Originally published in "The Lord's Coming Herald & Wesleyan Bible Prophecy Advocate," Spring Edition 2007
Sanctified Reason: The Friend Of Christian Faith
Much of what we do is to wrestle with the issue of why Scofield/Darbyism is so widely entrenched in the modern Holiness movement.
Our conclusion is that this is what most of us were taught.
Now what was going on back in the day--fifty
years ago--that made us "old guards" all so convinced that the theory we were
accepting was the gospel truth? Was it the title of some book, for example, Larkin's Dispensational Truths? Did we actually think the theological nonsense
Larkin outlined in his book of falsehoods was the true teaching of the Bible? Or
were we simply fooled by the display of his artistic ability in placing lines on
paper?
No, friends, there is something far deeper than that here. What this was about
was the issue of fundamentalism. Dispensationalism spread during a period of
great conflict in American between fundamentalism and liberalism. We have to
understand liberalism to understand dispensationalism, because dispensationalism
IS, at heart, real liberalism, too.
Let me explain. The hallmark of modern liberal theology is subjectivity. That means it grounds all religious authority in human experience. Liberalism is also the theory of evolution applied to Christian theology, which produces a system of theological humanism.
Liberal theology is anti-rational, and anti-objective,
when it comes to the matter of history. That is how liberals can deny the
supernatural virgin birth of Jesus, or the bodily resurrection of Christ from
the dead, and still claim to be Christians. That is also how millions of we
moderns can now ignore the biblical teaching on Christian ethics and morality
and still claim to be the Church. It is because we follow another Christ than
the true Christ of the Bible. The "Jesus" we worship to is the sentimental Jesus
of our own humanistic imaginations. The "god" we serve is ourselves.
The one thing that we should understand clearly here is that dispensational
ideology is based on the very same subjectivistic approach to the Bible and
Christian theology as is modern liberalism. The point of our historical irony as
a Wesleyan Holiness movement was that many of us accepted Darbyism as "the
gospel truth" because we thought that it was supposed to have been the
equivalent of biblical fundamentalism, but nothing could be further from
reality. Dispensationalism was the fundamentalism of a system of
hyper-Calvinism called antinomianism, not the true fundamentalism of the Bible
at all!
When we get down to the brass tacks of honest biblical exegesis, friends, we find that dispensationalists everywhere disregard the plain literal meaning of the Bible in favor of interpretations that are anti-rational, and grounded in human subjectivity. Get out of subjectivity, and defer to sanctified reason in religion, friends, and it will lead you out of Darbyism--straightway!
Related Article Links
Can Entirely Sanctified People Believe Dispensationalism?
How Dispensationalism Has Led The Holiness Movement Into Liberal Theology