Things I’ve Unlearned

I have taken a long path to Confessional Reformed Theology: KJV-only Fundamentalism; Seeker-Sensitive; Emergent; Evangelical Mega-Church; Expository Preaching Dispensationalism.  Along the way I have had to unlearn quite a bit.  Here are a few in somewhat chronological order:

1.  The King James Version is the Word of God.  All other translations are not the Word of God.

2.  Pre-tribulational, Pre-millennial, Dispensationalism.

3.  Predestination is not in the Bible.

4.  Free will means the ability to make an uninfluenced decision between good and evil.

5.  Nineteenth-Century revivalist songs are the only true Christian music.

6.  Credo-baptism.

7.  Altar Calls.

8.  Topical Preaching.

9.  Door to Door Evangelism.

10.  Every member ministry.

11.  Congregational church government.

12.  Seeker-sensitive worship.

13.  Contemporary Christian music is the only music to be played in the worship service, because it is most appealing to the unchurched.

14.  Worship should be lead by a charismatic musician fronting an energetic praise team instead of by the pastor.

15.  Calvin killed Servetus, ergo predestination is not true.

16.  The worship service is better experienced in candlelight.

17.  Multimedia enhances every sermon.

18.  People who speak more about the Bible than experience or community should repeatedly be cautioned against making the Bible into an idol – Bibleolatry.

19.  Small groups are the lifeblood of the church.  This is where ministry really happens.

20.  The Lord’s Supper should take place at most once per month.

21.  Bigger is always better.

22.  Multi-campus churches with video sermons are the most effective way of reaching people.

23.  Doctrine divides, and that’s always a bad thing.

24.  A person’s entire theology can immediately be evaluated based on his/her view of the end-times.

25.  The Lord’s Supper is strictly memorial. 

26.  Theologians with whom I disagree have nothing to contribute, therefore I should not read them.

27.  People who do not believe in 6/24 Creation do not believe the Bible.

28.  The Anabaptists were right.

29.  Paedo-baptism is a holdover of Constantinian Church/State Christianity.  The Reformers continued the practice solely because they wanted to keep order in the community.

30.  Holding at least 3 of the 5 points of Calvinism earns one the title “Reformed.”  All other aspects of someone’s theology, piety, and practice do not factor in to wearing that title.

Your Weekly Machen Fix: Faith and the Gospel

Originally published in What is Faith, in 1925.

If what we have said so far be correct, there is now living a Saviour who is worthy of our trust, even Christ Jesus the Lord, and a deadly need of our souls for which we come to Him, namely, the curse of God’s law, the terrible guilt of sin.  But these things are not all that is needed in order that we may have faith.  It is also necessary that there should be contact between the Saviour and our need.  Christ is a sufficient Saviour; but what has He done, and what will He do, not merely for the men who were with Him in the days of His flesh, but for us?  How is it that Christ touches our lives?

The answer which the Word of God gives to that question is perfectly specific and perfectly plain.  Christ touches our lives, according to the New Testament, through the Cross.  We deserved eternal death, in accordance with the curse of God’s law; but the Lord Jesus, because He loved us, took upon Himself the guilt of our sins and died instead of us on Calvary.  And faith consists simply in our acceptance of that wondrous gift.  When we accept the gift, we are clothed, entirely without merit of our own, by the righteousness of Christ; when God looks upon us, He sees not our impurity but the spotless purity of Christ, and accepts us “as righteous in His sight, only for the righteousness of Christ imputed to us, and received by faith alone.”

That view of the Cross, it cannot be denied, runs counter to the mind of the natural man.  It is not, indeed, complicated or obscure; on the contrary it is so simple that a child can understand, and what is really obscure is the manifold modern effort to explain the Cross away in such fashion as to make it more agreeable to human pride.  But certainly it is mysterious, and certainly it demands for its acceptance a tremendous sense of sin and guilt.  That sense of sin and guilt, that moral awakening of a soul dead in sin, is the work of the Spirit of God; without the Spirit of God no human persuasion will ever bring men to faith.  But that does not mean that we should be careless about the way in which we proclaim the gospel: because the proclamation of the message is insufficient to induce faith, it does not follow that it is unnecessary; on the contrary it is the means which the Spirit Himself graciously uses in bringing ment to Christ.  Every effort, therefore, should be made, with the help of God, to remove objections to this “word of the Cross” and to present it in all its gracious power.

Mondays with Mencken: The I.Q. of Holy Church

Originally published in 1930.

If only because it is manifestly more honest, intelligent and urbane than any of the dominant Protestant sects, the Catholic church usually enjoys good press in the United States.  Ku Kluxers allege that this is because newspaper and magazine editors are afraid of its ire, but that is not altogether true.  Some of the more bullet-headed Irish bishops may occasionally try to put down a critic by force, but not often.  The commoner method is simple remonstrance, and not infrequently is so artfully employed that the offender is persuaded, and emerges from the experience convinced that the church and its agents are excessively amiable, enlightened, sagacious and high-toned.

This judgment, alas, is somewhat over-sanguine.  There are undoubtedly many shrewd fellows among the Catholic clergy, and there are many more who are charming and amusing, but the church as a church, like any other ecclesiastical organization, is highly unintelligent.  It is forever making thumping errors, both in psychology and in politics, and despite its occasional brilliant successes among sentimental pseudo-intellectuals, as in England, and among the Chandala [the lowest caste of Indian society], as in America it seems destined to go downhill hereafter.  Consider its position in the world today.  After 1800 years of uninterrupted propaganda, during 1500 of which it was virtually unopposed in Christendom, scarcely a dozen really first-rate men subscribe to its ideas, and not a single first-rate nation.

Its poverty in this respect is well demonstrated by its almost comical excess of enthusiasm whenever a stray member of the intelligentsia succumbs.  Reading the Catholic papers – I allude, of course, to the more intelligent of them, not to the dismal diocesan rags – an uninformed person might easily gather the impression that Hilaire Belloc is the greatest historian who ever lived, and G. K. Chesterton the most profound metaphyscian.  Both men, obviously, are immensely clever, but the Catholic Hazlitts are not content to say so much: they must make them universal geniuses.  Similarly, at least on this side of the water, the late Joyce Kilmer is converted into a poet comparable to Whitman or Browning, and the late Bertram C. A. Windle becomes a scientist almost equal to Pasteur, Koch, Darwin or Johannes Muller.  The thing proceeds to the lowest and most grotesque level.  Even Harvey Wickham, among Catholic critics, is usually spoken of as if he were a grand and incomparable fellow, glorious alike to the True Religion and the human race. 

This gurgling, it seems to me, is injudicious.  A more moderate rejoicing would be far more convincing.  And a more moderate reviling would probably do more damage to the church’s chief current enemies – the birth controllers and the physical scientists.  The war upon birth control, as it is commonly carried on by virgin bishops, is not only unfair, but also ridiculous, for it is based upon theological postulates that no educated man could conceivably accept.  There is, I believe, a lot to be said against the birth-controllers – for example, on the score of their false pretenses: they really know no more about preventing conception than any corner druggist.  But their Catholic critics, so far as I know, have never said it.  Instead, they ground their case upon a dogmatism that is offensive to every intellectual decency, and try to dispose of their opponents by denouncing them as mere voluptuaries.  This last is sheer nonsense.  The principal birth-controllers are as serious as so many witch-burners, and the theory that they are voluptuaries is easily refuted by looking at one of them, preferably a female.

The war upon modern science, carried on in Boston by Cardinal O’Connell and elsewhere by ecclesiastics even less prudent, is quite as silly.  Its sole effect must be to make every enlightened Catholic blush.  And in the long run, if he be of a reflective habit, it must make him wonder whether he really belongs in the Roman camp.  Every Catholic of that sort, the world being what it is, has a hard enough time already to hold his faith: it is opposed not only by a multitude of objective evidences but also by the inner spirit of his day and generation.  Certainly it does not help him to be told that Belloc is a great historian and that Gibbon was an ass, that Kilmer was a good poet and Hardy a bad one, and that Windle was superior to Einstein.  Nor does it help him to be taught solemly that the hatching of rachitic and syphilitic children is an act of merit, ad maiorem Dei gloriam.

Your Weekly Machen Fix: The Good Fight of Faith

Delivered to students at Westminster Theological Seminary.  Published in God Transcendent, 1949.  Any resemblence to current pugilists or pacifists is purely prophetic.

The human instruments, however, which God uses in those triumphs are no pacifists, but great fighters like Paul himself.  Little affinity for the great apostle has the whole tribe of the considerers of consequences, the whole tribe of the compromisers ancient and modern.  The real companions of Paul are the great heroes of the faith.  But who are those heroes?  Are they not true fighters, one and all?  Tertullian fought a mighty battle against Marcion; Athanasius fought against the Arians; Augustine fought against Pelagius; and as for Luther, he fought a brave battle against kings and princes and popes for the liberty of the people of God.  Luther was a great fighter; and we love him for it.  So was Calvin; so were John Knox and all the rest.  It is impossible to be a true soldier of Jesus Christ and not fight. . . .

You will have a battle, too, when you go forth as ministers into the church.  The church is now in a period of deadly conflict.  The redemptive religion known as Christianity is contending, in our own church and in all the larger churches of the world, against a totally alien type of religion.  As always, the enemy conceals his most dangerous assaults under pious phrases and half truths.  The shibboleths of the adversary have sometimes a very deceptive sound.  “Let us propagate Christianity,” the adversary says, “but let us not always be engaged in arguing in defence of it; let us make our preaching positive, and not negative; let us avoid controversy; let us hold to a Person and not to a dogma; let us sink small doctrinal differences and seek the unity of the church of Christ; let us drop doctrinal accretions and interpret Christ for ourselves; let us look for our knowledge of Christ, not to ancient books, but to the living Christ in our hearts; let us not impose Western creeds on the Eastern mind; let us be tolerant of opposing views.”  Such are some of the shibboleths of that agnostic Modernism which is the deadliest enemy of the Christian religon today.  They deceive some of God’s people some of the time; they are heard sometimes from the lips of good Christian people, who have not the slightest inkling of what they mean.  But their true meaning, to thinking men, is becoming increasingly clear.  Increasingly it is becoming necessary for a man to decide whether he is going to stand or not to stand for the Lord Jesus Christ as he is presented to us in the Word of God. . . .

Where are you going to stand in the great battle which now rages in the church?  Are you going to curry favor with the world by standing aloof; are you going to be “conservative liberals ” or “liberal conservative” or “Christians who do not believe in controversy,” or anthing else so self-contradictory and absurd?  Are you going to be Christians, but not Christians overmuch?  Are you going to stand coldly aloof when God’s people fight against ecclesiastical tyranny at home and abroad?  Are you going to excuse yourselves by pointing out personal defects in those who contend for the faith today?  Are you going to be disloyal to Christ in external testimony until you can make all well within your own soul?  Be assured, you will never accomplish your purpose if you adopt such a program as that.  Witness bravely to the truth that you already understand, and more will be given you; but make common cause with those who deny or ignore the gospel of Christ, and the enemy will forever run riot in your life. . . .

In many lands there are those who have faced the great issue of the day and have decided it aright, who have preserved true independence of mind in the presence of the world; in many lands there are groups of Christian people who in the face of ecclesiastical tyranny have not been afraid to stand for Jesus Christ.  God grant that you may give comfort to them as you go forth from this seminary; God grant that you may rejoice their hearts by giving them your hand and your voice.  To do so you will need courage.  Far easier is it to curry favor with the world by abusing those whom the world abuses, by speaking against controversy, by taking a balcony view of the struggle in which God’s servants are engaged.  But God save you from such a neutrality as that!  It has a certain worldly appearance of urbanity and charity.  But how cruel it is to burdened souls; how heartless it is to those little ones who are looking to the church for some clear message from God!  God save you from beings so heartless and so unloving and so cold; God grant, instead, that in all humility, but also in all boldness, in reliance upon God, you may fight the good fight of faith.  Peace is indeed yours, the peace of God which passeth all understanding.  But that peace is given you, not that you may be onlookers or neutrals in love’s battle, but that you may be good soldiers of Jesus Christ.

Did the Sabbath Go Out with the Old Covenant?

Rev. Danny Hyde explains the doctrine of the Sabbath.

Mondays with Mencken: Confession of a Theological Moron

Originally published in 1920.

One of my heaviest handicaps in this world is the fact that I am absolutely devoid of what is called religious feeling.  That is to say, I have no sense whatever of the divine presence or of a divine personality; neither ever enters into my thinking.  I have faced, in my time, all the great disaster that man must suffer – professional failure, financial catastrophe, social ignominy, the treacher of friends, the loss of a best girl, intolerable physical pain, even the threat of death itself.  Yet I cannot remember that even in the blackest moments of long and ghastly nights have I ever had the slightest impulse to pray to God for help.  Twich I have been shot at, deliberately and at short range.  Both times I was scared stiff, and yet neither time did it occur to me to ask any aid of the celestial hierarchy.  As for the impulse to worship, it is as foreign to my nature as the impulse to run for Congress.

I am anything but a militant atheist and haven’t the slightest objection to church-going, so long as it is honest.  I have gone to church myself many times, honestly seeking to experience the great inward exaltation that religious person speak of.  Not even at St. Peter’s in Rome have I sensed the least trace of it.  The most I ever feel at the most solemn moment of the most pretentious religious ceremonial is a sensuous delight in the beauty of it – a delight exactly like that which comes over me when I hear, say, Tristan and Isolde or Brahms’ stupendous fourth symphony.  The effect of such music, in fact, is much keener than the effect of the liturgy.  Brahms moves me far more powerfully than the holy saints.

As I say, this deficiency is a handicap in a world peopled, in the overwhelming main, by men who are inherently religious.  It sets me apart from my fellows and makes it difficult for me to understand many of their ideas and not a few of their acts.  I see them responding constantly and robustly to impulses that to me are quite inexplicable.  Worse, it causes these folks to misunderstand me, and often to do me serious injustice.  They cannot rid themselves of the notion that, because I am anaesthetic to the ideas which move them most profoundly, I am, in some vague but nevertheless certain way, a man of aberrant morals, and hence one to be kept at a distance.  I have never met a religious man who did not reveal this suspicion.  No matter how earnestly he tried to grasp my point of view, he always ended by making an alarmed sort of retreat.  All religions, in fact, teach that dissent is a sin; most of them make it the blackest of all sins, and all of them punish it severely whenever they have the power.  It is impossible for a religious man to rid himself of the notion that such punishments are just.  He simply cannot imagine a civilized rule of conduct that is not based upon the fear of God.

Let me add that my failing is in the fundamental religious impulse, not in mere theological credulity.  I am not kept out of church by an inability to believe the current dogmas.  In point of fact, a good many of them seem to be reasonable enough, and I probably dissent from most of them a good deal less violently than many men who are assidious devotees.  Among my curious experiences, years ago, was that of convincing an ardent Catholic who balked at the dogma of papal infallibility.  He was a very faithful son of the church, and his inability to accept it greatly distressed him.  I proved to him, at least to his satisfaction, that there was nothing intrinsically absurd in it – that if the dogmas that he already accepted were true then this one was probably true also.  Some time later, when this man was on his deathbed, I visited him and he thanked me simply and with apparent sincerity for resolving his old doubt.  But even he was unable to comprehend my own lack of religion.  His last words to me were a pious hope that I would give over my lamentable contumacy to God and lead a better life.  He died firmly convince that I was headed for hell, and what is more, that I deserved it.

Your Weekly Machen Fix: Truth of Doctrine

From What is Faith?, published in 1925.

As over against this pragmatist attitude, we believers in historic Chrisitanity maintain the objectivity of truth; and in doing so we and not the modernists become advocates of progress.  Theology, we hold, is not an atempt to express in merely symbolic terms an inner experience which must be expressed in indifferent terms in subsequent generations; but it is a setting forth of those facts upon which experience is based.  It is not indeed a complete setting forth of those facts, and therefore progress in theology become possible; but it may be true so far as it goes; and only because there is that possibility of attaining truth and of setting it forth ever more completely can there be progress.  Theology, in other words, is just as much a science as is chemistry; and like the science of chemistry it is capable of advance.  The two sciences, it is true, differ widely in their subject matter; they differ widely in the character of the evidence upon which their conclusions are based; in particular they differ widely in the qualifications required of the investigator: but they are both sciences, because they are both concerned with the acquisition and orderly arrangement of a body of truth.

At this point, then, we find the really important divergence of opinion in the religious world at the present day; the difference of attitude toward theology or toward doctrine goes far deeper than any mere divergence in detail.  The modern depreciation of theology results logically in the most complete skepticism.  It is not merely that the ancient creeds, and the Bible upon which they are based, are criticized – indeed we ourselves certainly think that they ought constantly to be criticized in order that it may be seen that they will stand the test – but the really serious trouble is that the modern pragmatist, on account of the very nature of his philosophy, has nothing to put in their place.  Theology, according to him, may be useful; but it can never by any possibility be true.  As Dr. Fosdick observes, the liberalism of today must necessarily produce an intellectual formulation which will become the orthodoxy of tomorrow, and which will then in turn have to give place to a new liberalism; and so on (we suppose) ad infinitum.  This is what the plain man in the Church has difficulty in understanding; he does not yet appreciate the real gravity of the issue.  He does not see that it makes very little difference how much or how little of the creeds of the Church the Modernist preacher affirms, or how much or how little of the biblical teaching from which the creeds are derived.  He might affirm every jot and tittle of the Westminster Confession, for example, and yet be separated by a a great gulf from the Reformed Faith.  It is not that part is denied and the rest affirmed; but all is denied, because all is affirmed merely as useful or symbolic and not as true.

Mondays with Mencken: Machen – The Impregnable Rock

Published in 1931.

Thinking of the theological doctrine called Fundamentalism, one is apt to think at once of the Rev. Aimee Semple McPherson, the Rev. Dr. Billy Sunday and the late Dr. John Roach Straton.  It is almost as if, in thinking of physic, one thought of Lydia Pinkham or Dr. Munyon.  Such clowns, of course, are high in human interest, and their sincerity need not be impugned, but one must remember always that they do not represent fairly the body of ideas they presume to voice, and that those ideas have much better spokesmen.  I point, for example, to the Rev. J. Gresham Machen, D.D. Litt.D., formerly of Princeton and now professor of the New Testament in Westminster Theological Seminary, Philadelphia.  Dr. Machen is surely no mere soap-boxer of God, alarming bucolic sinners for a percentage of the plate.  On the contrary, he is a man of great learning and dignity – a former student at European universities, the author of various valuable books, including a Greek grammar, and a member of several societies of savants.  Moreover, he is a Democrat and a wet [against Prohibition], and may be presumed to have voted for Al [Smith] in 1928.  Nevertheless, this Dr. Machen believes completely in the inspired integrity of Holy Writ, and when it was questioned at Princeton he withdrew indignantly from those hallowed shades, leaving Dr. Paul Elmer More to hold the bag.   

I confess frankly, as a life-long fan of theology, that I can find no defect in his defense of his position.  Is Christianity actually a revealed religion?  If not, then it is nothing; if so, then we must accept the Bible as an inspired statement of its principles.  But how can we think of the Bible as inspired and at the same time as fallible?  How can we imagine it as part divine and awful truth and part mere literary confectionery?  And how, if we manage so to imagine it, are we to distinguish betwen the truth and the confectionery?  Dr. Machen answers these question very simply and very convincingly.  If Christianity is realy true, as he believes, then the Bible is true, and if the Bible is true, then it is true from cover to cover.  So answering, he takes his stand upon it, and defies the hosts of Beelzebub to shake him.  As I have hinted, I think that, given his faith, his position is completely impregnable.  There is absolutely no flaw in the arguments with which he supports it.  If he is wrong, then the science of logic is a hollow vanity, signifying nothing.

His moral advantage over his Modernist adversaries, like his logical advantage, is immense and obvious.  He faces the onslaught of the Higher Criticism without flinching, and he yields nothing of his faith to expediency or decorum.  Does his searching of Holy Writ compel him to believe that Jesus was descended from David through Joseph, and Matthew says, and yet begotten by the Holy Ghost, as Matthew also says, then he believes it calmly and goes on.  Does he encounter witches in Exodus, and more of them in Deuteronomy, and yet more in Chronicles, then he is unperturbed.  Is he confronted, in Revelation, with angels, dragons, serpents and beasts with seven heads and ten horns, then he contemplates them as calmly as an atheist looks at a chimpanzee in a zoo.  For he has risen superior to all such trivial details, the bane of less devout and honest men.  The greater marvel swallows all the lesser ones.  If it be a fact, as he holds, that Yahweh has revealed the truth to His lieges on this earth, then he is quite as willing to accept and cherish that truth when it is odd and surprising as when it is transparent and indubitable.  Believing, as he does, in an omnipotent and omniscient God, maker of heaven and earth, he admits freely that God probably knows more than he himself knows, both of the credible an the incredible, though he is a member of both Phi Beta Kappa and the American Philological Assocation.

It must be plain that the Modernists are in a much weaker position.  The instant they admit that only part of the Bible may be rejected, if it be only the most trifling fly-speck of the Pauline Epistles, they admit that any other part may be rejected.  Thus the divine authority of the whole disappears, and there is no more evidence that Christianity is a revealed religion than there is that Mohammedianism is.  It is idle for such iconoclasts to say that one man – usually the speaker – is better able to judge in such matters than other men, for they have to admit in the same breath that no man’s judgment, however learned he may be, is infallible, and that no man’s judgment, however mean he may be, is neglibible.  They thus reduce theology to the humble level of a debate over probabilities.  Such a debate it has become, in fact, in the hands of the more advanced Modernists.  No two of them agree in  all details, nor can they conceibably agree so long as one man, by God’s inscrutable will, differs from all other men.  The Catholics get rid of the difficulty by setting up an infallible Pope, and consenting formally to accept his verdicts, bu thet Protestants simply chase their own tails.  By depriving revelation of all force and authority, they rob their so-called religion of every dignity.  It becomes, in their hands, a mere romantic imposture, unsatisfying to the pious and unconvincing to the judicious.

I have noted that Dr. Machen is a wet.  This is somewhat remarkable in a Presbyterian, but certainly it is not illogical in a Fundamentalist.  He is a wet, I take it, simply because the Yahweh of the Old Testament and the Jesus of the New are both wet – because the whole Bible, in fact, is wet.  He not only refuses to expunge from the text anything that is plainly there; he also refuses to insert anything that is not there.  What I marvel at is that such sincere and unyielding Christians as he is do not start legal proceeding against the usurpers who now disgrace the name.  By what right does a Methodist bishop, in the face of John 2:1-11, Matthew 11:19 and Timothy 5:23, hold himself out as a follower of Jesus, and even as an oracle on Jesus’ ideas and desire?  Surely there is libel here, and if I were the believer that Dr. Machen is I think I’d say that there is also blasphemy.  I suggest formally that he and his orthodox friends get together, and petition some competent court to restrain the nearest Methodist congregation from calling itself Christian.  I offer myself a witness for the plaintiffs, and promise to come well heeled with evidence.  At worst, such a suit would expose the fraudulence of the Methodist claim and redound greatly to the glory and prosperity of the true faith; at best, some judge more intelligent and less scary than the general might actually grant the injunction.

Your Weekly Machen Fix: Historical Hermeneutics

Originally published in What is Faith, in 1925.

Scientific historical method in the interpretation of the Bible requires that the Biblical writers should be allowed to speak for themselves.  A generation or so ago that feature of scientific method was exalted to the dignity of a principle, and was honored by a long name.  It was called “grammatico-historical exegesis.”  The fundamental notion of it was that the modern student should distinguish sharply between what he would have said or what he would have like to have the Biblical writer say, and what the writer actually did say.  The latter question only was regarded as forming the subject-matter of exegesis.

This principle, in America at least, is rapidly being abandoned.  It is not, indeed, being abandoned in theory; lip-service is still being paid to it.  But it is being abandoned in fact.  It is being abandoned by the most eminent scholars.

It is abandoned by Professor Goodspeed, for example, when in his translation of the New Testament he translates the Greek word meaning “justify,” in important passages, by “make upright.”  I confess that it is not without regret that I should see the doctrine of justification by faith, which is the foundation of evangelical liberty, thus removed from the New Testament; it is not without regret that I should abandon the whole of the Reformation and return with Professor Goodspeed to the merit-religion of the Middle Ages.  But the point that I am now making is not that Professor Goodspeed’s translation is unfortunate because it involves – as it certainly does – religous retrogression, but because it involves an abandonment of historical method in exegesis.  It may well be that this question how a sinful man may become right with God does not interest the modern translator; but every true historian must certainly admit that it did interest the Apostle Paul.  And the translator of Paul must, if he be true to his trust, place the emphasis where Paul placed it, and not where the translator could have wished it placed.

What is true in the case of Paul is also true in the case of Jesus.  Modern writers have abandoned the historical method of approach.  They persist in confusing the question what they could have wished that Jesus had been with the question what Jesus actually was.  In reading one of the most popular recent books on the subject of religion, I came upon the following amazing assertion.  “Jesus,” the author says, “concerned himself but little with the question of existence after death.”  In the presence of such assertions any student of history may well stand aghast.  It may be that we do not make much of the doctrine of a future life, but the question whether Jesus did so is not a matter of taste but an historical question, which can be answered only on the basis of an examination of the sources of historical information that we call the Gospels.

And the result of such examination is perfectly plain.  As a matter of fact, not only the thought of heaven but also the thought of hell runs all through the teaching of Jesus.  It appears in all four of the Gospels, which have been reconstructed, rightly or wrongly, by modern criticism.  It imparts to the ethical teaching its peculiar earnestness.  It is not an element which can be removed by any criticial process, but simply suffuses the whole of Jesus’ teaching and Jesus’ life.  “And fear not them which kill the body, but are not able to kill the soul and body in hell.”  “it is better for thee to enter into life with one eye, rather than having two eyes to be cast into hell fire” – these words are not an excrescence in Jesus’ teaching but are quite at the centre of the whole.

At any rate, if you are going to remove the thought of a future life from the teaching of Jesus, if at this point you are going to reject the prima facie evidence, surely you should do so only by a critical grounding of your procedure.  And my point is that that critical grounding is now thought to be quite unnecessary.   Modern American writers simply attribute their own predilections to Jesus without, apparently, the slightest scrutiny of the facts.

As over against this anti-intellectual tendency in the modern world, it will be one chief purpose of the present little book to defend the primacy of the intellect, and in particular to try to break down the false and disastrous opposition which has been set up between knowledge and faith.

Mondays with Mencken: A Day with Billy Sunday

Published in 1916

. . . . As for the actual Sunday book, dated 1914, it already tells an old story, for the sweating doctor has since done such press-agenting as not even a whole library of books could do, and his public eminence in these States is scarcely less exalted than that of Col Roosevelt, Jess Willard, Henry Ford and the Kaiser.  Dr. Horn-Brown reviews his career in phrases of laudation – a career of double distinction, for he was a celebrated baseball-player before he became the American St. Paul.  (Joseph Smith, William Miller, Mary Baker G. Eddy, John Alexander Dowie, Same Jones, William A. Sunday: we have produced some noble theologians!)  His paternal grandfather was a Pennsylvania Dutchman named Sontag, but on the distaff side he stems from Lord William Corey, “who married the only daughter of Sir Francis Drake.”  The family of Corey de Pittsburgh de Reno is apparently the jüngerer Linie.  Bill, our present hero, was converted in Chicago at the Pacific Garen Mission, in 1886 or thereabout, and after getting clear of his baseball contracts became assistant secretary of the Chicago Y.M.C.A.  Then he got a job as advance man for J. Wilbur Chapman, an itinerant evangelist.  When Chapman retired, in 1896, Sunday took over his traded, and has since gone steadily ahead.  For fifteen years he worked the watertanks, snaring the sinful tobacco chewers for the heavenly choir.  Then he struck out for bigger game, and today he performs only in the main centers of population.  He has saved Philadelphia, Baltimore, Kansas City and Pittsburgh; he is headed for Boston, Chicago and New York.  He has been lavishly praised by the President of the United States, is a Freemason and a Doctor of Divinity, and has enjoyed the honor of shaking me by the hand.

So much for the facts of his career, and the book of Dr. Horn-Brown.  In laborious preparation for the review of that book I went to hear the whooping doctor himself.  I found him vastly more interesting than any tome that these old eyes have rested upon in many a day.  He was engaged, as I entered his vast bull-ring for the first time, in trying to scare a delegation of Civil War veterans into some realization, however faint, of the perils of hell, and when I took my seat in the pen reserved for the literati, directly under the eaves of his pulpit, I was sprinkled copiously with the dew of his frenzy.  In it came, dribble, dribble, splash, splash, every time he executed one of his terrifyng revolutions.  It was like holding the bottle for a Russian dancer with a wet sponge strapped to his head.  Of a sudden he would rush to the edge of the platform – his pulpit is as long as a barroom, but is without rails -, scream hysterically, and then bring himself up with a jolt and spin ’round like a top, his arms flung out and sline globules leaping from his brow in a pelting shower.  He shed, I daresay, at least eight ounces of sweat betwen 7:45 and 9:00 p.m., and though he mopped his brow constantly and tried to be polite, a good deal of it escaped into the air, and so begemmed my critical gown. . . .  Revolting details, but the love of all truth is above all prudery!

Of the sforzando doctor’s actual discourse, that night or on the other nights I heard him, I have only a faint memory.  Some sweet mush about the joys of heaven, with dogs and children playing on the grass; a long review of the life and times of King Solomon, with incidental railings against money; the orthodox arguments against ethyl alcohol, of no effect upon my thirst; high words against deacons who roll their eyes on Sunday and rob the widow on Monday; the joys of hell in detail, with not a singe omitted – all the orthodox camp-meeting stuff, howled from a million stumps by Methodist dervishes since the days of Wesley, and before them by Puritans of one sort or another since the croaking of the captive in Herod’s rain-barrel.  Out of all this I could get nothing; it was as empty of ideas as an editorial in the Boston Transcript.  But away with ideas, and their pursuit.  It was not by ideas that the downpouring doctor bemused those sinful veterans, and white-faced shop girls, and quaking Sunday school teachers, and staggered fat women; it was by his sheer roar and outcry.  He survives in the cortex, not intellectually or visually, but purely aurally – as an astounding and benumbing noise, a riot of unearthly sound, and ear-torturing cacophony.  Time and again he would have to pause for breath.  Time and again he would make a megaphone of his hands to give the yell more pedal.  Time and again you could see the elect in the front rows shrink and quiver beneath the gargantuan wallop of his shouts.  I have fought through four wars; I have been a boilermaker; I have hear Feuersnot.  But never have I eared such a flabbergasting caterwauling; never have I suffered such a racking of the fenestra rotunda.  It penetrates the capital ivory like a bullet, and sets up a raging pyemia.  Sunday tells the simplest anecdote with the triumphant yelp of Satan sighting another archbishop in the chute.  He utters such bald words as “Yes” and “No” with all the withering passion that the Old Guard put into its naughty reply at Waterloo.  In the midst of a quite banal sentence his voice flies off into a shrill falsetto, and he clubs the side of his desk as if it were the very door of hell. 

No wonder the candidates down in the arena are raised to incandescence, and begin screaming to be saved!  Imagine the balcony scene in Romeo and Juliet with Juliet bellowing like Klytämnestra in the last round of Electra, and Romeo howling up at her like an auctioneer, and both swinging Indian clubs, and revolving like pinwheels, and sweating like the colored waiters in a Pullman diner!  Imagine “Nearer, My God, to Thee” accompanied by anvils, tom-toms, phicleides, bass-drums and artillery, and a committee sticking pins into the tenors to make the squeal!  No wonder the devil flees in alarm, and takes refuge in some quiet Unitarian church! . . . Losing, alackaday, not much!  Robbed of very little appetizing stock!  The converts, indeed, are but feeble specimens of God’s handiwork.  Those I saw seemed anthropoid, but no more.  In all my life I have never looked into more stupid and miserable faces.  At least half of the aspirants for harps were adolescent and chlorotic girls; most of the males were of the sort one finds in water-front missions and at Salvation Army Christmas dinners.  Even an osteopath, glancing at the former, would have noted a deficiency in haemoglobin, a disturbance below the diaphragm and above the neck, a profound veneration for moving picture actors.  Some of them seemed to be flirting with tuberculosis; many of them had heads of curious shape and eyes that did not match; nearly all looked pitifully poor and wretched and godforsaken.  Of such, perhaps, are the kingdom of heaven.  They, too, have immortal souls, as much so as Claude Debussy, General Carranza or the Hon. Josephus Daniels.  Let us hope, at all events, that somewhere or other they will get square meals, and less work, and a chance to be care-free, and sinful, and happy.

Such is my memory of four nights of the Rev. Dr. Billy Sunday, now the emperor and pope of all our uplifters, the beyond-Gerald Stanley Lee, the super-Herbert Kaufman, the Augustine of American theology, the heir of Bryan, Dowie and Barnum.  Let it stand as a review of Dr. Horn-Brown’s instructive book, the which I commend to your study.  Buy a couple of copies.  Give one to your pastor, that honest man.  But if it sets him to whooping like Sunday, then I advise you, in all charity, to have your gunmen do execution of the lex non scripta upon him.  You will never stand such fortissimons – as a steady diet.  Now and then, like laparotomy or mania-a-potu, a benign stiumlant, but not for every Sunday! . . .