September 1924
T HE K I N G ’ S B U S I N E S S
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Athenian Culture and Christianity Rev. I. Mi Haldeman, D. D. Pastor First Baptist Church, New York City Abridged by permission from “ The Signs of the Times,” by Dr. Haldeman, a book of fifteen chapters, containing vivid and startling portrayals of present day conditions, drawn by this keen observer of age movements in the moral, religious and political world.
will deny regeneration, or the necessity of a new and spirit ual birth, and will set up the doctrine of its opposite— the doctrine of evolution. It will teach that man finds his root in lowest animal forms and has come up through manifold brute ways to his present position and, by the same law, is moving upward on moral, spiritual and intellectual lines. It will look upon the ancient ordinances of the church as useless baggage. Baptism, which is intended primarily to set forth the death, burial and resurrection of our Lord and, secondarily, the identification of the believer in that death, burial and resurrection; the Lord’s Supper, intended to be a constant memorial of the solemn passover of the cross and to teach continually that our only ground of approach to God is through the blood of sacrifice; baptism and the Lord’s Supper, these ordinances will be relegated to the dump- heap of meaningless and fossiliferous rites. The new religion will not hold out the hope of future compensation for present ills. It will repudiate the promised joys and measureless felicities of Heaven. No sound of harpers harping with their harps will ever fall upon the ears of the members of this new church. The chant of angelic choirs floating downward from some uplifted dome of glory will never stir and thrill their souls. A holy city with its jasper walls, its streets of gold and its gates of pearl, the tree and the river of life, will be smiled away as the childish dream of a crude and perfervid imagination. All the rewards of a cloudless and endless tomorrow held out so persistently by Christ and his apostles will be counted as so many bright but deceitful fancies. The minister of the new religion will not be a man who shall stand up like the Apostle Paul and preach Jesus and the resurrection. He will be the graduate of a medical college, a clear-headed diagnostician, a skillful surgeon, a family practitioner. His instrumentalities will not be the Bible and the hymn book, but the scalpel, the knife, the saw of the surgeon and the materia medica of the physician. The new religion will not offer a remedy to meet the needs of the soul. Its aim will be the cure of the body. Its instrumentalities will be the pharmacopoeia of the druggist, the appliances of the operating room and the atmosphere of a modern hospital. It will take away such texts as, “ Come unto me all ye that labor and are heavy laden and I will give you rest,” "Thou wilt keep him in perfect peace whose mind is stayed on thee, because he trusteth in thee.” All testimony which paints a glowing heaven and a returning immortal Man, coming back to the earth which once rejected him, coming to speak the word that shall make the dust to bloom with immortality for every buried saint, such a concept, and all the words which speak of it, will be looked upon as the rhapsodical sentimen tality and meaningless vagaries of ignorance and super stition. This new religion will present to every man a God who shall be a “multiplication of infinities.” Repeat the phrase and roll it again and again through the chambers of your mind. It is a sacramental phrase of (Continued on page 602)
“For the Athenians and strangers which were there, spent their time in nothing else, but to tell or hear some new thing.”— Acts 17:21. mm Greeks. |AUL was at Athens. Everywhere he saw art. He saw it in architecture, in temple and statue. The statues' were those of the gods. The gods repre sented the religion and the philosophy of the As Paul contemplated them his heart was stirred within him because of the ignorance and superstition they revealed. Although he had intended to make Athens but a temporary stopping-place, he could not be still. He had a message to deliver. He went into the Jewish synagogue and preached there. He went into the forum and whenever he could find any one to listen to him, he preached Jesus and the resurrection. On one occasion certain philosophers who met daily in the stoa or porch of the temple and were known as the Stoics, encountered him. At first they made light of him and then, finally, invited him to go into the Areopagus and tell his stbry there. The motive of that invi tation is to be found in the words of the text: “For the Athenians and the strangers which were there, spent their time in nothing else, but either to tell or hear some new thing.” This is the Athenian spirit. It has two marked characteristics, to tell and to hear some new thing. The spirit of Athens is the spirit of human culture, progress and inquiry. That spirit is in our midst today. It is still marked by the dual characteristic, to tell and to hear some new thing. Recently it has told us what it deems to be a new thing. Through one of its most representaive and university heads it has told us of a new religion befitting the Twentieth century, befitting its culture, development and intellectiyii worth. A careful aUSlysis of this official report of the address in which this new religion was presented gives at least twelve propositions. It will be a religion without authority. It will therefore set aside the Bible as the inspired, infal lible Word of God. It will refuse to deify remarkable human personages. As a consequence it will reject the deity of Christ. It will deny His virgin birth and will categorize His genera tion on the basis of natural parentage. It will be monotheistic. That is to say, it will be Unitarian. It will not tolerate the doctrine of the Trinity. All covenant obligations and promises flowing out of the operation of Father, Son and Holy Spirit, as distinctive personalities in the unity of the God-head, will be cast aside. It will not accept the intercession of any personal inter mediary between God and man. It will, necessarily, deny the priesthood and heavenly intercession of Christ. And as priesthood is inseparably based on sacrificial and atoning death, it will deny the death of the cross as an atoning sacrifice. It will teach that the death of the cross was a useless and brutal mur der; that the death of Christ was not a necessity, and that no human being has ever been redeemed by his blood. It will not believe in original sin. It will not believe that God created man originally upright, gave him free and independent choice and that, perverting his will, he fell into a state of sin in which he is helpless to move toward holiness and God. Logically, it
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