and he bare the sin of many and made intercession for the transgressors.” Pouring out His soul unto death is something quite different from pouring His soul into His disciples and being “glorified through the group into whom he poured his soul.” Pouring His soul into His disciples as the thought of the text is a sad travesty, not to say perversion, 20 INTERCHURCH WORLD MOVEMENT of Holy Scripture, a tremendous shutting out of the protoevangelium proclaimed by the fifty-third chapter of Isaiah. According to that Scripture our Lord poured out His soul to death. And how? In the one way in which Scripture ever speaks of it, by shedding His blood, sacrificing Himself. We are not left in any doubt about it. He was numbered with the transgressors. Not only was He hung up between the thieves and so numbered with them, but as the Apostle tells us — “He was made sin for us;” and being so made, so treated of God, was Himself counted as a trans- gressor, looked upon of God as the criminal of the universe. Isaiah says He bare the sin of many. He made intercession for the transgressors. It is true He interceded for His enemies. He prayed for them while on the cross; but His inter- cession goes beyond that. He intercedes now. And where? In Heaven. On what ground? On the ground that “He bare their sins in His own body on the tree;” and is now their high priest within the upper vail. We are to preach Christ. We are to preach Him with a burning, unfailing enthusiasm. But it is to be the Christ Paul preached. A crucified Christ, a sacrificial and a risen Christ, 21 WHY I AM OPPOSED TO THE the only Saviour of men and the only way in which He can save them. Let the minister get a burden of souls. Let him cry out for them and crave them as sincerely as Paul did when He was willing for the sake of his brethren if needs be to be accursed from Christ that he might save some; but let there be no question about the kind of Christ that is preached. And if it be the “passion of the cross,” let it be the cross as an altar on which God the Father gave His Son to be the sacrificial Lamb ordained before the foundation of the world; let the “passion” be the sacrificial suffer- ing of Him who was in truth the sin-bearing Lamb of God. The Inter church Movement is organized for the might of money. It dictates budgets for churches and invents worldly methods to raise them. All the method and manner of war drives; all the noise, publicity effort and insistence of those world efforts are used to create enthusiasm and stir up the contagion and rivalry of contribution till the sums of money are figured in hundreds of millions of dollars. HJ; However the ultimate of moral benefit may be urged, the money thought and the money idea, the immensity of the aggregate, the assurance what it will do, the feeling that it guarantees power and victory for the Church fill the air and dominate the mind. The Scriptural method, be it more or less, is the voluntary offering, the dictation and direction of the 22 INTERCHURCH WORLD MOVEMENT Holy Spirit and the firm conviction that spiritual success is attained neither by might nor by power;' neither by the wealth of a few over-rich, nor the syndicalized wealth of the many, but by the Spirit Himself dwelling in the individual and pervading the assembly. The conglomeration of money through headline pleas and whole-page advertisements in the daily press may not be as it has been charged a species of “wildcat financiering,” but it is leading the pro- fessing Church from the ground of dependence on God to a dangerous degree of dependence on money, feeling that in it is to be found the “hiding of power.” The deductions I have thus far made concerning the Interchurch Movement and the formulation of reasons against it are not the results of mere imagina- tion nor personal prejudice, but are drawn from statements made in the literature of the movement itself. I will cite a few of them and in doing so will necessarily repeat some of the deductions already made but with fuller analysis. In the Interchurch literature much is said about the condition of America and the obligation of the Church in respect to it. Many of the generalizations made are true when measured from the basis of political economy and belong to the realm of the world, the powers that govern it, but not to the Church of Christ called to walk in separation from world rulership and policy. The Church is neither on the throne nor in the presidential chair; and however individually Christ- 23 WHY I AM OPPOSED TO THE ians may be there and personally using Christian influence, the Church, as a Church, has no corporate part in it. The very word “Church” signifies “the called out ones,” called out and separated from world ways and principles. The divine Spirit commands the Church not to be yoked together with unbelievers. He commands all who would be faith- ful to the true place of the Church to “come out, be separate, and touch not the unclean thing.” Our Lord Himself has said to the Church: “Ye are not of the world. * * * I have chosen you out of the world.” That is separating them and making them distinct from the world, from that system wherein the three operative forces are, “the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes and the pride of life;” where self and not God is the enthroned and all-directing principle. The Inter church Movement asks: “Shall the Church emphasize minor differences ?” Minor differences are the expression of original convictions. If these convictions or differences have no Scrip- tural foundation they are worse than minor, they are false. If they are true, then those who profess them must stand for them or be guilty of professing what they no longer believe. Not to believe what is professed is deceptive, it is actually lying. Not to stand fully by what is believed is arrant cowardice. To make a compromise for the sake of peace or 24 INTERCHURCH WORLD MOVEMENT position is to be a traitor to the truth and guilty of high treason against God — a blind leader of the blind and too despicable even for contempt. The Interchurch Movement tells us that “the problems of society, national and international, are solved by the Golden Rule intelligently applied. ” Nothing would seem more basic than that state- ment. It is so affirmatively made. It carries with it such an atmosphere of profound self-satisfaction, such finality, that you seem to feel the solution al- ready attained, all warring interests settled and peace speaking in harmonious phrase. And yet rudely iconoclastic as it may sound to say it, it is nevertheless true that nothing could be more absurdly false. These problems, national and international, can be solved only when all men shall know the Lord from the least to the greatest. According to Holy Scripture, that will be only when the Lord Himself shall have returned as the King of righteousness, “the God of the whole earth.” Not when the Golden Rule is applied by natural men will the world learn righteousness and act in brotherly fashion one toward another. On the con- trary, it is written, “when thy judgments are in the earth, the inhabitants of the world will learn right- eousness.” Not till He comes as the Prince of peace to rule with a rod of iron will evil authority be overthrown. Not till He returns and with the touch of His power transforms the nature of men will the Golden Rule be intelligently applied. 25 W H \ I AM OPPOSED TO THE The Golden Rule set up on the basis of an unre- generate world would be as a building of gold on a foundation of shifting sand. The Inter church Movement says: “ Another great duty of the Church in this hour is the promotion of education * * * with Christian ideals.” The Church is not here to educate men in the wisdom, knowledge and science of the world, seeking to get into this teaching the flavor of Christian sentiment and ideals. The folly of any such proposition ought to be self-evident. How can the Church attempt a scheme of educa- tion that confronts it in textbook and teaching ap- paratus with the principal of evolution, of uniformi- tarianism, the logical denial of an original, personal causation? How can the Church teach evolution and be true to the declaration of Holy Scripture that the natural man, however much he may accept teaching on science and philosophy, cannot receive the things of the Spirit of God? The Christian teachers may go along smoothly enough with the outlines of general education; but, at what point in history can they introduce the Virgin Birth? At what point in biology can they set forth Lazarus, dead, with broken-down tissue, corrupt, putrefying and coming to life again? And when they are teaching the law of gravitation and control of the heavenly bodies, at what point can they introduce seriously the doctrine that Jesus 26 INTERCHURCH WORLD MOVEMENT ascended in His human body and passed across undetermined spaces to some particular location where distance from the earth is to be measured, not by miles, but years as light travels? Will they go on and teach that which in the curriculae of the schools is dead set against the fundamental doctrines of Christianity; and then skipping all doctrinal statements contrary to the standards and pronouncements of science, com- promise and give the scholars the ethical side of Christianity, that ethical side which is not worth a picayune unless Jesus Christ was Virgin born, rose from the dead in the body in which He died, as- cended to Heaven and now sits omnipotent God and immortal man on the throne of the universe? Education promoted by Christian ideals means compromise on the truth of God’s Word, and the presentation of a Christ shorn of every claim that should lead us to fall down and adore Him. The Interchurch Movement lays down as a funda- mental principle that, “The mission of the Church is to establish a civilization, Christian in spirit and passion throughout the world.” Such a commission was never given by the Son of God. Such a proposition is a denial of the commission. No warrant for it can be found in Holy Scripture. The Church is not here to establish civilization, but to save the souls of men individually, not merely from moral wreck and ruin in time, but disfellowship with and separation from God hereafter. 27 WHY I AM OPPOSED TO THE What avail will the best civilization be to any soul which goes out of this life into eternity without a passport signed and sealed in the sacrificial blood of Christ? To establish civilization means to take part with the world in its social and governmental business; but we are expressly told that in this age God is visiting the Gentiles to take out of them a people for His name; that this is not the age in which the Church is to be a co-partner with the world in any degree, but the age in which it is to be “taken out;” and that this age is to be characteristically the age of the “taking out.” The Apostle James exhorts Christians to be separ- ated from the world as a system. He says the friend- ship of the world is enmity with God, and that whosoever will be a friend of the world is an enemy of God. It is not the work of the Church to better the world, but to condemn it, even as Noah did in the building of the ark. Every Church true to its calling and mission should stand as a condemnation to the world that enthrones self and not God as its prime principle and directing force. The Church is not here to deceive men with the cry of peace when there is no peace. It is not here to sing the Lorelei song that the world is moving on to better and happier days. It is not here in the midst of industrial peril, political confusion, growing lawlessness and the agonizing endeavor of men to stabilize a society shivering more and more under its inability to hold together, the true Church is not 28 INTERCHURCH WORLD MOVEMENT here to lull men to sleep but to warn of a judgment to come that will sweep away the best civilization man can establish even with the aid of a professing Church subsidized by the world. The Church is here to keep open door, bidding men to enter through Christ who is the door, and flee out of a world hastening to its fixed and judicial doom. Salvation, not civilization — that is the work of the Church, and the only work given of God, sal- vation from this world as well as the woe to come, even as it is written: “Who gave himself for our sins, that he might deliver us from this present evil world (age).” The Church must either recognize this system, called the world, to be a splendid ship, moving steadily out of the region of storm and stress to the port of better days and the haven of unruffled peace, giving each day fresh opportunity to the decorators to paint and gild, to the sanitary engineers to cleanse and purify, each day affirming that it is better farther on; or, the Church must awake to the fact that the world, like the ship, is already on the breakers; that each succeeding and tempestuous wave is settling the groaning system deeper in the tide of lawlessness, anarchy, confusion, revolt, woe, misery and death; and that the real and practical work of the Church is to be like that of the men of the life-saving station, to put out in face of the storm and stress and get the imperilled cr ew and the seemingly dazed and stupefied company to the shore of safety. To talk of better days and a purified 29 WHY I AM OPPOSED TO THE world while the Son of God is away is to speak softly, teach falsely and treacherously deny all He and His apostles have so warningly said of the end of the age. The concrete meaning of Bible Christianity is a protest against the best as well as the worst in the natural man. It is a protest against the best char- acter he can live, a protest against the finest civiliza- tion he can establish. The Church is under bonds not to talk about civilization, but salvation, not salvation of society, but the individual; under bonds to proclaim a new life from a risen Christ as the only hope for man in this hour and warn the world in no uncertain terms that civilization in its most moral and exalted form will be swept away by the Son of God when He comes the second time; that He is coming, not to establish a civilization Christian in spirit, but a divine re- genesis of the world where self will be denied and God wholly enthroned in every human soul. In laying down, therefore, as a fundamental proposition that the work of the Church in this age is to establish a civilization and call it Christian, the Interchurch Movement is putting itself on record as against the commission of Christ and seeking to save that which God has judged, condemned and will overwhelmingly destroy. In a booklet, “ The New World Movement,” sent forth by The Northern Baptist Convention, I find this startling proposition: “ The mission of the Church is not merely to pluck a few brands from the burning, 30 INTERCHURCH WORLD MOVEMENT but to establish a civilization that is Christian in spirit and passion the world around” This, of course, is a repetition with amplification of the proposition already discussed concerning civilization, but it calls for a reiteration with ampli- fication of the protest against it. The Church is not here to mend society, estab- lish good government and make the world a decent, safe and comfortable place to live in. It is not the work of the Church to make the natural man a better man naturally to live in the world; nor to make the world a better world for the natural man to live in. The Church is here for one supreme purpose, and that is “ to pluck brands from the burning ” — not a few, but many. It is here to pluck the souls of men, lay hold of them, snatch them out and away from all danger of the burning; and they are to be plucked out individually, one at a time, and not otherwise. Whatever may be the beneficent results to society and government as by-products of the ex- pansion of a genuine Christianity, the initiative of Christian action and the one compelling motive must be to get the individual soul into an eternal life union with a once crucified, but now risen Christ and Lord. The Son of God, as already affirmed, has given emphasis to the value of individual life in saying a whole world gained will not compensate for a soul lost. 31 WHY I AM OPPOSED TO THE ‘ ‘ Christian’ ’ civilization ! The name is a misnomer. There is no such thing today on the face of the earth. There never has been and never will be a civiliza- tion Christ filled and owned of God as such. To call any nation today a Christian nation with the sky covered with war aeroplanes, the sea filled with battleships, the land echoing with the tread of armed men, public and private greed every- where and the professing Church in the midst dazed and smitten with the leprosy of apostasy, is to juggle with words and criminally hide the truth. Civilization at its best, however much it may have a head of gold, will always have its feet of clay. Civilization and Christianity are irrevocably apart. The disaster is that the professing Church as a whole and the Interchurch Movement in particular are deceiving men into the belief that civilization and genuine Christianity are identical. So long as we have teachers who hold that all men are the sons of God by nature, needing only to follow the example of an ethical Christ as He lived on earth, get vision of His moral and humanitarian ideals to develop that innate sonship; so long as we have teachers who hold God’s Christ to be nothing more than a social reformer appealing by the Golden Rule to the resident good in men, we shall continue to hear about the moral betterment of the world under the impulse of Christian (?) civilization and behold in- creasing surrender to its insidious appeals. 32 INTERCHURCH WORLD MOVEMENT The Committee on Survey of the Northern Baptist Convention recommends “ The development of educa- tion work in the Orient during the next five years.” The Apostle Paul, so far as the record goes, did not seek to establish schools either in Corinth or Ephesus. The one place from which he was repudiated and the city in which in spite of his fine sermon he never established a Church, was Athens, the univer- sity center of Greece, the national marrow of phil- osophy, learning and culture. In writing to the Corinthian Church Paul says some very marked things about the inability of human wisdom to know God, the failure of human culture to attain unto Him and the facility of edu- cated man to miss the truth about Him. Paul refused, capable as he was, to preach with enticing words of man’s wisdom. He was not willing faith should stand in nor in any way be supported by the wisdom of men. He determined not to know anything among them save Jesus Christ and Him crucified. Where he stood when he preached he could see Parnassus, Helicon and the Castalian spring. Every mount, promontory, vale and in- dented shore breathed out its classic story. He knew them all. The scholars of the gymnasium as well as the denizens of the purlieus gathered to hear him, and although he might have larded his speech with Grecian philosophy, quotations from the Greek poets, touches of classic grace and rounded periods; although he was a man of three languages, a cultured adept in the use of words, he spoke so 33 WHY I AM OPPOSED TO THE simply and in such short, abrupt syllables that many of his hearers in sneering accents said his speech was “contemptible;” that is, literally, “of no account.” Such a man with such a method could feel no call to establish schools, and while teaching the knowledge and science of the times endeavor to permeate them with Christian ideals. We have no record of schools established in Ephesus; but we do hear that his testimony made the trade in the silver souvenir images of the goddess Diana profitless and caused the whole province of Asia to turn away from the worship of idols. The Interchurch Movement tells us Christ was the Great Physician and believed part of His mission was to relieve human suffering. Perhaps no more radical blunder in teaching was ever made than this. The mission of Christ was not objectively to relieve human suffering. His miracles were purely incidental. They were wrought as credentials that He was what He claimed to be, the annointed and covenant King of the Jews. When John the Baptist sent to inquire whether He was the “Coming One,” or whether they should look for another, He at once reported Himself through His works, bidding the messengers go back and tell John what they saw: how at His Word the blind were receiving their sight, the lame walking, the deaf hearing, the lepers being cleansed and the dead raised to life again. 34 INTERCHURCH WORLD MOVEMENT All this John knew had been foretold of the true Messiah and such, therefore, He must be. The mission of the Christ was not to heal the physically sick, save only as He went to the core of their sickness, delivered them from the sin coinci- dent with it and the power of that Devil who had inspired the one and wrought the other. His mission was to die on the cross as a sacrifice for sin, by His death destroy him who had the power of death, that is the Devil, and become in resurrection the giver of new and eternal life which in itself should be the prophecy of a perfect and immortal body. The Inter church Movement is a concerted, purpose to support modernist theological seminaries. If these institutions are of the sort that of old time were to be found in the city of Jericho, where the faculty were unwilling to believe even though it was reported by Elisha that Elijah had ascended alive in his body into Heaven, and suggested to the now unnerved Elisha that he should go out and hunt among the rocks and no doubt would find the body of his master — fallen, bruised, mangled, dead — there; if the advanced teaching in the advanced seminaries of today balk at the idea that Jesus rose from the dead in the body in which He died, as- cended to Heaven as “this same Jesus,” and in that stigmatized, nail and spear-pierced body sits on the eternal throne; if these modern Jericho seminaries with their Jericho faculties and Jericho theology do not believe in a whole Bible; if these seminaries are becoming more and more the clearing houses of 35 WHY I AM OPPOSED TO THE infidelity — why should we give money to support them? It does not require a theological course to make us doubters, nor full-fledged unbelievers, we all have that gift and that drift by nature; we do not need higher, lower, criticism, positivism or rationalism of any sort to develop such conditions already in us. Not one dollar ought to be given to any school or any system of teaching which puts a question mark over against the Virgin Birth, draws a bar sinister over the name and fame of the Mother of Christ, sets Him as a bastard before men, an illegiti- mate who had no right to be born and robs Him of His resurrection triumph. Nay! with fervent heart we should pray God to render nugatory and destroy the evil efficiency of all such institutions and raise up colleges, religious institutions, that will make a whole Bible the basis of their curriculae, standing in unbroken faith for it as fully inspired of God. In the book entitled, “ The New World Movement of the Norther 7i Baptist Convention" I find this pertinent inquiry — “ How did the Church come to be?” The answer, viewed in the light of Holy Scripture, is not only unique, original, but altogether remark- able as a characteristic expression of the new world movement. Since it has received a safe conduct from the Northern Baptist Convention it must be the voicing of that body. We are told with great assurance that were the 36 INTERCHURCH WORLD MOVEMENT Church wiped out tomorrow a “new one would spring up.’’ And what think you is the principle by which it is to spring up, the principle by which it was caused to spring up at first? This is the principle! Listen to it: “Where there is a common interest people in- stantly group themselves together, something within the human breast says, ‘There is one of your own kind; get together;’ and the club, the fraternity, the Church springs into being.’’ According to this definition the Church is the natural, the logical outworking of the human, the social, the club and fraternity interest. The definition of the New Testament is alto- gether different. According to the New Testament, the Church exists, not because of the fraternal feeling in man, not because of social necessity, but because the risen Lord breathed on His disciples and bade them receive the Holy Ghost. On that resurrection night He imparted to them something which previ- ously did not reside in them and could not possibly have sprung up out of them. The suggestion about the Church being wiped out tomorrow is nearer truth than the writer of it evidently imagines. The Church at Laodicea is, according to the Word of God, the culmination of the professing Church in this age. The Lord Himself tells us so. He says He will eventually spew it out of His mouth. That 37 W H I / AM OPPOSED TO THE is, He will reject it as the expression of His mouth , the utterance of His Word, His witness on the earth even as He set aside the Jew. So far from springing up again the next chapter tells us the truly regenerated in the professing Church will be caught up to Heaven to meet the Lord and wait with Him there till the ordained moment when with Him they shall come forth as the true and adorned Bride, not to inaugurate Christian- ity afresh, but to set up the promised and covenant kingdom of Christ. But as the teachers of the Inter church Move- ment appear to be wholly blind to dispensational truth, look upon the Church as the kingdom of Christ and therefore a permanent factor in the earth, any statement that the regenerated Church is a temporary system and that Christianity is to give way to a kingdom coming from Heaven in the person of a coming King would be incomprehensible. Nevertheless, such is the truth and in itself is a ter- rific denial of the origination of the Church by any fraternal necessity in the breast of man. We are told in the same article that — “ Jesus gave the Jews an ideal far beyond the ‘ renewal of the kingdom of David’ ” It is, however, of record when the angel Gabriel announced to Mary she had been chosen of God to be the Mother of Jesus; that He should be miracu- lously conceived; that she should be mother and yet virgin he affirmed, not only that the Child should be called the Son of the Highest, but that 38 INTERCHURCH WORLD MOVEMENT God should give Him the throne of His father David; that He should reign over the house of Jacob forever, and that of His kingdom (the king- dom of His father David) there should be no end. It is also of the genealogical record by Luke that He was descended through His Mother from David and in the line of Nathan. Matthew is equally careful and precise to give us the descent of His adopted father Joseph from David in the line of Solomon. Matthew tells us Joseph was the son of Jacob. Luke assures us he was the son of Heli. He could not be the actual son of both. He was the actual son of Jacob. He was therefore the son-in-law of Heli. As he married Mary, then Mary was the daughter of Heli. As Heli was descended from David through Nathan and Nathan’s had become the reigning line, he was a prince of the House of David and lineal heir of David’s throne, and Mary, his daughter, a princess of that house. Joseph came down from David through Solo- mon, but at Coniah, because of the wickedness of that king, God swerved the line of inheritance from Solomon to Nathan. The descendants of Coniah were princes, had full and proper title as such, but no legal right to sit upon the throne. Joseph was a prince, therefore, but with no thronal rights. When he married Mary, however, his title passed over to her Son, the Son of a princess; thus was Jesus doubly prince of the House of David and heir of the throne — legally on the side of His adopted father in 39 WHY I AM OPPOSED TO THE that he was recipient of the title, and lineally on the side of His mother. If it were true He came to give the Jews a better ideal than the renewal of the kingdom of David and take the place which prophecy and covenant made sure for Him, then the Holy Ghost went to a lot of useless genealogical pains to prove Him to be the Son of David. If it be true He came to give the Jews a better ideal than a renewal of the kingdom of David, He Himself went to a lot of worthless and theatrical pains in sending His disciples to get the colt the foal of an ass and then riding into Jerusalem on the day we call Palm Sunday; and equally amazing that the people should obey the injunction of the prophet — shout aloud and cry till Jerusalem echoed and echoed again, “Hosanna to the Son of David: Blessed is he that cometh in the name of the Lord; Hosanna in the highest. Blessed is the king of Israel.” It is equally astounding that He should ride in this kingly and Davidic fashion into Jerusalem in the exact year, in the exact month, at the very hour, minute and second foretold by the angel Gabriel to Daniel in Babylon centuries before. It is further of record that He was put to death, not as a religious teacher, not because He expressed an ideal beyond that of a renewal of the kingdom of David, but as a political disturber, as one guilty of sedition against Rome and her authority. He had announced to His disciples that they should sit on twelve thrones and rule with Him over the twelve tribes of Israel. Pilate abjured Him to say whether 40 INTERCHURCH WORLD MOVEMENT He had made these claims, whether He considered Himself to be the King of the Jews. He answered Pilate in the strongest possible form of affirmation. He said Pilate had simply repeated the truth in asking Him the question. He was King and with such high and Heaven-given authority that neither He nor His disciples were called upon to maintain it as the kingdoms of mere earthly power, by the edge of the sword. So convinced was the Roman that Jesus claimed to be King that he caused His accus- ation to be written over His cross: “This is Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews. But the record in this matter goes still further: The Apostle Peter speaking to the multitude in Jerusalem announced to them that if they would but repent, accept this Jesus of Nazareth whom they had caused to be crucified, but who had risen from the dead and ascended to Heaven, God the Father would send Him back to be their triumphant King, give Him the throne of David and fulfill the prophecy of the second psalm that He would set His King upon His holy hill of Zion. But further still, when the first ecumenical council met in Jerusalem the Apostle James speak- ing by the Holy Spirit declared that Christianity was but a temporary proposition; that this was the age, not of universal conversion, but of election; that an elect Church should be called out and completed in this age; after that the Lord would return and build up the tabernacle (the House, the Throne) of David that had fallen down; in other words, bring in a re- newal of the actual and covenant kingdom of David. 41 WHY I AM OPPOSED TO THE But again, and wonderfully, it is of record that when in the fifth chapter of the Revelation we have a vision of our Lord Jesus Christ in Heaven with the Church which the fourth chapter shows He gathered there at the sound of His voice like a trumpet, He is seen as the Lamb that had been slain, now risen from the dead, and declared to be “The Lion of the tribe of Judah, the Root of David” (His kingly, Jewish and Davidic title). Thus in in Heaven He is declared to be Son of David, Root of David, therefore David’s Lord, David’s God and glorified King of the Jews. He is represented as taking a seven sealed book, the title deeds of His Davidic kingdom. When He does so the enthroned Church salutes Him, confesses redemption through His blood as the blood of the Lamb and bursts forth into a paean of praise that with Him she shall reign over the earth. He breaks the seals of the book and sends abroad those judgments that are to cleanse the earth of all things that offend and at their climax comes Himself in judgment as the Lion of the Tribe of Judah, as David’s Son, to set up a king- dom which shall find its center in Jerusalem and its circumference in the whole world. It is abundantly safe, therefore, and of inexorable logic to say this concept that Jesus came into the world to give the Jews an ideal far beyond the re- newal of the kingdom of David finds no other source nor authority than in the sentiment and imagination of those who invent it; it is simply an expression of the unscriptural idea that the Church is the kingdom of Christ, the higher evolution of the Davidic king- 42 INTERCHURCH WORLD MOVEMENT dom and the working hypothesis by which the Inter- church Movement has the audacity to go before the Church and the world and demand their millions. Somewhere in the Interchurch Movement literature I have read that Jesus was a “ propagandist ” a “ giver of great ideas.” Can you conceive of anything more levelling than that? He was neither propagandist nor merely a giver of ideas. He was something altogether more than either. Speech concerning Him must needs take off its shoes as on holy ground. Concept concerning Him is under bonds to wrap itself in the white, spotless robes of profoundest adoration. A propagandist sits in a swivel chair in his office, dictates circular letters, has his key men, his alert men and an army of waiting factotums. A giver of ideas may stand on a platform, some- times, actually, may be found in a pulpit, he not in- frequently occupies a soap box and harrangues. To speak of God’s Christ as a propagandist and a giver of ideas is, suddenly and ruthlessly to take the [nimbus and the crown from His head and jostle Him indifferently into the midst and on the level with a noisy crowd of little men, each man swelled and bloated with his own importance, attempting painfully to give birth to an idea, but an idea shriv- elled and small and utterly valueless in the clear rays of an unsympathetic sunlight. 43 WHY I AM OPPOSED TO THE The Christ of God was human. There need be no question about that, nor the realism of His humanity. He was compassionate, tender, an ex- quisitely constructed organ specifically “prepared” of God, played upon in all His octaves by every sigh heaved from a human breast, by every tear distilled from a heart of woe — so responsive that He absorbed both sighs and tears and became a Man of Sorrows and acquainted with grief, the grief, the sorrow and anguish of other lives. Like sunlight which reveals the unclean but takes no stain, He received sinners, ate with them and remained the Holy One of God, the sinless, perfect man; yet was He God manifest in the flesh, God enthroned in humanity. Propagandist and Giver of ideas! In His presence the words grow worse than cheap, they become vulgar and strained and very sordid. He did not come into the world to start a cru- sade and win a crowd. No! passing beyond the gate of Judah’s foreseen refusal to profit by the things that made for her peace in the day of her visitation by Him as her ordained King, He went forth to be a sacrifice both for Israel in their blindness and for that Gentile world that seemed to lie outside the covenant. Today, on the throne of the Highest, He is the Second Man, the Last Adam, the Giver of new and potential life to those who will own and receive Him as such. Mahomet, Buddah, Zoroaster and the rest of them were propagandists; Jesus our Lord is Son of God and God the Son, the Author and Giver of 44 INTERCHURCH WORLD MOVEMENT that life that is to be crowned at last with immor- tality. There are, beyond all doubt or question, large numbers of earnest and devout men in the Inter- church Movement, or, rather, who are supporting that movement; men who seriously believe the work of the Church is to convert the world by the preach- ing of the Gospel, reorganize it socially, permeate it governmentally with the spirit of Christ, the grace of His unselfishness and love, and to whom the “survey” reports of a world in sin and spiritual dark- ness profoundly and movingly appeal. No doubt there are many among them who believe in a whole Bible, but have not, as yet, awakened to the full mind of God as set forth in that inspired and infallible Word. They are, nevertheless, on a course which leads more and more away from the Lord, yields more and more to the sentiment and imagination of men and opens the door for the teaching and influence of those who do not accept an unexpurgated edition of the Scriptures, those who are steadily leading the professing Church to descend from the plane of the supernatural to the plane of the natural and merely ethical or humanitarian, bringing it down from the highlands of spiritual efficiency to the low and sin- burned heath of the flesh and the ways of the flesh, to the energy of man and the capitalization of his many inventions. Through this Interchurch Movement there is a growing danger of erecting an ecclesiastical autoc- racy which will compel the surrender of that individ- 45 WHY I AM OPPOSED TO THE ualism and independency without which the as- semblies of Christ cannot receive available contact with the power and guidance of the Holy Spirit. There never was time when the Church needed to be so free from the clogging and retroactive effect of machinery, so free from the aggressive influence of what is called with glib utterance the “get to- gether,” the “cooperative” magic that promises successful achievement. When analyzed these phrases mean the compacting of human energy and offer the most vicious principle that could be oper- ative in a Church of Christ; for, it ought to be ab- solutely clear that the power of a Church is in direct ratio to the denial of human energy and the complete recognition that God again and again hath chosen the weak things to confound the mighty, things which are not to bring to naught things that are. It is a fixed law in the divine economy that no flesh shall glory in the Lord’s presence. The Interchurch Movement is building a colossal machine. It is organizing a tentacular, octupus power that will, sooner or later, make it difficult for pastors and churches to act as they may deem themselves led, apart from this outside and growing dictation. Letter after letter that I receive from pastors has in it a protest against the movement, not be- cause they are lacking in desire to give themselves in full surrender to the Lord; not because they do not wish to lead their Church into the spirit of liberal giving and the widest proclamation of the Gospel in mission fields till throughout the earth every 46 INTERCHURCH WORLD MOVEMENT soul shall have heard of the saving power of a risen Lord, but because there is a persistent consciousness that its methods and doctrine are not according to the mind of God; that it is dishonoring to the head- ship of Christ and a limitation of the Holy Spirit, a denial that He comes and goes where He listeth and an effort to confine Him to the predetermined plans of men. There is a widespread feeling that this movement does not exalt the authority of Holy Scripture, making it the determining standard of action, and that there is in it a subtle breaking down of the old faith once for all delivered to the saints; along with the protests in these letters is a feeling that in keeping out of the movement they may be overrun by it as by a juggernaut and crushed as to standing, position and influence. I am satisfied that five years of this Interchurch Movement, if compactly persisted in, will succeed in discounting the Bible as the infallible Word of God, will bring Protestantism together, not on the basis of a sacrificial, but an ethical, Christ, will shut out the vision of Him as risen Lord, risen in the body in which He died, make a pariah of the overwhelm- ing Scripture doctrine of the Second Coming, turn the minds of men away from the hereafter, the wonders of Heaven, the woes of Hell and bring the Church to the function of a mere society for com- petitive morality, a rival factor with socialistic clubs and systems in the endeavor to exalt time, forget eternity and make the life that now is the worth-while life and this world as the only arena for the unfolding of the soul. 47 WHY I AM OPPOSED TO THE This Interchurch Movement, however much it may be disguised, however much it may use the nomenclature of the old faith, however much it may repeat the name of Christ and call to service and contribution in His name, is a well-concealed device of Satan to bring in the apostasy, turn the Church away from its commission to save men for eternity, and softly, speciously, spread before the world a system of righteousness that never was woven on the loom of the cross, a righteousness that has not a single stain of sacrificial blood in all its filaments. It is a scheme of Satan (transformed as an angel of light) to bring into the Church and proclaim from its pulpits his ministry of a bloodless righteous- ness; to install in the Church the offering of Cain with all its fruit, flowers and fluttering birds, shutting out of view Abel’s lamb, its streaming blood and fire of acceptance from an approving God; in short, the new movement repudiates the old theology as the theology of the shambles, rejects with bitterness the doctrine of vicarious sacrifice on the part of Christ, lowers Him to the level of an extraordinarily good man, a propagandist, a giver of ideas with socialistic tendencies; it is old Socianianism come in company with Cain to town again, exhales the breath and expands the atnosphere of unregenerate Unitarian- ism, leading the natural man to rest with self- satisfied comfort in his own righteousness and turn his back on the righteousness of God. I protest against this Inter church Movement, accelerated as it will be by mass, by combination might, by engineered enthusiasm and almost rioting 48 INTERCHURCH WORLD MOVEMENT in its formidable bulk of systematically-gathered millions, as one of the signs of the times and as characteristic fulfillment of Paul’s prophecy that the professing Church would not endure sound doctrine; that teachers who delighted to tickle the ear with pleasing sensations should turn them from the truth and they should be turned to the fables and imaginations of men. I counsel all preachers who know the truth, who believe in a whole Bible and the faith once for all delivered to the saints, who know the Coming of our Lord to be, not a fiction, but a blessed fact, who hold it as an imminent hope and walk in the light of it — to stand apart from this Interchurch World Movement, this movement that makes no provision for a returning Lord, has no hope, nor expectation, nor desire that He will return and in its exaltation of an ethical Christ almost forgets to speak of His cross and even when it does fails to see the blood shed there was the blood of sacrifice, has no warning vision of the gathering judgments that are to break on a sleeping world, in its exploita- tion of the life that now is and the crowding needs of the present hour has little room to speak of that which is to come, and in its determination to save society in bulk and make a new world according to the architecture of man, turns from the individual soul standing on the edge of eternity without Christ, having no hope and without God in the world. I counsel all who would be faithful to the truth in this crucial hour to redouble their efforts to 49 WHY I AM OPPOSED TO THE preach the Gospel of a crucified and risen Christ, lead the Church over whom God may have ap- pointed them to greater liberality, to a more pro- found apprehension and realization of the respon- sibility of money stewardship and to a more de- termined and systematic missionary effort — but under no circumstance to accept favors from nor recognize the Movement as an instrument or channel for their service. Summary The Interchurch Movement is a Post-millennial drive. It confounds the kingdom of Christ with the Church of Christ. It confounds the Gospel of grace with the Gospel of the kingdom. It is a socialistic, educational and ethical cam- paign. It is organized for money with greater detail than for power from God. It dictates budgets for churches and arranges worldly methods to raise them. It seeks to save society rather than “pluck a few brands from the burning.” It reverses the whole commission and charter of Christ. It talks more about the Christ who lived on earth than the Christ who died on the cross. It preaches regeneration, but means regener- ation of society. 50 INTERCHURCH WORLD MOVEMENT It speaks of the sacrifice of Christ, but means his moral, and not his penal, sacrifice. It tells us Christ poured out His soul into the soul of others. By that it means He poured His enthusiasm into His disciples, but it says nothing about the pouring out of His soul unto death to save others. It preaches a social, rather than a personal, Gospel. It seeks to save society, rather than the in- dividual. It makes civilization and not salvation the supreme purpose of the Church. It talks of the teachings, ideals and principles of Christ and not of the atoning blood of Christ. It sets up Christ in life as an exemplar of right- eousness, rather than through death the righteous- ness of God unto all and upon all them that believe. It talks more of citizenship in America than citizenship in Heaven. It is occupied with the life that now is, and not so much with the life that is to come. It says little of Heaven and appears to have for- gotten there is a Hell. It teaches all men are sons of God. It stands for the Fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of man. It makes the Golden Rule and not a returning Christ the remedy for the world’s unrest. It seeks to make the world a better world in contradiction to the Son of God who says it is a doomed world and on the way as a system from bad to worse. 51 WHY I AM OPPOSED TO THE It denies the Second Coming of Christ as the Blessed Hope of the Church. It exhorts the Church to be taken up with com- munity interests while the Son of God exhorts the Church to come out and be separate from the community. It has nothing to say about forgiveness of sins through redemption by blood. It does not warn about the second death and the certainty of eternal punishment. It opens the door of opportunity for Satan (as an angel of light) to introduce into the Church his ministry of a bloodless righteousness. It sometimes uses evangelical language, but in teaching denies it. It fills the Church with the machinery of man and not the energy of God. It seeks to build a kingdom for Christ to which it never expects Him visibly and personally to come. It supports theological seminaries that are not faithful to the Word, undermine the authority of Scripture and graduate men who repudiate a whole Bible. It is a menace to the authority of Holy Scripture, the guidance of the Holy Spirit and the upbuilding of a spiritual Church. It is organizing an ecclesiastical autocracy, a compelling spirit of dictatorship that will override pastoral liberty and destroy assembly independence. It is one of the foretold signs of the Great Apos- tasy, the end of the age, the Coming of Christ, His repudiation of the professing Church and a warning 52 INTERCHURCH WORLD MOVEMENT to all who know the truth to refuse it fellowship, stand apart from it, give it no support, but openly, publicly and unfailingly as occasion may occur and responsibility demand, to testify against it as of man and not of God. It is Modern Theology in the disguise of evangeli- cal and missionary appeal. It has the hands of Esau, but the unchanged voice of Jacob. The preacher who professes to be a premillenarian and yet supports it is either grossly ignorant of the logic of his profession or lacks the courage of his con- victions. 53