Dogmatic Thoughts from 1923, 2009

Jesus said to His disciples, "Behold, we are going up to Jerusalem, and the Son of Man will be delivered up to the chief priests and scribes, and they will condemn Him to death, and will deliver Him to the Gentiles to mock and scourge and crucify Him, and on the third day He will be raised up" (Matthew 20:18,19)

J. Gresham Machen wrote the following in 1923:

'Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.' The Gospel which Jesus proclaimed in Galilee consisted in the proclamation of a coming Kingdom. [By doing so He was not merely declaring] general and permanent principles of religion, [but rather] made the message depend upon something that happened. . . Jesus was certainly not a mere enunciator of permanent truths, like the modern liberal preacher; on the contrary He was conscious of standing at the turning-point of the ages, when what had never been was now to come to be.

[Therefore] when He gave an account of the meaning of the event, no matter how brief that account may have been, He was overstepping the line that separates an undogmatic religion, or even a dogmatic religion that teaches only eternal principles, from one that is rooted in the signficance of definite historical facts; He was placing a great gulf between Himself and the philosophic modern liberalism which today incorrectly bears His name. (Christianity and Liberalsim, pages 31-33)

My observation:
The same Bible that tells us to turn the other cheek and judge not lest ye be judged also records Jesus telling His disciples He was going up to Jerusalem to die. According to an eye witness's intepretation, going up to Jerusalem to die and be resurrected was a demonstration of the love of God by being the propitiation for our sins through His death on a cross (I John 4). Another eyewitness of Jesus' life, death, burial and resurrection called what He saw as being the root of a living hope and an act of grace (I Peter 1).

These Christian teachings (dogmas) about love, hope and grace are directly tied to a unique and particular historic event. And yes, while the Bible does tell us to be kind, patient when wronged, etc. those characteristics are not necessarily unique to Christianity. That is not meant to demean the importance of generosity or kindness, or helping blue-haired ladies across the street, but rather to recognize the message of God's grace is rooted in the unique and particular death of Jesus. The living hope of which Peter writes is explicitly tied to the bodily resurrection of Christ. The love of Christ, the grace of God, the hope we can have are not based in esoteric, generic, universial niceties but rather in Jesus Christ being a particular person and doing a particular thing in time and space.

Consider, if John Newton had read the Scriptures in a non-dogmatic way and allowed Jesus to be merely another human demonstrating a higher god-consciousness: Newton wouldn't have penned those dogmatic and demeaning words, "Amazing grace how sweet the sound that saved a wretch like me."

We preached Christ crucified. . . foolishness and stumbling block. . . that no man should boast before God (I Corithians 1).

-- TWMathis