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! . . .

Your Weekly Machen Fix: Foundations of Faith

From What is Faith, published in 1925.

The trouble with the university students of the present day, from the point of view of evangelical Christianity, is not that they are too original, but that they are not half original enough.  They go on in the same routine way, following their leaders like a flock of sheep, repeating the same stock phrases with little knowledge of what they mean, swallowing whole whatever professor choose to give them – and all the time imagining that they are bold, bad, independent young men, merely because they abuse what everybody else is abusing, namely, the religion that is founded upon Christ.  It is popular today to abuse that unpopular thing that is known as supernatural Christianity, but original it certainly is not.  A true originality might bring some resistance to the current of the age, some willingness to be unpopular, and some independent scrutiny, at least, if not acceptance, of the claims of Christ.  If there is one thing more than another which believers in historic Christianity ought to encourage in the youth of our day it is independence of mind.

It is a great mistake, then, to suppose that we who are called “conservatives” hold desperately to certain beliefs merely because they are old, and are opposed to the discovery of new facts.  On the contrary, we welcome new discoveries with all our hearts, and we believe that our cause will come to its rights again ony when youth throws off its present intellectual lethargy, refuses to go thoughtlessly with the anti-intellectual current of the age, and recovers some genuine independence of mind.  In one sense, indeed, we are traditionalists; we do maintain that any institution that is really great has its roots in the past; we do not therefore desire to substitute modern sects for the historic Christian Church.  But on the whole, in view of the conditions that now exist, it would perhaps be more correct to call us “radicals” than to call us “conservatives.”  We are seeking in particular to arouse youth from its present uncritical repetition of current phrases into some genuine examination of the basis of life; and we believe that Christianity flourishes not in the darkness, but in the light.  A revival of the Christian religion, we believe, will deliver mankind from its present bondage, and like the great revival of the sixteenth century will bring liberty to mankind.  Such a revival will be not the work of man, but the work of the Spirit of God.  But one of the means which the Spirit will use, we believe, is an awakening of the intellect.  The retrograde, anti-intellectual movement called Modernism, a movement which really degrades the intellect by excluding it from the sphere of religion, will be overcome, and thinking will again come to its rights.  The new Reformation, in other words, will be accompanied by a new Renaissance; and the last thing in the world that we desire to do is to discourage originality or independence of mind. . . .

When one is asked to preach at a church, the pastor sometimes asks the visiting preacher to conduct his Bible class, and sometimes he gives a hint as to how the class is ordinarily conducted.  He makes it very practical, he says; he gives the class hints as to how to live during the following week.  But when I for my part actually conduct such a class, I most emphatically do not give the members hints as to how to live during the following week.  That is not because such hints are not useful, but because they are not all that is useful.  It would be very sad if a Bible class did not get practical directions; but a class that gets nothing but practical directions is very poorly prepared for life.  And so when I conduct the class I try to give them what they do not get on other occasions; I try to help them get straight in their minds the doctrinal and historical contents of the Christian religion.

The absence of doctrinal teaching and preaching is certainly one of the causes for the present lamentable ignorance in the Church.  But a still more influential cause is found in the failure of the most important of all Christian educational institutions.  The most important Christian educational institution is not the pulpit or the school, important as these institutions are; but it is the Christian family.  And that institution has to a very large extent ceased to do its work.  Where did those of us who have reached middle life really get our knowledge of the Bible?  I suppose my experience is the same as that of a good many of us.  I did not get my knowledge of the Bible from Sunday School or from any other school, but I got it on Sunday afternoons with my mother at home.  And I will venture to say that although my mental ability was certainly of no extraordinary kind I had a better knowledge of the Bible at fourteen years of age than is possessed by many students in the theological Seminaries of the present day.  Theological students come for the most part from Christian homes; indeed in very considerable proportion they are children of the manse.  Yet when they have finished college and enter the theological Seminary many of them are quite ignorant of the simple contents of the English Bible. 

The sad thing is that it is not chiefly the students’ fault.  These students, many of them, are sons of ministers; and by their deficiencies they reveal the fact that the ministers of the present day are not only substituting exhortation for instruction, ethics for theology, in their preaching; but even neglecting the education of their own children.  The lamentable fact is that the Christian home, as an educational institution, has largely ceased to function.

Mondays with Mencken: Evangelical Ignoramuses Pt 3

Pt 1, Pt 2

Their public effects are constantly underestimated until it is too late.  I ask no indulgence for calling attention again to the case of Prohibition.  Fundamentalism, in its various forms, sneaks upon the nation in the same disarming way.  The cities laugh at the yokels, but meanwhile the politicians take careful notice; such mountebanks as Peay of Tennessee and Blease of South Carolina have already issued their preliminary whoops.  As the tide rolls up the pastors will attain to greater and greater consequence.  Already, indeed, they well visibly, in power and pretension.  The Klan, in its early days, kept them discreetly under cover; they labored valiantly in the hold, but only lay go-getters were seen upon the bridge.  But now they are everywhere on public display, leading the anthropoid host.  At the great outpouring in Washington a few months ago – which alarmed the absentee Dr. Coolidge so vastly that he at once gave a high Klan dignitary a federal office of trust and profit – there were Baptist mullahs all over the lot, and actually more in line, I daresay, than bootleggers or insurance solicitors. 

The curious and amusing thing is that the ant-like activity of these holy men has so far got little if any attention from our established publicists.  Let a lone Red arise to annoy a barroom full of Michigan lumberjacks, and at once the fire alarm sounds and the full military and naval power of the nation is summoned to put down the outrage.  But how many Americanos would the Reds convert to their rubbish, even supposing them free to spout in on every street-corner?  Probably not enough, all told, to make a day’s hunting for a regiment of militia.  The American moron’s mind simply does not run in that direction; he wants to keep his Ford, even at the cost of losing the Bill of Rights.  But the stuff that the  Baptist and the Methodist dervishes have on tap is very much to his taste; he gulps it eagerly and rubs his tummy.  I suggest that it might be well to make a scientific inquiry into the nature of it.  The existing agencies of sociologial snooting seem to be busy in other direction.  There are elaborate surveys of some of the large cities, showing how much it costs to teach a child the principles of Americanism, how often the average citizen falls into the hands of the cops, how many detective stories are taken out of the city library daily, and how many a children a normal Polish woman has every year.  Why not a survey of the rustic areas, where men are he and God still reigns?  Why not attempt to find out just what the Baptist dominies have drilled into the heads of the Tennesseeans, Arkansans and Nebraskans?  It would be amusing – and instructive.

And useful.  For it is well, in such matters, to see clearly what is ahead.  The United States grows increasingly urban, but its ideas are still hatched in the little town.  What the swineherds credit today is whooped tomorrow by their agents and attorneys in Congress, and then comes upon the cities suddenly with all the force of law.  Where do the swineherds get it?  Mainly from the only publicists and metaphysicians they know: the gentlemen of the sacred faculty.  it was not the bawling of the mountebank Bryan, but the sermon of a mountain Bossuet that laid the train of the Scopes case and made a whole State forever ridiculous.  I suggest looking more carefully in to the notions that such divine ignoramuses spout.

Your Weekly Machen Fix: What is Faith?

The following is from What is Faith, published in 1925.

The question, “What is Faith?”, which forms the subject of the following discussion may seem to some person impertinent and unnecessary.  Faith, it may be said, cannot be known except by experience, and when it is known by experience logical analysis of it, and logical separation of it from other experiences, will only serve to destroy its power and its charm.  The man who knows by experience what it is to trust Christ, for example, to rest upn Him for salvation, will never need, it may be held, to engage in psychological investigations of that experience which is the basis of his life; and indeed such investigations may even serve to destroy the thing that is to be investigated.

Such objections are only one manifestation of a tendency that is very widespread at the present day, the tendency to disparage the intellectual aspect of the religious life.  Religion, it is held, is an ineffable experience; the intellectual expression of it can be symbolical merely; the most various opinions in the religious sphere are compatible with a fundamental unity of life; theology may vary and yet religion may remain the same.

Obviously this temper of mind is hostile to precise definitions.  Indeed nothing makes a man more unpopular in the controversies of the present day than an insistence upon definition of terms.  Anything, it seems, may be forgiven more readily than that.  Men discourse very eloquently today upon such subjects as God, religion, Christianity, atonement, redemption, faith; but are greatly incensed when they are asked to tell in simple language what they mean by these terms.  They do not like to have the flow of their eloquence checked by so vulgar a thing as a definition.   And so they will probably be incensed by the question which forms the title of the present book; in the midst of eloquent celebrations of faith – usually faith contrasted with knowledge – it seems disoncerting to be asked what faith is.

More to come next week!

Why are there no children in the church?

Josh Forrest at Creed or Chaos examines the all-too-common practice of children’s church.