Notes on The Rise of Liberalism - Denton Bible Church
Notes taken from "The Rise of Liberalism - The Late 1800's to Present", history12_062099, Tom Nelson, Denton Bible Church
Theological Liberalism disputes these:
-Trinity
-Deity of Jesus Christ
-Virgin birth
-Jesus' death was substitutionary and not mere martyrdom
-Inerrancy of the Bible
-Necessity of the rebirth
-Judgement
-Hell
Liberalism started with German philosophy in Higher Criticism that taught seminary professors who then taught the pastors, and they fitted Christianity to a Procrustean Bed: they chopped off everything that didn't fit with those philosophies, including anything miraculous, and they said the Bible is a mere document and not inspired. In America, these liberalized churches responded by taking out anything supernatural (the list, above), and they reduced Christianity to the existence of God, the historical person of Jesus, the necessity of love and ethics. They reduced Jesus to a mere martyr, they reduced sin to merely being mistaken and they reduced salvation to a human level ethical achievement with nothing supernatural in it. No longer is humanity seen as constitutionally sinful - he's just dumb. No longer is salvation seen as a supernatural work, but the ethical raising of society. This is the social gospel.
Philosophy:
-Rationalism said that God could be proven by A = B and B = C so A = C reasoning.
-Empiricism said Rationalism didn't work, because the mind would have to stand outside of observations but doesn't, and so the mind cannot come up with rational ideas. Therefore, they said, you have to have documents and things you can touch to prove a matter.
-Skepticism. David Hume said both Rationalism and Empiricism are wrong and that man can't know anything absolutely (he was absolutely sure of that). He said that when you analyze data by your senses and run it through your mind to come up with reasonable conclusions, that all you got was on the relative idea of your mind as to what was true. You simply came up with pictures of what you thought reality was, but there was nothing behind you to declare that your system was flawless, and therefore the idea of Mind being able to stand outside data and draw rational conclusions that are true is impossible, because, he said that your mind is an organ that secretes thought like your liver secretes bile, and your mind thinks what it has to because of the data it gets, and since your mind is not outside the system, you cannot guarantee true conclusions. Your mind is not absolute, he said, and you can't even know that matter exists but only that your mind perceives it. You don't know if the Universe exists, if you exist or whether you are a daydream in the mind of an iguana on the beach. Salvador Dali followed the ideas of Hume, and Charles Manson followed the work of Dali as he said nothing is real, and we see how mere words and mere thoughts end up in Earth-shaking stuff when they're worked out in societies.
-Agnosticism. Emmanuel Kant tried to recover knowledge at the expense of metaphysics. He had a divided field of reality where he said that you can know things, but only things in the physical realm, but you cannot know things in the realm above the physical (the metaphysical), including things of the mind and soul and God.
-George Friedrich Wilhelm Hegel dropped a bomb when he tried to recover the metaphysics by saying that you can know the truth about the higher things of the mind, soul, God, etc., because you determine and invent the higher things. He said truth is relative to each generation. He said there's no God, except we are gods. He came up with a process called the Hegelian Dialectic where, he said, society takes the old thing (the thesis) and forms beliefs about its opposite (the antithesis) and a struggle between the two occurs until a compromise is reached in society (the synthesis), and that synthesis is the thesis of the next generation, and so on, to make the evolution upward of metaphysical ideas - you don't discover them, you form them, and this spirit of history that formed these changing syntheses is called the Geist (or the "gist", as we say in America). Kant said that this Geist is the ultimate God. Karl Marx believed him, and figured the political thesis of his day was Monarchy, the antithesis was Democracy and the synthesis was Marxism or Communism.
-Charles Lyell measured the silt at riverbeds. He calculated that if the silt on top that he could watch and measure built up at a certain rate, then all he had to do was to measure down and apply that rate to all the silt down to the bottom to figure out the age of the Earth. At that time, Christians mainly believed Bishop Usher's calculation of the age of the Earth beginning at 4,004 BC. Lyell got far longer, though he didn't account for cataclysm or anything, and he adopted a term that was like the guru of his time and he said his conclusion was "scientific" and that it proved the Bible's not true.
-Charles Darwin noticed micro-adaptations in species and he leaped to the idea of macro-evolution, which we cannot study by observation. This goes outside "science", but it is falsely so-called "science". Amazingly, this fairy tale has been bought so much that it has become the foundation of Western civilization. Today, Evolution has quantum jumps instead of missing links and all sorts of extra things to try to keep the idea going, and, of course we know that the World sternly believes this explanation of the origin of the Universe which also explains who we are, where we came from, what type of creatures we are, morality, and it is a religion by definition due to these wide-ranging metaphysical explanations. Abortion, Divorce, Immorality, Relativism, and War are all normalized and allowed by Evolution, because it agrees with Hegel and says we're just animals and morality is a construct that we also cause to evolve.
The Church in many main-stream denominations trimmed everything during all this time to conform with these things. In Berlin, where American pastors would study, assumed that it's obviously wrong that God has revealed Himself in the physical realm and that man can know Him, and they thought Christianity was demolished by all these philosophies. So, they took Christianity and the Bible and trimmed out everything that went against these philosophies. From this we got follows like:
-Friedrich Schleiermacher, "The Father of Theological Liberalism", was a seminary professor who said that Christianity and the Bible is not taking our minds into this document that is inerrantly revealed from the Deity. He said that biblical religion is a feeling of ultimate dependence upon God, but it's not documented by Truth. He said that the Bible is not a document that is historically, scientifically, spiritually true as a revelation from God. He said that the Bible is merely a compendium of different men's accounts of their total dependence on God - Abraham, Noah, David and the classic historical figure of Jesus. That way, you retain some vestige of Christianity as a thing of faith, of God and of morals.
-FC Bauer, out of Germany again, took Hegel and applied his philosophy to the New Testament. He said that Peter was thesis (salvation to the Jew under the Law), Paul was antithesis (salvation to the Gentile in their freedom), and the synthesis was Luke and John with their gospel of love!
-David Strauss "demythologized" the historical Jesus. It goes like this: Jesus was a wonderful man who held to the ideas of God and love and the dignity of the soul. The Church has surrounded him with these fantastical notions to give him some sort of credence. They have said he was virgin born, they have called him "Messiah" and they have said he is Deity and did miracles. He said we should get rid of all these supernatural, non-provable things so we can find the real, historical man named "Jesus".
-Albrecht Ritschl said that faith is irreducible to other experiences and outside the scope of reason. He said that faith didn't come from facts but from value judgments (remember, in contrast, the biblical statement that if Christ did not rise from the dead, then our faith is empty). He reduced the Bible down to God, Christ, the dignity of the soul and love.
-Julius Wellhausen analyzed the Pentateuch and said one man didn't write these and it is not a revelation from God. He studied language to break it up into parts by different authors. No longer did you see the Pentateuch as authored by Moses.
Consider that at that time, Christians had all these bombshells, and the seminary professors were studying it in German schools, and they came back to Yale and Princeton and McCormick and to the Baptists and the Methodists and the Lutherans with this. They should have stood! They should have challenged the conceits that drove these things and they should have continued to assert that there is an infinite personal God who made man with mind to understand and the Bible to reinforce true thoughts, but they did not stand. American pastors and theologians shaped the gospel to German Higher Criticism, and we got the Social Gospel, which has no supernatural thing, such as the Deity of Christ, the Trinity, the Death for our sins and Resurrection of Christ, and the Second Coming of Christ, and instead it has man is selfish and needs to be societally raised and regeneration is not faith in the death for our sins and the Resurrection of Christ and rebirth by The Holy Spirit, but regeneration is where society gets rid of the abuses of that society and brings about the Kingdom of God. Then a man wrote what would become the handbook of this Social Gospel and which many Christians blindly accept as very good. Charles Sheldon wrote "In His Steps". It's sales have become second to the Bible, rivaling even "Pilgrim's Progress". That book does not contain the gospel. There's no faith in the death for our sin and Resurrection of Christ, Who will return and judge and the idea of sin is not in it. It has sin as societal and institutional and regeneration is collective and a higher sense of ethics. It did a taxidermy on the Bible. It has a Jesus who is not God, man who is not sinful and a cross that did not save. Then, in the early 20th century, a response was made to this Liberalism, where you began to have "Bible Conferences" where the great ideas of the faith were preached and heralded. Here are some of those who did so:
-Harry A Ironside would have conferences at different places to defend the Trinity and the Deity of Christ.
-CI Scofield recognized that all the war in the World meant that we are not going to bring about the Kingdom of God and we would have to wait for Christ to establish it, and he promoted Premillinialism.
-G Campbell Morgan
-John Wilber Chapman
-Lewis Sperry Chafer began Dallas Seminary
-Reuben A Torrey took over Moody Bible
And people would come out from all sorts of denominations to listen to this great preaching on the Fundamentals, and those who held to them in 1912 were called the "Fundamentalists". Bible Institutes or Bible Colleges rose up where you could send your children to learn Bible and be protected from Liberalism.
-Billy Sunday the baseball player and lecher got converted when a little girl invited him to a gospel mission meeting, and he began to preach against Liberalism (he said, "If you took Hell and turned it upside down, it would say, 'Made in Germany'"). He preached against booze and Prohibition might not have happened without him.
-Charles Spurgeon preached so vehemently against Liberalism that his widow felt it's what killed him. His own peers rejected him.
Heresy trials sprang up where people were ousted from the congregations due to their Liberalism. Yet, strangely, by about the 1930's, the Liberals had taken the Denominations, the Conventions and the Seminary Chairs, at which time the Evangelicals in those Denominations were cast out. In the Presbyterian Church, a great fundamental teach named Gresham Machen was bullied to keep silent on his speaking out against Liberal missionaries and the denial of the virgin birth in Presbyterian circles, and the Liberals were going to defrock him for disloyalty! The bad guys won and the Denominational and the Convention level. So you saw the phenomenon of Separation:
-In 1932, in Northern America, The General Association of Regular Baptists split
-In 1947, the Conservative Baptist Association split
-In 1950, the Bible Baptist Fellowship split
Up until then, baptists were pretty much all the same, but the Fundamentalists had to come out of those organizations and start their own. The Southern United States didn't see so much of that then, because they were Northern ideas and Northern Seminaries, and the South didn't "cotton" to those ideas, because the Civil War was still big on people's minds and the Southerners didn't readily accept those "Northern Lies".
Within Presbyterian circles, you had:
-In 1936, The Orthodox Presbyterian Church split
-In 1938, The Bible Presbyterian Church split
-In 1955, The Evangelical Presbyterian Church split
-In 1965, The Reformed Presbyterian Church split
..to preserve biblical truth.
Greshem Machen started a brand new seminary called Westminster Seminary. It was said that in 1929, the stock market fell and Princeton fell, because they rejected biblical inerrancy in their belief system! And that's why Dallas Seminary was started.
Among Methodism, the Evangelical Methodists, the Southern Methodists and the Fundamental Methodists split.
Among the Lutherans, the Missouri Synod Lutherans maintain their conservative stance.
Non-Denominational Churches emerged, such as Denton Bible Church, out of the Dallas Theological Seminary.
By the mid-1900's, Christians came out of many types of congregations to form the phenomena of independence and splits, due to Liberalism winning at the Seminary level.
Southern Baptists have a problem:
After losing at the Convention and Seminary levels, Fundamentalists formed their denominations and they began to huddle.
They became militant Fundamentalists. Anything that was societal in ministry was seen as an extension of the Social Gospel and Liberalism, and they pulled out of society. They started their own colleges, pulling out of Education everywhere else. Liberals had the publishing houses and the seminaries. These militants didn't involve themselves in apologetics, in science, in scholarship or in social movements, because it was seen as Liberal.
In the 1940's, the kids who came out of the parents of the 1920's looked up and said that they have to integrate into the fallen World to be light and salt. Carl Henry preached at a seminary graduation and said that we in Fundamentalism have become spiritually legalistic, scholastically inept and silent, scientifically silent and withdrawn, and socially unconcerned. He said that the divide between God and reality that they were trying to live in made them withdrawn and dead Fundamentalists. So, in 1947, he proposed a new Evangelicalism, or a Neo-Evangelicalism. They became the pastors who were retiring at the turn of the 21st century (around the time of this sermon).
So, these new pastors rose up and mixed it with society. One was Bill Bright, who started Campus Crusade for Christ. There was Dawson Trotman of The Navigators, InterVarsity Christian Fellowship, The Fellowship of Christian Athletes. Christians began to retake the publishing houses. CS Lewis and Francis Schaeffer came out. They challenged Evolution and the Documentary Hypothesis. They challenged Liberalism in an intellectual sense and regained some dignity. However, their dialoguing with science and scholarship began to go too far, and Evangelicals began to adjust their view on inerrancy of the Scriptures to compensate the Liberals. It gave Neo-Evangelicals a bad name. In the early days of Neo-Evangelicalism, they would win them, disciple them, send out missionaries, and mix it with societies. Now, you can't call yourself a Neo-Evangelical, because of a trimming of the sails. Here's the argument they succumbed to: Is the Bible inerrant? The Neo-Evangelicals of the 1950's and 1960's changed their stance like this: "Yes", they would say, "it is inerrant". You mean to tell me the Bible has no mistakes?! "Well, I'm not saying that. Yes, it has mistakes. Some of the scientific postulates of the Bible are wrong, and some of the complementary books - Kings, Chronicles and Samuel - contradict historically. But you have to realize the Bible is not a scientific or a historical book. The Bible is a spiritual book, and what it says of God, Christ, man, sin and salvation is true." They effectively said that the Bible can't be trusted in areas that you can judge - science and history - but it can be trusted in areas that you cannot judge - God and the soul. Do you buy that? If the Bible is untrustworthy in areas that you can judge, will you trust it in areas that you cannot judge? Is God the God of the spiritual and not of the physical also? Yes. He is, indeed, the God of the physical also, and so these Neo-Evangelicals compromised on inerrancy ..first. The Southern Baptists got infected with this at every one of their seminaries and is struggling with it now (as of the time of this sermon in 1999, and now very much in 2021). They modified Fundamentalism to Liberal ideas. At the time of this sermon, there were Southern Baptists who did not feel that that battle was worth waging war, or that standing up for God's Word is worth the discomfort of argument, because (at that time, at least) they still believed that the Bible was true in spiritual matters. War broke out at the turn of the century at SBC conventions, and it is certain that conceding on science and history leads to concessions on homosexuality, sexual immorality, women's roles, and ultimately sin, salvation and Hell. It happened!
The Bible is true. It may take study and harmonization, but as God exists and is good, His Word is true in both upper story matters and lower! The Bible is not "Inspired Purpose" - a spiritual document only - but it is a "Totality of Inerrancy".
..as militancy died away under Liberal ideas, you began to see a pietistic movement that took Wesley's teachings and changed them into a "Second Blessing", which lead to the Pentecostal movement, then the Charismatics, and then the Third Wave, that God wants you healthy and God wants you rich.. How do we go from John Wesley to Kenneth Copeland?!
Theological Liberalism disputes these:
-Trinity
-Deity of Jesus Christ
-Virgin birth
-Jesus' death was substitutionary and not mere martyrdom
-Inerrancy of the Bible
-Necessity of the rebirth
-Judgement
-Hell
Liberalism started with German philosophy in Higher Criticism that taught seminary professors who then taught the pastors, and they fitted Christianity to a Procrustean Bed: they chopped off everything that didn't fit with those philosophies, including anything miraculous, and they said the Bible is a mere document and not inspired. In America, these liberalized churches responded by taking out anything supernatural (the list, above), and they reduced Christianity to the existence of God, the historical person of Jesus, the necessity of love and ethics. They reduced Jesus to a mere martyr, they reduced sin to merely being mistaken and they reduced salvation to a human level ethical achievement with nothing supernatural in it. No longer is humanity seen as constitutionally sinful - he's just dumb. No longer is salvation seen as a supernatural work, but the ethical raising of society. This is the social gospel.
Philosophy:
-Rationalism said that God could be proven by A = B and B = C so A = C reasoning.
-Empiricism said Rationalism didn't work, because the mind would have to stand outside of observations but doesn't, and so the mind cannot come up with rational ideas. Therefore, they said, you have to have documents and things you can touch to prove a matter.
-Skepticism. David Hume said both Rationalism and Empiricism are wrong and that man can't know anything absolutely (he was absolutely sure of that). He said that when you analyze data by your senses and run it through your mind to come up with reasonable conclusions, that all you got was on the relative idea of your mind as to what was true. You simply came up with pictures of what you thought reality was, but there was nothing behind you to declare that your system was flawless, and therefore the idea of Mind being able to stand outside data and draw rational conclusions that are true is impossible, because, he said that your mind is an organ that secretes thought like your liver secretes bile, and your mind thinks what it has to because of the data it gets, and since your mind is not outside the system, you cannot guarantee true conclusions. Your mind is not absolute, he said, and you can't even know that matter exists but only that your mind perceives it. You don't know if the Universe exists, if you exist or whether you are a daydream in the mind of an iguana on the beach. Salvador Dali followed the ideas of Hume, and Charles Manson followed the work of Dali as he said nothing is real, and we see how mere words and mere thoughts end up in Earth-shaking stuff when they're worked out in societies.
-Agnosticism. Emmanuel Kant tried to recover knowledge at the expense of metaphysics. He had a divided field of reality where he said that you can know things, but only things in the physical realm, but you cannot know things in the realm above the physical (the metaphysical), including things of the mind and soul and God.
-George Friedrich Wilhelm Hegel dropped a bomb when he tried to recover the metaphysics by saying that you can know the truth about the higher things of the mind, soul, God, etc., because you determine and invent the higher things. He said truth is relative to each generation. He said there's no God, except we are gods. He came up with a process called the Hegelian Dialectic where, he said, society takes the old thing (the thesis) and forms beliefs about its opposite (the antithesis) and a struggle between the two occurs until a compromise is reached in society (the synthesis), and that synthesis is the thesis of the next generation, and so on, to make the evolution upward of metaphysical ideas - you don't discover them, you form them, and this spirit of history that formed these changing syntheses is called the Geist (or the "gist", as we say in America). Kant said that this Geist is the ultimate God. Karl Marx believed him, and figured the political thesis of his day was Monarchy, the antithesis was Democracy and the synthesis was Marxism or Communism.
-Charles Lyell measured the silt at riverbeds. He calculated that if the silt on top that he could watch and measure built up at a certain rate, then all he had to do was to measure down and apply that rate to all the silt down to the bottom to figure out the age of the Earth. At that time, Christians mainly believed Bishop Usher's calculation of the age of the Earth beginning at 4,004 BC. Lyell got far longer, though he didn't account for cataclysm or anything, and he adopted a term that was like the guru of his time and he said his conclusion was "scientific" and that it proved the Bible's not true.
-Charles Darwin noticed micro-adaptations in species and he leaped to the idea of macro-evolution, which we cannot study by observation. This goes outside "science", but it is falsely so-called "science". Amazingly, this fairy tale has been bought so much that it has become the foundation of Western civilization. Today, Evolution has quantum jumps instead of missing links and all sorts of extra things to try to keep the idea going, and, of course we know that the World sternly believes this explanation of the origin of the Universe which also explains who we are, where we came from, what type of creatures we are, morality, and it is a religion by definition due to these wide-ranging metaphysical explanations. Abortion, Divorce, Immorality, Relativism, and War are all normalized and allowed by Evolution, because it agrees with Hegel and says we're just animals and morality is a construct that we also cause to evolve.
The Church in many main-stream denominations trimmed everything during all this time to conform with these things. In Berlin, where American pastors would study, assumed that it's obviously wrong that God has revealed Himself in the physical realm and that man can know Him, and they thought Christianity was demolished by all these philosophies. So, they took Christianity and the Bible and trimmed out everything that went against these philosophies. From this we got follows like:
-Friedrich Schleiermacher, "The Father of Theological Liberalism", was a seminary professor who said that Christianity and the Bible is not taking our minds into this document that is inerrantly revealed from the Deity. He said that biblical religion is a feeling of ultimate dependence upon God, but it's not documented by Truth. He said that the Bible is not a document that is historically, scientifically, spiritually true as a revelation from God. He said that the Bible is merely a compendium of different men's accounts of their total dependence on God - Abraham, Noah, David and the classic historical figure of Jesus. That way, you retain some vestige of Christianity as a thing of faith, of God and of morals.
-FC Bauer, out of Germany again, took Hegel and applied his philosophy to the New Testament. He said that Peter was thesis (salvation to the Jew under the Law), Paul was antithesis (salvation to the Gentile in their freedom), and the synthesis was Luke and John with their gospel of love!
-David Strauss "demythologized" the historical Jesus. It goes like this: Jesus was a wonderful man who held to the ideas of God and love and the dignity of the soul. The Church has surrounded him with these fantastical notions to give him some sort of credence. They have said he was virgin born, they have called him "Messiah" and they have said he is Deity and did miracles. He said we should get rid of all these supernatural, non-provable things so we can find the real, historical man named "Jesus".
-Albrecht Ritschl said that faith is irreducible to other experiences and outside the scope of reason. He said that faith didn't come from facts but from value judgments (remember, in contrast, the biblical statement that if Christ did not rise from the dead, then our faith is empty). He reduced the Bible down to God, Christ, the dignity of the soul and love.
-Julius Wellhausen analyzed the Pentateuch and said one man didn't write these and it is not a revelation from God. He studied language to break it up into parts by different authors. No longer did you see the Pentateuch as authored by Moses.
Consider that at that time, Christians had all these bombshells, and the seminary professors were studying it in German schools, and they came back to Yale and Princeton and McCormick and to the Baptists and the Methodists and the Lutherans with this. They should have stood! They should have challenged the conceits that drove these things and they should have continued to assert that there is an infinite personal God who made man with mind to understand and the Bible to reinforce true thoughts, but they did not stand. American pastors and theologians shaped the gospel to German Higher Criticism, and we got the Social Gospel, which has no supernatural thing, such as the Deity of Christ, the Trinity, the Death for our sins and Resurrection of Christ, and the Second Coming of Christ, and instead it has man is selfish and needs to be societally raised and regeneration is not faith in the death for our sins and the Resurrection of Christ and rebirth by The Holy Spirit, but regeneration is where society gets rid of the abuses of that society and brings about the Kingdom of God. Then a man wrote what would become the handbook of this Social Gospel and which many Christians blindly accept as very good. Charles Sheldon wrote "In His Steps". It's sales have become second to the Bible, rivaling even "Pilgrim's Progress". That book does not contain the gospel. There's no faith in the death for our sin and Resurrection of Christ, Who will return and judge and the idea of sin is not in it. It has sin as societal and institutional and regeneration is collective and a higher sense of ethics. It did a taxidermy on the Bible. It has a Jesus who is not God, man who is not sinful and a cross that did not save. Then, in the early 20th century, a response was made to this Liberalism, where you began to have "Bible Conferences" where the great ideas of the faith were preached and heralded. Here are some of those who did so:
-Harry A Ironside would have conferences at different places to defend the Trinity and the Deity of Christ.
-CI Scofield recognized that all the war in the World meant that we are not going to bring about the Kingdom of God and we would have to wait for Christ to establish it, and he promoted Premillinialism.
-G Campbell Morgan
-John Wilber Chapman
-Lewis Sperry Chafer began Dallas Seminary
-Reuben A Torrey took over Moody Bible
And people would come out from all sorts of denominations to listen to this great preaching on the Fundamentals, and those who held to them in 1912 were called the "Fundamentalists". Bible Institutes or Bible Colleges rose up where you could send your children to learn Bible and be protected from Liberalism.
-Billy Sunday the baseball player and lecher got converted when a little girl invited him to a gospel mission meeting, and he began to preach against Liberalism (he said, "If you took Hell and turned it upside down, it would say, 'Made in Germany'"). He preached against booze and Prohibition might not have happened without him.
-Charles Spurgeon preached so vehemently against Liberalism that his widow felt it's what killed him. His own peers rejected him.
Heresy trials sprang up where people were ousted from the congregations due to their Liberalism. Yet, strangely, by about the 1930's, the Liberals had taken the Denominations, the Conventions and the Seminary Chairs, at which time the Evangelicals in those Denominations were cast out. In the Presbyterian Church, a great fundamental teach named Gresham Machen was bullied to keep silent on his speaking out against Liberal missionaries and the denial of the virgin birth in Presbyterian circles, and the Liberals were going to defrock him for disloyalty! The bad guys won and the Denominational and the Convention level. So you saw the phenomenon of Separation:
-In 1932, in Northern America, The General Association of Regular Baptists split
-In 1947, the Conservative Baptist Association split
-In 1950, the Bible Baptist Fellowship split
Up until then, baptists were pretty much all the same, but the Fundamentalists had to come out of those organizations and start their own. The Southern United States didn't see so much of that then, because they were Northern ideas and Northern Seminaries, and the South didn't "cotton" to those ideas, because the Civil War was still big on people's minds and the Southerners didn't readily accept those "Northern Lies".
Within Presbyterian circles, you had:
-In 1936, The Orthodox Presbyterian Church split
-In 1938, The Bible Presbyterian Church split
-In 1955, The Evangelical Presbyterian Church split
-In 1965, The Reformed Presbyterian Church split
..to preserve biblical truth.
Greshem Machen started a brand new seminary called Westminster Seminary. It was said that in 1929, the stock market fell and Princeton fell, because they rejected biblical inerrancy in their belief system! And that's why Dallas Seminary was started.
Among Methodism, the Evangelical Methodists, the Southern Methodists and the Fundamental Methodists split.
Among the Lutherans, the Missouri Synod Lutherans maintain their conservative stance.
Non-Denominational Churches emerged, such as Denton Bible Church, out of the Dallas Theological Seminary.
By the mid-1900's, Christians came out of many types of congregations to form the phenomena of independence and splits, due to Liberalism winning at the Seminary level.
Southern Baptists have a problem:
After losing at the Convention and Seminary levels, Fundamentalists formed their denominations and they began to huddle.
They became militant Fundamentalists. Anything that was societal in ministry was seen as an extension of the Social Gospel and Liberalism, and they pulled out of society. They started their own colleges, pulling out of Education everywhere else. Liberals had the publishing houses and the seminaries. These militants didn't involve themselves in apologetics, in science, in scholarship or in social movements, because it was seen as Liberal.
In the 1940's, the kids who came out of the parents of the 1920's looked up and said that they have to integrate into the fallen World to be light and salt. Carl Henry preached at a seminary graduation and said that we in Fundamentalism have become spiritually legalistic, scholastically inept and silent, scientifically silent and withdrawn, and socially unconcerned. He said that the divide between God and reality that they were trying to live in made them withdrawn and dead Fundamentalists. So, in 1947, he proposed a new Evangelicalism, or a Neo-Evangelicalism. They became the pastors who were retiring at the turn of the 21st century (around the time of this sermon).
So, these new pastors rose up and mixed it with society. One was Bill Bright, who started Campus Crusade for Christ. There was Dawson Trotman of The Navigators, InterVarsity Christian Fellowship, The Fellowship of Christian Athletes. Christians began to retake the publishing houses. CS Lewis and Francis Schaeffer came out. They challenged Evolution and the Documentary Hypothesis. They challenged Liberalism in an intellectual sense and regained some dignity. However, their dialoguing with science and scholarship began to go too far, and Evangelicals began to adjust their view on inerrancy of the Scriptures to compensate the Liberals. It gave Neo-Evangelicals a bad name. In the early days of Neo-Evangelicalism, they would win them, disciple them, send out missionaries, and mix it with societies. Now, you can't call yourself a Neo-Evangelical, because of a trimming of the sails. Here's the argument they succumbed to: Is the Bible inerrant? The Neo-Evangelicals of the 1950's and 1960's changed their stance like this: "Yes", they would say, "it is inerrant". You mean to tell me the Bible has no mistakes?! "Well, I'm not saying that. Yes, it has mistakes. Some of the scientific postulates of the Bible are wrong, and some of the complementary books - Kings, Chronicles and Samuel - contradict historically. But you have to realize the Bible is not a scientific or a historical book. The Bible is a spiritual book, and what it says of God, Christ, man, sin and salvation is true." They effectively said that the Bible can't be trusted in areas that you can judge - science and history - but it can be trusted in areas that you cannot judge - God and the soul. Do you buy that? If the Bible is untrustworthy in areas that you can judge, will you trust it in areas that you cannot judge? Is God the God of the spiritual and not of the physical also? Yes. He is, indeed, the God of the physical also, and so these Neo-Evangelicals compromised on inerrancy ..first. The Southern Baptists got infected with this at every one of their seminaries and is struggling with it now (as of the time of this sermon in 1999, and now very much in 2021). They modified Fundamentalism to Liberal ideas. At the time of this sermon, there were Southern Baptists who did not feel that that battle was worth waging war, or that standing up for God's Word is worth the discomfort of argument, because (at that time, at least) they still believed that the Bible was true in spiritual matters. War broke out at the turn of the century at SBC conventions, and it is certain that conceding on science and history leads to concessions on homosexuality, sexual immorality, women's roles, and ultimately sin, salvation and Hell. It happened!
The Bible is true. It may take study and harmonization, but as God exists and is good, His Word is true in both upper story matters and lower! The Bible is not "Inspired Purpose" - a spiritual document only - but it is a "Totality of Inerrancy".
..as militancy died away under Liberal ideas, you began to see a pietistic movement that took Wesley's teachings and changed them into a "Second Blessing", which lead to the Pentecostal movement, then the Charismatics, and then the Third Wave, that God wants you healthy and God wants you rich.. How do we go from John Wesley to Kenneth Copeland?!
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