The Church, the Schools and Evolution Part 5

For by one Spirit have we all been baptized into one body.

They regard it as referring to the inward, spiritual union with Christ which takes place in the new birth, rather than to an outward act. For in the moment of regeneration, every believer is baptized by the Holy Spirit into the Body of Christ.

But even so, the word "buried" still stands in the first pa.s.sage above, and a burial has to do with the dead, not with the living. Being "buried,"

therefore, when the Holy Spirit baptizes us into Christ, it is "into death," not into an enlarging life, because we are so completely dead that the baptizing Spirit sets the "old man" forever aside as utterly unimprovable, in order that He may make us "partakers of the divine nature"

by which we become a "new creation" in Christ.

All this, however, is utterly intolerable to the consistent evolutionist.

For if man is dead and therefore unimprovable, that makes progress upward impossible, and, if that is impossible, the whole doctrine of evolution is at an end.

And so the evolutionist a.s.sumes the presence of life, and conceives the race to be progressing upward out of crude forms and unethical conceptions toward G.o.d. It is perfectly consistent, therefore, that he should seek to stir man's n.o.ble aspirations and should present high ideals for him to strive after. For it is not life man needs, they say, it is simply conversion to higher ideals and aspirations in life.

Hence Dr. E. D. Burton is in perfect harmony with this evolutionary conception when he says:

Jesus was a teacher of great principles, which it is inc.u.mbent upon us to apply to the mult.i.tudinous phases and experiences of life, and the embodiment of an ideal, which it is ours to endeavor, as best we can, to achieve.

Dr. Herbert L. Willett, of the University of Chicago, was also in harmony with all this when he said in an address heard by the writer:

It is the task of the Church to interpret to the world the ideals of Jesus for men to strive after.

And Dr. J. H. Coffin also voiced the evolutionary position when, in speaking of conversion, he said:

It is conversion =to= something, namely, the =principles= of Jesus.

Now when the logic of this conception is followed out, it turns evangelism into religious education. And so it is easy to see why the advocates of evolution are stressing religious education with increasing insistence. For it is through the methods of religious education, according to Dr. Burton, that the lost are being

led to adopt the principles of Jesus and to accept his leadership quietly and gradually.

This makes regeneration simply an added impulse in the direction in which men are imagined already to be going. It also has the effect of altogether reversing the emphasis in the work of the Church with the lost. According to Dr. Burton, it transfers it

from the salvation of the individual, with emphasis upon rescue from future woe, to the creation of a human society dominated by the spirit of Jesus.

And Dr. Gerald Birney Smith, speaking of present-day missionary methods, says:

Humanly determined programs are being subst.i.tuted for dogmatic decrees in the work of the churches. This is genuine democracy. The missionary enterprise is rapidly being conceived as a democratic social program rather than as the rescue of a few individuals from the divine wrath....

Education is coming to be a primary means of accomplishing the missionary task.

Such a mission to the lost would be altogether unthinkable if men were believed to be spiritually dead. For dead men are helpless to adopt principles and strive after ideals. Dead men do not need education, they need life.

Any one of average intelligence can see at a glance that these two programs of salvation are headed in opposite directions. By one we strive after an ideal; by the other we quit all striving and surrender to a Person. One is salvation by a human resolution to press toward the pattern set before us by the "Flower of the Race"; the other is salvation by a divine rescue from that natural hatred of purity and holiness which made possible the murder of the Son of G.o.d. By one program we adopt the principles and follow the spirit of the life of Christ; by the other we trust in the merits of the shed blood and subst.i.tutionary death of Christ.

These two programs are mutually exclusive. Thus the evolutionary philosophy utterly destroys the doctrine of the new birth.

7. The logic of evolution destroys the doctrine of the =holiness of G.o.d=, for it makes G.o.d the =author of sin=.

Le Conte says:

If evolution be true, and especially if man be indeed a product of evolution, then what we call evil is not a unique phenomenon confined to man and the result of an accident [the fall], but must be a great fact pervading all nature and a part of its very const.i.tution.

No thinking man can get away from that conclusion. For if evolution in any form is a fact, then the thing the Bible calls sin was either somehow embedded, by a competent and responsible Creator, in man's very const.i.tution as a necessary process of his evolution, or else it slipped into the race through the bungling and unwatchful incompetence of an impotent Creator. Thus in either case G.o.d becomes the author of sin!

This puts evolution almost, if not altogether, on the ground of blasphemy!

G.o.d responsible for the unspeakable woe and the unmeasured suffering of man? G.o.d the author of that inherent force in man's nature which has filled the earth with hatred, violence, bloodshed, and death? Let him think so who can!

After these doctrines of the Word are set beside the evolutionary philosophy, and after it begins to dawn on the thinking mind how utterly irreconcilable they are, the absolute impossibility of a consistent evolutionist believing in an inspired, inerrant, and infallible Bible becomes well nigh an axiom. It is no wonder that Dr. W. B. Riley exclaims:

What thinking man fails to see the infinity of s.p.a.ce between Modernism and Orthodoxy, or to apprehend the fact that daily they are drawing farther apart! Time holds no promise of even a patched-up peace.

Lord Kelvin was astonished at the preachers and teachers who are trying to apply the doctrine of evolution to the fundamentals of the faith. He said:

I marvel at the undue haste with which teachers in our Universities and preachers in our pulpits are restating the truth in the terms of evolution, while evolution itself remains an unproven hypothesis in the laboratories of science.

And well might he marvel. And well might the Church become aroused and alarmed as the logical workings of these false doctrines produce more and more fearful results within her ranks. The whole Church is being moved away from the foundations of the faith, and this false philosophy is at the bottom of it all.

The group announcements of the Sunday services of the Los Angeles liberal churches show where all consistent evolutionists are headed. Standing at the head of these announcements are these words, the capital letters being theirs:

We found our faith on the thought of EVOLUTION rather than Special Creation; on revelation through NORMAL HUMAN EXPERIENCE rather than the supernatural; on salvation through GROWTH rather than a miraculous rebirth.

And when it comes to the awful harvest that is being gathered from our churches for the forces of spiritual destruction through our colleges and universities, William Jennings Bryan has had some information given to him that will give us a hint of what is going on. He says:

Having had opportunity to make a personal investigation, I feel it my duty to warn the lovers of the Bible of the insidious attacks which are being made upon every vital part of the Word of G.o.d. A father tells me of a daughter educated at Wellesley who calmly informs him that no one believes in the Bible now; a teacher in Columbia University begins his lessons in geology by asking students to lay aside all that they have learned in Sunday-school; a professor of the University of Wisconsin tells his cla.s.s that the Bible is a collection of myths; a professor of philosophy at Ann Arbor occupies a Sunday evening explaining to an audience that Christianity is a state of mind and that there are only two books in the Bible with any literary merit; another professor in the same inst.i.tution informs students that he once taught a Sunday-school cla.s.s and was active in the Young Men's Christian a.s.sociation, but that no thinking man can believe in G.o.d or the Bible; a woman teacher in a public school in Indiana rebukes a boy for answering that Adam was the first man, explaining to him and the cla.s.s that the "tree man" was the first man; a young man in South Carolina traces his atheism back to two teachers in a Christian college; a senior in an Illinois high school writes that he became skeptical during his soph.o.m.ore year but has been brought back by influences outside of school while others of his cla.s.s are agnostics; a professor in Yale has the reputation of making atheists of all who come under his influence--this information was given by a boy whose brother has come under the influence of this teacher; a professor in Bryn Mawr combats Christianity for a session and then puts to his cla.s.s the question whether or not there is a G.o.d, and is happy to find that a majority of the cla.s.s vote that there is no G.o.d; a professor in a Christian college writes a book in which the virgin birth of Christ is disputed; one professor declares that life is merely a by-product and will ultimately be produced in the laboratory; another says that the ingredients necessary to create life have already been brought together and that life will be developed from these ingredients, adding, however, that it will require a million years to do it. These are a few of the ill.u.s.trations furnished by informants whom I have reason to believe.

These facts certainly furnish sufficient reason why the Church cannot compromise with the evolutionary philosophy. To do so would be to head herself toward destruction. She must stand uncompromised and unflinching against that unproven and discredited theory, the acceptance of which destroys faith in that infallible and inerrant Word on which she was founded, and on whose "thus saith the Lord" she must rest her message to a lost world. =There is no middle ground. To compromise would be to commit suicide.= If the Church and the Schools are ever to come into harmony, it cannot be because the Church gives up an infallible Book and accepts a discredited theory in its place, and so it must be because the Schools give up this unscientific, because unproven, theory and get back to faith in the inerrant Word of G.o.d.

That this is the only basis on which the Church and the Schools can ever come into harmony is strenuously denied by the evolutionists in both Schools and Church. But their denial is meaningless when it is remembered that they are working night and day to capture the Church, as they have already almost done with the Schools, before we wake up to what is going on. But it can never be done. The true Church will never surrender to those who would remove her foundations and wreck her message.

CHAPTER II

The Present Controversy--the Cure

In the previous pages we went back to the cause of the present controversy between the Church and the Schools. We found that the unproven and discredited theory of evolution lies at the bottom of it. We also concluded that no compromise that permits entrance to this theory in any form is possible, for the truth which is at once both the life and the message of the Church, and the theory of evolution, are mutually exclusive.

In this chapter we will seek to find the cure for this distressing controversy. That there is a cure is beyond all possible question. And if it is not found and applied, the controversy cannot fail to intensify until it may force a re-alignment in the Church--a thing a great company of the most earnest in the Church are fighting to prevent.

Now the only possible basis on which both the Church and the Schools can take their stand, if this controversy is to be settled without final disunion in the Church, was laid down by Christ in that scientific formula:

If any man willeth to do His will, he shall know of the teaching, whether it be of G.o.d, or whether I speak from Myself.

To follow this formula in our search for common ground is to be utterly scientific, for it is the laboratory method of experiment. The true Church has always believed and received the Bible as the inerrant Word of G.o.d, not because, in blind credulity, she has followed some irrational and unscientific impulse, but precisely because she has been =scientific enough= to work by this formula and carry the laboratory test to its =final a.n.a.lysis=. And for the Schools to follow this same formula with scientific accuracy would be for them to arrive at the same place at which the true Church has arrived. For when the Church and the Schools start out in search of truth and do not arrive together, it is either because they did not start together, or because one or both of them did not proceed all the way with scientific exactness. Truth is an eternal unity, and conclusions regarding it that are mutually exclusive and therefore the cause of controversy prove to a demonstration that somebody's methods of investigation were unscientific.

If we really intend to be scientific, therefore, when we start out to investigate truth of any sort and in any realm, the first thing we will do will be to cla.s.sify. We can neither start nor proceed together unless we do. Indeed, if we are to be scientific enough to follow the formula laid down by Christ, we will be compelled to cla.s.sify before we can even begin our investigation.

Therefore--