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The Christian Citizen

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May

Keep Yourselves from Idols

By

Cornelius Van Til

ARTICLE

A Charge to graduates — and to you.

Little, children, it is the last time: and as ye have heard that antichrist shall come, even now are there many antichrists; whereby we know that it is the last time" (I John 2:18) . It was with these and similar words that the last of the apostles wrote to the early followers of Jesus the Christ.

"And we have seen and do testify that the Father sent the Son to be the Savior of the world. Whosoever shall confess that Jesus is the Son of God, God dwelleth in him, and he in God” (I John 4:14).

How simple then the task that now awaits you who are called to be God’s servants. It is the message of God's saving love in Jesus Christ with which you must go into the world. And the whole world lieth in wickedness. As for his own, to whom Jesus came, they received him not. "But as many as received him, to them gave he power to become the sons of God, even to them that believe on his name: which were born, not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God" (John 1:11-12).

By grace you are saved. You were not wiser than other men. It is not you that have chosen Christ to be your Savior; it is Christ the Savior who has chosen you to be his witnesses. It is not you who by depth psychology have discovered the true need of man; it is Christ who through his servant John tells you that the whole world lieth in wickedness. It is not you — when you speak of homo sapiens, of 'organization' man or of 'irrational' man — who understand the nature of man. It is Christ who alone knows what is in the heart of man. It is he who through Paul tells you that men walk "in the vanity of their mind, having the understanding darkened, being alienated from the life of God, through the ignorance that is in them, because of the blindness of their heart" (Ephesians 4:17-18). It is the Son of God that "hath given us an understanding, that we may know him that is true, and we are in him that is true, even in his son Jesus Christ. This is the true God and eternal life. Little children, keep yourselves from idols" (I John 5:20,21).

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How Hard It Will Be

How difficult it will be to keep yourselves from idols! How hard it will be to discern the spirit of antichrist. If it were possible Satan would deceive the very elect of God. The antichrist appears as an angel of light. He enthrones himself in the place of Christ. He uses the words of Christ. He speaks even of the cross of Christ as that by means of which men must be saved. He speaks of the resurrection of Christ as the victory by which men have been and are being saved. He speaks of the kingdom of God in which all sin and unrighteousness shall be done away and men shall forever praise the Christ.

How often in the past has the church failed to discern the spirit of antichrist and therefore how often has it failed to keep itself from idols. How often the church has yielded to the idea that Christ has not come into the world, that he has not finished his work of redemption for his own in the world, but that he is identical with the ideals of sinful men as they would reform themselves and thus escape whatever punishment the gods may have for them.

It was thus in Luther's time. A great amalgamation had taken place. With pomp and circumstance the church of Rome was seemingly preaching the Christ of the Scriptures, but was in reality mostly preaching a Christ of its own construction. In Luther's time the church refused to stand on the gospel which Paul preached. Said that apostle: "For I delivered unto you first of all that which I also received, how that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures…” (I Corinthians 15:3). It was this gospel of the finished work of Christ for the salvation of men that the official church had toned down till little was to be found of it in its teaching.

Then Luther nailed his 95 theses to the door of the castle church in Wittenberg. Then Calvin came and, "Discern the spirits and proclaim the Christ of God so long as your Maker and Redeemer gives you breath.” following Paul, urged men to turn away from idols, both physical and spiritual. All is idolatry that springs from the heart of the natural man, and a gospel that seeks for the cooperation of the natural man with the grace of God is not the true gospel at all, he insisted. Then did the churches prosper and "the Lord added daily such as should be saved." A great era of creed-making followed, finding its climax in the Westminster Confession of Faith, the Larger and the Shorter Catechisms.

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The Broadening Church

In this country too the church made profession of its faith in the grace of God, but it was not to be for long. Soon the amalgamation process that had proved fatal to the spread of the gospel in the pre-Reformation church was to start anew, and with faster speed in the very churches of the Reformation. Dr. Lefferts A. Loetscher wrote of the broadening church, referring primarily to the Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A., but what he said applies pretty much to the decline of the Protestant church in general.

The broadening church has now become so broad that its leadership wants to have it adopt a new confession. In the Confession of 1967 proposed for the United Presbyterian Church a greater amalgamation between belief and unbelief speaks forth than the Roman Catholic. Church has ever offered.

Paul asked the church at Corinth to stand on the gospel of the death and resurrection of Christ "according to the Scriptures." The church is now no longer to stand on this. Oh yes, it must still use these words. The Introduction tells us that "the Confession is intended to be Biblical throughout” (Blue Book of the 177th General Assembly, p. 29). The church must continue to speak much of Scripture. It must speak of Scripture as the witness, even as the "normative witness” to the Christ.

But who is the Christ of this new Confession to which the Scripture is said to bear witness? It is not the self-testifying Christ. That could not be. For it is assumed that if Christ is really incarnate in this world, then he must be thought of as participating in all the relativity of this world.

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The Ancient Creeds

The new Confession, moreover, seems to speak with great respect. of the creeds of the past. "In the ancient church," we are told, “salvation needed creedal definition in terms of the deity of the Redeemer. Later, the work of the Redeemer came to the fore, then the means of redemption” (Blue Book, p. 27). Do the 1960’s no longer need a creedal statement on the deity of the Redeemer? Yes, we are told in effect, this decade needs this as information about what the church fathers used to believe and about what men in the first century used to think about Christ.

The church today, in genuine respect for the forefathers, carefully preserves the memory of what they thought about what men, living still earlier, thought about Christ. Not only the Westminster Confession, but other, and earlier confessions are to be included in a "Book of Confessions.” All these creeds are to "stand in their original form and in historical sequence.” A new Smithsonian Institute of Creeds will be erected, so that we and our children's children can see what our fathers actually believed about Christ.

What heroism it was for Charles Lindberg to venture across the waters of the broad Atlantic. What great faith in that feeble instrument of flight that carried him across the waters. But how much greater faith it was when our fathers ventured to lay out in neat conceptual arrangements the various relations within the three persons of the one God; or the relation of the divine and human natures of Christ. How did they dare thus to enter upon that which is inherently unknowable to man by means of concepts they themselves had to produce as finite and fallible men?

Unbelievable as it is to us today, they did so because they thought they had in the Scripture the very words of God. They "equated the Biblical canon directly with the Word of God” (Blue Book, p. 29). But now, those who introduce the new Confession argue, we are set free from the “doctrine of inerrancy which placed the older Reformed theology at odds with advances in historical and scientific studies" (Ibid., p. 29).

The Westminster Confession “derives from an age of scholastic theology, of preoccupation with authority, and law, of churchly and political absolutism,” it is stated (p. 20). We are free from all this. "The Confession of 1967 is not designed to define the faith of Presbyterians. The central elements of the faith of Presbyterians are all shared as well by other Christians” (p. 29). The Confession must set the pace in leading all Christians in taking advantage "of the remarkable advances in the doctrine of revelation in the twentieth century” (Ibid., p. 42).

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The New Man

This modern advance in "the doctrine of revelation" — on what does it rest? It rests on the new doctrine of man. Let Dr. James I. McCord, the President of Princeton Seminary, tell you in his own words: "Actually, the Reformers could not ask, 'What is man?' They did not have the tools and background to raise this question. They could only ask, 'What is man as sinner?' But the nineteenth century produced a revolution in biology with Darwin and his discoveries, to be followed by a revolution in the social sciences and psychology" (Theology Today, Vol. XVII, 3, p. 294).

Unable to ask the question, ‘What is man?' the Reformers were bound to have a mistaken view of Christ as man in relation to Christ as God. They could do nothing better than simply repeat the creed of Chalcedon with respect to the relation of the two natures of Christ to one another. “But with the coming of the nineteenth century there were new factors unknown to the Chalcedonians. One was the new critical philosophy of Kant, with its emphasis on the subjective limitations of human knowledge.” Another was the "replacement of the old ontological categories with psychological categories, while a third was a new understanding and mastery of historical tools. Basically, therefore, the Christological question remains undealt with in our time in the terms that are now available to us” (Ibid., p. 298).

In more pointed form Dr. George S. Hendry, also of Princeton Seminary, tells us about the new view of man that underlies the new view of revelation. Modern philosophy, he argues, has shown us, chiefly through Kant, that man is spirit. And spirit is free. God too is spirit. God too is free.

At one stroke this insight relieves us, says Dr. Hendry, of such difficulties as the Westminster divines had in relating the all-inclusive plan of God to the responsibility of man. The whole relation between God and man is now for the first time seen to be exhaustively personal. Science is now seen to deal with the world of impersonal relations, and religion speaks of that area where man stands face to face with God.

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The New Christ

It is thus that a new theology — a theology in which man is no longer a creature, no longer a sinner, a theology in which man first tells himself who he is — then makes a Christ in man's image. Having made a Christ in the image of man, the proposed Confession now asks all men everywhere to bow to this Christ. The new creed thinks of the apostles as making a Christ in their image.

If the Reformers, if the writers of the Westminster Confession, could not even ask the question, 'What is man?’ then they could not but find wrong answers for the question, What is Christ? Surely, then, those twelve innocent fishermen of Galilee, far more ignorant of Immanuel Kant, cannot claim to offer a Christ that is better than our own! Away then with Paul’s Christ who died according to the Scriptures and who rose according to the Scriptures. Let us worship the Christ that we ourselves have made and are remolding every day.

How sad, how inexpressibly sad this spectacle! The church of the Reformation is not merely returning to Rome. If it were only that! But it is far worse than that. If the Roman church sought to amalgamate the teaching of the ancient Greeks, and notably that of Aristotle, with the truth of God as it is in Christ, there might be said to be some excuse for it. It had not yet been clearly pointed out that Greek philosophy is an apostate philosophy, a philosophy by means of which the natural man sought to suppress the truth about himself as a sinner in need of grace.

There is no excuse for the modern Protestant church. The Reformers themselves and many a son of the Reformers have clearly shown that if men are to be saved from sin they must allow the Great Physician to diagnose their sickness and give them healing. He alone knows the heart of man.

Your whole training has centered about the Christ who died and rose according to the Scriptures. The whole world lieth in wickedness and is without hope unless you and many others with you bring this Christ to men. The spirit of antichrist is now welcomed into much of the Protestant church by those who ought to be the first to banish it. No longer will many preach the Christ who died for men to set them free from the wrath to come. No longer will they preach Christ as risen from the dead.

But discern ye the spirits and proclaim the Christ of God “according to the Scriptures" so long as your Maker and Redeemer gives you breath. "Little children, keep yourselves from idols.”

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Notes

Cornelius Van Til

Cornelius Van Til (1895-1987) served as Professor of Apologetics at Westminster Seminary until 1975. His work in presuppositional apologetics remains a hallmark of our institution.

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