Truth is ancient; it's grey hairs may make it venerable;
it comes from Him who is the ancient of days. --Thomas Watson

 

16 July, 2007   comments: (0) Sound Doctrine   "Deeds Not Creeds"? The Reformers Knew Better    Quoting Horatius Bonar . . . In the Reformation we find doctrine, life, and action, nobly blended. Between these there was harmony, not antagonism. Some who have decried doctrine have set up life and dogma as antagonists; lauding the former at the expense of the latter. This is foolishness. What we accept, as the true adjustment of conflicting claims, is life and dogma in harmony; not life without dogma, nor dogma without life; not theology without religion, nor religion without theology. "Religion without theology" is a phrase meant to sound well; yet, after all it is a deception. There can be no such thing. A tree must have a root. The phrase implies that theology has been the prison-house of religion, and that there must be emancipation from theology before religion can exercise her functions. It looks at religion as a beautiful flower embedded in a block of ice; and demands the melting of the ice, and the liberation of the flower. One of Today's Deeds Not Creeds Megachurches: Christianity, say many among us, is a life, not a dogma; and they reckon this the enunciation of a great and unappreciated truth. It is, however, a mere truism, or it is an unmeaning antithesis, or it is an absolute falsehood. It sounds oracular and great; it is only pompous. Christianity is both a life and a dogma; quite as much the one as the other. But it is a dogma before it is a life; it cannot be the latter till it has been the former. It is out of the dogma that the life emerges; not the dogma out of the life; and the importance that is attached in Scripture to knowledge,--right knowledge,--should make us cautious in disparaging doctrine, as if it were harmless when wrong, and impotent or uninfluential when right. ... Remain ignorant of the doctrine, and you remain ignorant of the person [of Christ]; nay, that person becomes a mysterious shadow,--vague, unintelligible, and unlovable. ... Our Reformers, following Scripture, abhorred error. They regarded it as sin, as in itself evil, and as the root of almost every evil. They loved truth, upheld it, sought to spread it. They eschewed error as poison; they prized truth as medicine, containing in it the world's true health. They knew that men might have it and yet not use it, that they might abuse it, that they might "hold it in unrighteousness;" but they loved it still, and refused to believe that any untruth, however beautiful, however well argued or well adorned, however recommended by authority, or antiquity, or genius, could be available for the revivification of collapsed prostrate Europe, for expelling the poison of ages from the veins of humanity, for bracing the constitution of the race, even apart from the great purpose of saving the lost, of gathering in the chosen of the Father, the purchased of the Son. Our Reformers, working on the model of the Bible, labored to set truth before the nations. They did not despise head knowledge. They were careful that head knowledge should be true knowledge; and, in so far as it was so, they urged its widest propagation; undeterred by the thought which acts as a drag or damper on some, "What is the use of head knowledge without heart knowledge?" They had confidence in truth, because it was of God, and because it was the representative of Him who is the wisdom and the truth of God. They felt that truth could be trusted to do its own work, and to fulfill its heavenly mission among the sons of men; and so they launched it forth as seamen do the lifeboat; they spread it far and wide, as husbandmen do the precious seed, believing in its vitality, and its power to spring up and cover the broad fields of earth with its summer green and autumn gold. From:  Catechisms of the Scottish Reformation, 1866   Posted by: Jim B.   Link: http://www.oldtruth.com/blog.cfm/id.2.pid.762   Be the first to post a comment about this article        Home  |   About  |  Videos   |  Calvinism