By John MacArthur, June 14, 2006
Is Pragmatism Really a Serious Threat?
I am convinced that pragmatism poses precisely the same subtle threat to the church in our age that modernism represented nearly a century ago.
Modernism was a movement that embraced higher criticism and liberal theology while denying nearly all the supernatural aspects of Christianity. But modernism did not first surface as an overt attack on orthodox doctrine. The earliest modernists seemed concerned primarily with interdenominational unity. They were willing to downplay doctrine for that goal, because they believed doctrine was inherently divisive and a fragmented church would become irrelevant in the modern age. To heighten Christianity’s relevance, modernists sought to synthesize Christian teachings with the latest insights from science, philosophy, and literary criticism.
Modernists viewed doctrine as a secondary issue. They emphasized brotherhood and experience and de-emphasized doctrinal differences. Doctrine, they believed, should be fluid and adaptable—certainly not something worth fighting for. In 1935 John Murray gave this assessment of the typical modernist:
The modernist very often prides himself on the supposition that he is concerned with life, with the principles of conduct and the making operative of the principles of Jesus in all departments of life, individual, social, ecclesiastical, industrial, and political. His slogan has been that Christianity is life, not doctrine, and he thinks that the orthodoxy Christian or fundamentalist, as he likes to name him, is concerned simply with the conservation and perpetuation of outworn dogmas of doctrinal belief, a concern which makes orthodoxy in his esteem a cold and lifeless petrification of Christianity. [“The Sanctity of the Moral Law,” Collected Writings of John Murray 4 vols. (Edinburgh: Banner of Truth, 1976), 1:193.] <Continue reading post>