|
|
Compromise, Pragmatism, and Doctrinal Diplomacy
John Brine, born into a poor home in Kettering, Northamptonshire, England in 1703, was for thirty-five years the pastor of the Particular Baptist congregation which met at Curriers' Hall, Cripplegate, London. He was a Christian of great standing among English Baptists, and the esteem in which he was held by his Baptist brethren is evident from the frequency with which Brine was called upon to preach at the ordination of younger ministers and funeral ceremonies of other faithful ministers and private Christians. At his own death in February of 1765, none other than the venerable Dr. John Gill preached a sermon in Brine's memory to his own congregation at Goat Yard, Horsleydown, in Southwark, from 1 Corinthians 15:10 - By the grace of God I am what I am.
Brine ministered in a day in which historic, orthodox Christianity was under heavy attack and Deism, the belief that God was an aloof creator who made the world and then left it to operate by "natural laws," was on the rise. It was a period of bold, near-universal scepticism, which historian Paul Hazard has labeled as the era of the "ubiquitous critic" (see his European Thought in the Eighteenth Century: From Montesquieu to Lessing [New York: Meridan, 1963] 3.). During this time of declining influence, most churchmen were prepared to "circle the wagons" alongside any professors whose creed was even partly faithful to "the faith which was once for all delivered to the saints" (Jude 3); Brine was not so inclined. In 1743, Brine authored a work whose thesis challenged the notion that minimal doctrinal fidelity was a sufficient basis for ministerial partnership among Christian professors: The Certain Efficacy of the Death of Christ Asserted. In the preface to this volume, Brine acknowledges that he was viewed with disfavor by those who consider that "it is very unseasonable to oppose a writer who appears to be an advocate for the Christian Religion, and endeavors to set any Scriptural Doctrines in an easy and unexceptionable light, tho' he may be mistaken in some particular things." In an age of ascendant Deism and general infidelity, professors of a less doctrinally-precise stripe looked down on what they considered to be Brine's unnecessarily harsh criticism of others of apparent Christian goodwill. "Our opponents," they would argue, "are the deists, infidels, and other 'free-thinkers' - not professing believers in Jesus Christ." Brine would not relent. His rebuttal was simple and pointed, in words which resonate within the heart of every true child of God: "We are under an indispensable obligation, not only to vindicate the holy Scriptures from those objections, which bold and daring men are pleased to frame against it (i.e., the deists and other 'free-thinkers'); but also to contend for the glorious Truths therein expressed, by whomsoever they are misrepresented, or corrupted, or opposed. It seems to me a conduct not the most consistent, to maintain the credibility of the Bible, and decline or censure an attempt to defend and support its doctrines."
Though now more than two-hundred years removed, our own day is not so different from Brine's. The popular American religion, both within and without the visible church, is a revived and revised Deism: God created the cosmos, with its "natural laws," and left it to function independently of Him; God similarly created humanity with the "natural law" of free choice, and then left men to themselves in the employment of this "free will" to discover the Creator as best they could. Also, in our day as in Brine's, attempts to expose the error of this thinking is met with the strongest censure, both within and without the church. The epithete "fundamentalist" is commonly employed by secular critics, while the label "Calvinist," now a near-pejorative, is heard within most ecclesiastical circles. Even among Christians who claim to hold to the inerrancy (a modern synonym for Brine's preferred term, credibility) of the Bible, many are apparently more than ready to grant equal status to all whose creeds and confessions contain the necessary doctrinal components (e.g., "God," "sin," "Jesus Christ," "Heaven/Hell," etc.), regardless of their arrangement. They are motivated by a conviction that the theological systems called Calvinism and Arminianism can be reconciled within the overall unity of the Church. "Both the Calvinist and the Arminian," it is asserted, "possess an equal share in Gospel truth, and, therefore, both sides must regard each other as brethren for the sake of unity within the Body of Christ."
Biblical theology, however, is more than simply a collection of free-floating theological concepts which may be associated and juxtaposed in any number of ways. Biblical theology (i.e., the Gospel) orders these concepts in a certain way. James I. Packer, in his introduction to John Owen's Death of Death in the Death of Christ, reminds us that the biblical message, concisely put, is that God saves sinners (cf. 1 Timothy 1:15). He stresses the arrangement of these ideas: (1) God - not the God of our vain imaginations but the Triune Godhead working in concert to achieve the salvation of a chosen people: the Father electing; the Son redeeming; and the Spirit executing the purposes of the Father and Son through the application of Christ's crosswork. (2) Saves - God does everything that is necessary to bring men from death to life in Christ: plans, achieves and communicates redemption, calls and preserves, justifies, sanctifies, glorifies. (3) Sinners - men as God finds them: guilty, vile, helpless, powerless, unable to lift a finger to do God's will or better their spiritual condition. This, simply put, is the Good News. Genuine ecclesiastical unity cannot exist in the absence of this robust declaration of biblical truth. "What part hath truth with error?" John Brine was correct after all.
What of the assertion that sinners are being saved under the hearing of an Arminian message? How could God be pleased to regenerate and convert sinners in the complete absence of the Gospel? Surely the Calvinist would admit that there is present in Arminian preaching some semblance of the Gospel, wouldn't he? In reply, it should be remembered that there has never been a lack of counterfeit spirituality; Calvinists, above all men, recognize the dangers posed by false professors (Matthew 7:21-23; 2 Cor. 13:5). Indeed, we are warned not to accept the credentials of every so-called Christian minister or ministry (Revelation 2:2-3; 1 John 4:1-6; 2 Corinthians 11:13-15). We are, however, commanded to contend for evangelical truth - the truth of the pure Gospel (Jude 3). Located within the pages of Scripture, the Gospel is a known, definable, and measurable reality. It is to the propagation and defense of this message, without admixture, that we have been comissioned, and it is in regard to our faithfulness to this sacred charge that we will be judged (Luke 9:26).
In January of 1803, Andrew Fuller, another highly esteemed English Baptist pastor, penned a series of letters in which he defended himself and his ministry against the charge of sympathy with Arminian error. In response to the accusations of a Mr. Booth, Fuller repudiates the assertion that he has "adopted some of the leading pecularities" of recognized Arminian churchmen: "Mr. [Richard] Baxter considers Calvinists and Arminians as reconcilable, making the difference between them of but small amount. I have no such idea...Their scheme [i.e., the Arminians] appears to undermine the doctrine of salvation by grace only, and to resolve the difference between one sinner and another into the will of man, which is directly opposite to all my views and experience. Nor could I feel a union of heart with those who are commonly considered in the present day as Baxterians, who hold with the gospel being a new remedial law, and represents sinners as contributing to their own conversion."
Clearly, Fuller - following John Brine - rejects any sort of contrived unity with those who downgrade the Gospel. May God grant to our own generation of pastors the same clear eye and stiff spine!
