Holiness Essential to Salvation by Charles Finney

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HOLINESS ESSENTIAL TO SALVATION

A sermon preached on Friday, June 7, 1850

By the Rev. C. G. Finney

“And she shall bring forth a Son, and thou shalt call his name Jesus; for he shall save his people from their sins.”-Matthew 1:21.

In speaking from these words, I design to show.
I. That salvation from sin is the great necessity of man.
II. That Jesus has undertaken this work.
III. Inquire why it is that so many persons fail of this salvation.

I. That salvation from sin is the great necessity of man.

This is a fact of universal observation. It is also a fact of universal consciousness. Every man is conscious of the fact that he is a sinner, and while he is a sinner he cannot be satisfied with himself, he cannot truly respect himself, he cannot have peace of mind, he cannot have the favour of God; and he ought not to have all or any of these things. In short, it is a fact of universal experience that men are sinners, and that they must be saved from sin as a condition of their being made happy, either in this world or in the future world.

Men are so constituted that they cannot doubt that ultimate happiness is impossible unless they can be delivered from that which they know to be a great curse in this world, and which they also know will be their ultimate ruin, if persisted in. While men are violating their own consciences, they know that happiness is impossible. These facts are always assumed in the Bible, and their truth is declared by the universal sentiment of mankind. But I must not dwell on this thought; the text announces the fact that Jesus Christ has come into the world, and that his great business is to save men from sin. This leads me to the second thought-

II. That Jesus has undertaken this work.

“He shall save his people from their sins,” therefore is his name called Jesus–the name Jesus signifying a Saviour. Now, salvation from sin is of the highest importance to mankind. The term strictly, as here used, means merely deliverance, or safety from some tremendous evil; it is often found in the Bible, and includes in it very generally, in addition to mere deliverance, the result of it-eternal happiness and enjoyment in heaven with the people of God.

Thus, properly and scripturally speaking, the term salvation means deliverance, both from guilt and it’s consequences. In this text, the reason assigned for the name that was to be given to the child of Mary was, that he should save his people from their sins-that he should bear the particular relation of a Saviour-that he should save both from the guilt and the punishment of sin. The Bible represents him as having given himself to be the Saviour of the world, as having consecrated himself to this end, as having died and opened a way by which sinners could be saved; and that previous to this, as being in a waiting attitude to accomplish this work; as endeavoring to gain the consent of God and man to comply with the natural and necessary conditions of sinners being saved; and that now he possesses in himself all the fullness of power of necessary to the accomplishment of the work-he is able to save unto the uttermost all that will come to God by him. The Bible represents Jesus as coming on this great mission, and as occupying himself exclusively with this work, and as having fully secured this end. Now, whenever persons come into sympathy with him, and seek what it is his business to give, knock at the door which it is his business to open, the Bible represents him as ready and willing to do these things for them. We now come to the inquiry.

III. Why it is that so many persons fail of this salvation.

That many do fail of it, is a simple matter of fact. Now, the question is, Why do they fail? We remark, first, that many persons fail of this salvation because they have not abandoned reliance upon themselves. It is the most obvious thing in the whole world, that many persons are living not to God, but to themselves.

Now, wherever this principle is manifested, it is certain that persons are not saved from sin, for what is sin but living to self and not to God; self-seeking is the very essence of sin. Now, multitudes of persons manifest that this spirit is not set aside in them, but that, on the contrary, the whole end and aim of their life is self-seeking, instead of the first and great end being the glory and honour of God. Now, a man cannot be saved unless he is justified, and he cannot be justified unless his sins are pardoned,– this must be a condition of a sinner’s salvation.

Salvation consists in being saved from sin; and the reason why a great many persons are not saved is, that they are unwilling to accept of salvation on such a condition, they are unwilling to give up their sins; but if they will not be persuaded to be saved from the their sins, and become sanctified,– if they will not relinquish and renounce their sin, they never can be saved. Many persons will even pray to God that he will save them, but they really do not desire that for which they ask-they do not mean what they say; to get men to consent to relinquish their sins, is the great difficulty.

Now observe, if a man is saved at all he must consent to it; his will must acquiesce in the arrangement; and the will is not moved by physical force. A man must voluntarily consent to be saved, or Jesus himself cannot possibly save him. Man is a moral agent, and he is addressed by God as such, and therefore, in order to his salvation, he must voluntarily consent to relinquish sin, and have his mind brought into obedience with the law of God.

Again: Multitudes are not saved because they seek forgiveness while they do not forsake their sins. Some individuals will spend much time in praying for pardon, while they indulge themselves in sin. Again: multitudes are seeking for salvation while they neglect the natural condition of their being pardoned. While they continue in sin, indulge in a self-seeking spirit, it is naturally impossible, that they can be saved.

If a man should act in this way in relation to his body, every one would plainly perceive the folly of his conduct; if he should partake of things which rendered good health impossible, and yet should wonder that he did not possess the robustness of health which he desired, people would not pity, but blame him. Now, the fact is, that many persons are seeking for that which must result alone from holiness, while they are not themselves sanctified. They are seeking comfort while they refuse to be holy; thus they neglect to fulfill the natural conditions on which either comfort or salvation can be obtained. Again, many persons fail of this salvation because they are waiting for God to fulfill conditions which it is naturally impossible for him to fulfill, and which they themselves must fulfill, and which God is endeavoring to persuade and influence them to fulfill.

For example: God cannot repent for them; he cannot believe for them; no, but these are the natural conditions of their salvation, and these very things Christ is persuading them to do. Now, they are waiting for God to do that which he will never do, that in fact, which he cannot do, but which he is requiring us to do for ourselves. Let me be understood. God never requires of us to perform an impossibility, nor does he accomplish that for us which we can do ourselves. Don’t be shocked at this, for it is truth. Now, observe, God requires us to repent; this is an act of our own minds, and therefore he cannot do it for us. It is true that these things are spoken of sometimes as being done by God; it is said that he gives repentance, faith, and love, but he only does this in the sense of persuading and inciting our minds to the performance of these duties.

Now, if anybody is seeking for God to do that which they must do themselves, they will fail of eternal life. How many are making mistakes in this matter! they are waiting for God to put repentance and faith into them, and entirely overlooking the fact of its being an exercise of their own minds. Again: Another difficulty, and another reason, why persons are not saved is this-they profess to be waiting for the Holy Spirit, while in fact they are resisting the Holy Spirit. They pretend that they are waiting for the Holy Spirit to save them and convert them: now, mark, every moment they wait they are grieving and resisting the Holy Spirit. Now, what do they mean by waiting, when they ought to be acting? From the beginning and end He is the teacher. “No man can come unto me, except the Father which sent me draw him.” “They shall all be taught of the Lord.” “He shall take of the things of mine and show them unto you.” Now, the Bible represents the Holy Spirit in this way as a teacher, and those who do not yield when the truth is presented to them, are resisting and grieving the Spirit. You remember the words of our Saviour to the Jews, “Ye do always resist the Holy Ghost; as your fathers did, so do ye.”

Now, multitudes in the present day are resisting the Holy Spirit under the pretence of waiting for it. The divine influence is always waiting to save you, if you will comply with the necessary conditions; but if under any pretence you neglect your duty, you never will

be saved. But I pass next to consider another great difficulty in the way of a sinner’s conversion. Many are really seeking to be justified in sin. They ask God to pardon them, but they refuse to be sanctified; they seek Christ as their justification only. They cleave to their sins, they are living in their sins, and they seek to be justified rather than sanctified- indeed, they refuse to be sanctified at all. Now, this is a very common case.

Again, let me say that this class of persons really regard the gospel as a mighty system of indulgence, on a large scale. They really suppose that men are subjects of this salvation while they are living in selfish indulgence. In the very early ages of Christianity, the Antinomian spirit had crept into the Church: the doctrine of justification by faith, as opposed to justification by works, was sadly abused by many. While some of the Apostles were still living, many persons came to regard the gospel as a system of indulgence, that men were to be justified in sin rather than be saved from sin; thus they took an entirely false view of the gospel of Christ. You will remember that the Apostle James wrote his epistle to denounce this wrong view, and to guard the Christians against abusing the doctrine of justification by faith. Some persons imagine that the Apostle rejected this doctrine altogether, yet this is not true; but his epistle being written for the purpose we have mentioned, he does not give this doctrine the prominence that Paul did.

Now, no man who lives in sin can be justified, because no man can be pardoned who lives in any form of iniquity. The Apostle tells you plainly that those who commit sin are the children of the devil, and while they are living in sin they cannot enjoy the privileges of the gospel. He does not mean that an individual cannot be a Christian who falls under the power of temptation and into occasional sin. The Apostle John also says, “Whosoever is born of God sinneth not”–“whosoever is born of God does not commit sin, for his seed remaineth in him: and he cannot sin because he is born of God”–“he that committeth sin is of the devil.” This is strong language, and if I should affirm so strongly the necessity of holiness, you would think I spoke harshly; but it ought to be insisted upon more than it is, that men cannot be Christians unless they are holy.

The moral law is as much binding upon Christians as it was upon those to whom it was first given. Faith without love will never save man; but let me say, that true faith is always true love. Every man who breaks the law systematically and designedly, living in violation of its precepts, is a child of the devil, and not of God. Let this be thundered in the ears of the Church and the world.

Now, it is very common for men to overlook this great truth, and fall into the worldly mindedness and sinful practices of the those around them. Again: multitudes are not saved because they regard the gospel as an abrogation of the moral law-a virtual repeal of it. Now, the gospel does not repeal the moral law. What saith the Apostle? “Do we make void the law through faith? God forbid! Yea, we establish the law.” Now, it is true that the gospel was designed to set aside the penalty of the law, upon all who should be persuaded to come back to its precepts, and yield that love and confidence which the law requires. Now, it is frequently the case, if ministers begin to say anything about obedience to the law, the people call out against it as legal preaching! If they are roused up and urged to do that which the law of God requires of them, they tell you they want

the gospel. Now, such people know nothing at all of the gospel! They make Christ the minister of sin! They seem to think that Christ came to justify them in their sin, instead of saving them from it.

Let me say, once more, that another reason why men are not saved from sin is, that they have really come to regard justification in sin, as a means to save them from it! In support of this monstrous idea, they will even appeal to the Scriptures. They found justification on the atonement; now, this work of Christ can never be imputed to any man in such a sense as to justify him while he remains in sin! Justification in sin is a thing impossible! Now, how can a man be pardoned and justified, before he repents and believes! It is impossible! He must be in a state of obedience to the law of God before he can be justified! The fact is, there is a very great mistake among many people on this subject. They think that they must persuade themselves that they are justified, but they are not, and never can be, till they forsake sin, and do their duty.

In the next place, multitudes make this mistake-they seek hope, rather than holiness; instead of working out their own salvation, they seek to cherish a hope that they shall be saved. Again, they seek to persuade themselves that they are safe, while they are in a state of condemnation. Those who seek salvation oftimes fail because they seek it selfishly; not so much because they abhor sin, and want holiness, as because they desire personal happiness, or personal honour, by being held up as very pure and good men, and because they seek sanctification for some selfish reason they do not get rid of their sins. Again, some individuals content themselves in sin so long as they can indulge a hope, or get others to indulge a hope for them. If they have certain feelings, which lead them to hope that all will be well with them at last, they are perfectly satisfied, and have no desire to be saved from sin.

But I cannot continue this train of observation, and will therefore conclude with some remarks. First, no person has any right to hope for eternal life, unless he is conscious of possessing the spirit of Christ within him-unless he is free from those sinful tempers which are indulged in by wicked men-unless he is free from a self-seeking spirit of doing business which characterizes the men of the world. How can a man in such a condition expect or hope for eternal life? How can any man suppose that he is justified before he is sanctified? I do not mean to say, that a man is not in any sense justified before he is sanctified; but, as a matter of fact, a man is not safe for eternity unless he is saved from sin. He has no right to expect to get to heaven unless the work of sanctification is going on in his soul. Again, it is easy to see from what has been said, that many persons regard the doctrine of justification by faith, as the whole gospel. It is the gospel, in their conception of it!

Now, why is this the gospel to them? Why is it good news? Why is it not good news that Christ will save them from sin? How is it that the good news of the gospel as it strikes them is the good news that will justify rather than sanctify?-that Christ is precious to them, not so much because he came to save from sin, as because he came to forgive, to die for their sins, and to justify them! Is there not something wrong in all this? Does it not show, when persons lay more stress upon justification than upon sanctification, that they

are more afraid of punishment than of sin?-more afraid of the consequences of sin than of the sin itself? If they can but get rid of the penalty, the governmental consequence of sin, they are satisfied. Again, it is certain, that where this principle takes possession of the mind, that the individual seeks much more to be pardoned than to be made holy. It is better news to him that Christ will justify him, than that Christ will save him from his sins. Talk to him about his sins; preach to him about his sins; require him to become holy; present Christ as his sanctification, and that is not the gospel! Let me say, that there are multitudes of persons who have contracted their views into that one point-that Christ has died to save men from punishment. All idea about Christ being the believer’s sanctification, or that sanctification is a condition of salvation, is wholly lost sight of. There is no stress laid upon the doctrine of sanctification.

Christ is chiefly precious because he saves from wrath, much more than because he saves from sin; more because he justifies, than because he sanctifies. Now, rely upon it, that, whenever this is the case, there is a sad defect of character. What is the true spirit of the children of God? Why, it is this,– they feel as if they must get rid of sin, at any rate. They don’t want to be saved in their sins; they feel that to live in their sins is hell enough. They abhor themselves on account of their sins. They must get away from their sins. They would not wish to be saved at all, if they could not be saved from sin. They are ready to say, If the gospel cannot save me from sin, it is a failure, for this is my necessity.

Now, who does not know that the true Christian is more afraid of sin than of punishment? Yes, a great deal more! They abhor sin; and when they ever fall into sin, they are ready to curse themselves; and all the more because Christ is so willing to forgive them. The man in this condition of mind will never look upon the gospel as mere justification. Again: whenever the doctrine of justification comes to be more prominent in the church than sanctification, there is something wrong, there is a radical error crept into the church; there is a danger of that church losing all true idea of what the gospel is. I don’t know how it is in this country, but I greatly fear that the doctrine of sanctification is kept very much in the background. Now, why is this? While there is so much said about justification, there is very little said about personal holiness. So much is said about a Saviour, as if the gospel was meant simply to save men from punishment.

Now, while I know that the gospel presents salvation from punishment, and the promise of eternal life through Jesus Christ, I know that its chief relation to men, is to save them from their sins-to become their sanctification. Again: the true state of men is always known by the great absorbing idea which is in their minds. A man’s character is as is the end for which he lives. Now, a man who lives in any sin, any form of self-pleasing, and self-seeking, cannot be a Christian; for the true idea of the gospel is, that, for a man to be a Christian he must be devoted to God, and thoroughly withdrawn from all forms of sin and iniquity. He must be devoted to God, living for God, living for the same end that God lives; sympathizing with Christ, and with everything that is good. This is the character of every true Christian. This is the true conception of Christianity, and just in proportion as individuals approach to this standard have they a good hope of salvation, and just in proportion as they recede from this standard they fail of salvation. Again: there are a

great many persons whose aim is to get peace of mind, and who are constantly crying “peace” to others, when there is no peace.

Now, let me say that there can be no real, true peace, unless all the conditions of the gospel have been complied with. You cannot have that peace of God which passeth all understanding, while you are in an unsanctified state; and, if you think so, you are deceiving yourself. Now, let me ask of you, Are you not conscious that this “peace of God” does not “rule in your hearts?” If I am not greatly mistaken, there are many persons in this house who have been trying for years to make themselves happy, but who, after all, are in such a state of mind as not to know that they are pardoned, have no real confidence in their own piety; now, how is it possible that they should have peace of mind? Peace of mind results from sanctification, and this they have never obtained. Let an individual who has been making justification the great idea, be at the point of death, and does he feel happy and resigned, having a full confidence that he shall go to heaven? How often do we hear such persons exclaim under such circumstances, “I am undone, I am not prepared.” Why are you not prepared? A short time ago you were indulging a comfortable hope that you were a Christian, and now you cry out in fear, lest you should lose your soul. How is this?

There is a great delusion in the minds of men on this subject. They suppose that they have a very comfortable hope, but it is in the absence of piety; and when death stares them in the face they discover that they have no confidence in religion, or any ground of hope. Again: persons who do not like to have their hopes tried, and themselves searched, do great wrong to their souls. The more hope is tried, if it be good hope, the more consoling and satisfactory will it become. The man who is seeking to be sanctified, desires to be searched that he may not be resting in any degree upon an uncertain and unsafe foundation, because he is more afraid of sin than of anything else; he is more ready to forsake sin, than anything else in the world; he would rather forego any earthly good than have anything to do with sin. Now, don’t say that this is extreme, because it is a universal truth, if religion implies supreme love to God: if we supremely love any being, we shall supremely delight to please him: this is a universal characteristic of the children of God.

Now, if this be so, what shall we say of the great mass of professors, who give the highest possible evidence that self-indulgence is the chief end of their lives? They wait to be saved, not from sin, but in it. But while they live in sin they never can be saved! Before hope can be cherished, the conditions of salvation must be fulfilled: you will never be saved at all unless you are saved from sin–mind that! You must become holy in order to become happy. Fulfill the conditions; become holy, and then your peace shall flow like a river. Give up your sins, give your heart to God, and rely upon it that the peace which passeth all understanding shall rule in your hearts.

Believer in Christ, the Lord hath set you apart for himself, separated you from the rest of the world; but you are only set apart as ” holiness to the Lord:” this must be written plainly upon you; and if the Lord has written his name upon you, you are safe, not else. And let me say to every one in this house, Don’t you expect to be forgiven, don’t you expect to be pardoned, unless you will consent to be separated from your sins, and have

the name of the Lord Jesus Christ written upon your hearts; unless your prayer is, “O Lord, write thy law upon my heart and make me holy.” Receive his name in your forehead and his law in your heart, give yourself up to him, body and soul, and rely upon it, as the Lord liveth, as Jesus liveth, you shall understand what is the salvation of God. Will you do it tonight?

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Overview of the Subject of Holiness By Dean H. Harvey

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Overview of the Subject of Holiness

By Dean H. Harvey

Introduction: My presentation will be primarily Biblical, because I believe that right theology and principles are absolutely necessary before we can move on to right practics.

I. Basic views of holiness

A. What I call the legalistic righteousness (probably the most common “Christian” stereotype) view: Teaches that godly living is equated to a list of prohibitions. We are familiar with various lists, i.e., card playing, dancing, movies, etc. (Ill-the donkey who was elected to the deacon board) This is in contrast to a list of “do’s”, which we have in the two greatest commandments: (Matt. 22:36-40) “Thou shalt love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, amd mind,” and “Thou shalt love your neighbor as yourself.”

1. Are externals important? Matt. 23:26-Thou blind Pharisee, cleanse first that which is within the cup and platter, that the outside of them may be clean also.

B. What I call the imputed righteousness (probably the most widely taught in evangelical churches) view: That we are unable to keep the commandments of God, and therefore the only way we can be holy is by way of imputation, i.e., Christ’s righteousness is imputed to us by God, and therefore in God’s sight we are holy, regardless of how we actually live in this world.

1. Within evangelicalism, most Christians I have known have believed two things, which show how much work we have to do.

a. We cannot obey God to point that we do not sin, b. Jesus could not help not sinning.

C. What is often called perfectionism: This view historically holds that sinful acts are a natural, inevitable result of having an inborn sinful nature, usually thought to be inherited from Adam. (We sin because we are sinners, not, We are sinners because we sin.) So the first step is to eradicate the sinful nature,

through an experience sometimes called sanctification, a second work of grace, or the baptism of the Holy Spirit.

1. As long as we are moral beings, we will never be able to escape the possibility of sinning, in that, as free moral beings, we can always respond to any situation in a sinful way.

D. Outside of evangelicalism, liberal churches, as far as I know, do not talk about holiness. Christianity, for them, becomes conformity to the “church’s” (their particular stream of the the church) current agenda for the world, usually with socialistic or humanistic programs.

E. What I believe is the Biblical view, that we are forgiven of all our sins when we come to Jesus in repentance and faith, and then begin to obey God from the heart according to the light we have up to that moment.

II. Definition of holiness

A. Holiness is usually defined primarily as “to set apart, the separation of a person or thing to divine use…” Examples are:

1. Ex. 3:5-holy ground
2. Ex. 28:38-holy things and holy gifts 3. Ex. 28:2-holy garments

B. Holiness is usually defined secondarily as “to be righteous and obedient, in regard to behavior.” This comes from the primary root meaning of the word “clean, or cleansing.” I believe that this should be the primary meaning when applied to individuals.

1. It would be easier to live a “holy” life if we would underdefine sin. 2. It would be harder to live a “holy” life if we would overdefine sin. III. God’s clarion call to holiness:

A. Leviticus 19:2-Speak to all the congregation of the sons of Israel and say to them, “You shall be holy, for I the Lord your God am holy.” Note the specifics which are included in this context.

1. v. 3-Honoring one’s mother and father

2. v. 3-Honoring God by observing the Sabbath
3. v. 4-No idolatry-honoring God by having no other gods

4. vvs. 9-10-Honoring God by having compassion for and provision for the poor

5. vvs. 11, 12, 35-Attention to truth in word and deed 6. v. 13-Pay one’s obligations
7. v. 14-Kindness to the handicapped
8. v. 15-Avoid respect of persons

9. v. 16-Avoid gossip and slander

10. v. 16-Value human life

11. v. 17-Love your neighbor as yourself: Honest, open dealings with others

12. v. 19-A general commandment with three specific applications. Obedience to God’s commands, He knows better than we do.

13. vvs. 26-28-Avoid any contact with the (occult) spirit world 14. v. 32-Honoring the aged
15. vvs. 33-34-Love for brother (in cross cultural situations) 16. v. 35-Honest and just business dealings

B. This call to holiness is renewed and confirmed in the New Testament. The Old Testament informs the New Testament.

1. I Peter 1:15-16-…like the Holy One who called you, be holy yourselves in all your behavior, because it is written, “You shall be holy, for I am holy.”

2. Eph. 1:4…that we should be holy and without blame before Him in love…

3. Col. 1:21-23…and you, who were sometime alienated and enemies in your mind by wicked works, yet now hath he reconciled in the body of his flesh through death, to present you holy and unblameable and unreproveable in his

sight, if you continue in the faith grounded and settled, and not be moved away from the hope of the gospel…

4. II Pet. 3:11…Seeing then that all these things shall be dissolved, what manner of persons ought ye to be in all holy conversation (lifestyle, or way of life) and godliness…

5. The best practical working definition of holiness I ever heard came from Alan Snyder,

Love plus Faithfulness = Holiness

6. “I think it is important to define sin. However, it should be made very clear that it is not necessary to define sin in order to argue moral perfection! If people have a different definition of sin, then they need only insert their definition of sin whereever the Bible mentions sin. One must still conclude the Bible commands us not to do it, that we do not have to do it and if we continue to do it we will go to Hell. Some will to divert a holiness argument to quibbling about details of possible scenarios of sin. Then (they) try to claim they have a higher standard, etc. Again, the definition of sin is important but we must first recognize God’s command is not to do it, whatever “it” is (John 5:14; 8:11; Psalm 4:4; I Cor. 15:34)”

[John 5:14-…Do not sin anymore, so that nothing worse may befall you. John 8:11-…From now on sin no more. Psalm 4:4-Tremble (Be angry-KJV) and do not sin. I Cor. 15:34-Become sober minded as you ought, and stop sinning, for some have no knowledge of God. I speak this to your shame.]

a. Take some time to show from Rom. 14 and I Cor. 8 that the weak brother could not walk in holiness and violate his conscience (I Tim. 1:5…a good conscience)

IV. Elements each of us must take into consideration in evaluating whether or not we are living in holiness.

A. Ultimate intention-God instead of self.
B. Motive-What is my motive in the action I am contemplating?

C. Knowledge-What is my knowledge about God’s will in the action I am contemplating?

D. What effect will my action have on God’s reputation (Matt. 5:16), on a weaker brother (I Cor. 8:10-13)? This shows us that we have a responsibility to both our own consciences and to other Christians.

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GOD: THE MEANS OR THE END? By Jonathan Duttweiler

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GOD: THE MEANS OR THE END?

By Jonathan Duttweiler

When I was in college (many years ago!) I attended a college and career age Sunday School class in my home Church. One Sunday we had a visitor from out of town, a young man who professed to being a “born again” Christian. At the time we were studying Jerry Bridges’ book, The Pursuit of Holiness, and were discussing what it was that attracted other people to Christ. Most of us involved in the study said it was by the way we lived as Christians. This young man expressed some consternation over the emphasis some of us made that it was seeing the holiness of God in people’s lives that attracted others (non- believers) to Christ. He felt that it was God’s blessings, the material prosperity God showers upon His children, that attracted others. This was a precursor to the explosive outbreak of the so-called “prosperity gospel”, though I did not realize it then.

A. W. Tozer pointed out long ago that it seemed that popular Christianity’s most effective “selling point” is that God exists to help people get ahead in this world. Preacher after preacher exhort their hearers to “accept” Christ because of the joy, peace, or prosperity that being a child of God brings. Evangelists urge congregations to receive Jesus so they can escape hell. Slogans confront us with the claim that salvation is “eternal life insurance” or “heavenly fire insurance.” Everywhere we look people are proclaiming “come to God and get!”

But God declares that He must be sought for HIMSELF! — never as a means toward something else. You see, scripture tells us that God is never found in this manner. In fact, Jeremiah declared, speaking for the Almighty, “And you will seek me and find me, when you search for me with ALL your heart.” Whoever seeks God as a means toward an end, no matter how grand, how noble, how glorious or worthy, will never find God!

The Bible reveals to us that God is Himself the end for which humanity was created. Revelation 4:11 trumpets forth: “Thou art worthy, 0 Lord, to receive glory and honour and power; for thou has created all things, and FOR THY PLEASURE they are and were created.” Yet there is a philosophy pervading our society which says man is his own end. All of us are, by now, familiar with Secular Humanism. This philosophy teaches that man’s happiness is the supreme end, that God does not exist and that belief in Him is, in fact, dangerous. Nothing matters but the ultimate happiness of man. With this kind of philosophy we can only assume that the “end justifies whatever means are necessary” i.e. whatever induces happiness in a person is alright. Even a highly respected “father” of our country, Thomas Jefferson, wrote that “life, liberty, and the PURSUIT OF HAPPINESS” were inalienable rights. This philosophy, this quest for happiness at any cost, has become so pervasive that religion is now seen by many with this end in view: God exists to please man and the goal of religious faith is to benefit man!

But Jesus declares we are not to love ourselves with all our being but to love GOD with all our heart. “You shall love the Lord your God with ALL your heart, with ALL your

soul, and with ALL your mind.” The Psalmist reveals this same attitude in Psalm 73: “Whom have I in heaven but Thee? And BESIDES THEE, I DESIRE NOTHING on earth.” Would that we all learn to have this attitude! Luke tells the story of a lawyer who came to Jesus seeking the secret to eternal life. “What must I do to have eternal life?”, the lawyer asks. Jesus replies, “What does the Law say?” The Law says “You shall love the Lord with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength, and with all your mind.” Jesus declares, “Do this, and you will live.” Love God with ALL your heart, not part of your heart, or even with the major portion of it, but with all your heart.

Bernard of Clairvaux begins a treatise on the love of God by asking the question “Why should we love God?” He answers, because He is God! Being who He is, God is to be loved for His own sake! Not because we’ll go to heaven when we die. Not because He prospers us or protects us from sorrow. Daniel tells of Shadrack, Meshack, and Abendnego. They refused to compromise and serve the gods of Babylon and so were to be thrown into the fiery furnace. The king gave them one last chance to change their minds but they declared, “If it be so, our God whom we serve is able to deliver us…But even if He does not, let it be known to you, 0 king, that we are not going to serve your gods …” What a wonderful declaration! Even if God does not meet our expectations, even if He does not grant our happiness, even if He does not give us peace, or joy, or material prosperity, we are not going to compromise and serve other gods who you say will! We will worship God, not because of what He does for us, but because of Who He is! This is the direct antithesis of the religion of pragmatism that pervades the Church today that emphasizes “whatever works!”

We might pause here to reflect and rejoice that God’s nature is, however, to share, to give, and that creation reveals God meant His universe to be a joyful one. A. W. Tozer, again, points out that those who have come to love God for Himself will encounter countless blessings in relationship to Him. But we must remember that each gift is a bonus and because it was not sought for itself it may be enjoyed without injury to our relationship with God. But we must make no mistake, God will not stand for being one treasure among many, or even the chief treasure. People often like to say “God is number one in my life,” or “Jesus first.” But God doesn’t want to be number one, or first, HE wants to be EVERYTHING ! Jesus declares, “If anyone comes to me, and does not hate his own father and mother and wife and children and brothers and sisters, yes, and even his own life, he cannot be my disciple.”

The means or the end: what is God for you? Humanity has made the search for happiness the be all and end all of life, and it has brought untold tragedy and sorrow to the race. Again as Tozer says, the effort to achieve these things as the ulterior motive in back of accepting Christ may be something new, but new or old, it can only bring judgement upon those who teach it and those who believe it. The humanism of our day declares that man is his own end and his own greatest good. But scripture asserts God is to be our end, for Himself alone, because of who He is and because, in Christ, He bought us with a price at great cost to Himself. As the motto of the Moravian missionary cause asserts, “May the Lamb who was slain receive the reward of His suffering.”

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Freedom from Sin by Jesse Morrell

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Freedom from Sin

Jesse Morrell

2005

Romans 6:22 “But now having been set free from sin, and having become slaves of God, you have your fruit to holiness, and the end, everlasting life.”

Deep in the corridors of death row sat a guilty prisoner awaiting execution. On one fateful day the jailer walked into the prisoner’s cell causing the prisoner to wonder if this would be the day of his death. After months and years of waiting on death row, he knew this day would inevitably come. Just as the prisoner was dropping his head in shame and despair, the jailer said the words which echoed through his mind, “I am setting you free. Another man has turned himself in and requested that you be released immediately.” After fully expecting to die, the prisoner had a look of astonishment on his face. The jailer assured him by telling him that all his criminal records would be erased. He went on to say that he will not be put to death and that he can freely walk out of his cell today. It would be an understatement to say the prisoner was overjoyed. Overwhelmed with gratitude, the prisoner thanked the jailer and walked out of the cell that had him bound for countless years.

Is this not a picture of the wonderful freedom men receive by grace through faith in the blood of Jesus? Jesus Christ has turned himself in so that we can walk freely out of the cell that has had us bound. Not only are we free from the guilt and consequences of our crimes against God, but we are free from the chains of bondage that held us captive. Teaching and preaching that a man can be saved from the guilt and consequences of his sins, but yet not be saved from his sins themselves would like the jailer telling the prisoner “you are free, your record is erased, you will not be put to death, but you must remain bound in this cell for the rest of your days.” That would be no freedom at all! If we are to be slaves of God and slaves of righteousness, we must be free from death, hell, and also sin itself.

There is no such thing as treadmill Christianity. To say that a man who desires to be holy will never be able to reach it in this life opposes the very teachings of Jesus who said “blessed are those who hunger and thirst after righteousness, for they shall be filled.” (Matt 5:6). God never intended for the Christian to be as a mouse in a cage running anxiously and endlessly on a running wheel yet never getting anywhere. God has always intended to set men free, and “Therefore if the Son makes you free, you shall be free indeed.” (John 8:36).

Am I proposing here that a man can be holy while remaining here on earth and that a man can obey all the commandments of the Lord? Absolutely I am because this is what reason, logic, and the scriptures force me to believe and accept and I wouldn’t want it any other way. “For this is the love of God, that we keep His commandments. And His commandments are not burdensome” (1 John 5:3). And also “I say then: Walk in the Spirit, and you shall not fulfill the lust of the flesh.” (Gal 5:16). If you are lead by God

will He not lead you into all righteousness? Is it impossible to obey the One who said “follow me”? (Luke 18:22). Was it unreasonable when Christ said “I have given you an example that you should do as I have done”? (John 13:15).

God has not charted a course which is impossible to sail. Nothing shall be impossible for God. So long as God is the Captain and Commander of the ship He can and will sail it wherever He so pleases. Certainly mutiny against the Captain and Commander is possible on our part, but loyalty is also a possibility.

E. M. Bounds stirs us to pursue personal holiness in this quote: “Nothing short of absolute obedience will satisfy God. The keeping of all His commandments is the demonstration of obedience that God requires. But can we keep all of God’s commandments? Can a man receive moral ability that helps him to obey every one of them? Certainly he can. By the same token, man can, through prayer, obtain ability to do this very thing…Does God give commandments that men cannot obey? Is he so arbitrary, so severe, so unloving, that He issues commandments that cannot be obeyed? The answer is that, in all of Scripture, not a single instance is recorded of God having commanded any man to do a thing that was beyond his power. Is God so unjust and so inconsiderate to require a man something that he is unable to do? Certainly not! To infer is to slander the character of God.”

I fear that the issue is not that man can not obey God, but that many men will not obey God. Many do not walk in holiness because they have yet to forsake their sins and walk in complete repentance. But true repentance is always complete. If a man is driving down a two way road and fails to pay attention and therefore ends up on the wrong side of the road he is in great danger. He is in even greater danger when he notices a massive Mac truck heading straight for him. Panic grips his heart and sweat pours from his brow. What must he do? The answer is simple enough. He must suddenly, not slowly, get back on the right side of the road. If he leaves even a little bit of his vehicle on the wrong side of the road that would be enough to get him killed. Likewise, when you’re on the road of life and you end up on the wrong side of the road called sin, you are in grave danger because the Mac truck of death and hell is heading straight for you. What ought you to do? As quickly as you can you must get completely on the right side of the road. If you leave even the least bit of your life on the wrong side of the road is that not enough to get you killed?

And so it is that Christ has set us free, so we must walk free. The pardon has been issued, the records have been erased, and the cell gate has been opened wide. Now it is up to us to walk out of the chains of bondage into the marvelous freedom that is found in Jesus Christ.

Quote: The Complete Works of E. M. Bounds page 155-156.

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THE DOCTRINE OF THE SANCTIFYING SPIRIT: Charles G. Finney’s Synthesis Of Wesleyan And Covenant Theology By Timothy L. Smith

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THE DOCTRINE OF THE SANCTIFYING SPIRIT:

Charles G. Finney’s Synthesis Of Wesleyan And Covenant Theology

By Timothy L. Smith*

The year 1835 was the annus mirabilis of both liberation theology and the doctrine of sanctification in the United States. Phoebe Palmer professed the experience of perfect love at a weekly ladies’ prayer meeting held at her sister’s home in New York City that year, and for the next four decades made the “New York Tuesday Meeting for the Promotion of Holiness” the center of Methodist perfectionism and spiritual feminism, and the source of much of its social concern.1 That year, also, Orange Scott, presiding elder in Springfield, Massachusetts, won over a majority of the New England Methodist ministers to abolitionism by sending each one a three-month subscription to William Lloyd Garrison’s The Liberator. Scott’s subsequent agitation of this issue, in defiance of the bishops, led eight years later to the secession of the Wesleyan Methodists in upstate New York and, in a move to prevent New England from joining them, to the division of the Methodist church, north and south, at the General Conference of 1844.2

Methodists scarcely dominated the scene, however. Evangelicals of New England Congregationalist backgrounds, who when residing west of the Hudson River were required by the terms of the plan of union of 1801 to become Presbyterians, moved in parallel directions in the year 1835. In January, John J. Shipherd and Asa Mahan came to New York City to persuade Arthur Tappan to locate at Oberlin, Ohio, the college he planned to support for the students who had withdrawn from Presbyterian Lane Theological Seminary, in Cincinnati, when the trustees forbade their anti-slavery activities the year before. Tappan, who had been a mainstay of Lane, and who had supported the students during much of the year of feverish antislavery activity which followed their withdrawal, agreed to the plan, and named Mahan, a Cincinnati Presbyterian pastor who had sustained the students against the trustees, to be president at Oberlin. Tappan’s conditions were, however, that evangelist Charles G. Finney, recently pastor of the congregation of revivalists and reformers which he and his brother Lewis Tappan had helped organize in New York City, should spend half of each year in Oberlin as professor of theology; that the faculty, and not the trustees, should be in control of the college; and that it should be committed to “the broad ground of moral reform in all its departments.”3

Oberlin became at once the vital center of Christian reflection and action aimed at the liberation of Black people from slavery and racism; of women from the male oppression which excluded them from the higher professions, but exploited them in the oldest; of poor people from ignorance, alcohol, and the greed of merchants and land speculators; and of American society generally from all those forms of institutionalized evil which stood in the way of Christ’s coming kingdom.4 Theodore Dwight Weld, whose perfectionist view of Christian faith underlay his recent emergence as the most prominent evangelical abolitionist in the country5, appeared at Oberlin in the fall of 1835, just as Finney completed his first half-year as professor there, to give a series of lectures on

abolition and train students as anti-slavery agents. Finney, whose New York congregation had meanwhile erected the Broadway Tabernacle for his church and revival center, began that fall the Lectures to Professing Christians which signaled his growing involvement with the doctrine of the sanctification of believers, which he thought crucial to further progress in Christendom’s march toward the millennium.6 The widespread merging of Christian perfection with moral reform, in a theology no longer Calvinist, though professedly Puritan, was too much for the more conservative of the Scotch-Irish preachers in the Presbyterian church, U. S. A.7, and certainly too much for the Princeton Seminary faculty. Within two years, that denomination also divided, ostensibly over theological but in fact also over social issues.

The broader significance of these events has been obscured by the tendency of historians, recently being reversed, to view perfectionists and abolitionists as eccentric if not lunatic strains in American religion. Another series of events in the same year 1835 suggest, rather, that Christian radicalism was for the moment in the mainstream. Nathaniel W. Taylor, professor of theology at Yale and the chief architect with Lyman Beecher of the “New Divinity,” or the “New England Theology,” as it was called, published four essays in his journal, The Christian Spectator, which placed him firmly in the camp of those to whom sanctification had become the crucial issue. By grafting onto covenant theology the doctrine of the moral nature of divine government, which required the consent of the human will to all that God provided or demanded; by locating depravity not in our natures, as Jonathan Edwards had, but in our dispositions our selfish wills; and by adopting Samuel Hopkins’s idea that disinterested benevolence, or unselfish love toward God and man, was the sum of the Christian’s duty, Taylor and Beecher transformed Calvinist dogma into a practical Arminianism, without having to jettison Calvinist verbiage.8 Meanwhile, Lyman Beecher’s son Edward, who joined the famous ‘Yale Band” to become the first president of Illinois College, spoke for many of the young New Englanders whom Yale and Andover seminaries sent out as missionaries to the Midwest in the 1830’s.9 He called in 1835 for “the immediate production of an elevated standard of personal holiness throughout the universal church-such a standard . . . as God requires, and the present exigencies of the world demand.” With Finney, Edward Beecher believed that on its creation depended all hopes for the establishment of the kingdom of God on earth.10

The ethical seriousness of the New Divinity equaled that of the Methodists on one hand, or the Unitarians on the other. The title of the first of the four articles Taylor published indicated its content:11 “The Absolute Necessity of the Divine Influence for Holiness of Heart and Life.” The second began with refreshing directness: “The promised agency of the Holy Spirit, for the conversion of sinners and the sanctification of saints, is the rock of safety to the church, and the hope to the world. All preaching and prayer which dispenses with the necessity of this divine influence . . . tends to drive revivals of religion, and religion itself, from the earth.” This divine influence, however, Taylor went on to say, “never violates the great laws of moral action or contravenes the freedom of the subject.” It does not leave man “the mere creature of passive impressions or a machine operated upon by compulsory force.” As such radical moralism became the central expression of evangelical piety, Boston’s Unitarians could no longer claim a monopoly on

ethical concern. In the years 1834 and 1835 their most honored leader, William Elderly Changing, brought to a climax his series of twelve sermons on The Perfect Life which closely paralleled the radical ethics of both Methodism and the New Divinity. In each of them he insisted that absolute personal righteousness, attained by obedience to the commands and imitation of the character of Jesus, was the only standard of Christian virtue and the only assurance of everlasting life.12

The year 1835, finally, was crucial in the history of the movement to free the slaves. Lewis Tappan helped William Lloyd Garrison out-maneuver his brother Arthur and two other Tappan brothers, both of them Unitarians living in Boston, who wanted to moderate the abolitionist crusade for a moment in search of broader popular support. Arthur then joined Lewis in financing an immense expansion of abolitionist propaganda through four monthly journals, one appearing in each week of the month. They flooded the country in the twelve months after July, 1835 with a million pieces of abolitionist literature. The anti-slavery movement, having mounted this radical and “public” challenge to the South, could never again unite moderate Christians in a genteel moral consensus.13

That year also, Garrison embraced radically perfectionist piety as the only way to motivate the nation to free the slaves, liberate women, renounce warfare, and substitute love for force in the administration of justice. A company of able scholars have recently underlined the essentially evangelical commitments which governed the abolitionist crusade, not only in its earliest years, but during and after the year 1835, when Garrison began advocating a platform of “universal reform.” He aimed to overthrow “the empire of sin” by an agitation whose only weapons were truth and love.14 Aileen Kraditor has shown that Biblical ideas of righteousness dominated his thought down until 1843, when he began to question the authority of the Scriptures, and 1845, when he discovered Thomas Paine. That before those dates Garrison’s position paralleled that of Finney, Weld, and Orange Scott is evident from an editorial entitled “Perfection” which he published in The Liberator on October 15, 1841. “Whether this or that individual has attained to the state of ‘sinless perfection'” is not the issue, the unsigned editorial began. What matters is “whether human beings, in this life, may and ought to serve God with all their mind and strength, and to love their neighbors as themselves!” Instead of assailing the doctrine “be ye perfect,” Garrison continued, believers who were “not wholly clean, not yet entirely reconciled to God, not yet filled with perfect love,” should acknowledge that “freedom from sin is a Christian’s duty and privilege,” and obey St. Paul’s injunction to “put on the whole armor of God.”15

Garrison’s use of Wesleyan terms and concepts is a reminder that Methodist clergyman believed God had raised up their movement in order “to reform the nation, and spread scriptural holiness over the land.” Since my days in graduate school, when I wrote Realism and Social Reform, evidence has multiplied that holiness preaching was from Francis Asbury’s time onward an important catalyst to Methodist participation in movements for social justice. Philip Bruce, a preacher stationed in Portsmouth, Virginia, wrote Bishop Thomas Coke on March 25, 1788, of immense revivals among African slaves as well as free whites. “Here liberty prevails,” he wrote. On one preacher’s circuit in nearby Sussex and Brunswick Counties, between twelve and fifteen hundred whites

besides a great number of Blacks had been converted; and a friend had informed him that at the February court in Sussex, Methodists had filed deeds of manumission setting free over a hundred slaves.16 By the 1830’s, Wesley’s followers in New England had established a reputation of commitment to the popular side in such political issues as universal white manhood suffrage, workingmen’s rights, and a tax-supported system of free public schools. They generally endorsed the crusade for total abstinence earlier than others, in response not only to Wesley’s influence, but to the cry of their American Indian converts, and of free Blacks and working class whites in Northern cities, who insisted that liquor was for their people a tragic curse.17 And at the end of the century, Norris Magnuson has shown, such Wesleyan organizations as the Salvation Army and the Door of Hope Mission learned from the poor people they served the necessity for a moral reconstitution of the social and legal structures which allowed the exploitation of the indigent. Evangelicals of many persuasions, including Methodist William Arthur, author of the famous holiness tract, The Tongue of Fire, had come by the same route to a similar conclusion during the 1850’s.18

But on the American scene, at least, the denominational approach is myopic, as indeed I find it to some extent to be in Bernard Semmel’s study of what he calls The Methodist Revolution in England. I have briefly examined the reports of Moravian missionaries in Antigua, in the years between 1800 and 1833, comparing them with those of the Methodists who were equally effective on that island, and find little difference between the efforts of the two missions to liberate Black people from the molds in which their African past and their American enslavement had imprisoned them. An immensely detailed plan of personal interviews and moral instruction for individual converts kept Moravian missionaries busy from dawn to dark of every day. True, they scorned preaching theology, being convinced that to tell the story of the cross of Jesus was the surest way to awaken the hearts and minds of the Africans. Once awakened, however, the converts found Biblical teachings about purity, honesty, unselfishness, loyalty to marital bonds, and a forgiving spirit-in short, about the life of holiness-defined the character of a Moravian, despite what Methodists complained (and Semmel argues) was the antinomian character of the Moravian doctrine of justification.19

The same is true for the home missionary movement which swept American Congregationalism in the early decades of the nineteenth century. Whether at Yale College, or along the advancing frontier of Yankee settlement in New York, Pennsylvania, and the upper Midwest, revivalists and home missionaries whose doctrines were still cast in Calvinist language displayed the same purpose as the Methodists: to produce, through a free response to the gracious truth of the gospel, the sanctification of disorganized and demoralized persons.20

The rising expectations of the millennium which both home and overseas missions inspired did not glorify the American Empire or rationalize westward expansion, but demanded holiness. The millennial vision seems to have been a thoroughly internationalist one-at least as ecumenical as Wesley’s view of the world parish. Those who shared it proclaimed the judgments of God upon all laws, governments, and social

institutions, whether in the United States or elsewhere, which stood in the way of hope for a just and holy future for human kind.21

Spokesmen for the New Divinity were never able to see, or at least to admit, what their critics readily perceived was their adoption of many Methodist doctrines.22 In the same year 1835 when the columns of Nathaniel Taylor’s Christian Spectator made the sanctifying work of the Holy Spirit the central issue in New England theology, he published an attack on Wesley’s doctrine of the witness of the Spirit which misconstrued the founder of Methodism to teach that a subjective and personal revelation from God, rather than a transformed ethical life, attested one’s conversion. Nathan Bangs remonstrated, but Taylor stuck to his charge. Methodists were only partially dismayed to hear themselves denounced by Congregationalism’s greatest intellectual leader for not making personal holiness the only assurance of saving grace.23

For these reasons, then, the story of how Charles G. Finney forged in the crucible of Oberlin’s social activism a theology of liberation in which the Arminianized Calvinism of the New Divinity was the chief element, and the doctrine of what Finney called “perfect sanctification” through the baptism of the Holy Spirit was the catalyst, seems to me to illuminate best the history of radical religious thought in nineteenth-century America. Among Congregationalists and New School Presbyterians, the notion of Christian perfection was new and, therefore, almost impossible to associate with a traditional order. Although Methodists occasionally preached or wrote on the theme without reference at all to the social crisis of the 1830’s for which their founder’s message was newly relevant, antiquarian or individualistic views of that doctrine were not possible for preachers whose roots lay in Calvinism. At Oberlin especially, the interaction of theological reflection and spiritual experience with revolutionary ideology and political action was evident in all parties, and most especially in the evangelist whom Arthur Tappan made a professor of theology, Charles G. Finney.

Finney consented, after some initial reluctance, to accept the appointment at Oberlin because, during the previous two years, he had become convinced that the church could not save the nation unless its members found a way to translate the doctrine of sanctification into concrete experience. He had carried his evangelistic crusade from western New York to Philadelphia, New York, Providence and Boston and then had become pastor of Arthur Tappan’s circle of revivalist and antislavery radicals in New York City. There, however, amidst the institutionalized evil evident in urban culture, the optimism with which he had in preceding years anticipated the early onset of the millennium was harder to sustain. Reform crusades-even one mounted to liberate “fallen women”-encountered withering opposition, some of it from less aggressive New School Presbyterians. Finney saw in the invitation to Oberlin an opportunity to develop a company of leaders who would make the idea of Christian holiness the center of a renewed campaign to subject American society to the rule of Christ.24 There he could help train and inspire a corps of revivalists, ready to declare judgment upon all institutions which ran counter to the law of God and to affirm the dawn through His grace of a new day.25

Finney’s role, as he conceived it, was not to agitate for particular reforms so much as to provide spiritual inspiration and a Christian ideology for them all. When Arthur Tappan guaranteed that the Oberlin faculty and students would be free of interference from trustees or other outsiders, and then guaranteed not only Finney’s salary but whatever might become necessary to maintain the solvency of the school, the evangelist agreed to plant himself for half of each year at what he thought were the two arenas where America’s moral destiny would be decided-New York City and the upper Midwest. The Oberlin venture did not in any sense, therefore, isolate him from the main currents of American social idealism. Rather, the college and community furnished him with a laboratory of both spirituality and radical social action, in which the idea of Christian perfection soon reigned supreme.26

Both Finney and Mahan left behind autobiographies, written in their old age, which recounted with some improvement from hindsight the events at Oberlin between 1835 and 1840. Far from fitting the image of a backwoods evangelist, Mahan was a moral philosopher of great sophistication, His textbook asserting an absolute standard of righteousness and directly challenging the increasingly popular utilitarian views of Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill was the second most widely used in the standard course which college presidents taught for senior classes in nineteenth century America. Both Mahan and Finney, moreover, were very close students of the English Bible; and their study aimed not only at understanding theology but at cultivating their own spiritual life. They freely acknowledged that during Oberlin’s first five years a deep hunger for the highest personal achievements of piety and righteousness was their primary motivation. Mahan wrote that though he had been an effective evangelist, and preached often at Methodist camp meetings, he found in St. Paul’s writings evidence of a personal relationship with Christ which he did not know, and for which he continually prayed.27 Not since Luther and Wesley had theology and experience been so closely intertwined.

In September, 1836, in the middle of the revival with which the college opened its second year, a student asked whether Christians had Biblical grounds to anticipate a relationship with Christ which would enable them to live without committing such sins as produced guilt and condemnation-in short, to live a morally sanctified life. President Mahan answered, passionately, “yes,” though acknowledging he had not yet attained such a relationship. During that evening and the following day, however, he broke through to what he saw was the way to the experience of Christian perfection: faith in Christ’s atonement. “When I thought of my guilt, and the need of justification,” he recalled, “I had looked at Christ exclusively, as I ought to have done; for sanctification, on the other hand, to overcome the world, the flesh, and the devil, I had depended mainly on my own resolutions.”28 The next evening, Mahan preached to the revival congregation on the text “the love of Christ constraineth us,” declaring both from Scripture and his own experience “that we are to be sanctified by faith, just as we are justified by faith.” Although he did not use in the sermon the phrase “baptism of the Holy Spirit,” as he remembered having done when writing his autobiography over thirty years later, the version of the sermon which appeared in print in 1839 declared that “the appropriate office of the Holy Spirit” is to reveal the love of Christ so powerfully as to enable Christians fully to consecrate themselves to Him.29 Later, in a thoughtful discourse

entitled “The Divine Teacher,” the president explained that the Holy Spirit “enlightens the intellect, and carries on the work of sanctification in the heart,” presenting Christ to our minds “in such a manner, that we are transformed into His image” and freed from forlorn reliance upon “our own natural powers as moral agents.”30

Finney was not present that second evening, and probably did not yet approve Mahan’s decisive turn toward the idea that a “second crisis” of Christian experience was necessary to a life of sanctity. But he began immediately what proved a three-year process of working his way through the teachings of the Bible concerning the covenant of holiness. As always, his head must go ahead of his heart. That fall and winter, however -which proved to be his last in New York City-Finney included in the second series of his Lectures to Professing Christians one entitled “Sanctification by Faith,” two on the subject of “Christian Perfection,” another declaring “Love is the Whole of Religion” and a final one entitled “Rest of the Saints.” The last defined faith as “yielding up all our powers and interests to Christ, in confidence, to be led, and sanctified, and saved by Him.” All of these lectures took as their starting point the general outlines of the New Divinity.31

In the fall of 1838, when ill health prevented his spending the winter traveling in evangelistic work, Finney undertook to deliver and publish in The Oberlin Evangelist, the faculty’s new organ of religious and social reformation, a series of lectures on Christian perfection. In a letter to readers, printed along with the third lecture, he explained that in the years before 1835 he had been wholly and, he believed in retrospect, wisely committed to revival preaching aimed at securing the conversion of sinners. During his years in view York City, however, he became “fully convinced, that converts would die” and “that revivals would become more and more superficial, and finally cease, unless something effectual was done to elevate the standard of holiness in the church.” He subsequently realized that he had known Christ “almost exclusively, as an atoning and justifying Savior,” but not as a sanctifying one. In the last two or three years, he continued, “I have felt as strongly and unequivocally pressed by the Spirit of God to labor for the sanctification of the Church, as I once did for the conversion of sinners….God has been continually dealing with me in mercy….How often I have longed to unburden myself, and pour out my whole heart to the dear souls, that were converted in those powerful revivals.” Through the lectures, then, he hoped to correct the deficiencies of his earlier ministry.32

The suggestion some scholars have made, following William McLoughlin, that such high-blown spirituality indicated a turning away from the movement to reform society will not fit the facts. 1839 and 1840 were vintage years for Christian revolutionary ideology at Oberlin. Finney’s Skeletons of a Course of Theological Lectures published in the latter year included several on human government, in which he declared that “when one form of government fails to meet any longer the necessities of the people, it is the duty of the people to revolutionize…. In such cases it is vain to oppose revolution; for in some way the benevolence of God will bring it about…. God always allows His children as much liberty as they are prepared to enjoy.”33 Finney claimed, in a passage cut from his Memoirs before their publication in 1876, that he led the college that year also in

resistance to racism. When students from the South questioned the propriety of Black students eating with them at the same tables, he wrote, the faculty adopted his proposal to set up separate tables where any who did not wish to eat with the Blacks might take their meals; the historic arrangements thus being reversed, the separate tables remained empty. 34 Moreover, the lectures on sanctification themselves contained a radical attack on prevailing legal standards of business ethics which left little room of the profit motive.35

As for slavery, then in 1839 the Ohio legislature, as Donald Dayton has recently pointed out,36 adopted a statute which seemed to extend to all of that state the jurisdiction of Kentucky law over fugitive slaves, Finney introduced a resolution at the next meeting of the Ohio Anti-slavery Society declaring the statute “a palpable violation of the Constitution of this state, and of the United States, of the common law and of the law of Clod,” and announced it “as a well-settled principle of both Common and constitutional law, that no human legislation can annul or set aside the law or authority of God is At the commencement exercises in September, 1839, Jonathan Blanchard presented his famous address, “A Perfect State of Society” to the Oberlin Society of Inquiry. Over a thousand persons attended a meeting of the Lorain County Anti-slavery Society on commencement evening; they denounced “the disgraceful ‘Black laws’ of Ohio” and resolved that the membership would “not support any man for the legislature” who did not favor the repeal of all Ohio laws “founded on a distinction of color.”37 The report of these events in the Evangelist accompanied a stirring account of schools for the children of fugitive slaves which Oberlin graduates were maintaining in Canada and a denunciation of the “blood- thirsty and land-coveting whites” of Florida who had waged a three years war against the Seminole Indians and now were resisting their permanent settlement in the southern part of that state out of fear that runaway slaves would find protection among them.38

The development of Finney’s doctrine of Christian perfection, then, reflected and reinforced his revolutionary concern, and that of the Oberlin community generally, to reform society. The lectures of 1838 and 1839, which we shall examine in a moment, demonstrate that Oberlin’s political radicalism was rooted in the central theme of the Old and New Testament Scriptures: the God of eternity had bound himself in covenant with those who would be his people, making them morally responsible to him and to one another to help his kingdom come, as Jesus put it, and his will to be done, on earth as it was in heaven. Unlike John Wesley, Finney drew deeply upon Moses and the prophets, and upon the long tradition of Puritan or covenant theology. Moreover, his starting point in New Testament studies was not Moravian pietism, but Samuel Hopkins’s distillation of the ethical teachings of Jesus and Paul into the law of disinterested benevolence-what Wesley called perfect love. When Finney discovered, apparently out of his own study of the English Bible, the logical and historical links between covenant and promise in the Old Testament, and Jesus’ covenant and promise in the New of His continuing presence through the sanctifying comforter, the Holy Spirit, the circle was complete. He then proclaimed, as Wesley refused to allow his preachers to say, that the entire sanctification of the believer’s moral will was achieved through the baptism of the Holy Spirit. That proclamation did not reduce but in fact radicalized Christian concerns for social justice. For it offered to Calvinist, Pietist, and Arminian alike a way of repossessing the doctrine of the sovereignty of God over individuals as well as over the structures of society.

The result, Finney recognized, would be a radical reshaping of what the next year he called the “science of theology.” Like other branches of knowledge, he declared, theology must be open to “new truth” and ministers of the Gospel should cast aside the fear of changing their opinions about what the Scriptures teach. “I was to a wonderful extent blind to my profound ignorance of the word of God, till about three years past,” he wrote. “Since that time I have been able to read it with a degree of astonishment in respect to my former ignorance which I cannot express.” And he added, “I pray the Lord to deliver me, and to deliver the ministry, from the absurd prejudice that chains them and the Church to a set of stereotyped opinions on all religious subjects.”39

Finney began the lectures, then, with one on “eternal life” which, based on a text from the fifth chapter of I John, equated it with the present experience of sanctity, rather than a future experience of blessedness. True faith, he said, is “receiving Christ as in dwelling Savior,” who becomes “the eternal life of the soul.” God’s presence does not alter human nature, but enables the Christian to begin a life of complete obedience.40 The second lecture, on faith, based on Jesus’ response to those who asked him “what shall we do,” insisted that Calvinists and Arminians alike were trying to produce faith by obedience, despite God’s directive that holiness flows from “faith which works by love.” Finney declared that in his earlier Lectures on Revivals he had erred in not showing “that the exercise of faith is the first thing to be done.” The key element in that faith, he wrote, was “the consent of the heart or will” to the truth of God’s faithful love, as it is “perceived by the intellect.” Trust stemmed from “confidence in the character of God.” 41 The third in this trilogy on hope, faith, and love was entitled “Devotion,” which Finney defined, with characteristic concreteness, as “that state of the will in which the mind is swallowed up in God, as the object of supreme affection.” In such a life of devotedness, “we not only live and move in God, but for God.” He renounced the tendency to separate devotion from duty, including faithfulness to the ordinary duties of business life. And he rebuked those who forget that “devotion belongs to the will,” not to the “ever-varying states of emotion,” which some “are prone to call religion.”42

For lecture four, Finney revised one of his earlier Lectures to Professing Christians entitled “True and False Religion,” based on Galatians 5:1. The true, he said, is the opposite of slavery: genuine liberty to act out of love. “The true Christian never yields to the will of God by constraint” but is drawn and persuaded, engaged and committed, by joyous awareness that “infinite wisdom and love” makes Christ the soul’s “supreme, eternal choice.”43 Slavery consisted in being obliged to choose between two evils. The slaves in the American South were not strictly speaking in a state of involuntary servitude, he said, for they “prefer being as they are, to being in a worse condition-to being imprisoned or whipped for attempting to escape.” Though the religion of many persons is analogous to such slavery, he said, true faith brings genuine liberty.44

Finney then turned to two lectures on “the law of God.” Its demands were wholly fulfilled, he said, following both Moses and Jesus, in the commandment to love God with all your heart, soul, and mind, and to love your neighbor as yourself. Drawing upon but expanding Samuel Hopkins’s idea of disinterested benevolence, he made a crucible distinction between loving one’s self as an act of benevolence, and mere self-indulgence

Even more important, however, was Finney’s explanation that by love of the heart” he did not mean simply an emotional attachments “By the heart I mean the will,” he wrote; “emotions, or what are generally termed feelings, are often involuntary states of mind . . . and of course do not govern the conduct. Love, in the form of an emotions may exist in opposition to the will….” Since “the will controls the conduct,” he continued, “it is, therefore, of course, the love of the heart or will, that God requires.”45 The second talk on divine law set forth the doctrine that behind the American constitution stood a higher law, defined by what Hopkins had declared was the nature of God and the sum of man’s duty: disinterested benevolence, or pure love. “In the light of this law,” Finney wrote, “how perfectly obvious is it, that slavery is from hell. Is it possible that we are to be told that slavery is a divine institution? What! Such a barefaced, shameless, and palpable violation of the law of God authorized by God himself? And even religious teachers, gravely contending that the Bible sanctions this hell-begotten system? ‘Oh shame where is thy blush?’ What! Make a man a slave-set aside his moral agency-treat him as a mere piece of property . . . and then contend that this is in keeping with the law of God. . . ?”46

The two lectures came to a climax, characteristically, in a concrete application of the law of radical love to the ethics of conducting business. Every violation of the rule of disinterested benevolence, or perfect love, “is fraud and injustice,” Finney said, not only toward God but “toward every individual in the universe.” To transact business merely upon the “principles of commercial justice” upheld by courts of law is “rebellion against God”; in a Christian, such behavior is “real apostasy,” for which restitution must be made in all cases possible, “or there is no forgiveness.” Fiercely denouncing on this ground not only slaveholders and merchants who priced goods beyond their real value, but speculators in Western lands, Finney declared such offenders must “give back their ill- gotten gains,” or suffer damnation. He then outlined the proper Christian attitude toward wealth in terms which differed from John Wesley’s. “The law of love,” he said, “requires that we should afford everything as cheap as we can, instead of getting as much as we can. The requirement is that we do all the good we can to others, and not that we get all we can ourselves. The law of God is, sell as cheap as you can-the business maxim, as dear as you can.” Not content to leave the matter there, Finney added a third lecture, entitled “Glorifying God,” which defined holiness as faith in practice. In it he decried the love of money and praised simplicity of life, particularly in clothing and food, then came back, grandly, to link the idea of holiness to the first question of the Westminster catechism.47

The eighth lecture, on “True and False Peace” followed a letter to readers of the Evangelist which revealed Finney’s doctrine of “sin in believers” to be very close to Wesley’s, as was his appeal to converts to have faith in Christ, the sanctifying Savior. The lecture itself dealt with the psychic dimension of choice. When conscience and will unite in holy commitment to God, peace is complete. But to yield one’s will to conscience or persuasion without a deep conviction that God is trustworthy-that is, without a motive rooted in the assurance of His love-is to paper over cracks in the wall.48

By late April, both the lectures and Finney’s accompanying letters revealed the results of his deepening personal quest for Biblical understanding. The scriptural promise of a

renewed covenant of grace, taken from the prophecy of Jeremiah as well as the epistle to the Hebrews, laid a basis in logic for the emphasis upon the work of the Holy Spirit which preoccupied him in the succeeding months. And his dawning awareness that the Christian needs divine help beyond that of merely the illumination of the intellect was evident in his thoroughly Wesleyan exposition of chapters 7 and 8 of the epistle to the Romans.49

Five lectures on “The Promises,” printed from May to July, bore the fruits of his study of the Old and New covenants. “We never keep the commandments, only as we take hold of the promises,” Finney began; “by this I mean that grace alone enables us, from the heart, to obey the commandments of God.” In a vastly complex recitation of the Old Testament promises which, he said, “belong emphatically to the Christian church” and especially of God’s pledge recorded in Jeremiah 31 and Ezekiel 36 to put a “new heart” within His people-passages which he quoted at length three or four times in the first of these five lectures-Finney burst through to an assertion that holiness consists in partaking of the divine moral nature. This did not mean that God had promised “to change our constitution-to destroy our personal identity-and make our spiritual existence identical” with his. Rather, Christians were invited to become “partakers of the moral nature, or attributes or perfections of God” which are “by the Spirit, through the promises, begotten in our minds.” This assertion, though couched in the language of God’s moral government, was staggering to anyone not teethed on St. Paul. It clearly made the work of the Holy Spirit central to the new covenant. And that covenant, Finney now declared, was not the promise itself, nor an “outward precept,” nor “any outward thing whatever, but an inward holiness brought about by the Spirit of God-the very substance and spirit of the law written in the heart by the Holy Ghost.”50

This study of the promises inspired Finney’s decisive turn to the language of Pentecost to expound the covenant of grace. On further examination of the Scriptures, he concluded that “the blessing of Abraham,” which Paul wrote had “come on the Gentiles through Jesus Christ,” was not simply Christ himself but, rather, the Holy Spirit. The promises of His coming formed “one unbroken chain from Abraham to Christ,” completed when the risen Lord pledged to his disciples that they should be baptized with the Spirit. This “blessing of Abraham,” Finney declared, Christians must receive by faith which, though it began in “perception of the truth,” was complete only when they yielded their wills to “the guidance, instruction, influences, and government of the Holy Spirit.”51 It was now clear to him, he said, that Christ and the apostles regarded the day of Pentecost “as the commencement of a new dispensation, in which the old covenant was set aside only in the sense that it was fulfilled in the new.52

In this rich context of scriptural and covenant theology, Finney was finally able to declare the doctrine of sanctification through the baptism of the Holy Spirit. “Every individual Christian may receive and is bound to receive this gift of the Holy Ghost at the present moment,” he proclaimed Christians who have been born again do not have that gift “in such a sense as it is promised in these passages of the Holy Scripture, or in a higher sense than he was received by the Old Testament saints . . of whom it was said that ‘they all died in the faith, not having received the promise.’” 53

The next year, Finney’s “Letters to Ministers of the Gospel” urged them to preach earnestly the doctrine he had so recently come to understand himself. They should spare no pains to help new converts realize their need of the experience of entire sanctification. He acknowledged again that his instruction to converts had in former times “been very defective,” for he had not clearly seen “that the baptism of the Holy Ghost is a thing universally promised . . . to Christians under this dispensation, and that this blessing is to be sought and received after conversion.” That baptism “is the secret of the stability of Christian character,” he declared; new converts need “to be baptized into the very death of Christ, and by this baptism to be slain, and buried, and planted and crucified, and raised to a life of holiness in Christ.”54

Throughout all of their lectures and letters of these years, Finney and Mahan consistently declared that the only assurance that God was accomplishing his purpose in human lives was ethical: the righteousness which showed itself in radical rejection of all sin, whether individual or structural, through faith in Jesus Christ. Again and again, they and other members of the Oberlin faculty rang the changes on this theme, renouncing what they alleged was the antinomianism of the Oneida “perfectionists” on one hand and, on the other, the unwillingness of conservative Calvinists to trust the promises of God.55

Here was a theology cradled in experience and nurtured in Scripture, just as Wesley’s had been. And the experience was of persons ready to organize their lives around the pursuit of a right relationship with God, which they believed would be attested by just and loving relationships with their fellow human beings and a holy war on the corrupted structures of society. The immediate background, however, was the revitalized Calvinist ethics of Samuel Hopkins, rather than the Anglican moralism which launched Wesley on his quest, or the pietism which helped him at a crucial juncture to see he could realize it through trust in Christ. The social contest, moreover, was the optimism of a new nation, where hopes were blossoming of a social order hallowed by divine grace and hence characterized by justice and love.

Finney’s earlier preaching had stressed so much the freedom and responsibility of human beings to repent and make a new life as to allow the charge that he ignored the role of God’s grace in sanctification. Now, however, he was affirming that divine grace, poured out in the baptism of the Holy Spirit, was indispensable to the sanctification of both persons and the structures of society. Individual Christians must receive that divine gift by a faith so reasonable and a consecration so deliberate as to leave fully intact their moral responsibility to help build a righteous society and a holy character. Never a Pelagian, I think, Finney had found a way to reclaim the doctrine of God’s sovereignty without becoming a Calvinist, either. He had discovered, he believed in Scripture, a Pentecostal version of covenant theology which opened the door to the evangelical unity for which Wesley and Whitefield prayed but were never able to grasp. Rooting the experience of the baptism of the Spirit in the Old Testament covenant of holiness also insulated it against the anti-intellectual and mystical corruptions of it which Wesley feared and which, alas, forgetting Finney, twentieth-century Pentecostals seem often to have embraced.

Interestingly enough, Finney did not profess to have attained this experience himself until three years after these lectures were completed. They provide the context necessary to understand the little-noticed passage of his autobiography, describing his supply pastorate during the winter of 1843-1844 at Marlborough Chapel, in Boston. This was a newly- organized Congregationalist group which, he said, was “composed greatly of radicals,” most of them holding “extreme views” on such subjects as non-violence, women’s rights, or anti-slavery. During this winter, he declared, “my mind was exceedingly exercised on the question of personal holiness.” After many weeks of Bible reading and prayer during which he avoided visiting with individuals, Finney found himself, as he remembered it, in “a great struggle to consecrate myself to God, in a higher sense than I had ever before seen to be my duty, or conceived as possible.” In particular, he felt unable to give his ailing wife up without reservation to the will of God. “What if, after all this divine teaching, my will is not carried,” he asked himself, “and this teaching takes effect only in my sensibility? May it not be that my sensibility is affected by these revelations from reading the Bible, and that my heart is not really subdued by them'”‘ The issue was the same one he had raised at the revival in Oberlin in 1836: desire versus will, sentiment versus choice.56

One memorable day, however, the evangelist was able, as he put it, “to fall back, in a deeper sense that I had ever before done, upon the infinitely blessed and perfect will of God.” Then, in an act of consecration which fit precisely Samuel Hopkins’s description of the Christian’s duty, but which Wesleyans thought outrageous, Finney recalled, “I went so far as to say to the Lord, with all my heart, that He might do anything with me or mine, to which His blessed will could consent, that I had such perfect confidence in His goodness and love, as to believe that he could consent to do nothing, to which I could object,” including “the salvation or damnation of my own soul, as the will of God might decide.” In this moment he said he also gave up his former assurance of salvation, and took it for granted from that day forward that he would be saved, as he put it, “if I found that . . . [God] kept me, and worked in me by His Spirit, and was preparing me for heaven, working holiness and eternal life in my soul.”57

Looking back at this experience when writing his Memoirs thirty-two years later, Finney declared:

As the great excitement of that season subsided, and my mind became very calm, I saw more clearly the different steps of my Christian experience, and came to recognize the connection of all things, as all wrought by God from beginning to end. But since then I have never had those great struggles, and long protracted seasons of agonizing prayer, that I had often experienced. It is quite another thing to prevail with God, in my own experience, from what it was before…. I have felt since then a religious freedom, a religious buoyancy and delight in God, and in his word, a steadiness of faith, a Christian liberty and overflowing love, that I had only experienced, I may say, occasionally before…. Since then I have had the freedom of a child with a loving parent.

This testimony to the fruits of a second work of grace would have suited any Methodist. Certainly the evangelist did not describe it in the terms of man’s natural ability to obey God’s absolute moral law which had pervaded his earlier preaching. The full cooperation of God with man, an immersion in the divine presence which both made possible and hallowed the free act of full consecration, had become for him, as for John Wesley’s Methodists, the way to spiritual peace and moral triumph.58

The transfer of Finney’s Pentecostal language into American Methodism was direct and immediate. George O. Peck, editor of the influential Methodist weekly, the New York Christian Advocate, paid close attention to Finney’s lectures as they appeared in The Oberlin Evangelist in 1839 and 1840. In the fall of the latter year, he became the first Methodist since John Fletcher to equate the experience of entire sanctification with the baptism of the Holy Ghost.59 Others followed at once, and by 1855 reports of Methodist camp meetings and revivals in a variety of periodicals frequently referred to persons being “baptized” or “filled with the Spirit,” and used the terms interchangeably with “heart purity,” “perfect love,” or “entire sanctification.”60 Phoebe Palmer, leader of the holiness awakening among Methodists, was so deeply involved in the elaboration of John Wesley’s language of Calvary that she was one of the last to adopt the new terminology; but she did adopt it, in the fall of 1856, after a summer of immense spiritual refreshing in camp meetings in Western New York. 61 Her next major book, Promise of the Father for the Last Days, made Peter’s text at Pentecost the basis of faith for the “second blessing” and the foundation as well of a Biblical argument in favor of women’s right to preach the gospel-a right which she had exercised, but refused to claim, for the previous 20 years.62

During the succeeding decade Wesleyans, Presbyterians, Congregationalists and Friends devoted to the proclamation of Christian holiness intermingled, in preaching and in witness, the language of Pentecost and the language of Calvary. The imagery of the Spirit did not displace the cross, certainly. Holiness camp meetings, especially Methodist ones held along the eastern seaboard, closed with long Sunday night communion services, at the end of which Christians who had prayed throughout the week for the baptism of the Holy Spirit were urged to open their hearts and sing “The cleansing stream I see, I see, I plunge, and oh, it cleanseth me.”63

What Methodists did not adopt from Finney, however, and possibly did not even seriously consider, was the revitalized form which his Biblical study gave to covenant theology. Grafted onto the tap-root of the Wesleyan doctrine of a sanctifying atonement, this Puritan perspective on Old and New Testament truth would have deeply enriched the Methodist tradition, I believe. John Wesley, as Professor John N. Oswalt has recently pointed out, did not rely very much upon the Old Testament as a source for the doctrine of Christian perfection. The immense revival of Old Testament studies in our time, illustrated in reference to these questions by Rudolf Otto’s volume, The Idea of the Holy, offers insight into what it might have meant had Wesley’s study of the Bible rooted itself more deeply in Moses and the prophets. But in Wesley’s century, those who made a specialty of Old Testament theology were the Calvinistic preachers whom he found it important to resist, because he thought their doctrine of election undermined the call to Christian perfection. The theology of Charles G. Finney, however, brought the whole of

both the old and new covenants to bear upon God’s purpose to create his children in holiness and righteousness.

Methodists shared Finney’s deep consciousness of sin-especially his awareness of its stubborn social character-and his fierce loyalty to the law of righteous love offered an alternative to the sentimentalizing of New Testament doctrine which lay immediately in the future. By the end of the century evangelicals of many backgrounds had romanticized the doctrine of the Atonement, separating their understanding of God’s love from his judgments which are “true and righteous altogether.” The liberal heirs of the New England theology had meanwhile pulled loose the idea of the Incarnation from its rooting in God’s covenant of grace. Moreover, the social gospel, which began in the sturdy Biblical theology of Oberlin and Wesleyan preaching before the Civil War, was shorn of its strength when nothing but a humanized conception of the love of Jesus was its motive power. Charles M. Sheldon’s question, “What would Jesus do” is always a crucial one; but what God’s law and our faithfulness to Him require should always be the context in which Christians ask that question. That context is precisely what the Biblical idea of a covenant of righteousness offered to those who were awakened to the promise of a sanctifying Spirit.

In retrospect, this story of the maturing of Charles G. Finney’s theology, and of its rooting in the clash of events and ideas in which the Biblical notion of righteousness was central, bears in important ways on issues of great significance today. The central one, of course, is the ethical problem raised by the more ecstatic, subjective, and individualistic character of contemporary witnesses to the experience of the baptism of the Holy Spirit, both in and outside Wesleyan circles. These have allowed if not encouraged an unbiblical divorce of individuals from corporate or social ethics, of personal from what Wesley called “social holiness. “Finney’s systematic interpretation of Biblical teachings also suggests a Scriptural authentication for a set of beliefs about the baptism of the Holy Spirit which some have suspected were an imposition from a folk theology upon Wesleyan doctrine. Dealing with that issue in Biblical terms, will I think, shed important new light on the nature of the link or, as I would incline to put it, the gap between nineteenth-century Wesleyan and twentieth-century Pentecostal and charismatic perceptions of higher Christian experience.

The story also returns us to the problem of evangelical ecumenicity. Christ calls to unity in doctrine and practice those who believe the Bible to be a sufficient rule of both. Finney’s labored effort to put together Wesleyan and covenant theology reminds us that since the days when Wesley and Whitefield found themselves pulled apart, their followers have never been able to pull themselves together. And the problem is larger than, merely, the dialogue between neo-Arminian and neo-Calvinist positions. For the world-wide mosaic of Bible-believing Christians today includes also the evangelicals in the Mennonite, Brethren, and Quaker traditions; the Pentecostals and their new-found allies in the broader charismatic movement; the modern heirs of continental Pietism, whether in Lutheran, Reformed, or Moravian communities; the Southern Baptists and their extended family of spiritual kinfolk in the South, which in some ways includes and in other ways does not include the many millions who follow in Alexander Campbell’s

train and call themselves Disciples of Christ; the Adventists, most of them now, perhaps, in the Seventh Day Adventist Church; those properly called fundamentalists, who look back to the Biblicist, millenarian, and Christological doctrines forged into an anti- modernist credo during the controversies of the first three decades of this century; and what I have called elsewhere the post-fundamentalist evangelicals of the center, mostly of Presbyterian, Baptist, and Congregationalist backgrounds, who dominate the headlines of church news in the great cities of the nation, maintain theological seminaries such as Fuller, Gordon, Trinity, and Bethel, and share in a network of evangelistic enterprises for which Christianity Today is the voice and Billy Graham the symbol. Finney’s pilgrimage through New England Theology to the doctrine of a baptism of the Holy Spirit which he believed would both inwardly sanctify and consecrate to radical ethical ideals the whole of the covenanted community of Bible-believing Christians speaks to all these evangelical movements. His enrichment of Wesleyan doctrine reminds us that Jesus concluded his last-supper homily on the coming of an illuminating and sanctifying spirit with the prayer that his followers should be one, “as I Father am in you, and you in me.”

Finally, Finney’s intellectual pilgrimage through the Scriptures (passing from the nature of the original covenants of holiness made between God and his people represented by Abraham, Moses, and David, through the prophetic translation of the ideas of both blessing and covenant into the promise of the Holy Spirit’s coming, and thence through the preaching of John the Baptist and the teaching of Jesus to the fulfillment of all these promises in the experience of Pentecost) challenges as a fundamental distortion of Christian theology the dialectical approach to the question whether Christology or Pneumatology are the vital center of Christian faith. What Finney proposed in the lectures I have summarized, and what, in my judgment, the Old and New Testament Scriptures repeatedly affirm, is that the three persons of the Trinity are united in all the mighty acts of redemption by which God renews and sanctifies His people. To extend the distorting dialectic between Christ-centered and Spirit-illuminated religion to an historical contrast of nineteenth and twentieth century faith compounds this bad theology with poor history; for from 1839 forward, evangelical believers in America moved steadily toward the conviction that the God who came near in covenant with Israel and in redemption through the life and death and life again of His Son remains savingly near in all ages through the sanctifying presence of the Holy Spirit.

This article was originally published in the Wesleyan Theological Journal, Volume 13, Number 1, Spring 1978 and may also be found at the Wesley Center for Applied Theology web site. The only alterations made have been to add links for the footnotes and correct typographical errors found in the original.

FOOTNOTES

1. Documentation for this (as for other points in this essay where the work is cited) appears in my Revivalism and Social Reform in Mid-Nineteenth-Century America (Nashville, Tennessee, 1957), 105, 116- 117.

2. The same, 181, 184-185. Cf. Donald Dayton, Discovering an Evangelical Heritage (New York, 1976), 73-85; Donald G. Mathews, “Orange Scott: The Methodist Evangelist as Revolutionary,” in Martin Duberman, ed., The Antislavery Vanguard: Neu Essays on the Abolitionists (Princeton, New Jersey, 1965), 71-101; and Smith, Revivalism, 181, 184-185.

3. Bertram Wyatt-Brown, Lewis Tappan and the Evangelical War Against Slavery (New York, 1971), 129-130.

4. Smith, Revivalism, 104-105, 1()8-113;Dayton, Evangelical Heritage, 15-24. 35-43. 5. Wyatt-Brown, Tappan, 131

6. Charles G. Finney, Lectures to Professing Christians (New York, 1837), lectures no. 17, 19, 20. This work has appeared in many subsequent editions.

7. George M. Marsden, The Evangelical Mind and the New School Presbyterian Experience: A Case Study of Thought and Theology in Nineteenth-Century America (New Haven, Connecticut), 59-87 Nathaniel W. Taylor, “The Revolution in the Presbyterian Church,” The Quarterly Christian Spectator, IX (December, 1937), 597-646, a little-noticed article in which Taylor equated New School doctrine with the New England Theology and raised the slavery issue, 629; Smith, Revivalism, 26-27, 185-18$7

8. Taylor, “Revolution in the Presbyterian Church,” loc. cit., 599, 604-17. Sidney E. Mead, Nathaniel William Taylor, 1786-1858: A Connecticut Liberal (Chicago, 1942), underplays the perfectionist ethics in Taylor’s theology.

9. Robert Meredith, The Politics of the Universe: Edward Beecher, Abolition and Orthodoxy (Nashville, Tennessee, 1968), 73-84.

10. Edward Beecher, “The Nature, Importance, and Means of Eminent Holiness Throughout the Church,” The American National Preacher: Or Original Sermons – Monthly, X (June and July, 1835), 193-194, 197, 203. Meredith, Politics of the Universe, 91-101, shows the relationship of these sermons to Beecher’s friendship and alliance with abolitionist Elijah P. I, lovejoy from 1834 to the latter’s death at the hands of a mob in October, 1837.

11. The articles, which appeared unsigned, as did all the others of which I presume Taylor to be the author, are: “Man’s Dependence on the Grace of God, for Holiness of Heart and Life, “The Christian Spectator,” ,’II (March, 1835) 76-89 The mature and Application of Divine Influence in the Salvation of Man,” the same (June, 1835), 301 -321; “An Inquiry into the True Way of Preaching on Ability,” the same, 223-257; and “The Scriptural view of Divine Influence,” the same, (December, 1835), 591 -597, in which the discussion of the work of the Holy Spirit, 595-597, seems to me to lay down the basis in logic for Charles G. Finney’s later use of the terminology, “baptism of the Holy Ghost.”

12. William Ellery Channing, The Perfect Life, in Twelve Discourses (Boston, 1873). I have recently discovered that the “Dr. C.” to whom Charles G. Finney refers in his Memoirs (New York, 1876), 356-357, is identified in the Ms. version at the Oberlin College Archives as William Ellery Channing.

13. Wyatt-Brown, Tappan, 131.

14. Aileen S. Kraditor, Means and Ends in American Abolitionism: Garrison and His Critics in Strategy and Tactics, 1834-1850 (New York, 1967), 59, 79-82.

15. The same, 90-91; cf. pp. 24-25, showing Garrison’s agreement with the New Divinity and, hence, with Finney and Mahan, on the nature of depravity and of free will, a context for Garrison’s thought of which Professor Kraditor is largely unaware.

16. Philip Bruce, “An Extract of a Letter . . . to Bishop Coke, dated Portsmouth, Virginia, March 25, 1788,” The Arminian Magazine (American), II (November, 1790), 563-564, came to my attention through my student, Thomas C. Johnson. Cf. the idea of sanctification as liberation from sin through love, “the inward law of the gospel, The law of the Spirit of life,” in a sermon by “Dr. Cutworth,” the same, I (September, 1789), 444- 445.

17. George Claude Baker, An Introduction to the History of Early New England Methodism, 1789-1839 (Durham, North Carolina, 1941), 37-38, 45-82;Smith, Revivalism, 154-159, 169,172, 184-185;JamesB. Finley, Dayton, Ohio, December 3, 1819, to the editor, The Methodist Magazine, III (January, 1820), 34-40, quoting statements by Indian chiefs praising the liberating power of the “good Spirit” from addiction to whiskey; “State Legislation on The Temperance Question,” The A. M. E. Christian Recorder, no. 18 (August 17, 1854), 70.

18. Norris Magnuson, Salvation in the Slums: Evangelical Social Work, 1865-1920 (Metuchen, New Jersey, 1977), 165-178 and, generally, 101-102, 117, 124-126, 140-142; Smith, Revivalism and Social Reform, 148-177; William Arthur, The Tongue of Fire; or, The True Power of Christianity (New York, 1880), 52-57, 110-132, 145-146.

19. Accounts of British Methodist overseas missions in The (American) Methodist Magazine, I (1819), 30-36, 193-200, 313-319, and passim do not refer at all to the doctrine of sanctification, though the journal shows Methodists in the United States continuously interested in the subject. For the Moravians, see their American journal, The United Brethren Missionary Intelligence and Religious Miscellany . . ., II (First Quarter, 1825), 9-10; and cf. Periodical Accounts Relating to the Missions of the Church of the United Brethren, I (1790), 7-15.

20. Robert T. Handy, A Christian America: Protestant Hopes and Historical Realities (London, 1971), 27-35; review of Thomas H. Skinner, Thoughts on Evangelizing the World (New York, 1836), in The Christian Spectator, IX (June, 1837), 291-295; and

“Encouragement to Effort, for the Speedy Conversion of the World,” the same, VII (March, 1835), 1-8.

21. Garth M. Rosell, “The Millennial Roots of Early Nineteenth-Century Reform: An Examination of Charles G. Finney’s Theology of Social Action,” presented to the Hopkins Harwichport Seminar in American Religious History, 1975.

22. Asa Rand’s description of Lyman Beecher’s New Divinity as resembling “in its prominent features and bearing Wesleyanism,” a “strange mingling of evangelical doctrine with Arminian speculation, . . . tending to produce spurious conversions,” quoted in The Baptist Weekly Journal of the Mississippi Valley (August 9, 1833), is typical of scores I have seen.

23. “Wesleyan Methodism on the ‘Witness of the Spirit’,” The Christian Spectator, IX (June, 1937), 176-182 and passim; and W. M. B., “Letter to the Christian Spectator on the Witness of the Spirit,” Methodist Magazine and Quarterly Review, n. s. VIII (October, 1837), 457-576, review the controversy.

24. Wyatt-Brown, Tappan, 65-70, 129-131, 133-141.

25. The same, 109-114, 121-123; Kraditor, Means and Ends, 22-25, 78-81; Finney, Memoirs, 333-343.

26. William G. McLoughlin, Modern Revivalism: Charles Grandison Finney to Billy Graham (New York, 1959), 108-113, misunderstands Finney’s choice of role as a pietistic withdrawal from social action, an interpretation which the events at Oberlin, described below, do not sustain. Cf. Dayton, Evangelical Heritage, 15-14.

27. Edward H. Madden, Civil Disobedience and Moral Law in Nineteenth-Century American Philosophy (Seattle, Washington, 1968), 44-45, and passim. Cf. D. H. Meyer, The Instructed Conscience: The Shaping of the American National Ethic (Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, 1972), 89-97, on Mahan as moral philosopher; Finney, Memoirs, 340-351; and Asa Mahan, Out of Darkness Into Light . . . (Boston, 1876), 125-131, 133-136.

28. Asa Mahan, Scripture Doctrine of Christian Perfection . . . (4th ed., Boston, 1840), 185- 187.

29. The same, 186-187; cf. Mahan, Out of Darkness, 139-147.

30. Mahan, Scripture Doctrine, 163-193, prints this lecture, which includes his personal testimony cited above; the quotation is from p. 172. This volume, printed on a Methodist press in Boston, uses Wesleyan terms such as “perfect love” and “entire sanctification” freely.

31. Finney, Memoirs, 340; Finney, Lectures to Professing Christians, 213.

32. Charles G. Finney, “Letter to Readers,” The Oberlin Evangelist (cited hereinafter as OE), January 30, 1839.

33. Charles G. Finney, Skeletons of a Course of Theological Lectures (Volume I, Oberlin, 1840), 24.

34. Finney, Ms. for Memoirs, 1875, Oberlin College Archives. Garth Rosell called my attention to this passage in the manuscript.

35.0E, I (March 14, 1839), 51, and (March 27, 1839), 57. 36. Dayton, Evangelical Heritage, 47.
37. OE, I (September 11, 1839), 157.
38. The Same

39. OE, II (April 22, 1840), 67-68. 40. OE, I (January 1, 1839), 9-10.
41. OE, I (January 16, 1839), 18-19. 42. OE, I (January 30, 1839), 26-27. 43. OE, I (February 13, 1839), 34.

44. OE, I (February 13, 1839), 34.
45. OE, I (February 27, 1839), 41. 46. OE, I (March 13, 1839), 50.
47. OE, I (March 13, 1839), 50-51.

48. OE, I (March 27, 1839), 65-67. Cf. Mahan, Scripture Doctrine, 52-58, 101-103, on Romans 7 and 8; and Cutworth’s sermon, The Ar1ninian Magazine, I (September, 1789), 429, 444, 446, on the “law of the Spirit of life,” in Romans 8.

49. OE, I (April 24, 1839), 74-75.

50. OE, I (June 19, 1839), 106, for the quotation, and for the other four lectures, the issues for May 22 to July 17.

51. OE, I (August 14, 1839), 137-138. Cf. Finney’s letter “To Ministers of the Gospel of all Denominations,” the same, II (June 3, 1840), 92, also using the terminology, “baptism of

the Holy Ghost” freely. The two references thus bracket the writing of the summary lectures early in 1840 which were published in Charles G. Finney, Views of Sanctification (Oberlin, 1840) in which the term does not appear, but in which, pp. 194- 195, Finney explains his preference for “entire sanctification” over “entire consecration,” on both Biblical and practical grounds.

52. OE, I (August 28, 1839), 147.

53. OE, I (August 14, 1839), 138.

54. OE, II (May 6, 1840), 76. Cf. the letters in the same series in the two succeeding issues: (May 20, 1840), 84, and (June 3, 1840), 92. Finney composed these letters shortly after completing the last seven lectures in the series on Christian Perfection, printed in OE from January through mid-April, 1840 and, in July of the same year, in his volume titled Views of Sanctification. These concluding lectures recapitulated the logic of the earliest ones in the series and did not employ the terminology of Pentecost, leading scholars (including myself) who previously relied chiefly on that volume and neglected to read the Evangelist carefully, to suppose Finney did not at this stage teach the doctrine of the baptism of the Holy Spirit.

55. OE, I (August 14, 1839), 140.
56. Finney, Memoirs, 350-351, 373-375. 57. The same, 375-376.

58. The same, 381, and, for testimony that his subsequent preaching promoted such a “second experience” of sanctification through the baptism or filling with the spirit, 422- 425. Charles G. Finney, Sermons on Gospel Themes (transcribed by B. J. Goodrich; Oberlin, 1876), of which I have seen an undated New York edition, contains, pages 406- 410, a passage which replicates all the teachings of Phoebe Palmer on the experience of sanctification.

59. (George O. Peck), “Christian Perfection,” The Methodist Quarterly Review, XXIII (January, 1841), 128-132, 151-152. The same author’s The Scripture Doctrine of Christian Perfection Stated and Defended . . . (New York, 1841), 224-244, set forth a detailed summary of literature pertaining to the Oberlin perfectionists which shows his close reading of the The Evangelist; the volume consists of his lectures delivered in New York City in response to developments at Oberlin. Cf. John Fletcher, Works, (4 vols.; New York, 1851), I, 160, 167-168.

60. See “Faith an Element of Power,” Zion ‘s Herald, XXV (September 8, 1852), 2; “How Souls are Purified,” the same, (August 25, 1852), 4; Peck, Scripture Doctrine, 416; John H. Wallace, Entire Holiness (Auburn, New York, 1853), a Methodist tract, 91-95; and editor Fletcher Harper’s use of the terms as synonyms in Harper’s Monthly, XVIII, number 109 (June, 1859), 841.

61. Richard Wheatley, The Life and Letters of Mrs. Phoebe Palmer(New York, 1876), 312- 317, 326-327, and (for an important quotation of an undated article of hers in ‘The Guide to Holiness) 544-546.

62. Phoebe Palmer, Promise of the Father, or a Neglected Specialty of the Last Days . . . (Boston, 1859).

63. Henry B. Ridgeway, The Life of the Rev. Alfred Cookman . . . (New York, 1874), 115, 193-198, 229, 235-236, 239, 258, 281, 292-293, 311, 345, 402-405. Cf. my Revivalism and Social Reform, 135-141, for numerous references; and, for surprisingly thoughtful discussions combining Wesleyan and Oberlin concepts in the seedbed of what became Midwestern holiness radicalism, Proceedings of the Western Union Holiness Convention, held at Jacksonville, Ill., Dec. 15th-19th, 1880 (Bloomington, Ill., 1881), 28, 38, 41, 47- 48, and 63-69.

*Minor typographical errors have been corrected, 8/16/2005 avb.

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How to Refute Atheism & Defend Theism by Jesse Morrell

A Review of the New Dallas Perot Evolutionary Science Museum by Jesse Morrell

 

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How to Refute Atheism & Defend Theism by Jesse Morrell

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How to Refute Atheism & Defend Theism 

By Jesse Morrell

I. DEFINITIONS OF TERMS AND EXPRESSIONS USED IN THIS LECTURE

1. Atheism: The belief that there is no God. Some atheists will say that they do not make the absolute claim that there is no God, but only that they have not seen enough evidence or proof that there is a God. They claim that they have not been presented with sufficient reasons to believe in His existence.

2. Theism: The belief that there is a God who created all things.

3. Presupposition: That which is supposed, assumed, or taken for granted beforehand or from the onset.

4. Axiomatic: That which is self-evident. That which is taken for granted or presupposed by all, based upon an intrinsic merit. An axiom, maxim, statement, or principle which is assumed by all as a first truth of reason.

5. Syllogism: A deductive scheme of formal argument or reasoning consisting in a major and a minor premise and a conclusion.

6. Fallacy: An unsound syllogism or line of reasoning. An argument which is contrary to the laws of logic. A deceptive and misleading line of reasoning.

7. Axiology: The study of values and judgments especially as it relates to ethics.

8. Metaphysics: The study of the fundamental or essential nature of reality.

9. Epistemology: The study or theories of the nature and grounds of knowledge, especially with reference to its validity and limits.

10. Empiricism: A particular epistemological theory that states that all knowledge is acquired by, and limited to, the five senses of touch, taste, sight, hearing, and smell. It is a perspective that states only the physical or material world exists.

11. Theodicy: The defense of the character and ways of God, especially in reference to His goodness in light of the existence of evil.

12. Arbitrary: That which is without sufficient reason. That which is based solely upon the mere will of a being, independent of any rational from his mind.

13. Finite: That which has limitations, particularly the limitations of a beginning and end.

14. Infinite: That which has no limitations, particularly that which is without the limitations of a beginning and end.

15. Transcendent: That which exceeds, surpasses, or lies above and beyond the natural limitations of the material world.

II. PRELIMINARY REMARKS

1. Atheists often misrepresent and slander the character of God. It is often necessary to engage in theodicy when reasoning with them.

a.       Do not be afraid to study the strongest arguments atheists have against God, as these are the most necessary to be refuted.

i. Atheists often charge that the God of the Bible endorsed and promoted slavery, genocide, etc.

ii. Study the Bible intensely, therefore, to see what the Bible says about these things.

1)      Genocide is the murder of a people group based upon their ethnicity. God’s judgment upon people is based upon their ethics. The destruction of cities and people was not because of the color of their skin but because of the corruption of their sin(Exo. 23:23; Lev. 18:28-29). God’s destruction of people groups was therefore not genocide.

2)      Slavery in Babylon was used by God as a temporary punishment upon Israel, which is certainly a more merciful punishment than total annihilation, as annihilation would exclude the possibility of the nation of Israel surviving, being delivered, and ultimately repenting and being restored back into a right relationship with God, but their slavery as a punishment would not exclude these. And God delivered them from the unjust slavery and oppression they suffered in Egypt (Exo. 3:9). There was no bankruptcy option in the legal system of the Jews, so if a person had a large debt that they could not pay they were punished with indentured servitude for six years and then released on the seven year of jubilee (Ex. 21:2). Though slaves were not viewed as economic equals to their masters, they were equals in regards to their intrinsic value. The Bible says that if a man sheds another man’s blood, his blood should be shed (Gen. 9:6; Ex. 21:12, 20).  It was an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth. By teaching that the master who kills his slave should be put to death, it was presupposed that the master was the equal of the slave. And it was forbidden in Jewish law to steal a man and sell him into slavery. It was an offense punishable by death (Ex. 21:16).

b.      Sometimes it may be a misunderstanding of the character of God that keeps an atheist back from submitting, serving, and worshipping Him.

i. Therefore, believers ought to study the Scriptures diligently to know and understand the good character and just ways of God, in order to properly and adequately defend Him from the attacks of the world.

2. When seeking to engage in an intellectual discussion or debate with an atheist, it is good to be familiar with the laws of logic and the various logical fallacies that exist.

a.       A simple search on the internet on this issue will provide you with an array of sufficient examples to become familiar with the laws of logic and fallacies. There are exhaustive books on the subject for a more thorough study. Asa Mahan has a good book on logic. An entire lecture may be dedicated strictly to this topic in the future.

b.      As we are commanded to love God with all of our minds, and view our intelligence as a great gift endowed to us by our Creator and as one of the great privileges we have being made in God’s image, Christians therefore ought to seek to be the most educated people in society.

i. Atheists have prided themselves as being intellectuals while Christians have been categorized as believers in blind faith. This ought to be shown by our behavior and speech as utterly fallacious, slanderous, and out right false.

3. It is important to analyze a discussion with any unbeliever to see if you are on the offensive or the defensive. It is necessary for a believer to both defend the faith and to attack that which is contrary to it, but you must be mindful not to let an atheist keep you in the defensive the entire time, as their position is the weakest one of all and ought to be exposed as such.

a.       Example: Atheists often claim that Christianity is a crutch.

i. Atheists charge that Christians are simple minded people who need to believe in life after death in order to deal with the harshness of reality. Christians, they claim, are unwilling to wake up to the harsh reality that there is no God. In responding to this charge, a Christian is on the defensive.

ii. After addressing the charge of the atheist, it is possible for a Christian to counter argue that atheism itself is a crutch. Atheists are individuals who, admittedly, do not want a supreme being to rule over their lives. It is convenient for them, therefore, to argue against the existence of such a rightful ruler and conducive to their lifestyle to reject the notions of a Law-giver, Judge, Judgment Day, eternal hell, etc. It can be said that they are unwilling to wake up to the reality that there is a God who has a rightful claim on their lives, who is worthy of our worship and service, and who will judge their lives. In stating such, the Christian is on the offensive.

1)      If the atheist’s presupposition is that a belief is shown to be wrong if it shown to be a crutch, then their own system has been shown to be wrong.

b.      Example: Atheists claim that religion has killed more people and has caused more wars than anything else.

i. The Christian would be on the defensive by stating that atheists are exaggerating, as it’s estimated that 200,000 died in the crusades, at most 200,000 died in the European and American witch hunts, and around 2,000 people were killed in the inquisitions, etc.

ii. The Christian would be on the offensive by stating that atheism has killed millions, particularly through the Soviet Union, as atheism was one of their fundamental beliefs. The atheistic Soviet Union murdered 61,000,000 people!

1) If the atheist’s presupposition is that a belief is wrong if it ultimately leads to war and death, then their own belief is consequently shown to be wrong. You can turn their presupposition against their own system.

iii. There were 6,000,000 people killed in the holocaust because they were viewed as lesser evolved by the Nazi’s who held to their evolutionary notion of an Arian, supreme, higher evolved raced.  Evolutionists have killed more people than those killed in the name of Christianity.

iv.            In these examples of the argument atheists advance against the Christian faith, they are presupposing an absolute moral truth – that killing is wrong – which their particular worldview provides no basis for. There is no basis in atheism for the authority of “thou shalt not kill” since there is no infinite or transcendent mind who says so, and especially because the intrinsic value of human well-being cannot be accounted for by our being created in the image of God. If we are the random and meaningless accidents of the universe, why is it wrong to kill on another? This is an example of a Christian taking the offensive position.

c.       Do not be so preoccupied with answering the attacks of an atheist that you never get to expose the foundation of his worldview as insufficient and faulty. If you allow it, an atheist will keep you on the defensive so that you their own foundation and worldview is never challenged or critiqued.

i.      The arguments of atheists will continue to come against God and against Christianity unless it is shown that they have no ground to stand upon. Therefore, a defensive approach will only be useful if it is coupled with an offensive approach as well.

4.      There many questions respecting God which we will never be able to fully answer, but this does not necessarily mean that there is no God, for you would expect that if an infinite God existed there would be many things about Him that we cannot fully comprehend or explain.

Further, God’s mind is infinite and He may have good and sufficient reasons for doing what He does, which our finite minds in their present form are not fully capable of understanding. This too is what you would expect from an infinite mind far superior to our own.

5.      In reality or from the Christian perspective, it is impossible for atheists to exist according to their own definition.

a.       They claim that an atheist is merely someone who hasn’t encountered enough evidence or sufficient reasons to believe in the existence of God. They pretend to be unbiased individuals who would believe in God if they were presented with proof of His existence.

b.      The knowledge of God’s existence is an inescapable revelation in this world.

i. “…The heavens declare the glory of God; and the firmament sheweth his handywork. Day unto day uttereth speech, and night unto night sheweth knowledge. There is no speech nor language, where their voice is not heard. Their line is gone out through all the earth, and their words to the end of the world” (Ps. 19:1-4).

ii. “For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who hold the truth in unrighteousness; Because that which may be known of God is manifest in them; for God hath shewed it unto them. For the invisible things of him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even his eternal power and Godhead; so that they are without excuse: Because that, when they knew God, they glorified him not as God, neither were thankful; but became vain in their imaginations, and their foolish heart was darkened. Professing themselves to be wise, they became fools…” (Rom. 1:18-22).

iii. Everything we see is proof that there is a God. This will be further explained later in this lecture.

iv. Atheists are, therefore, liars in the truest sense. They claim that they do not believe in God, but in their heart of hearts they know He exists. They claim that they haven’t encountered enough evidence or sufficient reasons to believe in God, but in reality they have suppressed the inescapable knowledge of God’s existence.

v. An atheist is someone who knows that there is a God but who doesn’t want to serve Him.

vi. I know from personal experience that atheists believe in the existence of God because I have seen them get mad at Him! Who is really the unreasonable one; the one who believes in a God that he cannot see, or the one who is angry at a God he doesn’t believe in?

6.      Atheists try to say that belief in God ought to be a logical conclusion, and that they haven’t concluded God’s existences because they haven’t been presented with sufficient reasons for doing so, when the Bible establishes theism as a presupposition or first truth. The Bible nowhere tries to prove the existence of God. Rather, Genesis 1:1 presupposes God as axiomatic. The existence of God is a necessary starting point or presupposition, as will be explained in greater detail later on in this lecture.

a.       Belief in God cannot truly be a logical conclusion, as the existence of God is necessary for the existence of logic. What is logic but the laws which ought to govern our thinking? And what basis or origin can there be for these absolute laws, other than the infinite mind of God? Finite minds cannot be the origin or basis for the absolute and universal laws of logic by virtue of their finiteness. Our logical minds could not have been caused by an unintelligent cause, as then the effects would be greater than the cause.  God is, therefore, a necessary presupposition. The existence of God is the necessary starting point for any logical discussion, as His divine mind is the basis for logic itself. There is a sense in which it is possible to logically conclude that there is a God, in that it is logical to believe in God’s existence; however, logic itself cannot be accounted for apart from the existence of God. More on this will be explained later.

III. HOW TO REFUTE ATHEISM

1. All major worldviews have three major categories within which we are to launch our attack.

a.       Metaphysics: Their theory of the nature of reality.

b.      Epistemology: Their theory of knowledge.

c.       Axiology: Their theory of ethics.

2. In seeking to refute atheism, we must not abandon our Christian worldview or act contrary to it.

a. We must not adopt their perspective of themselves, that they haven’t enough reasons or evidences to believe in God, and thus try to reason with them merely on an evidential level. Our worldview says that they are without excuse because of the inescapable revelation God has already given them of Himself.

i. Argumentation on a purely evidential level will be futile and endless, as all evidence that is presented will be reinterpreted by the presuppositions of their own world view.

ii. For example: An atheist can look at the similarities there are between different species of animals and concludes that they had a common ancestor from which they evolved. A theist will look at the similarities of various species and conclude that they had a common designer. The same exact fact is interpreted by each person’s presupposition to fit their particular worldview.

iii. “Answer not a fool according to his folly, lest thou also be like unto him” (Prov. 26:4).

b.      We must hold fast to our faith, specifically Genesis 1:1, and affirm God to be a necessary presupposition or starting point for any intelligible system of thought.

3. A worldview or system of thought needs to internally critiqued.

a.       An external critique is when you challenge someone else’s worldview using the premise and propositions of your own worldview.

i. For example, arguing, “I do not believe in Hinduism because the Bible says…”

ii. An external critique may give you as a Christian a reason not to accept someone else’s view, but it does not give the Hindu a reason not to, as the Bible is not the authority that they recognize.

b. An internal critique is when you take for granted, for the sake of argument, someone else’s presuppositions and critiques their worldview from inside of it.

i. By adopting their premise, show them that the logical conclusions that can be drawn from that premise are absurd. Take their system to a conclusion which you know they will not be willing to accept, but show that this conclusion is inevitable given their premise. This method is called “reductio ad absurdum” or “reduce to absurdity.”

1)      An example of an internal critique that reduces a position to absurdity is found in the logical reasoning of the Apostle Paul. He took for granted, for the sake of argument, a false presupposition and took it to a conclusion that he knew they would be unwilling to accept: “But if there be no resurrection of the dead, then is Christ not risen: and if Christ be not risen, then is our preaching vain, and your faith is also vain” (1 Cor. 15:13).

ii. By assuming their presuppositions, point out their systemic contradictions.

1)      For example, an atheist might say, “I cannot believe in anything unless I see it. If it cannot be observed, I cannot believe in it.” Well, how did they come to this realization that all knowledge must come through observation? Such a principle is conceptual and therefore cannot be observed itself. So if all knowledge is to be acquired by observation, how was the knowledge of this principle acquired? It could not have been acquired by observation, seeing that this concept is immaterial, and yet still they hold to it. This is a systemic contradiction within their system.

iii. By taking for granted their presuppositions, show them that their system is self-refuting – that it cannot stand on its own foundation and that it destroys itself.

1)      For example, the notion that “truth is relative” is a self-defeating position. If truth is relative, then that statement is relative, which means that there is room for absolute truth. The proposition defeats itself. If truth is relative, than relativism is relative, which means relativism is not absolutely true.

iv. “Answer a fool according to his folly, lest he be wise in his own conceit” (Prov. 26:5).

v. We are not to take for granted their presuppositions to try to prove our own worldview, as this would never work, but rather to take their presuppositions to disprove their own worldview. That is, we are not to try to prove Christianity to the unbeliever by assuming that their epistemology, metaphysics, or axiology are accurate and providing to them arguments based upon their requirements. Rather, we are to assume their presuppositions or step into their shoes and look out through their eyes, in order to show that their own system is faulty and false. Then we are to show that our own worldview is consistent within itself which they would see, if they adopted our own presuppositions.

1)      For example, an atheist presupposes the epistemology of empiricism. Since the atheist has established his own senses as the ultimate authority by which he tests all things and through which he claims all knowledge is acquired, should we try to prove God to him using empiricism? No, his epistemology is unchristian and even anti-God, since from the onset it establishes the boundaries to the material only and thus excludes even the possibility of the immaterial God. So instead of trying to prove the existence of God by adopting his presupposition, and thus answering a fool according to His folly and becoming like him, we should adopt his presuppositions and use them to show his own system to be faulty. We should show him that empiricism destroys itself as an epistemology, and thus answering a fool according to his folly lest he be wise in his own conceits. More on this will be explained through greater examples soon.

4. The presuppositions of an atheist need to be challenged through internal critiques, showing that they are self-defeating, reduced to absurdity, contradictory, insufficient, and utterly groundless.

a.       There are many things which an atheist takes for granted which they have no right to do so, granted their worldview.

i. METAPHYSICAL CRITIQUE: An atheist takes for granted his own sentient existence. Apart from an infinite sentient first cause, how can he account for his own finite sentient existence? It is a matter of fact or a first truth of reason that what is finite requires a cause, and that a cause must be equal to or greater than its effect. This is the established scientific law of cause and effect. Cause and effect is a law of logic. Our sentient existence is finite as it had a beginning and therefore required a cause. How then does an atheist account for his own sentient existence? As consciousness is greater than unconsciousness, unconsciousness cannot be the cause of consciousness. Our first cause cannot, therefore, be anything that is unconscious. But as atheists reject the notion of an infinite sentient being who created us, what adequate first cause of consciousness can they suggest? If there is no infinite sentient God, the consciousness of an atheist cannot be accounted for.

ii. EPISTEMOLOGICAL AND METAPHYSICAL CRITIQUE: An atheist takes for granted His own intelligence and He launches His attacks against God by the use (or misuse) of His reason and logic. But how can he account for the existence of these things granted his presupposition that there is no God? The Christian can account for the intelligence of man by stating that we have been made in the image of God. However, the atheist cannot give such an account for human intelligence.

1)      Intelligence cannot come from non-intelligence, as that would mean the effect is greater than its cause. What adequate cause of intelligence can the atheistic worldview provide? All that has a beginning must have a cause. Human existence and consequently human intelligence had a starting point. Therefore, it must have had a cause. But if there was no intelligence in the beginning, how could intelligence come about? There would be no adequate cause to bring about its existence! God’s existence is therefore a necessary presupposition for the existence of intelligibility.

2)      Reason and logic have no adequate cause or source of origin in the atheistic worldview, as we were not made in the image of a reasonable and logical God. Where did man’s reason come from in their view? What, besides a reasonable Creator, can be the adequate cause of rationality within man? It is unreasonable for an atheist to even believe in reason, given his presupposition that there is no God. He has no right to believe in reason as he cannot provide the necessary foundation of it.

3)      If an atheist is going to limit himself to his five senses, or empiricism, he has no right to use or believe in the laws of logic. Empiricism says only what is material exists and if we cannot experience it with our five senses, we cannot affirm its existence. The laws of logic are not material but are immaterial. We cannot experience the laws of logic with our five senses. They are conceptual, an idea or thought of the mind. Therefore, an empiricist or an atheist cannot use the laws of logic since according to their own system the laws of logic do not exist!

4)      If an atheist is going to limit himself to empiricism and claim that only the physical world exist, then how can an atheist believe in any thoughts or ideas at all? Thoughts or ideas are not physical objects. They cannot be examined with any of the five senses. Thoughts and ideas are immaterial. Yet if an atheist claims that only the physical exists, then nothing immaterial exists. In this case the atheist has essentially argued that thoughts and ideas must either be physical objects, which is absurd, or that thoughts and ideas do not exist, which is even more absurd!

Empiricism is a thought or a notion which states only what is physical exists and can be known. Empiricism itself is not a physical object and therefore, according to its own standard, it cannot exist or be known!

The notion of empiricism itself is an immaterial thought, and therefore, the notion that only the physical world exists is refuted by the existence of the immaterial idea of empiricism. In other words, the existence of the thought of empiricism refutes the point of empiricism. The existence of the thought refutes the point of the thought. It would be equivalent to saying, “I do not think that thoughts exist.” If you think that thoughts do not exist, then apparently thoughts do exist. So your thought, that there are no such things as thoughts, is proven wrong by the existence of your thought.

iii. EPISTEMOLOGICAL CRITIQUE: An atheist takes for granted the accuracy of his five senses and empiricism.

1)      In almost all that we do, we take for granted that our five senses are accurate. In order for an atheist to show up at a debate, he has to assume this. Every time he takes a step, stops at a stop sign, has a conversation with someone, etc, he is assuming the accuracy or reliability of his senses. It would be impossible to have a conversation with an atheist if he didn’t, as he couldn’t know for sure what you were saying and couldn’t be confident that you would hear what he was saying.

As effects cannot be greater than their causes, what adequate cause can atheists put forward for our five senses? Certainly, they would not say a being that has any senses is that first cause. They choose to admit a senseless first cause, which is not an adequate cause of senses at all. Atheists take for granted that they have these senses, but they provide no adequate cause or state any intelligible account of how they have these senses.

If we are the product of mere time and chance and our existence is the random accident of the universe, upon what basis can trust be placed upon our senses being accurate? In other words, as Christians we can trust in the reliability of our senses knowing that we were created and designed by God who gave us these senses to perceive the material world around us, but if an atheist cannot account for how he has these senses, upon what can he base his confidence for their accuracy or be able to account for their accuracy? A person has no right to take for granted the accuracy of their senses and has no ability to account for their accuracy, unless they presuppose that they have been designed and created by an intelligent and sensible God.

2)      Since empiricism states that all knowledge is to be acquired by empirical means, did the atheist acquire the knowledge of empiricism through empirical means? Since empiricism states that only that which is empirically proven can be affirmed, can empiricism itself be proven empirically?

Empiricism cannot be empirically proven as it is purely conceptual, an immaterial presupposition which cannot be touched, tasted, seen, heard, or smelt. Empiricism then, as an epistemology, destroys itself. It is self defeating. It cannot live up to its own requirements! It cannot exist under its own premise! If empiricism says that only the material world exists, and empiricism itself is an immaterial notion or concept, then empiricism is saying that empiricism does not exist!

And an atheist would run into an epistemological dilemma if they attempted to prove empiricism. If an atheist tries to prove empiricism using empiricism, as their system would require, than they are taking for granted their conclusion from the onset. But Empiricism states that all knowledge must be concluded through the experience of the senses and that no knowledge, therefore, is to be taken as a presupposition. However, empiricism itself is assumed or taken for granted as a presupposition and is not knowledge that is acquired through the experience of the senses. To prove empiricism using empiricism, as empiricism would require, is impossible without violating the demands of empiricism. Empiricism is taken as a presupposition in such a scenario and nothing is to be assumed according to empiricism.

And on the other side of the dilemma, if they attempt to appeal to another source of knowledge to show the validity of empiricism, such as an appeal to reason or logic, then they have forsaken empiricism and are now establishing rationalism as their ultimate authority. They have abandoned their principle of empiricism (that all knowledge is to come through the senses) by using reason and logic to try to prove empiricism. For if the knowledge of empiricism comes through reason and logic, then all knowledge does not come through the senses, and thus empiricism is wrong. Empiricism cannot be the sole source of knowledge, if the knowledge of empiricism doesn’t come through empiricism. Empiricism therefore, cannot stand upon its own foundation. It cannot measure up to its own requirement.

3)      Empiricism is insufficient to be the sole source of all knowledge, as our senses are limited to the material or physical, but certain knowledge is arrived though immaterial means. The laws of logic, as stated earlier, cannot be touched, tasted, seen, heard, or smelt as they are immaterial.  How can empiricists use logic? They have no right to presuppose the laws of logic when their system of empiricism doesn’t allow for their use or even for their existence!

4)      Empiricism begs the question of the existences of God. By presupposing from the onset that only the material exists and that only what can be experience through the senses can be affirmed, they are begging the question of the existence of the invisible God. The Bible states that God is invisible (Col. 1:15; 1 Tim. 1:17; Heb. 11:27). It is fallacious to say that you cannot believe in the invisible God unless you can be shown His material existence. It’s a contradiction to say that you can only believe in the invisible God, if you can see Him and He becomes visible to you. They exclude even the possibility of the conclusion of God by defining their requirements in such a way. It would be equivalent to saying, “I cannot believe in what cannot be seen, unless I see it.” If you see it, then it is not that which cannot be seen! If God were material, He would not be invisible. So the atheist sets up the debate in such a way as to exclude the possibility of the God of the Bible from the onset. His epistemology is therefore insufficient to deal with the question of God’s existence.

5)      If empirical experience is the sole source of knowledge that we should limit ourselves to, empirically we have only seen life come from life. It has never been empirically shown or proven that life can come from non-life. Even the creation of life within a laboratory would amount to nothing more than to prove intelligent design and that life is required to create life. All the life forms we have ever observed have come from other life forms. Is it not against empiricism then to say that all life has ultimately come from non-life? In this way, atheists contradict their own empirical system.

6)      If I were going to limit my knowledge and beliefs to that which I have empirically known and proved, then I could not believe that atheists have brains. I have never touched, tasted, heard, seen, or smelt the brain of an atheist. Others have told me that they have brains. But that is just hear say. They might be able to show me a cat scan of their brain, but that is just a computer picture. Not a single atheist has ever shown me their actual brains. Have I a right, according to empiricism, to assume or presuppose that atheists have a brain? Or can I possibly logically conclude that every atheist has a brain when none of my senses have perceived that each atheist has one? No, in empiricism assumptions and presuppositions are not to be taken for granted and logic itself cannot exist. Unless the brains of each atheist are experienced through the senses, we cannot believe that they have any at all.

iv. AXIOLOGICAL CRITIQUE: An atheist takes for granted a sense of morality.

1)      Many of the attacks that atheists make against Christians, the Bible, Christianity, or God, are based upon their own set of standards or sense of morality. “Christians are hypocrites,” “The Bible promotes slavery,” “Christianity has been the cause of wars,” “The God of the Bible is unjust.”

2)      Where did the atheist get his sense of morality? What makes his standard of morality authoritative instead of arbitrary? For if the laws of morality are not legislated and revealed to us by a transcendent, infinite mind, the laws of morality are reduced to nothing more than the mere thoughts of finite minds or the arbitrary inventions of our will. There may be thoughts that finite minds haven’t experienced yet, so our finite cannot be the basis for absolute and universal moral law. And an arbitrary invention of a beings will cannot create universal obligation, thus if moral law is the mere arbitration of an individual it cannot have absolute. Atheists do not believe that there is a God with an infinite divine mind, who knows with absolute certainty what behavior is good and beneficial and what behavior is not, and who reveals His infinite and divine thoughts to our minds through the voice of conscience, reason, and the Scriptures.

3)       If morality doesn’t come from God, where does it come from?  If morality is merely the finite thoughts of the collective society, or the arbitrary standards of the individual, then how could any society or individual be morally wrong? If morality is not absolute or like a solid rock, but is relative or like clay that can be molded by each individual and society, then no individual or society could ever be morally wrong. The Nazi’s were not wrong for putting Jews in the ghettos and concentration camps, for that is what their society determined was good to do. Neither are cannibal tribes morally wrong, as that is what their society determined is right and proper behavior. If morality is the invention of the finite individual or comes from the collective society, atheists cannot condemn the crusades, witch hunts, or inquisitions, as that is what individuals and society thought and determined were right and good in their day.

The atheistic system contradicts itself when it provides no basis for absolute morality but rather lays the foundation for moral relativism, and then to make objections against Christianity as if morality were absolute. Since it is evident that their system of thought cannot produce absolute moral law, as it provides no adequate basis or foundation for it, and consequently wicked societies and great evils like that of the Nazi’s cannot be condemned as absolutely morally wrong, there system is evidently reduced to absurdity. But as all men know that society and individuals can be morally wrong, then all men assume that morality is not the mere creation of finite minds or the arbitrary standards of the individual but that it comes from a transcendent and infinite mind that legislates over us.

v. METAPHYSICAL CRITIQUE: An atheist takes for granted uniformity in nature, upon which scientific law is established.

1)      Every individual assumes the uniformity of nature throughout their life. It is what stops us from touching the stove when we know it is hot. We know that if it burned when it was hot before, it will burn when it is hot later. It is why we put shoes on before we go for a walk. We assume that the law of gravitation will still be in place, causing us to walk on our feet. It is why we will drink a cold glass of water when we are thirsty, as we take for granted from previous experience that it will quench our thirst. Countless instances can be quoted to show that atheists take for granted the uniformity of nature throughout their life, as does everyone else.

2)      Any scientific law, such as the law of gravity, presupposes the uniformity of nature. It takes for granted that what happens in a single instance or in a series of instances will continue to occur in the future, if all the variables are identical and the circumstances are the same. There would be no basis to establish scientific law if the uniformity of nature was not taken for granted.

3)      It was the monotheism of the Judeo/Christian worldview that gave basis for the presupposition of the uniformity of nature, which laid the foundation for scientific law. Science is therefore the child of the Judeo/Christian worldview.

In the polytheistic worldview of the ancient world, the elements were not in uniform as the gods of these elements were different personalities, who may change at any moment, and who were often at war with each other. There was a god who controlled the river who was different from the god who controlled the moon, etc. This perspective did not lend to the notion that all of nature was uniform and that what happens in one particular instance would happen in another.

When the polytheistic worldview was replaced with the monotheistic perspective, that there is one God who made and controls the heavens and the earth, then a basis was established to take for granted the uniformity of nature. It was upon the notion that one infinite God controls all and that He established physical laws throughout the universe that scientists like Sr. Isaac Newton was able to discover the law of gravitation.

4)      What right do atheists have then to take for granted the uniformity of nature? If there is no law-giver, what foundation or source can there be for law? If there is no Supreme Ruler or Governor of the physical world, is not the belief in a continual and consistent uniformity in nature, upon which scientific law is established, nothing more than blind faith or wishful thinking on their part?  It is clear that atheists, as do all people, take the uniformity of nature for granted. But why they are able to do so, given their worldview, is not understandable.

IV. HOW TO DEFEND THEISM

1. The existence of a transcendent, infinite, intelligent God is to be defended and argued as a necessary starting point or presupposition, apart from which we cannot account for the nature of things as they are. In other words, we argue for the existence of God upon the impossibility of the contrary.

a.      THE METAPHYSICAL NECESSITY FOR GOD: The existence of anything finite necessitates the existence of the infinite.

i.  The law of cause and effect is a recognized scientific law that states that all effects must have a cause and that the cause must be equal to or greater than the effect.

Major premise: All effects must have a cause.

Minor premise: An effect is anything that has a beginning.

Conclusion: Therefore, anything that has a beginning must have a cause.

ii. The law of cause and effect is axiomatic. It is a self-evident truth or a truth that goes under the category of a “first truth” or a truth that is known “a priori,” which all assume or presuppose.

1) The law of cause and effect is an intuitive principle developed in the mind as early on as infancy, as babies will cry to try to get something they want. They assume that effects happen as a result of a cause.

2) Everything we do in this world take for granted that we assume the law of cause and effect. Everything from brushing our teeth, to driving to work, to making dinner, all assume the law of cause and effect. Even to argue that the law of cause and effect does not exist, itself takes for granted the law of cause and effect, for you are trying to persuade someone’s mind to change (an effect) with your argument (a cause).

iii. The First Cause cannot be finite but must be infinite.

1) Consider the following syllogisms:

Major premise: All effects require a cause.

Minor premise: All that is finite are effects.

Conclusion: Therefore, all that are finite had a cause.

 

Major premise: All that had a beginning had a cause.

Minor premise: All that had a beginning is finite.

Conclusion: Therefore, all that is finite had a cause.

2)      This brings us to the notion of the First Cause. The First Cause, by definition, cannot be finite. If it were finite, it would have had a cause. And if it had a cause, it would not be the First Cause. Therefore, the First Cause must necessarily be infinite. Only the infinite qualifies to be the uncaused First Cause as only that which is self-existent or eternal needs no cause.

Major premise: The First Cause cannot have a cause.

Minor premise: All that is finite needed a cause.

Conclusion: Therefore, the First Cause cannot be finite.

 

Major premise: The First Cause had no cause.

Minor premise: Only the infinite or self-existent can have no cause.

Conclusion: Therefore, the First Cause is infinite or self-existent.

 

3)       What is the proof than that the infinite exists? The answer is the existence of the finite. That which is finite cannot exist if the infinite does not exist. The finite is not self-existent. The finite can only exist if there is a self-existent or infinite First Cause. Therefore, anything finite is absolute proof of the infinite. God is necessarily antecedent to all finite things. As I said earlier, all that we see in this world is proof that there is a God.

Major premise: The existence of the finite necessitates the existence of the infinite God.

Minor premise: Atheists are finite.

Conclusion: Therefore, the existence of atheists necessitates the existence of the infinite God.

 

Major premise: The proof that the infinite exists is the existence of the finite.

Minor premise: Atheists are finite.

Conclusion: Therefore, atheists are proof that the infinite exists.

 

Major premise: The existence of finite cause and effect necessitates the existence of the infinite First Cause.

Minor premise: The arguments of atheists against God are finite products of cause and effect.

Conclusion: Therefore, the arguments of atheists against God necessitate the existence of the infinite First Cause.

 

iv. What caused God?

1.      Atheists often ask, “If everything had a cause, what caused God?” This question shows both the illogical fallaciousness of their thinking and their utter misunderstanding of the First Cause argument. It is not that everything has a cause, but only what is finite or had a beginning requires a cause. God, as an infinite self-existent being, requires no cause. There was no beginning to His existence, His consciousness, His intelligence, His complexities, etc. Therefore, these things require no cause.

2.      But as it is evident that human beings are not infinite or self-existent, but that we are finite and had a beginning, we therefore needed a cause to bring about our existence.

Major premise: The existence of anything finite required a cause.

Minor premise: The existence of our world is finite.

Conclusion: Therefore, the existence of our world required a cause.

b.      An EPISTIMOLOGICAL NECESSITY FOR GOD: The existence of consciousness, intelligence, logic, reason, rational, and personality all requires or necessitates the existence of God.

i. Effects cannot be greater than their cause.

1)      If a cause is not equal to, or greater than, the effect, is it is not an adequate cause in and of itself to bring about that effect.

ii. Consciousness is greater than unconsciousness, intelligence is greater than unintelligence, logic is greater than the illogical, rational is greater than the irrational, reason is greater than unreasonableness, sense is greater than senselessness, and personality is greater than the impersonal.

1)      These are self-evident truths that are recognized and presupposed by all intelligent minds.

2)      That we view consciousness as greater than unconsciousness is evidenced by the fact that we would prefer to be humans than to be a rock.

3)      That we view intelligence as greater than unintelligence is evidenced by the fact that we seek to educate ourselves and our children.

4)      That we view logic as greater than the illogical, rational as greater than the irrational, and reason as greater than the unreasonable, is evidenced by the fact that we expect to hear logical, rational, reasonable arguments to believe or to do something and look down upon that which is illogical, irrational, and unreasonable.

5)      That we view sense as greater than senselessness is evidenced by the fact that when one of our senses is damaged or lost, we recognize this as a terrible misfortune and great loss.

6)      That personality is greater than the impersonal is evidenced by the fact that we all prefer companionship with a living person than with a volleyball.

iii. Human beings are personalities that have been giving consciousness and intelligence and are endowed with the gift of logic, reason, rational, and sense.

iv. Our cause, therefore, must be a conscious, intelligent, logical, reasonable, rational, sensible, personable being. As effects cannot be greater than their cause, the First Cause cannot be an unconscious, unintelligent, illogical, unreasonable, irrational, senseless, impersonal, thing.

Major premise: Effects cannot be greater than their cause.

Minor premise: Humans are effects.

Conclusion: Therefore, humans cannot be greater than their cause.

 

Major premise: The cause must be equal to, or greater than, the effect.

Minor premise: Humans are conscious and intelligent personalities with the ability of logic, reason, rational, and sense.

Conclusion: Therefore, the cause of humans must be a conscious and intelligent personality with the ability of logic, reason, rational, and sense.

 

Major premise: The existence of intelligence in humans necessitates the existence of intelligence in God.

Minor premise: Atheists try to use their intelligence to argue that there is no God.

Conclusion: Therefore, the arguments of the atheist against God necessitate the existence of our intelligent God.

 

Major premise: Human intelligence is absolute proof of divine intelligence.

Minor premise: Atheists are humans with intelligence.

Conclusion: Therefore, the existence of atheists is proof of divine intelligence.

 

c. A METAPHYSICAL NECESSITY FOR GOD: The existence of uniformity in nature necessitates the existence of God. 

i. As stated earlier, the basis for the uniformity in nature is the presupposition of a sovereign and intelligent God who has established physical laws to govern His creation.

ii. The physical laws that govern the material world cannot be accounted for apart from the notion of a sovereign, intelligent, infinite Law Giver.

iii. A law cannot exist without a law-giver for the same reason that an effect cannot exist without a cause. If a law existed without a law-giver, then there is an effect without a cause, which is logically impossible.

d.      A METAPHYSICAL NECESSITY FOR GOD: The existence of complexity or design in the composition or arrangement of finite existences requires the existence of God.

i. As the finite cannot exist without the infinite First Cause, so complexity or design in the composition or arrangement of their existence requires intelligence from their First Cause.

1) That which is unintelligent cannot arrange itself in an intelligent manner.

2)      Intelligence is required for a material object to be constructed or arranged in a meaningful and purposeful way.

ii. The greater the complexity and design in their composition and arrangement, the greater the intelligence of their Cause or Creator must be.

iii. The unfathomable and incomprehensible intrinsic and in-depth complexity of the systems of our material world is all indicative of a transcendent, infinite, and intelligent being as the Creator of these existences.

1)      The brilliance of such systems as that of the ecosystem, digestive system, reproductive system, etc, all reveal not only the existence of God, but the genius of His mind.

2)      The more microscopic that man’s study of our world becomes, the more complicated that the systems of the world appear. What used to be called the “simple cell” is not considered so simple anymore.

3)      Man, with all His intelligence, is incapable of creating a single DNA strand or of composing even one cell or atom.

4)      It should be blatantly obvious and self-evident that the mind which created our world is far superior to our own.

e.       An AXIOLOGICAL OR ETHICAL NECESSITY FOR GOD: The existence of absolute morality necessitates the existence of God.

i. As was shown earlier, there is no basis for an absolute moral truth or law apart from an infinite transcendent mind that legislates over us and grants us this revelation.

1)      If the laws of morality do not originate in God’s divine and infinite mind, then the laws of morality must originate in man’s own finite mind or arbitrary will.

2)      There can be no basis for a universal moral law, obligatory upon all, if the origin of moral law is the arbitrary will of the individual.

3)      There can be no basis for a universal moral truth, or an absolute morality, if moral laws originate in man’s finite mind, as no two finite minds think perfectly alike.

4)      The only way that finite minds can be absolutely sure about the rightness of a moral law, is if there is a transcendent and infinite mind that can be appealed to, or which is the source and origin of the moral law.

5)      If the laws of morality are invented by the individual or the society, what is to say that a particular individual or society is morally wrong? There would be no moral standard above society by which to judge the moral rightness or wrongness of it, as the society would have authority over all moral standards. Morality would consequently be relative.

In which case, societies that engaged in genocide, slavery, cannibalism, torture, etc, cannot be objectively or absolutely condemned as morally wrong.

But as all individuals intuitively know that societies have been morally wrong, all individuals presuppose that moral law does not come from the society but is rather above the society and the society is subjected to it, rather than it being subjected to society.

6)      All rational moral beings know that there is an absolute standard of morality. For example, we all naturally know that murder, or the unjustified killing of a human life, is wrong. Even a murder knows that murder is wrong, not only because he will suffer from the pains of conscience for doing so, but because he doesn’t want anyone to murder him! He takes for granted that his life is valuable and that taking it would be a bad thing.

Men may talk about morality being relative, but in their hearts they know it to be absolute. And since a sense of absolute morality exists in the rational minds of all men, this shows that ultimately all rational minds presuppose the source and origin of moral law to transcend their own finite minds and arbitrary wills, for if they truly assumed that moral law originated in their own finite minds or arbitrary wills, they could not affirm it to be absolute or affirm its obligation to be universal.

f.       THE REAL ETHICAL PROBLEM OF AN ATHIEST: At the root of the issue, an atheist is someone who refuses to acknowledge the truth.

1)      An atheist is a rebel against God, who knows that there is a God but who refuses to serve Him (Rom. 1:21).

2)      An atheist is someone who has been exposed to more than sufficient reasons to believe in and serve God, but they choose to rather suppress this knowledge and choose darkness rather than light (Jn. 1:9; 3:19; Rom. 1:18).

3)      The purpose, therefore, of showing the irrationality of atheism and the self contradictions and self defeating principles of its system is simply to show the atheist that as an atheist, he is a rebel against God who has no sufficient reasons for rejecting the Lord. The purpose is to confront him in his rebellion, exhort him to consider his ways, call him to repent of his enmity against God, and to find salvation through Jesus Christ. Show the atheist the foolishness of his ways, the moral and intellectual repulsiveness of his own system, the sufficient reasons that exist to have faith in God, his guilt and inexcusableness before the Lord, and his desperate need for God to pardon His crimes by His mercy and to remit the execution of His deserved penalty through the atonement of Jesus Christ!

 

 

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A Review of the New Dallas Perot Evolutionary Science Museum by Jesse Morrell

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The Perot Museum More of A Sci-Fi Museum than Science Museum 

By Jesse Morrell

www.OpenAirOutreach.com

 

After visiting the new Perot Museum of Nature and Science that opened in Dallas TX, I made these remarks online on various websites:

“I took my son and daughter to this new “Perot Museum of Nature and Science” and as soon as we started our tour I wished we didn’t. It was full of anti-creation propaganda. All over the place were promotions for the Big Bang, evolution, etc. It mentioned “creationists” by name in a negative way right from the start. It taught that birds evolved from Dinosaurs because they have similar bones, and that everything somehow magically evolved over billions of years from a single molecule. Instead of, “In the beginning God’ it was “In the beginning a single molecule.” I can’t believe rational people buy this stuff. It offered zero proof for any of its wild claims. It as a whole bunch of fairytale propaganda apparently funded by God haters. It even had a picture on the wall of Charles Darwin and Richard Dawkins! I was very disappointed. I also took my family to the Creation Science Museum in Kentucky and was glad I did. We need more Museums like that.”

Contrary to some of the comments made on the ‘Reddit’ website, I am not alone in my beliefs. This initial post on my face book quickly received 81 “Likes” from various people across the world with over 500 comments.

A few days later after I made these initial posts, I received this email:

Mr. Morrell-

Hello, my name is Brad Pearson and I’m a writer with D Magazine in Dallas. I came across one of your comments about the Perot Museum in Dallas, and I was hoping to speak with you about it, since the museum’s become a pretty important tourist destination in the city. If you’re interested, feel free to email or call me back. Thank you for your time.

Bradford Pearson

Staff Writer

The next day, Bradford already decided to post an article about my comments. It was called, “Someone Has Been Trolling the Perot Museum Online, Calling it ‘Fairytale Propaganda’” He wrote, “As you can see above, Morrell did not enjoy his visit to the Perot Museum. He called it “fairytale propaganda” and was stunned that a science museum included photos of Charles Darwin and Richard Dawkins. Imagine that, a science museum with photos of scientists. The above screengrab is a Google review Morrell wrote, brought to the attention of the masses via Reddit. Redditors got a good laugh at Morrell’s expense, but thought he was nothing more than a troll. Wrong.” He also said, “spoke with Morrell via email yesterday, and he agreed to answer some questions about his visit, his beliefs, and why he was surprised that a science museum mentioned science. I haven’t heard back yet; I’m not holding my breath.”

 

Of course, I have never turned down an interview.

 

These were the questions that he sent me with my full answers:

1.      “Do you live in the Dallas area? If yes, where? I saw on your website that you might live in Connecticut; I just wanted to double check.”

I live with my family in the Tyler Texas area. I am originally from Connecticut. I have been traveling the country speaking on university and college campuses full time since 2005. I have spoken on over 100 campuses. For many years I was living on the road as I traveled but just settled down in East Texas permanently about a year ago. East Texas is now my home base I travel from. I have been street preaching in Dallas and Fort Worth for the past ten years. And now, the public sidewalks around the Perot Museum look like a great place for me to start giving Creation and Intelligent Design presentations.

2.      Why did you decide to visit the Perot? Do you visit many museums?

My wife and I are homeschooling our children. We travel the country for ministry and enjoy visiting many museums and zoo’s on our travels as part of our homeschooling. The Science Museum was a field trip for my three year old daughter and one year old son. They started school earlier than most children. Both can already count. My daughter is already spelling.

3.      What did you expect to see at the museum?

Seeing that it is a museum of nature and science, I was expecting to see facts relating to nature and science. My children have visited many science museums all across the country where they have interactive teachings on the law of cause and effect, law of gravitation, the design of the human body, the solar system, atoms, cells, etc. In the other science museums which I have taken my children to across the country, there was no apparent agenda to propagate the evolutionary and naturalistic worldviews of atheists. Science has existed long before the theory of evolution came around and much science can be taught without these unverified and unverifiable theories. Theology itself was once considered the Queen of the Sciences. Sir Isaac Newton was one of the greatest scientists of all times and he did not believe in evolution, of course, but was a theist. He said, “This most beautiful system of the sun, planets, and comets, could only proceed from the counsel and dominion of an intelligent Being.”  Ben Stein did a fantastic job in his film, “Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed,” showing that many great and leading scientists in the modern world believe in Intelligent Design as an absolute fact. They said that the more they research as scientists; they more convinced they are of Intelligent Design.

A science museum, for example, can have an interactive exhibit showing the laws of aerodynamics. Rather than trying to teach wild theories like dinosaurs evolving into birds, a science museum can show the wonderful design of birds which enables them to fly. It took our finite minds thousands of years to learn the laws of flight, yet these creatures with low intelligence can do it naturally. This shows that an intelligence greater than ourselves engineered these wonderful creatures. Their innate instincts for flight patters and migration are also a marvel reflective of the intelligence of their Creator.

Instead of an unbiased presentation of scientific facts, I found that the Perot Museum had an obvious bias against creationism and intelligent design and designed many of its exhibits to propagate the theory of evolution to the minds of vulnerable children. The fact that they had pictures of Charles Darwin (who was a racist), and Richard Dawkins (an outspoken atheist) on their wall, promoting them as great scientists, but neglected to mention or display a picture of Sir Isaac Newton, shows the museums blatant bias.

4.      Why were you so surprised that a science museum included big bang references as opposed to creationism? Not to be disrespectful, but that’s exactly what I’d expect at a science museum.

Secular or naturalistic science limits itself to empiricism as their epistemology. Given this limited and presupposed epistemology, the question of the origin of life or the origin of the universe is beyond its scope or reach. The origin of life or the origin of the universe was not something that anyone, except our Creator, observed or experienced. The origin of life and the universe cannot be empirically tested. None of our five senses could prove that the “Big Bang” ever occurred at all.

The Perot Museum stated that at one time, billions of years ago, all of the matter in the universe existed in a single molecule. This was their ultimate presupposition, instead of Genesis 1:1, they assumed “In the beginning a single molecule.” From that single molecule, everything magically evolved over billions of years. Of course, none of this was proven by the museum. It was simply stated. Even if, at one point, all of matter existed in a single molecule, this cannot be empirically shown or proven. We cannot touch, taste, see, or smell all of matter existing in a single molecule, nor can this hypothesis be observed, tested, or reproduced. It is unverifiable.

The Big Bang does not even qualify as a scientific theory, as that which qualifies as a scientific theory must be observable, testable, and reproducible. The Big Bang is not observable, testable, or reproducible.  The Big Bang is not, therefore, a valid scientific theory. It is, in the final analysis, mere speculation and imagination.

And for the Big Bang to be promoted as an argument against God, as the Perot Museum present it is itself a fallacious argument. Even if all of the universe existed in a single molecule that exploded, this does not necessarily exclude the existence of a Creator and Designer at all. They are trying to explain the “how” but the “how” does not necessarily exclude the “who” that was behind the “how.”

5.      How do you define “rational people”? Christians who believe in creationism?

A rational person is the antithesis of an irrational person. It is irrational to refuse to acknowledge the obvious. Therefore, a rational person would be willing to accept what is plainly the truth. That there is an infinite Creator and Designer of all the finite existences in the universe is an obvious truth. The rational rightly acknowledge this, the irrational foolishly deny it.

First, we know logically by law of cause and effect that anything that had a beginning had a cause. Anything finite had a beginning. Therefore, anything finite had a cause. Finite cause and effect necessarily implies the first cause. The first cause, by definition, must be self-existent. If the first cause had a cause, it wouldn’t be the first cause. Therefore, the existence of anything finite is absolute proof of the existence of the infinite. The finite could not exist apart from the infinite. Our finite existence is absolute proof that there is a Creator.

The existence of the Perot Museum itself is proof that there is a God. The Perot Museum had a beginning and is therefore finite. The existence of finite cause and effect necessarily implies the first great and infinite cause. Therefore, the existence of the Perot Museum proves the existence of God. In the same way, the existence of an atheist and of any argument presented by an atheist against God, in fact, proves that there is a God.

Secondly, the obvious design and laws of the universe are indicative of intelligence. Physical laws, like any law, necessarily imply the mind of a Law Giver. There can be no design without intelligence. All of the physical laws of the universe are a reflection of the intelligence of God. Adaptation to our environments, also known as micro-evolution, is reflective of the intelligence of our Creator. The solar system, eco-system, digestive system, reproductive system, etc, are also proof that our designer who engineered the universe is intelligent. Sir Isaac Newton said, “In the absence of any other proof, the thumb alone would convince me of God’s existence.” Our minds have been so constituted that we cannot help but to be impressed with the intricate complexities and obvious design of the universe. Therefore, the knowledge of God is an inescapable revelation. This can account for why every culture in every continent has recognized a Creator and why those who verbally deny the existence of such a Creator are such a minority.

Thirdly, any coherent worldview must begin with Genesis 1:1. There is no adequate foundation or basis for the universe or the human mind as we know it apart from an infinite and intelligent God. The rational cannot come from the irrational. The intelligent cannot come from the unintelligent. Life cannot come from non-life. The contrary has never been empirically observed or proven, nor is it logically feasible. The effect cannot be greater than the cause. The fact that we are intelligent and personal beings necessarily means that the first cause cannot be an unintelligent or impersonal thing. The existence of any finite and rational being necessarily proves the existence of our infinite and intelligent God. The atheist or naturalistic scientist cannot account for the reason and intelligence that they themselves use otherwise. They acknowledge that they have an intelligent mind and engage in its exercise every day, but they cannot account for its existence because they refuse to acknowledge the God to whom they owe their existence and design.

“ The heavens declare the glory of God; and the firmament sheweth his handywork.” Ps. 19:1

“The heavens declare his righteousness, and all the people see his glory.” Ps. 97:6

“For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who hold the truth in unrighteousness; Because that which may be known of God is manifest in them; for God hath shewed it unto them. For the invisible things of him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even his eternal power and Godhead; so that they are without excuse: Because that, when they knew God, they glorified him not as God, neither were thankful; but became vain in their imaginations, and their foolish heart was darkened. Professing themselves to be wise, they became fools…” Rom. 1:18-22

6.      What evidence do you have that your vision of the Earth’s beginning is the correct version? And what about the theory presented by the Perot Museum is so wrong?

Ultimately, the knowledge of God is an a priori truth, as opposed to an a posteriori truth. That is, the knowledge of God is a necessary prerequisite for any coherent worldview. The Scriptures never attempt to prove God, but assumes Him as the Creator of the universe from the onset, and addresses men in such a way as to imply that they already know God exists. There are necessary presuppositions, or starting points, that are taken for granted before any rational or intelligent discussion or meaningful discourse can take place. The Infinite Creator, presented in the Scriptures, is the only adequate foundation for finite existence, human intelligence, reason, the laws of logic, absolute or objective morality, etc. As a first truth, the existence of God is self-evident and needs no proof, but must necessarily be presupposed from the onset.

In order to engage in a debate or in a rational discourse, I assume from the onset that I exist. I also presuppose that I have an intelligent mind, that the laws of logic exist, etc. It would be foolish to try to logically prove logic. It would be unreasonable to try to reasonably prove reason. These are simply taken as first truths from the onset. And as God is the necessary prerequisite for my own existence and for the existence of reason and logic, God must be presupposed from the onset before any debate or rational discourse can take place.

All worldviews have ultimate presuppositions or first truths. For example, in atheism the epistemology of empiricism is taken for granted as a first truth. Empiricism states that all knowledge is to be acquired through the senses and consequently assumes that reality is purely physical or material. (It, therefore, begs the question of the existence of the invisible God whose essential nature is spiritual.) This epistemology of empiricism is presupposed not proven. It is not a conclusion but a premise. In fact, by its own standard it cannot be proven. Empiricism itself is not a physical substance or materialistic in its essential nature. Empiricism is conceptual, a mere idea of the mind. So while Empiricism is presupposed or taken as a first truth in the worldview of an atheist, it is an unfounded and self-contradictory one. The Infinite God who created us is the only adequate starting point for any coherent worldview.

The laws of logic, which any atheist attempts to use when he reasons, are also themselves conceptual and have no physical substance. The laws of logic cannot be handled or experienced through our five senses nor can they be empirically proven. For an empiricist to use the laws of logic, therefore, contradicts his own epistemology. It is unreasonable for them to engage in reason, since reason is not physical and therefore cannot exist in their worldview. It is only reasonable for us to engage in reason if we presuppose that we were created in the image of a reasonable Creator and do not limit ourselves to the material world as the only possible existences.

In other words, God is true because of the impossibility of the contrary. We cannot account, as already stated, for our finite existence or intelligence apart from God. Furthermore, empirical science presupposes the accuracy and reliability of our five senses. Every one of us do every time we drive a car. Reading, writing, walking, talking, etc, all presuppose the accuracy of our five senses. Going to the Perot Museum itself, and creating and presenting its exhibits, presupposes their accuracy. This we take as a first truth.

However, if there is no intelligent design to our human body, but we are the product of mere time and chance and are nothing more than the random accidence of the universe, we have no rational basis or intelligent foundation to trust in the reliability of our senses. The atheistic evolutionist assumes the accuracy of his senses, but he has no basis for doing so.

However, if we were created and designed by an intelligent God, who endowed us with the gifts of our senses to know and experience the material world, then we have a rational basis to trust in their reliability and accuracy. Apart from the presupposition that there is a God, there is no basis for the senses used in empirical study and research. Unlike a creation scientist, an atheistic scientist is, therefore, an oxymoron and a walking contradiction. An atheist will presuppose the accuracy of his senses and his own intelligence, but he has no basis in his worldview that validates this presupposition.

Now, as to question as to why the theory presented by the Perot Museum is wrong. The majority of my disagreement was with their theory that everything in the universe evolved over billions of years from a single molecule that exploded in a big bang. As already stated, the question as to the origin of the universe is beyond the scope of empiricism and cannot be verified using the scientific method. For an empirical scientist to speculate as to the origin of the universe, he necessarily forsakes his own epistemology.

One exhibit stated that dinosaurs are still around today, only they exist as birds. Their argument for this position was that the bone structure of the dinosaurs and modern birds are similar, since they are both hollow. In addition, they said, certain dinosaurs had feathers. Therefore, they reasoned, birds evolved from dinosaurs. Of course, this is not shown anywhere in the fossil record. To make up for this lack of evidence, they argued that such bones hardly fossilize because they are fragile and hollow.

I on the other hand, believe that the fossil record does not support their theory because it didn’t happen and because fossils do not record the evolution of creatures over millions of years. Most of the fossils that we find today are the product of the great flood which occurred thousands of years ago.

This argument of birds evolving from dinosaurs because of similarities was clearly fallacious to me. Similarities between two creatures do not necessitate the logical conclusion that one of them evolved from the other. Especially if the similarities are nothing more than hollowed bones and feathers. There are much more similarities than that between a Ford truck and a Chevy. But these similarities do not necessitate the conclusion that the substance of one evolved from the substance of the other over billions of years. Rather, a common design reflects a common mind or designer. The same applies to birds, dinosaurs, and any other creature. Any similarity between them does indicate macro-evolution, but a common Designer.

Facts are interpreted by a person’s presuppositions and worldview. The same fact can be interpreted in two totally different ways. The similarities between creatures that we see in the natural world are interpreted by the naturalistic atheist as evidence of evolution only because they first presuppose an evolutionary perspective of nature. It is not the facts which are in dispute, but the interpretation of the facts based upon presuppositions. And, as has already been shown, the atheist or empiricist has no adequate starting point while the theistic presupposition is an absolutely necessary perquisite to a coherent worldview.

What the exhibits at the Perot Museum showed was that it is detached from reason and logic in its bias against God. They are advancing the fairytale propaganda of atheists like Richard Dawkins, whose imagination has run wild in vanity and foolishness. It would do our society much good, especially in the realm of science, to resurrect and relearn the laws of logic.

Furthermore, what museums like the Perot Museum fail to educate the public with is that the evidences that have been set forth for the theory of macro-evolution have been later found out to be fraudulent. Fossil fragments are found and then reconstructed using artistic license by those who want to try to make up for the lack of evidence for macro-evolution. “Lucy” is just one of the many examples of the evidences set forth, and taught in public schools, as empirical evidence of evolution. Scattered fragments were found very far apart and reconstructed, with the help of plaster and artistic license, to create a missing link. The only reason she was proclaimed as a missing link was because she supposed “could have” walked uprightly. This again shows how some scientists are biased in their analysis of the facts and illogically interpret similarities as proof for macro-evolution. Only later it is discovered that Lucy was nothing more than an ape. Many other supposed “missing links” have also been shown to be fraudulent. There is not a missing link, there is an entire missing chain. Macro-evolution is nothing more than a man-made religion that requires blind faith.

Even more recently, through DNA study it has been shown that there is no real difference between Homo Sapiens and Neanderthals, as many have been taught in public schools. Neanderthals were a group of people that had common facial and bodily features, which to us appear primitive, but they were really nothing more than a people group, like Asians, Africans, Europeans, Native Australians, etc.

What is startling is how the secular masses look at scientists as if their word is infallible. Scientists function as the high priests of our secular society. In debates and arguments, the statement “It is science” or “science says” is supposed to be an argument that settles the dispute. However, secular scientists have to keep reinterpreting the facts when their beloved theories are shown to be impossible. Scientific text books used in public school are always being updated to be new and improved. Science once taught that the earth was flat. Now, Pluto is not even a real planet! What was once promoted as scientific fact is later shown to be science fiction. This is because they do not have an adequate starting point and worldview through which to interpret the facts. The modern scientists, who have an apparent axe to grind against Christianity and an obvious bias against God, have proven themselves to be anything but credible and reliable.

Lastly, this is an excerpt from one of my ministry newsletters stating the arguments I presented at Yale University against the ridiculous theory of maco-evolution:

One of the arguments used against Christianity and the Bible on university campuses is the modern theory of evolution. When this was brought up on campus, I told the students that I had four objections to evolution. I have a logical objection, an empirical objection, a scientific objection, and a moral objection.

My logical objection to evolution is this. In a science text book, whenever macro-evolution is discussed, micro-evolution examples are used as proof for macro-evolution. Macro-evolution is the massive change or alteration of one special into another. Micro-evolution is minor changes, alterations, adaptations within species. When a person tries to prove macro-evolution with micro-evolution examples, this is a logical fallacy. Small and minor variations do not mean that massive or large alterations also occur. That would be equivalent to me saying, “I know how to rebuild the engine of a car. I’ll prove it to you. I’ll show you how I can build a bicycle.” There is no logical connection. To try to prove the one by showing the other is to make a logical fallacy.

My empirical objection to evolution was this: if we are going to limit our knowledge to our five senses, as many college students claim they do, then according to this view of epistemology we cannot believe in evolution because its process has never been empirically observed. If it is “blind faith” to believe in something that cannot be verified empirically, then it is blind faith to believe in evolution! When it comes to the origin of life all together, we cannot even address this issue nor have any beliefs on it at all if we are going to limit our epistemology to empiricism.

My scientific objection to evolution was this: effects cannot be greater than their cause. A cause is always equal to, or greater than, their effects. If it were not so, the cause would not be an adequate cause of the effects. It is scientific law that effects cannot be greater than their cause. This is not mere theory. But in the evolutionary process, effects are constantly greater than their cause. We are getting bigger and better as we progress through the evolutionary process (except for birds, which became smaller and more fragile). Therefore, the theory of evolution is at odds with established scientific law.

My moral objection to evolution is this: the holocaust. The very idea of the “Arian Race” or superior humans presupposes the evolutionary process. In the Bible, all men are created equal. But in evolution, you can have a higher evolved group of human beings. Charles Darwin book was not “The Origin of Species” as it is referred to today. It was originally, ‘The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection or the Preservation of Favored Races in the Struggle for Life.” And what was the “Favored Race” presented in his book? White people, whom he argued were more evolved than black people. Darwin’s theory spread like wildfire because, at the time, people were looking for a justification for slavery since Christians were seeking to ban it. Hitler was a firm believer in Darwin’s theory. Hitler’s Youth were brainwashed with the theory of evolution. Darwin’s theory of evolution gave birth to the idea of the Arian race, which lead to the extermination of millions of people thought to be inferior to those who have been more evolved. Evolutionary philosophy has killed millions.

7.      Mr. Morrell, I’m truly interested in your viewpoint, and do not want to be seen as disrespectful, but why would you go to a museum that is so antithetical to your beliefs, and expect any less?

Science itself is not antithetical to my theistic beliefs. In fact, natural science is really the child of theism. In the ancient world polytheism had dominance. Under the belief of polytheism, the elements of nature were all controlled by different gods. There was the god of fire, the god of water, the god of sex, the god of the sun, etc. And often, the gods were at war with each other and changing. The ancient world had a view of the universe that consisted of anything but uniformity in nature.

However, through the Judeo-Christian worldview, a monotheistic perspective of nature replaced polytheism on a grand scale. With the underlining presupposition that there was one Sovereign God who created the heavens and the earth, who established and upholds its laws which He set in motion, there became a rational basis for the belief in the uniformity of nature.

Scientific law is based on nothing more than the uniformity of nature. And the uniformity of nature is based upon nothing more than a monotheistic worldview. If we take away the basis for the latter, we necessarily take away the basis for the former. Take away monotheism, and natural and empirical science doesn’t have a basis to stand on but becomes nothing more than an unfounded presupposition itself.

Granted, I do not expect a secular science museum to be like the Creation Science Museum I took my family to in Kentucky. However, not every secular science museum I have gone to has had an agenda to brainwash children with macro-evolution propaganda. When I go to a science museum, I expect to find scientific law not science fiction. The law of gravitation, the law of cause and effect, the laws of aerodynamics, and the laws of physics are examples of what I expected to find at the Perot Museum. We can study the solar system, eco-system, digestive system, reproductive system, without indoctrinating our children with wild theories like evolution.

Macro-Evolution, which is unscientific and unverifiable with empirical methods, is hardly scientific theory let alone scientific fact. Unfortunately, much of the Perot Museum has shown me that it is really a Sci-Fi Museum. If I wanted Sci-Fi, like the Perot Museum presented, I would watch Planet of the Apes or the X-Men. However, if I want scientific facts, I will apparently have to go elsewhere than the Perot Museum.

It is far from being unreasonable to believe that all that we see is the product of the intelligent mind of an infinite God, but it requires a lot of blind faith and imagination to believe the fairytale that everything magically evolved over billions of years from a single molecule, with no intelligence from a Creator or Designer at all. “In the beginning God” is a far more reasonable starting point for a coherent worldview than the irrational assumption of, “In the beginning a single molecule.”

In conclusion, the existence of God is not the real question. Neither is evolution. The existence of God is an obvious fact and the evidence lacking for evolution is laughable and it is a wonder that it is taught in any rational society. The real problem is that our society is wicked and sinful and chooses to live in hostility towards God. If Darwin had not invented in his imagination the theory of evolution, another argument would have been created in our society against God. In an attempt to protect its sin, society attacks God. Sinners are unwilling to have God rule over them as the rightful Moral Governor of the universe. They therefore hid behind any excuse they can find for not submitting and serving Him. Yet despite man’s open rebellion and treason against God, the Lord has been very merciful and good to us. He even became a man in Jesus Christ and died for our sins to provide a substitute for the penalty that we deserve. Now God can offer pardon to our rebellious race, in consistency with the honor and authority of His law and the good of His moral universe, if we will simply repent of our sins and turn back to Him.

 

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How to Convict Sinners & Convert them to Christ by Jesse Morrell

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How to Convict Sinners & Convert them to Christ

By Jesse Morrell

Preach Free Will  to Convict Sinners and Destroy their Excuses

The Apostle Paul said that sinners are “without excuse” before God (Romans 1:20).

The favorite excuses of sinners is, “I couldn’t help it. I can’t obey God. His requirements are too hard for me.”

The Bible says the exact opposite.

The Scripture says God does not require that which is too hard (Deut. 30:11).

And it says that our obligation is always proportionate to the ability that we have (Matt. 22:37; 1 Cor. 10:13).

Charles Finney, the great American Revivalist, said that the first duty of a preacher is to destroy the sinner’s excuses.

When we seek to win souls to Christ, we must start by showing them that it is their sin that is unreasonable, not God’s law.

God’s law was perfectly reasonable and yet we choose by our free will to break it anyways.

God sets before us the choice between good and evil (Deut. 11:26-28; Deut. 30:19; Josh. 24:15; Jer. 21:8), so we alone are to blame for our sins.

That is why we desperately need salvation through Jesus Christ – because we broke God’s law when we didn’t have to.

It is when the sinner is left in a position where he sees that he is “without excuse” for his sins that he gives up trying to justify and excuse them and he begins to seek merciful forgiveness and gracious pardon from God through Jesus Christ.

“IT’S NOT YOUR JOB TO CONVICT ANYONE OF THEIR SINS” 

Someone made this comment on Facebook:

“The Holy Spirit is the one that convicts us of righteousness not any preacher”

Actually, it’s both.

THE HOLY SPIRIT CONVICTS 

Jhn 16:8 – And when he is come, he will reprove [ἐλέγχω – to convict] the world of sin, and of righteousness, and of judgment:

HOLY SPIRIT FILLED PREACHERS CONVICT 

Luk 3:19 – But Herod the tetrarch, being reproved [ἐλέγχω – to convict] by him for Herodias his brother Philip’s wife, and for all the evils which Herod had done

Eph 5:11 – And have no fellowship with the unfruitful works of darkness, but rather reprove [ἐλέγχω – to convict] them.

1Ti 5:20 – Them that sin rebuke [ἐλέγχω – to convict] before all, that others also may fear.

2Ti 4:2 – Preach the word; be instant in season, out of season; reprove [ἐλέγχω – to convict], rebuke, exhort with all longsuffering and doctrine.

Tit 1:9 – Holding fast the faithful word as he hath been taught, that he may be able by sound doctrine both to exhort and to convince [ἐλέγχω – to convict] the gainsayers.

Tit 1:13 – This witness is true. Wherefore rebuke [ἐλέγχω – to convict] them sharply, that they may be sound in the faith;

Tit 2:15 – These things speak, and exhort, and rebuke [ἐλέγχω – to convict] with all authority. Let no man despise thee.

Biblically, it is the Holy Spirits job AND the preachers job to convict sinners of their sins.

And the biblical support for the preachers to do it is technically greater, as there are 7 verses that support preachers convicting sinners and only 1 verse for the Holy Spirit…

Just saying…

“I CAN’T SAVE ANYONE. ONLY GOD CAN SAVE.” 

The Calvinist cliché, “I can’t save anyone. Only God can save” is not biblically accurate.

The Bible says, “Let him know, that he which converteth the sinner from the error of his way shall save a soul from death, and shall hide a multitude of sins” (James 5:20); and also “For though ye have ten thousand instructors in Christ, yet have ye not many fathers; for in Christ Jesus I have begotten you through the gospel.” (1 Cor. 4:15).

And so the Preacher of the Word can and does save souls – with the help of the Holy Spirit and by the Gospel of Jesus Christ.

In Acts Peter even commanded the crowd to “Save Yourselves…” So not only do preachers save souls, but sinners save themselves! And how did they do it? Well, as Peter said, they must repent and believe. That is how a sinner saves his soul – by turning to Christ. William Booth and the Salvation Army used to fly a banner outside of their meeting house that said, “SAVE YOUR SOULS!”

The salvation of a soul is not a monergistic work of God, where God the Father alone (mono) is active. The Holy Spirit has a role, the Word has a role, the preacher of the Word has a role, and the sinner himself has a role.

Charles Finney said, “Both conversion and regeneration are sometimes in the Bible ascribed to God, sometimes to man, and sometimes to the subject.”

It is this understanding that gives evangelism its urgency and elevates its work to extreme and eternal importance. There are souls right now that might be saved by your labors who also might be damned by your neglect! What we do now affects and determines the future – even the eternal destiny of souls.

In light of the biblical doctrines of synergism and the openness of the future, we can see the vitalness of us fulfilling the Great Commission and feel the heavy weight of responsibility to seek and save those who are lost!

So get out there Christian! Preach the Word and save some souls!

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Is Faith the Gift in Ephesians 2:8-9? Greek Exegesis by Jesse Morrell

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Is Faith the Gift in Ephesians 2:8-9?

Greek Exegesis by Jesse Morrell

I made this post with My Facebook in the Facebook group called Koine Greek Bible Study:

“For by grace are ye saved through faith; and that not of yourselves: it is the gift of God”

“τῇ γὰρ χάριτί ἐστε σεσῳσμένοι διὰ τῆς πίστεως καὶ τοῦτο οὐκ ἐξ ὑμῶν θεοῦ τὸ δῶρον οὐκ ἐξ ἔργων ἵνα μή τις καυχήσηται.”

Ephesians 2:8-9

Calvinists like John Piper have typically used Eph. 2:8-9 to teach that faith was the gift of God, though even Calvin admitted that this verse was not saying that.

However, “τοῦτο” [that] is a neuter demonstrative pronoun. But “πίστεως” [faith] is feminine. This is vital because when Greek demonstratives modify nouns, they will agree with the noun in gender, …number and case. And so “τοῦτο” [that] is not in reference to the “πίστεως” [faith] plain and simple.

“πίστεως” [faith] may be the closest to “τοῦτο” [that] but that is not how you determine its reference in a Greek sentence. The endings of the words that are how you do that.

The gift cannot be “χάριτί” [grace] as that is feminine also. It is gracious for God to give a gift so that grace is the basis of the gift, but the grace itself is not the gift. A person may give you a gift out of their generosity, but they do not give you the gift of generosity.

And while “σῴζω” [saved] is a verb, “τοῦτο” applies to the whole thought Paul was expressing about salvation, with the noun being elliptical. So it would read, “For by grace through faith are ye saved, and that not of yourselves, it is a gift of God lest any man should boast.”

In plain English, Ephesians 2:8-9 is teaching that salvation is the gift of God.

And the fact that the command to “believe” “πιστεύω” is in the imperative mood and active voice also shows that it is a choice of the will that God is commanding men to make. This is also supported by the fact that God rebukes and punishes men if they don’t believe, showing the volitional and avoidable nature of unbelief.

 

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