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Today's New Theology and the Bible
BD41-01© Berean Memorial Church of Irving, Texas, Inc. (1971)
We began way back with the philosophers—Kant who denied the
absolutes of Scripture, and Hegel who denied that we could come to any
conclusions but that rather everything was relative in our thinking. These men set the scene for the modern
thought. Their concepts found expression
in the teachings of Darwin, Marx, Freud, and Dewey, as well as many others.
Rationalism
The concepts of rationalism which were applied to the Bible that brought about the question and the doubt that we could know
anything about what God thinks finally brought man to a position where he just didn’t know anything. Everything became pointless
and profitless to pursue. It was Kierkegaard who brought this concept of frustration and nothingness
into theology. The theology of existentialism found its final expression in the writings of Karl Barth in the
beginning of the 20th century. What I want to do this morning is to bring you right down to our current scene
today as to what the people who move in college circles, the people who move in various
fields of life, educated people, the news media, the doctrines, the influences,
the opinions which they have conveyed to people in one way or another,
so that you will be right up to date now on the scene as it exists this morning.
Liberalism
Liberalism’s attempt to establish biblical authority in spiritual matters was the effort that Karl Barth brought about after
liberalism realized that it had no authority with people. Barth attempted to go back to the Bible. However, he still
viewed the Bible from the frame of reference of the higher critics—that it was a humanly produced book filled
with errors and therefore in itself and what it said was not a reliable book. The
attempt however has proceeded to abandon both biblical and natural theology, and to create what is called a
“new theology.” That’s the scene in which we move today—the new theology.
Doctrines of Demons
Now I think you will recognize, and I must remind you constantly, that all of this that we have been talking about is what
the Bible refers to as Satan’s doctrine of demons. It simply comes in one form or another. Liberalism is as
much Satan’s viewpoint today as it ever was. It is the natural product of the old sin nature controlled mentality. The
rejecters of the Bible as God’s Word, no matter how intellectual they are, had
nothing new to offer today concerning spiritual understanding.
Now that’s what all these men attempted to do. From Kant and Hagel right on down the line
they were all going to give us greater spiritual understanding. Instead they led people into increasingly
greater darkness. These men, have no doubt about it, have nothing for us. It
is a false hope to look to liberal theologians for spiritual guidance. As
a matter of fact, it is comparatively pointless except as an academic exercise to even study their writings. It
is pointless to read these writings with the hope that you are going to learn something about spiritual things. The
only value that it certainly has is to show you how dumb intellectual men can be—just how really
dumb men with high IQs can be. To read their writings, when
you understand the Word of God and what the Bible teaches, will show
you in stark contrast how pathetic is the product of these men once they cut
themselves loose and say that the Bible has not spoken to us from God. What
the Bible says is not absolute truth. When the Bible has spoken, everything else is settled. They are big men. They
have great intellects. They have great reputations, but I want to make it very pointed and clear and get across to you, especially you
college kids, lest you be inadvertently enamored with the suaveness and the sophistication and the intellectual aura that resides in these men. This
is why I have said many times to you college students: If you attend a secular university, you must understand that the moment you walk onto
that campus, you have walked onto the most ignorant place on the face of
God’s earth relative to spiritual things. If you do not walk onto a secular campus with that understanding, you may get
yourself hurt for all eternity because these men have demonstrated now from the 18th century to the 19th
century and to the 20th century that they have absolutely nothing to offer. It is pathetic when you read their writings and match
them up to the brilliant refreshing qualities to be found in the Word of God, and a believer who accepts it as such.
Satan’s main goal, as ever, is to draw people together in order to promote his cause. These men
are part of Satan’s system to draw people together in some way to serve his cause. The drawing is
increasingly going on in our day. Please remember that Satan will belittle God’s point of view. He will belittle
the propositions of God’s truth. He will tolerate anything about himself, and you may not have understood this—we’re going to
talk about this a little more this evening: He will tolerate any
expose’ of himself providing he can preserve one thing, and
that is, in our day, the drawing together of people around an emotional base. This
is what Satan is doing in the tongues movement today. The tongues movement
today is undoubtedly his trump card if he ever had one. If you keep your eyes open, you will be
fascinated by how much Satan will tolerate against himself providing he can
preserve an emotional core of activity in people to draw them together. That’s
why the great denominations who listen to Kant and Hagel and Kierkegaard and Karl Barth and right down the
line into darkness, this is why these groups are now drawing together. They’re
being drawn together around an emotional enthusiasm for, of all things, doctrines of demons.
Alright, let’s look at where the liberal view has brought us today. For 150 years,
rationalism has been fermenting its viewpoint and its ideas, and yet has been attempting to
make biblical Christianity more plausible and more palatable to the modern mind
which evolved out of the thinking of Kant and Hagel. Once people accepted their philosopher’s
point of view—no absolutes—thinking in terms of relativity, the modern mind was
born. Today you live with the thoroughly modern man as your neighbor. This is his way of thinking.
Friedrich Schleiermacher
Now, for 150 years they have been trying to make Christianity acceptable and palatable to this kind of modern mind. The
man who put all this together in a very outstanding way was Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768-1834). Schleiermacher
proceeded to create a theistic influence upon rationalistic thought. So, he came up with all of these concepts concerning how we think about the
Bible. When he said, “What is religion all about?” he concluded it’s man’s sense
of ultimate dependence. So, he interpreted all the doctrines accordingly. He kept the vocabulary of biblical
Christianity, but he changed all the meanings. So, he rejected, to begin with, the claim of the Bible of being a
revelation of divine propositions of truth from God. They view the Bible simply as a record of
religious experience. They have reduced what Christianity is all about to a sense of absolute dependence, but
absolute dependence on what is not known, and there are no bases of truth to depend upon.
They have reinterpreted all of Bible doctrine in terms of this dependence concept. The attributes
of God are expressed in terms of our absolute dependence on him. Sin is said not to be doing evil, but it is
rather man’s nature, wanting to be free, and instead it finds itself dependent. Salvation is not
regeneration through faith in Christ on the cross, but it is restoration to your
sense of absolute dependence on God, and usually a god who doesn’t exist.
Now Jesus Christ’s work of redemption—how does the liberal
look at that when he speaks about Christ’s redemption? Well, he means incorporating people into the
sense of dependence on God that Jesus Christ demonstrated. That’s how people are saved. When you capture
in your spirit the sense of dependence that Jesus had, then you are born again. These are all our terms, as fundamentalists, with
new meanings. But they don’t view Christ in the sense of one bearing our sins.
Ludwig Feuerbach
Another man who followed him was Ludwig Feuerbach (1804-1872). Feuerbach was an atheist. He was a student
of Hagel and he set out to replace the Bible concept of God. In its
place he wanted to put nature as man’s god. He went from Schleiermacher’s idea that religion is man’s sense
of dependence, and he said that what man depends upon is nature. The idea that there should be a divine being
is really a creation of man’s own reasoning. Man projects his
own nature and his own characteristics, and he creates
a super being out there, and he calls him God, Feuerbach says. Feuerbach
said there’s no God out there. There’s no person out there. This is something
that man by his reason looks at himself and he makes himself into a super being and puts that
being out there and says, “That’s God.” Now
this idea, of course, is in conflict with the Bible’s view of
God—a god who is separate from nature and sovereign over it.
Now it is neo-orthodoxy and its leader, Karl Barth, who took
the concepts of Schleiermacher and Feuerbach and incorporated them into
what is called today neo-orthodox theology. This is the existential expression of what Kierkegaard
taught—man’s hopelessness, purposelessness. You just leap out
by faith that there must be something better out there to achieve, but it’s all irrational and it’s all meaningless.
Bishop John Robinson
Now these modern views were epitomized in a writing by a bishop of the Church of England. In
1963 he wrote a book that was a bombshell in the theological world. He didn’t intend it to be. He compared himself to Martin Luther and
said, “I just wanted to write a book to bring up a few things for discussion.” No sooner did the
book hit the public than it was consumed by the man in the street because it was a very readable
book. It was putting in language that the man on the street could understand what the philosophers and the theologians
had been talking about since the beginning of the 20th century. His name was Bishop John A. T. Robinson and he
wrote the book called Honest to God. The book topped one million in sales and it represents the current
viewpoint of society toward the Bible.
Honest
to God
This view he likes to present as the new reformation—that it’s
a new reformation with a completely opposite attitude toward the Bible
that the old reformation of Martin Luther and John Calvin had. This
book calls modern man to start being honest about God—to start admitting the truth about God and
about the Bible. In the view of Bishop Robinson the truth is that there is no God out there and that the Bible is not
His Book. It is the thinking which is represented by Bishop Robinson that led a few years ago to the movement
that was described as “God is dead.” The battle cry of that movement was, “God is dead and Jesus
Christ is His Son.” It was trying to … reduce to what Bishop Robinson says is being honest about God and about the
Bible—the conditions as to how these things actually are, how they actually exist, and what we
actually know. His book is in effect an atheistic volume. He told a friend that he found that he had no trouble taking any number
of copies of his book into East Germany, and they are usually very adamant about not permitting religious
literature to enter East Germany. But he said, “I had no trouble whatsoever taking any number of
copies I wanted of my book Honest to God into East Germany,” because when the East Germans read it
they thought it was atheistic propaganda. So, they were glad to let it in (just to give you some idea of what’s in
the book, in case you don’t want to read it).
Well the book popularized the modern revolt against biblical Christianity and clarified what is called the new theology. It
calls for secular Christianity, a post-Christian faith, based on existentialism and universalism. What
Robinson did was crystalized the thinking of Schleiermacher and Feuerbach in an up to date manner for us
today. He rejects and he ridicules the concept of God, of a superpower person out there above and beyond the universe.
Just to quote him, in one place in his book, he says, “That God (that is, the God that the Bible presents) must die if man is to
live.” In another place he said about God, “The God of the Bible is intellectually superfluous, emotionally dispensable,
and morally intolerable.”
So, you see the basis for the “God is dead” movement. They mean that the God of the Bible is no
longer a functioning concept for 20th century modern man—that that
is a concept which must go, and as long as we keep hanging on, Bishop
Robinson says, to the view that the Bible gives of a God who is a super
omnipotent person out there above and beyond this world to whom we as creatures
must account, man will never be free and man will never find fulfillment. Now
this, dear friends, is where the thinking of the 18th century philosophers, the Hagels and the Kants and then
down through the 19th century of the Kierkegaards and its expression
through the Darwins and the Deweys and the Freuds and so on, and where we have
come through Karl Barth and where we are today. This is why I say there is no enlightenment in what these men have to
say. They often touch upon problems indeed, but (concerning) our real problems that we face both as
Christians and as a society, they have no solutions for them because they deny the
very foundation of all solutions in the Word of God.
So, this concept of God is one that he says must replace the old concept of the Bible. He says the
world has come of age so it has to reject the idea of a God who is hovering
over the world, and he wants people to start living (he says) as if there was
no god out there. Now that’s the thesis of this book. “People,
start living as if there was no God out there, then you will find your real self and your real fulfillment.”
Now this is rather shocking. You and I, by and large, move in a very restricted and protected
world. It’s hard for us to think that there are people who say things like this and believe it and build
their lives upon it. But I’ll guarantee you that if you were to walk on the campus of any secular university in this
country, you would find that the overwhelming number of students believe exactly
what Bishop Robinson presents in his book. This is their point of view. These are the
people who are going to lead this nation and who are going to be influential upon our lifestyle in the years to come.
Love
This concept of God that he has is one of personal relationship with people. He says
one’s response to all there is as if it were personal is what he calls god. It’s
pantheism in effect. God is everything that you come into contact with. Your personal
attitude of response is the guiding god feature of man’s existence. To believe in
this god of Robinson means to give yourself to the uttermost to some object in love. This
is a key word. I want you to get this. In the teachings of the modern
honest-to-god existentialist expression of theology today, the key word
is “love.” What is god? God is giving yourself to the uttermost in love. In
other words, love is deified and it is the final ground and resting place of our being. Doctrine thereby
becomes simply statements to be interpreted by love. A statement is not theological,
the bishop says, because it says something about a being called “God,” that we would
call Bible doctrine exposition. A statement is theological, he says, because it says that the final truth
and reality is love. Anything that says that love is the last and final and ultimate thing, that is a statement of
theological truth.
So
Satan’s theology very interestingly pushes, of all things, the quality of love as the main thing—not truth. Now
you have heard some good Christians who have pushed this same satanic doctrine. The thing that
counts is love, not truth. And you get this bad-mouthing of doctrine. You get this
belittling of the teachings of the Word of God. And you get this rosy world outlook that the main thing we all need is just to
love one another. Now that sounds good. But when we take this new theology of love,
we find that it is fantastically grotesque in its expression and in its outlook. Take the Lord
Jesus Christ. Let’s apply the theology of love to Christ. Jesus Christ, his theology
says, is not deity from “the other side,” who came into humanity on “this side”
as the Bible declares. The Bishop says this is the Christmas myth. Jesus Christ, rather, is the perfect man who formed a window through which we
can see God. Now that’s the atonement—not the Bible view of Christ bearing our punishment for our sins, but it is
that man can see God through Jesus Christ. The God that man sees through Jesus Christ is “love,”
the ultimate ground of man’s being.
Is There a God?
So, if you were to go up to the bishop and say, “Now, Bishop, you say we must reject the Bible view of God as a super being out there
who hovers above the world. What is God? Is there a god?” The bishop would say, “Dear friend, of course
there’s a god. Yes, of course there’s a god.” And you might say, “Well, Bishop, what is god?” He would say,
“He is love—whatever you give yourself to in the uttermost expression of selfless devotion—that is
god working in your experience. And Jesus Christ is the epitome of the example of the selfless man for others
through whom therefore we see love as the ultimate expression of deity. Now this has overtones of very true biblical
points of view because the Bible tells us that God is love, but they don’t
understand love in terms of its Holy Spirit fruit of the spirit “agape”
concept. They don’t know anything about that.
Prayer
They apply the new theology of love to prayer. The bishop says that prayer is not giving oneself
to one’s concern, to God out there beyond the world as the Bible says. It’s
not just talking to someone out there. But intercession, rather, is
listening and taking seriously what the other person has to say to you. It’s
not talking to God who is out there. It’s listening to this person and taking him seriously. That’s
prayer.
Ethics
When you apply the doctrine of the new theology of love to ethics, you really have a field day. Here the bishop
says morality is not based upon receiving second-hand rules from God. In other words,
that there is an authority over and above man such as the Bible presents,
and that authority says there are certain things that are wrong and certain
things that are right—certain things that thou shalt not do and certain
things that thou shall do. The bishop says, “That’s second-hand stuff.” If you read Honest
to God, you will notice that he does a great deal of ridiculing and he’s
sarcastic and he caricatures the things almost to the point of blasphemy that we hold in sacred esteem.
There are no rules, the bishop says, for conduct which are always valid such as the Bible says they are. This is an idea
brought down from Kant. The Ten Commandments is a moral code which is acceptable only if you add
the word “ordinarily” after each statement. Thou shalt not murder “ordinarily.” Thou shalt not
commit adultery “ordinarily.” Thou shalt not steal “ordinarily.” But
there are times when you will do all those things justifiably. Everything
that is right and wrong, the bishop says, is relative to the situation. That
is Hagel’s concept. It all began back there in the 18th
century and we’re still living with it today. That’s
what I’m trying to get across to you as to what constitutes
the thoroughly modern man and his thinking.
Situation Ethics
Rightness and wrongness depends on the amount that you care at the moment. What is the guide? Love. Whether a thing
that you do is right or wrong is determined by whether there is true and genuine love and heart-felt concern involved with you
toward that person at that moment. You will come to know this in the expression of the new morality, which as many
have pointed out, is of the old immorality in disguise, and it is called situation ethics. A thing is right
or wrong according to the situation, not that there are standards of right and wrong. It’s
right no matter what you do if you do it in real love, in real heart-felt concern, but it is wrong if you do it without love.
So, here’s a person dying of an incurable disease. They’re
in pain and agony. It is right if you take a gun and blow his
brains out, provided that you do it with love and deep felt concern. Bishop
Robinson takes his cue from all this, of course, from another theologian, Joseph Fletcher, an Episcopalian
minister who was the founder of the concept of the new morality. In his book, he will give you many situations
that will cause you to consider whether there aren’t really situations that
determine whether things are right.
Here are a group of people. They’re out in the old West. They are under attack by the Indians. They
have found a place of shelter in a cave and they are all huddled in there. A group of people
that has one baby. And the Indians are searching for them. They know they’re around there
someplace. They’re well hidden. Then they give you two situations. The baby begins
crying. If the baby cries, the baby will give away the location of the people. The Indians
will come in and they will kill everybody in the cave. So, the mother takes her child, grabs it by
the throat, and chokes him to death. The baby does not cry. The baby dies. Everybody
(else) is saved. Now Professor Fletcher says the mother acted in love toward the rest of the people in the cave. It
was a moral ethical right thing for her to murder the child. The other option would
be to let the baby cry. The Indians hear him. They come in and kill everybody in
the cave. That would be an unloving thing to do according to the new morality.
You can see the subtlety in this madness when you stop and think about it. The situations
can be thought up very much closer to home to you such that you might say, “I don’t
really know. Maybe there is something to that.” And they’ll get you thinking that
maybe they’ve got something. But you see the answer, of course, is that it’s our sovereign
God’s business as to whether everybody in that cave lives or dies under those conditions. It
is our sovereign God’s decision whether the baby cries and gives away the hiding place or not. But
it is never our decision to take life—ours or anyone else’s on a murder basis.
The New Morality
The new morality has to be read and understood from the framework of the Word of God or it will throw you. Consequently
the battle cry is “love.” It all comes down to what conduct is acceptable to the mind of modern man in whatever situation he finds
himself, provided he cares. This, again, is doctrine of demons. This is the demon’s point of
view of making love the controlling element. And perhaps it has struck you as it did me that there is quite a
similarity here between what the very modern up-to-date sophisticated theologians are now teaching in the new theology concerning the
all-pervading controlling influence of love, and the cry of love among emotionally-controlled
Christians who are genuine believers, because these Christians also have a way
of belittling Bible doctrine. They have a way of belittling the learning of the teachings of the Word of God,
and they make love the all-controlling factor in their relationships. It’s
not what you know that counts with them. It’s how you feel about people that counts.
Unfortunately most of them don’t know a thing about the Holy Spirit “agape” love, nor do they have the capacity
to be able to love in this way. The Bible spells out very clearly to us in 2 John 5-6 how we have the capacity for this mental attitude
of love—this freedom from bitterness and ill-will type of love. 2 John 5 says, “And now I beseech the, lady,
not as though I wrote a new commandment unto thee, but that which we had from the beginning, that we love one another (“agape”
love—Holy Spirit, fruit of the spirit, love). And this is love: that we walk after His commandments.” “This
is love: that we walk after His commandments.”
In other words, you cannot express “agape” Holy Spirit-produced love except as you are filled with the spirit and
oriented to the Word of God. Without a knowledge of doctrine you have no capacity for loving. That’s
why women who marry men, or vice versa, who are ill-versed in doctrine find they are married to someone who is a poor lover. This
is because they have no capacity for love. They think in terms of the human emotional aspect which even your dog or cat can express toward you. But
when it comes to the kind of love that God anticipates in the glories of the marriage relationship, this
cannot come to a person who does not know the Word of God. Period. Until
you have the orientation of the Word of God, you don’t know the first thing about love.
So, when you find someone who does a lot of mouthing about love, take a little inventory check and see how much doctrine that
person knows. If that person is a do-do bird when it comes to knowing the principles and the propositions of
biblical truth, you can just count on it that this person is an emotionally oriented yo-yo, and
that’s the kind of love they’re talking about, and they don’t know the first
thing about love. They have no capacity for it toward God, toward their opposite number, or toward their
friends. This new theology is gushing with a pseudo love under Satan’s direction and it signals the apostate
condition of these people, both believers and unbelievers.
Emotions
Please remember that Satan loves this. If there’s anything Satan loves, it’s love. Like he once
said, “All the world loves a lover.” And this football pep rally
emotional joy type of Christianity is what Satan is promoting today. On
the other hand, we hope that you will not be one of those tiresome people—and we are surrounded with
these tiresome people—who are interpreting (things) based upon the Word of
God relative to a false love with the idea that we are against emotional
expression—that we mean that we want people to be non-emotional. This is another
doctrine of demons. You will find that when a person yells bloody murder and waves the torn
and tattered flag of emotional domination of the soul love, which is
what Satan is cementing people of all types together with in preparation for the
world church of the antichrist—when you find a person shouting
wildly with that kind of love, he is also, you will find, a person who is doctrinally
disoriented and therefore doesn’t know what real love is. The two always go
together. He is also, while he waves that tattered flag, he is also accusing you of
being non-emotional. He is accusing you of not being able to have any feelings. He
doesn’t like the word “emotion.” That bugs him. He likes the word
“feelings.” But while he’s waving that flag of emotional
domination love, he’s also saying, “You don’t have any feelings.” Don’t
let that bug you because the people who have real depth at feelings, the people who are the keenest in the
realm of affection, are those who are people with doctrinal understanding. Never
make a mistake about that. I cannot warn you young people enough. Don’t
marry somebody who doesn’t have that. Period. Or you’ll regret it for the rest of your life.
Social Issues
The new theology is preoccupied with social issues. A Christian: Who is a Christian? What is a
Christian? Now we go to Bishop Robinson and we say, “Bishop, what is a Christian then?” The bishop will
say, “A Christian is one who has experience”—not personal
regeneration through faith in Christ; but a Christian is one who is a
gracious neighbor who identifies with the needs of his community.” Most college students don’t know where they
pick up the idea of social action. They have no idea in the world why they come out of school and they have
these great feelings and great visions toward improving society. They’re
actually ready to put their life on the line for this will of the wisp of making things better for people. The
bishop means to make things better for people without personal regeneration, and this is false. Society
will never be made better without the personal regeneration of every individual within it. That’s
why society is going to get worse and things are going to become more disastrous, and it’s coming
to a catastrophic end. Anybody who wants to give his life to chasing the will of the wisp of making society better and removing
its ills is a fool—a pathetic waste of life, for you will never do it. Unless there is personal regeneration, as
there will be in the millennium on the part of everybody, you will not resolve these problems. You will squelch
them in one place and they will jump up in another place. You will spend billions and billions of
dollars resolving a situation, and about the time you think you have it, it
breaks out ten times worse than before you had it. The social planners stand their shaking their
heads in disbelief, and every new generation comes up with a new vision and a
new glint in its eye, and it believes that it now will be able to solve the
problem. It’s going to devote itself with new zeal. Unfortunately, they start
going back to the old hack ideas of the new theologians and they start
off with the same misconceptions, and consequently they don’t get to first base either.
So, this new theology is that you’re a good neighbor. That’s salvation—identifying with the needs
of the community. It’s an attempt to completely accommodate the insights of modern scientifically oriented
men. They judge the truth of the Bible, not letting the Bible judge them. They
reject the Bible in content and in authority, so they don’t
seek the illumination of the Holy Spirit on His word to give them divine
viewpoint to guide them in the issues of life that they face.
Neo-Evangelicals
Neo-evangelicalism, which are people who believe the Word of God and are in our camp as conservatives, have been very much tainted
by this social action concept. This stress permeates their writhing of improving changing society. However,
they do recognize the need for personal regeneration. They make an effort
as neo-evangelicals to bring this regeneration about. Their problem is to bring it about on such a
wide-spread scale. What happens is they often find themselves cooperating with the liberal, on the
liberal’s ground, on the basis of the viewpoint of someone like Bishop Robinson after everything is said and done.
Robinson want’s something for everyone according to what everybody thinks. So, every
unbeliever in this way can do his own thing and still be religious. He says there is no subtle purpose and
meaning to life as the Bible pretends there is. He wants to make Christianity relevant to the 20th
century. He will compromise and accommodate. He will play ball with whatever ideas people
have in order to do this. Man is what he makes of himself by all his choices and acts, so everybody is
responsible to create a better world. So, man has cut himself off from all objective supernatural support. He’s
existentially on his own. Satan’s doctrine of subjectivity controls him. The God of the Bible has to
go. Robinson says that the God of the Bible is the greatest threat to human independence because as long as
the God of the Bible is out there in the minds of people, people are under a certain dread. They have a
hesitancy of living as if He wasn’t out there. Therefore, they can never fulfill themselves.
Experience
So, God, he says, has to be viewed as a dialectical process—Hagel’s idea that our god ideas
are constantly changing to a new synthesis, but he is not the god of the Bible. So
consequently, the liberal theologian centers on experience. Summing it all up, the big thing is
experience. It’s not doctrinal statements. It’s not what the Bible says. It’s
what you experience. But we have found from the Word of God that
experiences are not understood apart from what the Bible tells us. When
Isaiah, in Isaiah 6:6-7, had the coal put upon his lips, he didn’t understand what this symbolized
in the cleansing of God until God told him. In 2 Kings 19:35, the Assyrians have 185,000 of their army killed. The
Jews understood the significance of God’s act because God explained it, but the Assyrians didn’t know. Men
as sinners cannot interpret correctly the acts of God in history. If we understand
what God is doing in history it’s because we have the Bible to explain it to
us. Though the Bible is not a text book on theology, it does have God’s revealed propositions of
truth concerning Himself.
Biblical Statements
of Truth
Now this is something that, again, the modern new theology rejects. It says that the Bible does not
have statements of eternal truth. Yet in the Word of God, we read statements such as this: “I
am the almighty God. Walk before me and be thou perfect, and I will make my covenant between me and thee and will multiply thee
exceedingly.” Now what is that but a statement of direct doctrinal truth? Or,
“And God saw everything that He had made, and behold it was very good.” Genesis
1:31. What is that but a propositional statement of truth? “And the Lord passed by before him and
proclaimed, ‘The Lord, the Lord God, merciful and gracious, long-suffering and
abundant in goodness and truth.’” Exodus 34:6. That tells us something about
God. It’s a statement of truth. “My servant Moses is not so, who is faithful
in all mine house. With him will I speak mouth to mouth, even apparently and not in dark speeches, and the
similitude of the Lord shall He behold.” Numbers 12:7-8. And the Bible is full of
statements like that that are indeed statements of truth. So, the liberal is wrong that the Bible is not
propositions of truth.
God made Himself known through His mighty acts, but He explained what those acts meant to us, and that’s why we
understand him. The liberal claims that the revelation of God is to be distinguished from the actual words. Now Karl Barth
says that we have to go back to the Bible, but not back to the words that you read in the Bible. He says it is
wrong to identify the Bible as the Word of God. The liberal says that it “contains” the Word
of God. The bible has a divine message for the liberal, and it is hidden in the fallible words of men. So
if you read the Bible and something hits you, something comes through to you, something inspires you, now you
have the Word of God. If it does not come through to you, if it does not inspire you, then it is not the Word of God.
Now this is the way he gets around as a liberal wanting to say that the Bible if full of mistakes. It has errors in
it, and yet we want to be able to use it for authority, to give us a message from God. But
it’s a subjective decision as to what God is saying and not saying. That’s
why he has to say that the Bible has no propositions of truth. Don’t
gather people together in church and say, “Now we’re going
to teach you Bible doctrine.” That’s false, the liberal theologian says. You can’t teach people
that. There are no statements like that. It’s only what comes through to them.
The Divine Human Encounter
So, now some of you are going to go home today. You’re going to read the newspaper. You’re
going to pick up the funnies and you’re going to start reading about that famous All-American duck, Donald. And
you’re going to start reading the adventures of Donald Duck and all of a sudden something is going to
come through to you as you go through the frames, and before you finish it, God has
touched your heart and spoken to you. And you will praise Him for the Word of God that you have just
experienced through Donald the Duck. Do you see what I mean? How dumb
intellectual men can be? But that’s what it amounts to. But the liberal
calls this the divine human encounter. This is purely subjective. It makes man the
decider as to what is the Word of God and what is not. It is impossible to separate the knowledge
about God from the actual words of the Bible. Actually when the liberals use the Bible, they don’t separate it from
the words either. So, how can the Word of God come to us in words that are mistaken? The greatest need
we have today is to return to the expository teaching and preaching of the Word of God—to uncover doctrinal
propositions which convey to us the mind of God. The neo-orthodox theologian and the Dr. Robinsons say, “Oh, no,
that’s static. That has no life in it.” And yet what the Word of God requires is the
exegesis of its word.
Now it’s true that the Word will not be meaningful to you if it is not explained to you, and if you do not receive it under the
filling of the Holy Spirit, and if you do not go positive toward it, it is true that the Word
of God will be meaningless to you. But that is something entirely different than what the liberal theologian
is telling us today. The Bible is authoritative in what it says. It is inspired whether
you and I believe it or not, whether we have a divine human encounter or
not. This is because the Bible’s authority rests upon itself as the Word of God produced by inspiration. It
makes no difference how we view it. It is true that we must have the proper relationship of the guidance of the spirit of God, but God has provided
that system for us.
Summary – How to View
the Bible
So, here are the conclusions that we come to as a summary this morning. How shall we look at the
Word of God? 1) Do not approach the bible with the idea that you can apply to it certain tests of your own
subjective invention. 2) Do not advance theories in conflict with what the Bible clearly teaches, no matter
what experience may seem to suggest to you. 3) Come to the Bible as the inspired and thus inerrant revelation from
God in form of doctrinal propositions of absolute truths which may be understood by us. 4) Our fallen
mentality must be subject to all that God’s Word says. That’s divine viewpoint. 5) We must view
the very words of the Bible as the voice of God. 6) By thus becoming captive to the voice of God through Bible doctrine, we find ourselves
truly free, dealing then with reality. 7) May our rally cry in the 7th place be, “Thy Word is truth, and the truth
shall make you free.”
Dr. John E. Danish, 1971
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