Roadblocks Limiting Church Effectiveness—Part 1
Johannes G. Vos
Extracted from Ordained Servant vol. 9, no. 3 (July 2000), pp. 55-61
Christianity Involves a Definite Body of Truth
In the New Testament four great words stand related to each other. These words are: Truth—Doctrine—Knowledge—Understanding. We live in an age which tends to deprecate the use of the mind in connection with religion. The importance of truth, belief, knowledge and understanding, is constantly being minimized. The great fallacy of the present day is the notion that men can gather figs of thistles—that ignorance and unsound doctrine can produce salvation and a good life.
Knowledge of Truth Is Essential
The Bible lends no countenance to this foolish notion. On the contrary, the Bible emphasizes the importance of knowledge. It commands us to use our minds: "Thou shalt love the Lord thy God...with all thy mind." We are commanded, not merely to believe the truth, but also to know, understand and love the truth. We cannot really believe it without first of all knowing what it is. And we cannot know what it is unless we learn what it is. The Christian religion involves a body of information that has to be known before it can be accepted and lived.
The Fallacy of "Ideals" and "Values"
God redeems the world not by abstract ideals but by historical events which take place at particular times and places. The ancient Greeks thought of religion as a matter of abstract principles, such as justice, goodness, beauty, order, and so forth. Many people today cherish the same mistaken idea. A man is quoted as saying: "My religion is just goodness, truth and beauty. That is a good enough religion for any man!" But goodness, truth and beauty are just abstract ideas. To say that our religion is goodness, truth and beauty will not make us good, true and beautiful. On the contrary, we will still be the same miserable, inconsistent, selfish people that we always were.
Yet many people—even professing Christians—think of religion as just a matter of certain principles or ideals with a permanent value. These they call "spiritual values." If they study the Bible, they take the history of Abraham, for example, not as something uniquely important in God's historical plan of redemption, but just as one example of the operation of a timeless law. Abraham is taken as one example of the principles of "faith" and "unselfishness." All Bible events are similarly treated, thus becoming mere instances of the operation of timeless laws. The real meaning and importance of any particular event is cancelled. They become mere illustrations or samples of ideals or values. We could just as well pick our examples from ancient Greece or China.
When someone says, "The Golden Rule is enough religion for me," he is really saying that religion is a matter of ideals, not a matter of historical facts or events. He is really saying that he does not need a Savior, but only an ideal.
"Creeds" That Are Not Really Creeds
From time to time various organizations issue so-called "creeds," and when you read one of these "creeds," you find that it is not a creed at all, but only a list of ideals. It is not a statement of facts that people are to believe, but merely a statement of abstract ideals that they consider valuable or worthwhile. "I believe in honesty, I believe in unselfishness, I believe in service..." —so runs the "creed." But such a "creed" is not a creed at all in the Christian sense. A creed is not a mere statement of ideals. It must contain facts to be a real creed. The great Christian creeds contain facts, such as God's work of creation, the incarnation of Christ, His crucifixion, resurrection, ascension and Second Coming.
God Redeems by Facts of History
God's plan of redemption is not by ideals or values, but by facts of history. God has stepped into the history of this world and done certain particular things at certain particular times and places. He commanded Noah to build the ark; He called Abraham out of Ur of the Chaldees; He delivered the children of Israel from Egypt by the hand of Moses. And especially, God sent His Son to be born in Bethlehem, to live in Judea and Galilee, to be crucified outside the city wall of Jerusalem, to rise from the dead the third day, to meet with His disciples during forty days, and to ascend to heaven from a particular spot of latitude and longitude on this planet. The redemption of the world is accomplished by these definite, specific, particular events, all of them so very "local," so very "dated." What happened outside Jerusalem on a particular day, at particular hours, some 1900 years ago, has done more for the redemption of the world than all the ideals and values that men ever dreamed of.
Christianity a Story, Doctrine, Experience
God has given us the Bible, the record of His actions in human history, and the divine interpretation of the meaning of those actions. The Bible is a very large book. It is full of information; it is packed with historical facts and divinely revealed interpretation of those facts- with facts and doctrines not merely ideals and values. The facts constitute the story of God's work of redemption. The doctrines constitute God's interpretation of this story. On the basis of the facts as interpreted by the doctrines, Christian experience is founded. Christianity is a story, a doctrine and an experience. The experience is dependent on the doctrine, and the doctrine is dependent on the story, that is, on the historical facts, the Biblical revelation.
Where the story and the doctrines are unknown, Christianity cannot exist. Where the story and the doctrines are despised and minimized, Christianity cannot exist except in a dwarfed and unhealthy form. To be a Christian one must believe the doctrines of Christianity. This means we must know the facts and the divinely revealed meaning of the facts. There is more to being a Christian than just knowing certain facts and their meaning, but that is the basis of being a Christian, that is the foundation. There is more to a house than the foundation; but, after all, what is a house without a foundation?
There Exists Gross Ignorance of Christian Truth Today
The great trouble today is that so many people vainly imagine that they can have the house without any foundation; they vainly imagine that they can have Christian experience without knowing the facts of Christianity and without believing its doctrines. The utter tragedy today is that we have in the churches—to say nothing of the world outside—a generation of people who are grossly ignorant of the facts and doctrines of Christianity. This is not ignorance about minor details only; it is a gross ignorance about the main things. The result is that real Christian experience is becoming more and more rare.
Examples of Present-day Ignorance
We face today in the Church and in the community around the Church a prevalent and powerful anti-intellectual bias, coupled with gross ignorance of even the most elementary truths of the Christian faith. There are adults who have been communicant church members for years who cannot find a place in the Bible. Others cannot tell which lived first, Abraham or John the Baptist. Such people have not the slightest idea of even the general plan and structure of the Bible. They have only the vaguest ideas of what Christianity is all about.
Once in China a recently converted Chinese Christian asked me whether the Saul who persecuted David was the same individual as the Saul who was converted on the road to Damascus. His ignorance was understandable and excusable in view of the fact that he was a new convert to Christianity. But I venture the opinion that there are communicant church members who could not answer this question correctly if their life depended on it.
Two Forms of Religious Ignorance
Religious ignorance exists today in two forms, which we may designate the plain and the sophisticated. Plain ignorance is the common garden variety, the kind exemplified by the Chinese convert mentioned above. This kind of ignorance is deplorable, but it can be remedied without great difficulty. We should expect it in new converts on foreign mission fields. But in the Church members of years standing such ignorance is a disgrace and a shame.
The other kind of ignorance we may designate as sophisticated ignorance. This kind is much more of a problem in churches at the present day. This is a self-conscious, deliberate type of ignorance. It is vastly more serious than the plain or wild type. Sophisticated ignorance is like a cultivated inbred hybrid—it is deliberately intensified ignorance. The sophisticated ignorant person prefers to be ignorant. He not only lacks knowledge, he positively despises knowledge. He fancies knowledge to be worthless in the sphere of religion. He regards a professed ignorance as much better and worthier and more spiritual than what he deprecatingly calls "theology," or, with added disdain, "theological hair-splitting."
This phrase is a bogeyman of the sophisticated religious ignoramus. By "theological hair-splitting" he means any definite, exact truth or knowledge in the sphere of religion. This state of mind may rightly be described as people glorying in their shame. We face today a deep-seated contempt for knowledge in the sphere of religion. This present-day contempt for knowledge is wrong and is contrary to the Bible. [A brief reference to the period between the two World Wars has been omitted here because it is no longer relevant.]
Are Doctrinal Sermons "Too Deep"?
A pastor said to me that people in some of the congregations where he had preached complained that his sermons were "too deep." I told him not to worry about that—that the people who said that about his sermons would say the same thing about any truly Biblical preaching. It was not that this pastor was preaching on subtle theological problems or profound and baffling mysteries; not at all; it was simply that his preaching had a definite content of information. It contained facts and doctrines, not merely ideals and values; therefore those accustomed to thinking of Christianity in vague, general terms as a mere set of "spiritual values" objected to his preaching as "too deep." Any preaching which required them to think would be rejected as "too deep."
This contempt for knowledge, this objection to any solid doctrinal information as "too deep," arises from a misunderstanding as to the essential nature of Christianity. Christianity is first of all a story of things that happened—it is a body of specific information; and if we have contempt for information, then we have contempt for real Biblical Christianity, and that means, ultimately, contempt for the God of Christianity.
The Tragedy of Religious Illiteracy
There are church members who have not learned a single new item of truth in the last ten years. They are intellectually at a standstill, intellectually frozen stiff. Their Christian knowledge is static—a very small quantity of what are called "essential truths."
The tragedy of such lives is not merely their appalling ignorance of Christian truth, but the fact that they themselves are utterly unaware of this ignorance, and see no need whatever for acquiring any knowledge. They raised their hand or signed their name in some meeting years ago. They "joined the church," answering a few easy questions at the time. They attend Sabbath school and church sporadically, perhaps once or twice a month. As the years pass, they learn nothing. When they come to die, they will go out into eternity not knowing one iota more about God and His truth than they did the day they "joined the church" years ago.
Such a state of affairs is tragic indeed. Yet this situation exists; it is not imaginary, as every pastor knows only too well. It is one of the reasons for the deadly weakness of the Church at the present day. "Israel doth not know; my people doth not consider" (Isa. 1:3).
Minimum Knowledge Not enough
The Christian aim is not for a minimum of knowledge, but the maximum. We should seek, not to go to heaven with as little knowledge as possible, but to gain as much knowledge as possible about God and His Word. We should know more at the end of every Sabbath than we did before. If we have not learned something new from God's Word, we have made no real progress in knowledge. We ministers and church leaders should be like the scribe described by Jesus, who brings out of the treasure house of God's Word "things new and old."—" O how love I thy law! It is my meditation all the day."—" How sweet are thy words unto my taste! Yea, sweeter than honey to my mouth."
Intolerance of Truth Today
There exists today an indifference to truth, an intolerance of truth, even an antipathy to truth, in large sections of the Protestant Church. And all churches have been affected by this tendency to some extent. None can claim absolute immunity to this disease. There is a prevalent, subconscious assumption in people's minds—an assumption that truth is not of the essence of Christianity, and therefore need not be learned. There is a real intolerance of doctrine, coupled with a demand that sermons be made wholly "inspirational" or "evangelistic," or that they deal exclusively with what is called "applied Christianity."
People who cannot give a clear statement of what Christianity is, would like their pastors to preach on "Christianity and Psychology" or "Christianity and the Labor Problem" or similar subjects. What this boils down to is, that they want the fruit but they have no patience with the tree that produces the fruit. This notion of "inspiration" and "evangelism" without a foundation of sound Biblical doctrine underneath is a disintegrating force, and if it gains the victory in any church, that church will cease to be a truly Christian Church and will remain a mere empty shell, a mere monument to the glories of the past.
Something Is Seriously Wrong
Lack of conviction of the importance of truth, or doctrine, is also revealed by the free and easy way in which people leave one denomination to join another. The churches joined may vary from slight unsoundness to radical modernism. Hardly ever is the factor of orthodoxy considered; the real factors contributing to the decision are rather convenience, popularity, and the personality of the pastor of the church joined.
In many families the entire younger generation on reaching the age of 21 years, or soon after, will forsake the pure and faithful church in which they were brought up, and join some other more popular, less demanding church, leaving only their aged parents to continue alone and forlorn in the old church. And this happens even in the families of deacons, elders and ministers. Something is seriously wrong.
People Inhibited from Learning Facts
All of this is part of the picture of present-day intellectual decadence in religion. By and large, people are unable to give an ordered and intelligent account of their faith, and they consider it unnecessary to do so. This anti-intellectual bias results in a serious inhibition on the part of the very people who need religious knowledge and indoctrination the most. By their foolish and childish prejudice they are inhibited from ever acquiring the knowledge they lack. Like a child who is so sure that whole-wheat bread tastes bad that he will not even eat one slice to find out what it really tastes like, the person who is prejudiced against doctrine will not even listen to one sample of it with an open mind that he might find out whether it is really as unpalatable and indigestible as he assumes. This person is the victim of his own prejudice. He is inhibited from acquiring the very thing he requires for a healthy religious life and growth.
The Roadblock Must Be Removed
It is a commonplace among ministers and church leaders today that indoctrination is needed. Resolutions of synods and general assemblies call for indoctrination. But what people fail to realize is that there is a tremendous roadblock in the way of indoctrination. You cannot indoctrinate people who have buried in their mind an assumption that doctrine does not matter. The minister who would indoctrinate his people must first cope with the roadblock. There is a great stone on the door of the minds of many of his people. That stone must be rolled away first of all. Otherwise when the minister starts to instruct the people in Christian truth, their minds will click shut. An impenetrable curtain drops into place. After that all they hear is words. The words do not register.
No doubt many ministers have had the experience I have had, of having some person ask an intelligent question on some point of Christian truth, and the question asked concerns something which was preached on in a recent sermon. It may be that the question was thoroughly discussed and answered in the light of Scripture, and the person inquiring was there and heard the sermon. But somehow it just didn't register. He is unconscious of ever having heard the matter discussed before. For he had an inhibition against Christian doctrine which prevented the sermon from registering in his mind. First the inhibition against knowledge must be removed, then the lack of knowledge can be dealt with.
The Roots of Sophisticated Ignorance
The plain or common type of ignorance has no special roots. A person recently converted from paganism is ignorant of Christian truth because of his pagan background and his previous lack of opportunity to learn the truth. Many people in America, too, are ignorant of Christian truth, not because of a perverse disinclination to learn anything, but because of their very limited opportunities. It may be that the only church or religious teaching that reaches them brings a non-doctrinal type of message; consequently they do not and cannot really learn anything.
Ignorance Didn't Just Happen
But the cultivated or sophisticated type of ignorance is something quite different. This kind does nor come from mere lack of opportunity to learn. It has deeper, more sinister roots. This sophisticated type of ignorance did not just happen. It has been promoted, it has been "put over" on the Christian world. By deliberate, premeditated action, the contempt for doctrine has been instilled in people's minds by religious "experts" and leaders.
Basically, the anti-intellectual bias of the present day, and the contempt for doctrine which exists in the Protestant Church, has resulted from the life and work of three men. These men all lived more than 100 years ago. They are Immanuel Kant, Friedrich Daniel Ernst Schleiermacher, and Albrecht Ritschl. All Germans, they all discounted the intellect in religion, and emphasized the emotions or the will in place of the intellect. It is a strange paradox that these three men themselves were intellectual giants, yet they discounted the importance of the intellect in religion and emphasized something else instead.
Millions of people who have never heard the names of Kant, Schleiermacher and Ritschl, are yet very much under the influence of these three men. Many people in the churches are unconsciously influenced by this dominant trend of the times.
Truth Supplanted by "Experience"
Immanuel Kant, of course, laid the groundwork for divorcing religious truth from "metaphysics," that is, from the ultimate reality beyond what can be known by the senses. Schleiermacher and Ritschl followed Kant and put his philosophy to work in the realm of religion. Schleiermacher lived 1768 to 1834. He has been called "the father of modern theology." The son of a Prussian army chaplain of the Reformed confession, he earnestly studied the writings of Kant. Schleiermacher's chief theological work was The Christian Faith According to the Basic Principles of the Evangelical Church, first published in 1821, but later revised and republished. In this famous book Schleiermacher held that the real essence of Christianity is not to be found in the creeds but in religious feeling—the feeling of dependence on God, communicated by Christ through the Church. This puts religious feeling in place of Biblical truth. Schleiermacher held that the content of preaching is to be obtained from the religious consciousness of the preacher. Though called "the father of modern theology," Schleiermacher really destroyed theology and put in its place a study of the religious consciousness of man. The object of knowledge is no longer God as revealed in Scripture, but man as a religious being. Schleiermacher stressed method rather than content; he rejected truth and knowledge in favor of feeling; he substituted subjective religious experience for objective divine revelation in the Bible. It is not too much to say that Schleiermacher was the real founder of modernism.
Truth Supplanted by "Spiritual Values"
Albrecht Ritschl lived 1822 to 1889. He was the son of an Evangelical pastor in Berlin, Germany. Ritschl aimed to free religion from what he considered the tyranny of philosophy. He limited theological knowledge to what he considered the bounds of man's need. Ritschl was not interested in God, but only in what God can do for man. It would not be unfair to say that Ritschl was concerned with the usefulness of God rather than the glory of God. He was interested in religion, not in theology; in experience, not in truth. He was concerned with "value" rather than with doctrine.
Ritschl rejected all "forensic" ideas of Christianity, that is, the idea of Christ's atonement as a satisfaction for the broken law of God, and justification as imputing to the believer the perfect righteousness of Christ. Instead of these truths, he stressed chiefly the idea of the family or fatherhood of God. Ritschl stands for the false antithesis between theology and "metaphysics," that is, between Christian doctrine and absolute truth. According to Ritschl, the important question is not who or what Christ is, but what is His "value" to us. If Schleiermacher may be called the founder of modernism, Ritschl is the real father of that perversion of Christianity which regards it as primarily a set of "spiritual values."
Sophisticated ignorance in the Church is not to be explained simply by neglect. It is the logical and inevitable result of a definite philosophical and theological point of view which has been deliberately promoted by the "experts."
The Effect of Revival Movements
Another root of sophisticated ignorance is found in the revival movements in American Christianity in the 18th and 19th centuries. The various revival movements, from the Great Awakening down to the present day, have been a mixture of good and evil, a mixture of the real work of the Holy Spirit with much that was merely human and even contrary to God's will.
Jonathan Edwards gave a very careful appraisal of the revival movement of his day. He regarded it as a genuine work of the Holy Spirit. Yet he came to see that there was another side to the matter. The Great Awakening had an aftermath. In 1741 the revival was at the peak. Just a few years later, as early, as 1744-1748, in Edwards' own congregation at Northampton, Massachusetts, the church was utterly dead, according to Edwards' own admission. He states that during the four years 1744-1748 there was not a single conversion in the parish.
Charles G. Finney is often spoken of as a very great leader of American Christianity. The unsoundness of Finney on some of the doctrines of the Bible is seldom mentioned. But that multitudes responded to Finney's preaching and that many were converted to Christ cannot be denied. However, again there was an aftermath. This is very interestingly described in the late Dr. Benjamin B. Warfield's second volume on "Perfectionism," pages 25-27. Warfield quotes from an account of Finney's work which was published in 1835: "The writer entertains no doubt, that many true conversions have occurred under the system to which he is referring. But as with the ground over which the lightning has gone, scorching and withering every green thing, years may pass away before the arid waste of the church will be grown over by the living herbage." Warfield adds: "Finney came back in 1855 to Rome (N. Y.), the scene of one of his greatest triumphs in 1826. Now, however, his preaching elicited no response. He has himself told us of it..."
The Mirage of "Inspiration"
The great revivals were partly of God, certainly, but there was an admixture of evil, too. They were not an unmixed blessing. For from the history of American revivalism there has come down to our day the false antithesis between revival and sound doctrine.
We see this reflected today in those who would stress only evangelism as the remedy for the church's troubles, and who cannot see that for a real and effective evangelism there must be a much greater emphasis on truth, on knowledge, on doctrine.
We see it, too, in the idolatrous worship of what is wrongly called "inspiration," which really means, all too often, merely a powerful stimulation of the religious emotions, without an accompanying knowledge and conviction of truth. Revivalism that stresses the emotions and the will at the expense of the intellect leads to sophisticated ignorance in the churches in the end. It has been proved so time and again.
How Can we Cope with the Roadblock of Ignorance?
It is easier to diagnose this disease than to prescribe an effective remedy. Yet there must be a remedy, though it may be a slow and painful one.
First of all, pastors and religious teachers must have a strong and clear conviction of the absolute importance and relevance of Christian doctrine. Doctrine is not a luxury; it is an absolute necessity. It is to Christianity what bones are to the human body. It is not relatively important; it is absolutely important. It is of the essence of Christianity. Without it there can be no real Christianity. Unless the leadership is absolutely clear and convinced on this proposition there can be no real progress.
Preach What People Really Need
In the second place, ministers should absolutely refuse to compromise with or cater to the demand for a non-doctrinal type of message. It is a temptation to compromise with this demand. Ministers may be powerfully tempted to cater to the desire for a non-doctrinal message. They should count the cost and say No!
We are the Lord's servants; our commission is from Him, not from our congregations. We are to be true to Scripture at any cost. This means more than avoiding denials of Biblical truth. It means setting ourselves a long-range program of constructively preaching the contents of the Bible in their true meaning and relationships.
Sinful Lust for "Inspiration"
The lust for "devotion" without information is sinful. It is one of the great sins of the Church of our day. A large part of the religious press caters to it, as do the pulpits of many popular denominations. But it is sinful. "Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy mind."
We should absolutely refuse to bend on this issue. If we lose our job we are no worse off than the true prophets of old. We should have the courage to stand up, plainly and pointedly, for the real nature of the Christian message, in spite of the fact that the skimmed milk diluted with limewater which appears in some popular undenominational religious publications may appeal strongly to some of our people.
Try Hard to Make Doctrine Interesting
In the third place, doctrine should be made as interesting as possible. The notion that the truth is dull and dry is unfounded. It will of course always be dull to the unconverted. To the Greek it will be foolishness and to the Jew a stumbling-block. But it need not bore the spiritually awakened. It takes work to make doctrinal sermons interesting, but it can be done. We cannot please everyone in a congregation—even our Lord did not accomplish that when He was on earth in the flesh—but we can preach so as to please God, and accomplish His real purpose in our preaching. That, after all, is what we are in the ministry for.
Preaching doctrine does not mean preaching only formally doctrinal sermons. The minister who has Christian doctrine in his mind and heart can bring it out in biographical, historical, expository and other types of sermons. None of these, if truly Biblical, can be divorced from the doctrinal content of the Bible.
Also, doctrine should be served up in very moderate doses at first. People's capacity to digest it has become so weakened during the past generation or two that heavy doses will be likely to cause acute indigestion. "Easy does it." Line upon line, precept upon precept, here a little and there a little—but it must be the genuine article, not the popular counterfeit that consists only of "ideals" and "values."
The Fruits of Doctrinal Preaching
Ministers who preach the doctrinal system of the Bible will have the satisfaction, from time to time, of seeing another member of their congregation gaining doctrinal consciousness, and suddenly coming to a clear realization of what Christianity is really about. That makes one more member who will never again scoff at doctrinal preaching as "too deep" or "theological hair-splitting." That makes one more member who will be a real asset to the Church and not a mere dead weight or liability religiously. And it constitutes one more proof to the minister that his labor is not in vain in the Lord.
I believe, too, that we should do all we can to awaken in the membership of the Church an appetite for good Christian literature. Lend good books, recommend good books, quote from good books. Not all books are equally suited to all Christians. Books have to be matched to people's progress and capacity. But real Christian literature can play a great part in making people awake and alert to the truth of God's Word.
Johannes G. Vos was a minister in the Reformed Presbyterian Church of North America. He served as a missionary in Manchuria from 1931 until 1941, and later taught Bible at Geneva College for many years. This material first appeared in a periodical created and edited by Rev. Vos called Blue Banner Faith and Life. The material which originally appeared in that periodical is now the property of the Synod of the RPCNA, and this excerpt is reprinted with their kind permission. It will be continued in the next issue.