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The Fundamentals was there any need of the atoning death ? He would state, in the coolest possible manner, that the supposition of God’s dis pleasure or wrath at sin is an archaic concept; that sin is not guilt as traditional theology conceives, nor does it need any propitiation, and that there is no need of salvation, for there never was a fall. (A God who thinks of'poor, hard-worked people as miserable sinners, who must account themselves for tunate to be forgiven for Christ’s sake, says one of the fore most British modernists, is no God at all. The theologian may call Him a God of love, but in practice He is spiteful and silly!) The doctrine of evolution has washed out of the Bible the existence of such a man as Adam, and biology has taught that death is not due to sin. He would then probably hear the professor going on to show that nobody nowadays thinks of sin as Paul did; that it is impossible for the man of today, familiarized with the doctrine of evolution and the researches of Biblical scholarship, to think of sin as a debt that is due to God; that the God of the Bible is, after all, only the God of traditional theology. In one word, he would hear that what this age not only demands, but requires, is a reconstructed Bible, a re-interpreted Biblical theology, and a presentment of apostolic conceptions in accordance with the modern mind. But a theology which begins with accepting or rejecting according to its caprice such sections of the Word of God as it pleases, and substituting its own fancies for the New Testa ment conceptions of sin, o f guilt, of wrath, and death, and the idea of punishment, naturally tends to the climax of repudiat ing the Deity of our Saviour and the teaching of His in spired apostles! A Pelagian hamartology invariably leads to a Socinian Christology; and a Socinian Christology in variably goes hand in hand with a rationalistic soteriology. I f there is no objective Deity, there can be no sin. If man is God, there can be no guilt; and if there was no fall, and if it is the rise, not the fall of man with which the study of
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