Page:Southern Presbyterian Journal, Volume 13.djvu/559

 Christ better than does the Protestant spokesman. We remember the recent publication in a popular periodical of Fulton J. Sheen's magnificent statement of the Resurrection of Jesus Christ as the real meaning of Easter; while on the opposite page there was a philosophical argument for immortality by the President of the largest Protestant ecclesiastical body in the nation. Perhaps, our danger is philosophy, while their's is Mariolatry. Certainly, the Southern Presbyterian Journal holds no brief for any statement of the faith that puts either philosophy or Mariolatry in place of or alongside of our Lord Jesus Christ. God is not fooled by either. His purpose is that to Christ every knee shall bow and every tongue confess Him as Lord, and He blesses those who use their position in the Church to that end—whether they be Pope or President.

Nevertheless, over against the direction of Papal dogma of the last century there stands the other emphasis in the early Church. The central motif in the Apostles' as in the other ancient creeds is the Lord Jesus Christ. The First Ecumenical Council declared Him true and eternal God; the Second that He became also complete man; the Third that He Who is truly God became also truly man in One Person; the Fourth that this One Person exists in two distinct natures, the Divine and the human. We ask our Roman Catholic neighbors to place side by side the dogmas of the early Christian Church centering in Christ, and the dogmas of the infallible Pope centering in the Virgin Mary—and note the contrast. Professor George A. Barrois, now of Princeton, formerly of the Catholic University, has well said that the Dogma of the Assumption of the Virgin "certainly obscures the uniqueness and all-sufficiency of Christ as Saviour." *

Then we also ask the President of this great American Protestant organization and all other Protestants who are inclined to use Easter for their philosophizing on immortality—rather than for a mighty witness to the Resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead—to heed the testimony of the Protestant Reformers. Erasmus, the brilliant Roman Catholic opponent of Luther, had this to say of the primitive Protestants: "Some Frenchmen are still more out of their wits than even the Germans. They have five expressions always in their mouths: Gospel, Word of God, Faith, Christ, Holy Ghost; yet I doubt whether they be not urged on by the spirit of Satan."

Erasmus could doubt what he pleased, but God blessed the Reformers when they centered everything on Christ, just as He also blessed the early Christian Church when Christ was her Lord, her Saviour, her theme, her dogma, her life. Wm. C. R.


 * Theology Today, Jan. 1951, p. 466.

In these times when religious periodicals are so full of politics and so empty of Biblical exposition, the ignorance of the people is so great that every doctrine of the Westminster Confession needs vigorous proclamation. As we look at the doctrine of sin in Chapter VI, it is hard to avoid thinking that it needs even a more vigorous presentation than the others. This natural reaction may be exaggerated, but the chapter surely contains a wealth of material pertinent for our careless age.

Chapter IV had said that man was created righteous; the present chapter adds that our first parents sinned, and "by this sin they fell from their original righteousness, and communion with God, and so became dead in sin, and wholly defiled in all the faculties and parts of soul and body."

Roman Catholicism holds that man was not created positively righteous, but, rather, neutral; after his creation God gave him an extra gift of righteousness; and when Adam sinned, he lost the extra gift and fell back to the neutral state in which he was created. Thus man's present condition, according to Romanism, is not too bad. The Bible and the Confession say that man fell far below the estate in which he was created and is now wholly defiled in all his faculties and parts.

The modernists have a better opinion of themselves than even the Romanists have. If the race fell at all, it was an upward evolutionary fall; and man has been making rapid progress ever since. Herbert Spencer set the norm for much modernistic preaching in his prediction that the little evil remaining on earth would vanish in a short time. Books were written about moral man in an immoral society that needed only a good dose of socialism to become Utopian. Ministers dilated on human perfectibility. And in the summer of 1914 a college president and Presbyterian elder had almost finished a book to prove there would be no more war. He had forgotten what Christ said. Now, forty years later, two world wars and the brutality of totalitarian governments have shaken the confidence of this type of muddle-headedness.

The neo-orthodox are now ready to admit that something is wrong with man. But do they agree with the Bible as to what this something is? Does their obscure mixture of a few Biblical phrases and a great deal of esoteric terminology mean that man is dead in sin, "utterly indisposed, disabled, and made opposite to all good, and wholly inclined to all evil"? One thing is clear: the neo-orthodox deny that the guilt of Adam's sin was imputed to his posterity. Adam was not our representative in his trial before God. Indeed, Adam is only an unhistorical myth. And yet these men have had the effrontery to claim that they, rather NOVEMBER 17, 1954