Our post today is drawn from the pages of the old periodical CHRISTIANITY TODAY [1936-1949], not to be confused with the ongoing magazine of the same name, which began about 1956. The author of our post is the Rev. Samuel G. Craig, best known as the founder of the Presbyterian & Reformed Publishing Company. CHRISTIANITY TODAY was his first publication, before he began publishing books. We pray you will find today’s post instructive.

The Social Significance of Jesus Christ
by Samuel G. Craig
[Christianity Today 2.5 (Mid-September 1931): 1-2.]

IT would be misleading to speak of Jesus Christ as a social reformer. It is well within the truth, however, to say that He has been the most effective of social reformers. A comparison between the social conditions that prevailed before His advent and those that prevail in Christendom today, supplemented by a comparison between social conditions in Christian and non-Christian lands, evidence His unique effectiveness as a social reformer. Bad as are existing social conditions throughout Christendom, they would be infinitely worse were it not for the leaven He cast into the meal of humanity. Moreover if Christianity should cease to function in this world, there is every reason to believe not only that no further progress would be made along these lines but that what has been gained would be lost. The thought we have in mind has perhaps received its most eloquent expression in the oft-quoted words of James Russell Lowell

“When the microscopic search of scepticism which has hunted the heavens and sounded the seas to disprove the existence of a Creator has turned its attention to human society, and found a place on this planet, ten miles square, where a decent man can live in decency, comfort and security, supporting and educating his children, unspoiled and unpolluted; a place where” age is reverenced, infancy protected, manhood respected, womanhood honored, and human life held in due regard—when sceptics can find such a place, ten miles square on this globe, where the gospel of Christ has not gone and cleared the way, and laid the foundations, and made decency and security possible, it will be in order for the sceptical literati to move thither and ventilate their views. But as long as these very men are dependent upon the very religion which they discard for every privilege which they enjoy, they may well hesitate a little before they seek to rob the Christian of his hope, and humanity of its faith in that Saviour who alone has given to man that hope of life eternal which makes life tolerable and society possible, and robs death of its terrors and the grave of its gloom.”

Wherein lies the secret of Christ’s unique effectiveness as a social reformer? Unquestionably it lies in His ability to deal with sin. Other social reformers, except as they have been His followers, have had much to say about imperfect legislation, unfavorable environment, and such like; but they have had little to say about sin, notwithstanding the fact that sin on the part of somebody is the great root-cause of social misery. “Take away from the history of humanity,” to cite the late James Orr, “all the evils which have come on man through his own folly, sin, and vice; through the follies and vices of society; through tyranny, misgovernment and oppression; through the cruelty and inhumanity of man to man; and how vast a portion of the problem of evil would already be solved! What myriads of lives have been sacrificed on the shrines of Bacchus and Lust; what untold misery has been inflicted on the race to gratify the unscrupulous ambitions of ruthless conquerors; what tears and groans have sprung from the institution of slavery; what Wretchedness is hourly inflicted on human hearts by domestic tyranny, private selfishness, the preying of the strong on the weak, the dishonesty and chicanery of society! . . . If all the suffering and sorrow which follows directly or indirectly from human sin could be abstracted, what a happy world after all this would be!” If Jesus had had as little to say about sin as have so many of our modern social reformers, His efforts along the line of social betterment would have been as ineffectual as theirs. His work has proven effective while that of others has proven ineffective because He alone is able to deal adequately with sin. It is this ability that puts Him in a class by Himself among social reformers; moreover it is because He possesses this ability that in Him alone is found any adequate warrant for supposing that a kingdom in which justice shall prevail, in which love shall be the law and happiness the universal condition, may yet prevail on the earth.

But while Christians, because of their faith in Jesus Christ, may expect a renewed earth wherein dwelleth righteousness we are not to suppose that as a class they are committed to any specific social scheme. Christianity as such does not take sides between the advocates of the present social order and that proposed, for instance, by the Socialists. Unquestionably there is much in the present social order, such as child labor, sweat shops, white slavery, alcoholism, unfair distribution of wealth, race hatred, militarism, that must be eliminated before anything like Christianity’s hope for this world will have been realized. Equally unquestionable it is that there is much about Socialism (as it is commonly advocated), such as its irreligion, its materialism, its class hatred, that must be eliminated before it can even pretend to be in harmony with a social order that could rightly be called Christian. But Christianity as such does not decide the question whether an ideal social order is to come about through the elimination of the bad features and the strengthening of the good features of the existing social order, or, whether with the retention of what is good in the present social order, there is to be a reorganization of society along economic lines of a different sort. If most Christians oppose Socialism it is not because they are committed to the present social order by reason of the fact that they are Christians. Either it is because they believe that as an economic arrangement Socialism would not bring about the good results its advocates claim. If they thought that the reorganization of society along the lines proposed by Socialism (or other ism) would produce not merely a social order that is more just and equitable and better fitted to develop a high type of manhood and womanhood than the present social order, but one that is more just and equitable and better fitted to develop a high type of manhood and womanhood than the present social order freed from its bad and strengthened in its good features, we may be sure that they would favor such reorganization.

But while Christianity as such is not committed to any specific social scheme, and while it does not make its appeal to any one class within the social order, yet its social affinities are and ever have been with the poor and oppressed rather than with the rich and the powerful. From this point of view its fundamental note was struck in those words from the prophecy of Isaiah that Jesus took as the text of what has been called His inaugural address, to wit—”The spirit of the Lord is upon me, because He has anointed me to preach good tidings to the poor; He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives, and recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty them that are bruised, to proclaim the acceptable year of the Lord.” If it be true that there are laboring men who suppose that Christianity is out of sympathy with them in their efforts to secure better conditions for themselves and their children, this finds its explanation in the fact that they have gotten their conception of Christianity from those who by their unsocial conduct have misrepresented Christianity before the world. There is no warrant for the notion that many working men apparently have that the sympathies of Christianity are with the so-called capitalist class. As a matter of fact, as has frequently been pointed out, the best elements in that social ideal that is preached by Socialism are themselves children of the Christian Church —prodigals, perhaps, strayed far from home and into strange companionships, but children none the less. No doubt there have been, and are, those who, though identified with the Christian Church, have made their way to wealth and power by exploiting their fellows and who surrounded with every comfort are indifferent to the welfare and happiness of others; but that only proves that they are Christian in name rather than in fact; it does not at all militate against the thought that only as the gospel of Jesus Christ is accepted and lived can we hope for the full coming of that kingdom in which there shall be no wrong or injustice or oppression, but only that which is just and right and according to the law of love.

“Poor world! if thou era vest a better day,
Remember that Christ must have His own way;
I mourn thou art not as thou mightest be,
But the love of God would do all for thee.”

It has sometimes been alleged that the emphasis Jesus placed on the salvation of the individual implies that He was indifferent to social conditions. No inference could be less warranted. Rather it indicates that He was wisely concerned about such matters, as the salvation of the individual is the condition of the salvation of society.

Inasmuch as Christ’s effectiveness as a social reformer finds its explanation in His ability to deal with sin, the method by which we can best promote a better social order is the method of evangelism. All efforts to obtain better social conditions, whether by means of wise legislation or otherwise, ought to receive our sympathetic support. A mere change of environment, however, will not produce changed lives.. As an old Jewish proverb has it: “Take the bitter tree and plant it in the garden of Eden and water it with the rivers there; and let the angel Gabriel be the gardener and the tree will still bear bitter fruit.” These things of themselves have no power to change men’s nature. Jesus alone is able to do that. Hence it is only as He is made known unto men, and they are brought into right relations with Him, that we can hope for those men and women apart from whom it is vain to expect a truly Christian social order. “Even from the point of view of benevolence,” to cite the words of the late James Stalker, “evangelization is the deepest service that one man can render another. For while ordinary benevolence may feed the hungry and clothe the naked, evangelization enables the poor to feed and clothe themselves; because it touches the springs of manhood and self-respect and transforms the whole condition from within; and while it does so on a small scale in the individual and family, it does so no less on the great scale in the nation or race; for the whole course of history ever since the Advent goes to prove that wherever the light of the Gospel shines the blessings of civilization abound also.” The enemies of the Gospel are, therefore, the enemies of a better social order. For the same reason those who are doing most toward carrying out Christ’s last great command, “Go ye therefore and make disciples of all nations . . . teaching them to observe all things whatsoever I command you,” are those who are doing most toward bringing in a better order of society. The need of this age as of every age is an evangelization that teaches men to do all the things that Jesus commanded. In the very nature of the case men cannot take Jesus as their Saviour both from the guilt and power of sin and strive to do all the things He commands without becoming centers of influence that make for social well-being.

“Whatever destroys our conceptions of God in his strictest personality, destroys all spiritual values at the same time.”

Sifting more articles from the long-running Philadelphia-based magazine THE PRESBYTERIAN, there were on those pages  several articles by the the Rev. David S. Clark, father of Gordon H. Clark. The following is from the 5 September 1929 issue.

Pantheistic Modernism

It had become conspicuously evident that the Modernism of the present-day is shot through and through with the philosophy of Pantheism. This was inevitable since most of the modern liberalism can be traced back through Ritschl to the theology of Schliermacher, and increasingly inevitable because the evolutionary philosophy, which characterizes Modernism and which gives less and less recognition to a theistic conception of the universe, naturally runs to Pantheism. If Spinoza were living to-day, he would be highly pleased to see how his philosophy has penetrated the church and influenced the highbrows of both secular and religious education.

Some years ago we sat in the class rooms of Princeton Theological Seminary. By our side sat a brilliant young man from the South. He was scholarly, forceful and enthusiastic. No one went out from the class better fitted to preach the saving power of Christ to a lost world than our dear old friend, John H. Boyd. His ability soon won him recognition and he became pastor of a large and influential church, the First Church of Portland, Oregon. From this field he was called to a professorship in McCormick Theological Seminary. In his farewell sermon to his Portland congregation, he said : “I have not pleaded with you to believe in God. I have not asked to bring your sins to be forgiven primarily. I have not asked you to believe in the realities of the spiritual world. I have asked you to believe in yourselves, in the divinity of men, in the greatness of the human soul. Men are what they are because of a fatal disbelief in their own divinity.”

We were dumbfounded when we read such words. What had happened to our dear friend, John Boyd? We remembered his manliness, his ready tongue, his broken ankle in the gymnasium, his courageous spirit in the face of misfortune, and all our admiration. But what had come over him since we  sat in the class rooms of Princeton? That is all explicable enough. He had drunk in the modern poison. He had simply changed his conception of God and man with all the logical implications. He had just dropped out the distinction between Creator and creature, and identified God and man. To him, man was a spark of God. Sin had little significance. It did not need to be forgiven in any serious way, it was just a failure, as yet, to arrive. Man must remember his own divinity and, remembering that, will be inspired to act accordingly. That, I take it, is the solution of our old friend’s theological somersault. And the Pantheism of it is not hard to discover, and the same streak of Pantheism runs through all Modernism.

It is to be regretted that the word “divinity” is so often used in a loose way. It may express a meta-physical and numerical identity with God, or just the product of divine creative activity, or an expression of divine purpose, but at any rate its effect in the lingo of Modernism is to bias men’s minds toward Pantheism.

For further illustration we will refer to Professor Arthur C. McGiffert. Professor McGiffert was brought up an orthodox, psalm-singing United Presbyterian. He came to be one of the most conspicuous Modernists of this age. His remarks on the divine immanence so nearly express Pantheism that the difference would be difficult to mark. However some writers make the term immanence to connote identity. Dr. McGiffert says : “Divine and human are recognized as truly one. Christ therefore, if human, must be divine, as all men are.” And again : “Christ is essentially no more divine than we are or than nature is.” This is unconcealed Pantheism. All things are divine, whether you, or Christ, or a tree, or a snake, or a toad. God is substantially one with all things that exist, and Christ and man are the highest evolution of the divine substance.

Professor George Cross, of Rochester Theological Seminary, says in his book, Religions of Authority and Religions of the Spirit, that “Protestatism denies that the natural and the supernatural are separate. It finds the supernatural within the natural and the divine within the human.” The quotation is an expression of thorough-going Pantheism. No one denies that the supernatural is within the natural if a careful distinction is made between immanence and identity. We believe in the immanence of God, an all-pervasive immanence; we can even acquiesce in this half of Spinoza’s famous dictum, viz., that “God is the Spirit within all spirit,” but when the natural and the supernatural are indefinitely and carelessly commingled, or when God and the universe are made identical, or the natural world is conceived as an emanation or evolution from the metaphysical essence or substance of God, we call that Pantheism. And Modernism is full of it. The tendency of Modernism is to humanize God and deify man; but that is just another evidence of its pantheistic viewpoint.

Professor Henry Nelson Weiman, of the University of Chicago, in a recent book, says : “This cosmic process which is God.” Dr. Fosdick speaks much to the same effect. Now that God is in the cosmical processes, no Christian denies; but such bold unqualified statements lead to a partial or entire denial of the personality of God and to the losing of him in the laws and forces of the universe. This is intended by the radical exponents of Modernism. Whatever destroys our conceptions of God in his strictest personality, destroys all spiritual values at the same time. That is the inevitable end of Modernism.

Philadelphia, Pa.

[The Presbyterian 99.36 (5 September 1929): 6.]

Dr. J. Gresham Machen’s address on “The Necessity of the Christian School” remains timely, and is permanently posted here. But to refresh your memory :

The Necessity of the Christian School
by Dr. J. Gresham Machen, Professor of New Testament in Westminster Theological Seminary, Philadelphia, Pa.. This is a reprint of a lecture given by Dr. Machen at the Educational Convention held in Chicago under the auspices of the National Union of Christian Schools, August, 1933.

Two Reasons for the Christian School
In the first place, then, the Christian school is important for the maintenance of American liberty.The Christian school is to be favored for two reasons. In the first place, it is important for American liberty; in the second place, it is important for the propagation of the Christian religion. These two reasons are not equally important; indeed, the latter includes the former as it includes every other legitimate human interest. But I want to speak of these two reasons in turn.

We are witnessing in our day a world-wide attack upon the fundamental principles of civil and religious freedom. In some countries, such as Italy, the attack has been blatant and unashamed; Mussolini despises democracy and does not mind saying so. A similar despotism now prevails in Germany; and in Russia freedom is being crushed out by what is perhaps the most complete and systematic tyranny that the world has every seen.

But exactly the same tendency that is manifested in extreme form in those countries, is also being manifested, more slowly but none the less surely, in America. It has been given an enormous impetus first by the war and now by the economic depression; but aside form these external stimuli it has its roots in a fundamental deterioration of the American people. Gradually the people has come to value principle less and creature comfort more; increasingly it has come to prefer prosperity to freedom; and even in the field of prosperity it cannot be said that the effect is satisfactory.

The result of this decadence in the American people is seen in the rapid growth of a centralized bureaucracy which is the thing against which the Constitution of the United States was most clearly intended to guard.

The Attack Upon Liberty
In the presence of this apparent collapse of free democracy, any descendant of the liberty-loving races of mankind may well stand dismayed; and to those liberty-loving races no doubt most of my hearers tonight belong. I am of the Anglo-Saxon race; many of you belong to a race whose part in the history of human freedom is if anything still more glorious; and as we all contemplate the struggle of our fathers in the winning of that freedom which their descendants seem now to be so willing to give up, we are impressed anew with the fact that it is far easier to destroy than to create. It took many centuries of struggle — much blood and many tears — to establish the fundamental principles of our civil and religious liberty; but one made generation is sufficient to throw them all away.

It is true, the attack upon liberty is nothing new. Always there have been tyrants in the world; almost always tyranny has begun by being superficially beneficent, and always it has ended by being both superficially and radically cruel.
But while tyranny itself is nothing new, the technique of tyranny has been enormously improved in our day; the tyranny of the scientific expert is the most crushing tyranny of all. That tyranny is being exercised most effectively in the field of education. A monopolistic system of education controlled by the State is far more efficient in crushing our liberty than the cruder weapons of fire and sword. Against this monopoly of education by the State the Christian school brings a salutary protest; it contends for the right of parents to bring up their children in accordance with the dictates of their conscience and not in the manner prescribed by the State.

That right has been attacked in America in recent years in the most blatant possible ways. In Oregon, a law was actually passed some years ago requiring all children to attend the public schools — thus taking the children from the control of their parents and placing them under the despotic control of whatever superintendent of education might happen to be in office in the district in which they resided. In Nebraska, a law was passed forbidding the study of languages other than English, even in private schools, until the child was too old to learn them well. That was really a law making literary education a crime. In New York, one of the abominable Lusk Laws placed even private tutors under state supervision and control. Read the rest of this entry »

One of the Last Great Southern Presbyterians was a Canadian!
by Rev. David Myers

Francis Robert Beattie was born near Guelph, Ontario, Canada on 31 March 1848. His father was Robert Beattie and his mother, Janette McKinley Beattie.  Francis attended the University of Toronto, graduating there with the BA degree in 1875 and the MA in 1876.  He next attended Knox College in Toronto, in 1878. That same year he was licensed and ordained, on 11 November 1878 by Peterboro Presbytery (Presbyterian Church of Canada), being then installed as the pastor of the Balto and Cold Springs churches in Canada.  He served this group from 1878 to 1882.  During this pastorate, he married Jean G. Galbraith of Toronto in 1879.  She later died in 1897.  Rev. Beattie resigned his first pulpit to become the pastor of the First Presbyterian Church of Brantford, Canada.  Rev. Beattie also remarried, though that date of the marriage is not provided in the record.  His second wife was Lillie R. Satterwhite, and she survived her husband, passing into glory on 20 August 1940).

Rev. Beattie only served the Brantford church from 1882-1883, apparently leaving that pulpit to take up doctoral work.  He attended Illinois Wesleyan University in Bloomington, Illinois and successfully completed his dissertation in 1884.  There is no mention in the record as to how he was employed during the period from 1885 through 1887, but in 1888 he transferred his credentials to the Presbyterian Church in US, taking a post as professor of Apologetics at the Columbia Theological Seminary.  He held this position from 1888 until 1893.  In 1893, he became one of the founding professors, along with T.D. Witherspoon and others, at the newly formed Louisville Presbyterian Theological Seminary (KY), serving as Professor of Systematic Theology and Apologetics from 1893 until his death in 1906.  During these final years of his life he also worked as an associate editor of The Christian Observer.  He died in Louisville, Kentucky on September 3, 1906 and is buried in Louisville’s Cave Hill Cemetery, in Section D, Lot 26, along with his wife and one Thomas Satterwhite Beattie.  Thomas may have been a son born to that marriage, though this is unclear at this time.  Thomas died on May 27, 1904.

Honors afforded Rev. Beattie during his lifetime include the Doctor of Divinity degree, awarded by the Presbyterian College of South Carolina in 1887 and the LL.D. degree, awarded by Central University of Kentucky.  Dr. Beattie served on the PCUS Assembly’s Editing Committee for the 250th Anniversary of the Westminster Assembly and wrote the introduction to the volume produced in celebration of that occasion.

Rev. Beattie’s best known work was probably his commentary on the Westminster Confession of Faith, published in 1896:
The Presbyterian Standards : An Exposition of the Westminster Confession of Faith and Catechisms (Richmond, Va. : Presbyterian Committee of Publication,1896), 431pp.; 22cm.

STUDIES IN THE WESTMINSTER SHORTER CATECHISM