Here we go again.....
December 8, 2008
Reading the note below on Brain McLaren and liberalism led me the following quotation from another theologian:
`There is nothing we are more often told by those who discard evangelical faith than this -- that we must now do what scholarship has only just enabled us to do and return to the religion of Jesus. We are bidden to go back to practise Jesus' own personal religion, as distinct from the Gospel of Christ, from a gospel which calls him faith's object and not its subject, founder, or classic only. We must learn to believe not in Christ, but with Christ, we are told.'
The author? Peter Taylor Forsyth, writing in 1909, in an essay, `The Religion of Jesus and the Gospel of Christ.' Of course, the kind of churches that committed to the teaching he describes here (and then proceeds to demolish in subsequent pages) have long since closed their doors. Strange that the church feels a compulsive need to write essentially the same suicide note every generation.
`There is nothing we are more often told by those who discard evangelical faith than this -- that we must now do what scholarship has only just enabled us to do and return to the religion of Jesus. We are bidden to go back to practise Jesus' own personal religion, as distinct from the Gospel of Christ, from a gospel which calls him faith's object and not its subject, founder, or classic only. We must learn to believe not in Christ, but with Christ, we are told.'
The author? Peter Taylor Forsyth, writing in 1909, in an essay, `The Religion of Jesus and the Gospel of Christ.' Of course, the kind of churches that committed to the teaching he describes here (and then proceeds to demolish in subsequent pages) have long since closed their doors. Strange that the church feels a compulsive need to write essentially the same suicide note every generation.
