Saturday, December 27, 2014

A.W. Tozer disparages theology

"Dr. Tozer seems little interested in what a person believes. he is little interested because he has a low opinion of intellectual truth. He wishes to substitute a different kind of 'truth.' Exactly what it is, he does not make clear; but whatever it is, it is incompatible with evangelical theology and contradictory of John's Gospel. Read the quotation carefully:
[']The battle line, the warfare today, is not necessarily between the fundamentalist and the liberal. There is a ...difference between them, of course. The fundamentalist says God made the heaven and the earth. The liberal says, Well, that's a poetic way of stating it; actually it came up by evolution. The fundamentalist says Jesus Christ was the very Son of God. The liberal says, Well, he certainly was a wonderful man and he is the Mater, but I don't quite know about his deity. So there is a division, but I don't think the warfare is over these matters any more. The battle has shifted to another more important field. The warfare and dividing line today is between evangelical rationalists and evangelical mystics.[']
Note how Dr. Tozer disparages the difference between believing that God is creator, that Jesus is the Son of God, and presumably other fundamental doctrines, and believing that God did not create the world, that Jesus is no more than human, and that a good part of the Bible is untrue. He admits that there is a difference between the liberal and the fundamentalist, but he seems little interested in that difference. This warfare is over - says Dr. Tozer. But for a true Christian, if he has average common sense, this warfare is not over. A true Christian cannot treat the deity of Christ so lightly, nor the doctrine of creation, either. There may be a sense in which the battle line of the twenties has shifted in the seventies; but it is not such a new field as that between 'evangelical rationalists and evangelical mystics.' In one sense, a very fundamental sense, the battle line has not shifted at all. The old battle line that centered on Harry Emerson Fosdick's denial of the virgin birth and his warning against worshiping Jesus was itself a question of the truth of the Bible. Some people may have seen only that the deity of Christ and the atonement were involved. But scholars like J. Gresham Machen saw clearly that the whole Bible and all of Christianity were involved. This is still the battlefield. What may be new, since the middle of the nineteenth century, is a view that Truth is not true, and that the Bible instead of being honestly false, as Wllhausen asserted, is dishonestly 'true' like Aesop's fables. For the new 'truth' is simply the old falsehood." - Gordon H. Clark, What is Saving Faith

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