John Wesley is Disappointed

In 1756, John Wesley delivered an address to a gathering of clergy. During the address, he encouraged the ministers to cultivate the following: a disposition to glorify God and to save souls, a knowledge of Scripture, a good understanding, a clear apprehension, a sound judgment, a capacity of reasoning with some closeness, and an understanding of logic, mathematics, metaphysics, natural theology, and the ideas of important figures in the history of philosophy.

If Wesley were around today, he would surely be disillusioned at many of the conservative Christians he encountered:

"Hi Mr Wesley! Good to meet you. Remember, if it feels right in your heart, it's true! Have a nice day now. That long hair of yours is very cool."

"Hi John! Jesus appeared to me in my kitchen the other day, and he gave me some useful guidelines. He said my sermons should be more entertaining and less theological, and he gave me some tips for fundraising. If you use plastic buckets rather than wooden plates, you collect more money at each service! Way to go. Anyway, it will help us to pay for the walnut panelling and the new music center in my study. Must run; I have an interview on Godtube this afternoon with Howard-Browne: 'Five Ways to a Better and More Prosperous You'. Keep smiling, John."

Liberal Christianity

I would never model my own beliefs on the theology of H. Richard Niebuhr, but he was absolutely spot on in his summing up of liberal Christianity:

"A God without wrath brought men without sin into a kingdom without judgment through the ministrations of a Christ without a cross".

Here is a picture of a liberal Christian. The name of this friendly individual is John Shelby Spong (he is a retired Episcopal Bishop). In the interests of communicating his liberal "Christianity" effectively to the modern world, Spong rejects the following elements of the Christian tradition: theism, the Incarnation, the Virgin Birth, the biblical miracles, the objective character of the atonement, the resurrection of Christ, and intercessory prayer.

Perhaps we can call Spong's religious package "homeopathic Christianity", because the Christian content has been so diluted that you wonder whether the watery medicine is worth anything at all...

Two Reviews by DeYoung

Kevin DeYoung is senior pastor at University Reformed Church in East Lansing, Michigan. He has a blog at the Gospel Coalition.

I don't always agree with DeYoung, but he writes clearly and honestly and he is an excellent reviewer of books. Here are two of his book reviews (they are Acrobat/PDF documents):

Review of Rob Bell's Love Wins: a Book About Heaven, Hell, and the Fate of Every Person Who Ever Lived.

Review of Brian McLaren's A New Kind of Christianity: Ten Questions That Are Transforming the Faith.

Spurgeon and the Baptists

In the late nineteenth century, the celebrated pastor and preacher C.H. Spurgeon (1834-1892) was involved in the so-called Down Grade Controversy, in which he and a few like-minded Christians protested against the erosion of evangelical orthodoxy among British Baptists. Spurgeon opposed the leaders of the Baptist Union, and eventually he felt obliged to withdraw from the Union (in October 1887). A few months later, the Union passed a vote of censure against Spurgeon.

Some might see the whole controversy as water under the bridge, something not worth studying or even discussing. But similar things are happening today within Christian evangelicalism and on its borders.

During the controversy, Spurgeon summed up the views of his opponents as follows:

1. Denial of the verbal inspiration (that is, inerrancy) of Scripture.

2. Denial of eternal punishment and the affirmation of universalism.

3. Denial of the Trinity, mainly in terms of the rejection of the personality of the Holy Spirit.

4. A tendency to undermine the deity of Christ and original sin.

5. Denial that Christ's atonement has a substitutionary and propitiatory character.

6. Denial of the historicity of the Genesis creation account in favor of evolution.

7. The unhealthy influence of Higher Criticism on Biblical scholarship, particularly as it relates to the Old Testament.

Many of these issues are still actively debated today.

Here (in the form of an Acrobat/PDF document) is an interesting account of the Down Grade Controversy by Dennis M. Swanson.