A Wolf in Sheep's Clothing: Theological Liberalism

Today on the Sunday edition of Renewing Your Mind. There are certain foundational precepts that are so fundamental to historic Christianity that if you deny those you have denied the very essence of biblical Christianity.

Many people say that theological disagreements or unnecessary devices and roles shouldn't Christians get one today. We will see that there are certain foundational truths with fighting for certain truths that we must confess, if we want to call ourselves Christian Dr. RC scroll with a message titled a wolf in sheep's clothing. Recently I made a trip to Charleston South Carolina and have the opportunity to make it an Episcopalian church there in downtown Charleston and when I got to the church. They asked me if I would lecture to the adult Sunday school class. There, on the question what is liberalism, strange question because it's so broad in its makeup and I had to scramble for a while to try to to get specific about answering a question as almost hopelessly broad as that question is what is liberalism. Well, I think it is most noble and virtuous sense to be liberal is to be able to think critically in the sense of being free from the trappings of all human convention and human tradition.

I think that our thinking should pay under the authority of God and according to his categories and I never want to be so liberal that I declare my independence from the authority of God. But I do want to be liberal in the sense of having a positive zeal to discover the truth of God wherever it may be far and so the authentic liberal historically is the one who is eager to pursue truth as freely as possible without being enslaved by human conventions that I believe is a noble enterprise and a noble word and I hope that in the sense in which I'm defining liberal there that every Christian is a liberal, sometimes in our culture. The term liberal mean something else. The term liberalism in theology refers to a specific movement with a specific agenda and with a defined theology that occurred on the theological scene in the 19th century in your so when a theologian speaks about liberalism is usually speaking about what we call 19th century liberalism 19th century liberal theology, and as I said, it has a definite portrait with a definite agenda and so on. Now in the 19th century, one of the experiences of Western civilization was a growing awareness of the shrinking of the globe travel by modern technology was increasing and cultures were beginning to blend together and mix together and heretofore unprecedented ways, and the world was becoming a melting pot and to use the vernacular. The world was shrinking getting smaller and smaller.

Just this morning I bumped into the guy from the second time in two days that I hadn't seen them a couple years to different places around and of the same God. He looked at many sub or RC since it's a small world. Many posture second exhibit I sure wouldn't want to have to paint that small and one perspective, but large from another perspective, but what happened in the 19th century was an increasing awareness, particularly of European Western European thinkers of things and ideas that were going on in other parts of the world in the Orient among Islamic religions and so and a new science emerged on the sphere of the academic world and it was the science of comparative religion so that students of religion in Western Europe were not content simply to study Christianity or to compare with Judaism Malley wanted to study Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, Shintoism, Taoism, and so I look at all the different religions in the world and what came out of this new science of comparative religion was an effort in examining all the different world religions at discovering the essential core that could be found running through in various ways and stripes and threads in all these different various religions in the war in German scholarship. For example, there was one word in German that began to appear again and again in scholarly publications and books and journal articles, and so on. It became almost a buzzword in the theologians playground of the 19th century and it was the German word they said if you know any German you know that the word conveys and comes from the German participle form of the verb to be. It simply means being or essence and so you kept saying books that will are examining the sentence of religion, or the essence of Christianity in one of the most popular books coming out of Germany 19th century was written by the great church historian, a great historian of dogma Adolph von Harnack, who wrote a little book for popular consumption called what is Christianity that is what is its absence. What is its being.

Now this whole movement in German theology and liberal theology have certain basic commitments philosophically and theologically, the one that is most obvious and most evident of 19th century liberal theology basic thrust.

It was fundamentally anti-supernatural in its orientation that is in seeking to discern the essence of religion it was seeking to get beyond myths, legends, SAG is that sort of stuff that is contained in religious stories and cultic practices in various faiths of the world to get beyond miracle stories and angels and virgin births and dying and rising gods and all that kind of stuff and get to the stuff that you find in Islam in Buddhism and Taoism and so in the conclusion they came to was that the core of all religions was basically a concern for ethics for values that all the trappings of prayer and the symbols of redemption in the liturgy of salvation and all of those things are really the externals the negotiable peripheral matters that part of the essence. The virgin birth is not the essence of Christianity, the resurrection isn't of the essence of Christian the atonement of Jesus and isn't of the essence of Christianity. These things are part of the primitive trappings of religion. But the essence of Christianity is found in the ethical teaching of Jesus for example on the sermon on the Mount von Harnack came to this conclusion. He said that we can reduce Christianity to its core to foundational concepts being the universal fatherhood of God and the universal brotherhood of man universal fatherhood of God, universal brotherhood of man, not one of the strange dimensions of that reduction of Christianity. And I would have to say that's what it was.

I reductionism and inexcusable reduction of the core of Christianity to this simplest common denominator is the irony of it is that the two core concepts that Harnack saw as defining the very essence of the Christian faith are two concepts that only been found in biblical Christianity.

In light of the place where we were in American culture.

It may be shocking for an American to hear me say that the Bible does not teach the universal fatherhood of God, and maybe even more shocking to hear me suggest to you that the Bible does not teach the universal brotherhood of me and how many thousands of times in your lifetime. Have you heard that said universal fatherhood of God, universal brotherhood of man were all brothers and sisters and so is not the language of Scripture. I will admit that Henri near occasions. There are allusions to God as the supreme progenitor of the human race. And isn't the sense that he is the progenitor for the creator of everyone there is a sense in which in that regard, he could be called the father of all people.

When Paul says to the Greek skeptics of the Areopagus of Mars Hill in Athens. He said, is some of your own poets have said, we are all his offspring.

The apostle Paul there acknowledges a link with that sentiment, but ascribes the sentiment to a pagan philosopher Martha Moses. The reason I labor the point is this, that in the Scripture when the Bible normally speaks of the fatherhood of God. It is speaking of the concept for more narrow for more distinctive and for more precious than merely being a creature living on planet Earth go with a group of Christians listen to them. Pray in a home prayer meeting or Bible study and invariably as Christians pray out loud one after another will address God. How will start their prayer by saying father or our heavenly father is the most common expression that we as Christians used to address God and why not, when our Lord taught us to pray. He said when you pray, say what our father who art in heaven, hallowed be done what could be more basic to Christianity than to address God as father is like a mirror.

Mr. German New Testament scholar has done research on the prayers of the ancient Israelite people and it is his conclusion that there is not a single example anywhere in Pakistan Jewish literature including the Old Testament. The tunnel moved the targums and so on until the 10th century A.D. where a Jewish person addresses God directly as father that simply wasn't done.

People would speak of the fatherhood of God among the Jewish people. But no one would address him directly. Father Aramis says you don't find it until the 10th century A.D. in Italy. Yet in the New Testament we have the record of a Jew, a Jewish rabbi who has many, many prayers recorded for posterity and in every prayer that he prayed save one he directly addressed God as father and that's Jesus of net and what Jeremy us demonstrates is that Jesus is use of the term father for God was a radical innovation completely unheard of in Jewish liturgy and what he did in his radical departure from convention. He invited his followers to be involved because what Jesus teaches about the human race is that by nature. We are not the children of God. This was the dispute. Our Lord had with the Pharisees who thought that just because they were born Jewish that they were children of Abraham that they were there for the children of good Jesus that you are your father the devil God can raise up children of Abraham from the style because what Jesus does is defines son ship in terms of obedience to God. And because we are not by nature obedient to God.

We are by nature children of wrath.

The New Testament teaches us and not universally. Children of the father. The only way we ever have the right to call God father to cry Abba in his presence is because we have been adopted and the biblical message of son ship and daughter hood in the body of Christ is rooted and grounded in this concept of adoption that only Christ is the natural son of God, and only if you are in Christ, do you become a member of the household of God is the church in the New Testament that is called the family of God. It is the church in the New Testament that is called the household of God, and that unique concept of redemption through adoption is completely obscured. When we talk about the universal fatherhood of God, deceit, even more so is this concept that Harnack talked of the universal brotherhood of man.

The Bible doesn't teach the universal brotherhood of man. Again, the New Testament sees the brotherhood as something distinctive, restrictive and special to those who are in Christ that there is a brotherhood of all of those who have fellowship in the beloved who were invited to the sacrament of the Lord's supper who are marked by the sign of baptism, and who are in the family of God outside of the Fellowship of the church that brotherhood does not extend now what does the Bible teach the Bible doesn't teach the universal brotherhood of man teaches the universal neighborhood of me biblically, all men are not my brothers. If you are a Christian you are my brother or my sister. If you're not, you're not my brother or my sister in the New Testament sense, but whether you're my brother or my sister theologically and biblically in that sense you are my neighbor. This is the point that Jesus hammered home and though the Pharisees wanted to limit the neighborhood and the command to treat every person in the world to love my neighbor as myself to those simply who live close to me and they came to Jesus with the question, who is my neighbor knew how he answered that he said a man went down from Jericho and he fell among city's and he was ignored by the clergy, and a despised Samaritan came along and ministered to. That may bound his room's reached into his pocket, paid for his physical care and well-being. Jesus tells the story of the good Samaritan to communicate the point that everybody is my neighbor and the great commandment to love God with all my mind sold hard strength of the my neighbor as myself means that I am to treat everybody in this world with dignity, with justice with righteousness, with charity and in that sense there is a universal obligation toward everybody in the world but it's neighborhood not brotherhood soon now. The second thing I want to say about 19th century liberalism is that it provoked a strenuous reaction in church history, particularly in the United States, and the reaction was called fundamentalism and originally the fundamentalist response to liberalism was a response of classical Christian scholarship today in our culture and in religious jargon. Fundamentalism tends to communicate the idea of that which is anti-intellectual, legalistic, simplistic and primitive, but historically in the debate between liberalism and fundamentalism fundamentalist were so-called not because they wanted to reduce Christianity to five or six fundamental points, but they said look, there are lots of issues in theology that are open for discussion that we can differ among ourselves in theology and a wide diversity of ways of points.

Lutherans disagree with Baptist and Baptist disagrees Presbyterians and Presbyterians disagree with Episcopalians and all that but that there is an essential. There is a vague reason to Christianity there is an essential core. There is a sine qua non to historic Christianity. There are certain foundational precepts that are so fundamental to historic Christianity that if you deny those you have denied the very essence of biblical Christianity and what fundamentalism sought to do at the end of the 19th century and the beginning the 20th century was to spell out certain cardinal precepts and principles that are the nonnegotiable's of Christine of statements is the resurrection of Christ. He deny the resurrection of Christ is a supernatural event you have denied Christianity. If you seek to construct Christianity without the resurrection. You have a religion if you will, you may have at an interesting ethical system, but what you have is neither historic or biblical Christianity. This, to see what I'm saying this that was the message of the so-called fundamentalist or the conservative scholar at the turn of the century, Benjamin Warfield from Princeton that time said that the liberals of 19th century liberal theology did not reject mere peripheral matters but foundational principles such as the incarnation, the atonement and the resurrection. Warfield said if you negotiate resurrection you negotiate Christianity and so this was a to the death issue. One of the most significant splits in the history of the struggle of the Christian church. The war between historic Christianity and 19th-century liberalism as a movement what was at stake was the authority of Scripture and the very basic creeds of the church and I hope that we will understand that this crisis is a battle for nothing less, than the very beginning of biblical as Dr. RC Sproul with a message titled a wolf in sheep's clothing through reflective of the kind of passionate teaching. Dr. Spool displayed throughout his ministry in the clear trustworthy defense of biblical Christianity against the onslaught of liberalism in the 20th and 21st centuries that you for joining us here in the Sunday edition of Renewing Your Mind. I'm Lee Webb, and we been airing portions of Dr. Sproles classic collection over the past few Sundays. It's a series that contains 10 of his most beloved messages on 10 CDs RC's passion was to awaken people to God's holiness and that's why we like to offer this entire series to you today for your gift of any amount again is called the classic collection and you can request it. When you go online to Renewing Your Mind.org other messages in the series include if there is a God why their atheists and what is truth.

This is the final day to request the series so we hope you'll contact us soon with your gift of any amount again or web address is Renewing Your Mind.org before we go. Today I realize that to many of you may still be quarantined in your home. Please know that were praying for you and let me encourage you to tune into rough that that's legionnaire ministries 24 seven Internet radio outreach. We feature trustworthy preaching and teaching Bible readings daily news briefs and music and to listen just go direct at.FM or download the free rough that app. Well, this was the final message in Dr. Sproles classic collection next Sunday will begin featuring his sermon series from the Gospel of Mark, so we hope to see you right back here next week for Renewing Your Mind