We are living in an increasingly faithless age. Thankfully, this does not mean an age in which Christianity has gone into a final retreat, nor is it an age without many faithful churches and courageous Christian believers. But there is no question that authentic Christianity is confronted with headwinds of incredible hostility. The biblical mandate for Christ’s people is to remain steadfast.
The apostle Paul lists steadfastness among the marks of authentic ministry in 1 Timothy 6:11. The apostle James instructs believers to “let steadfastness have its full effect” in James 1:4 and, in the power of Christ’s resurrection from the dead, believers are instructed by Paul in 1 Corinthians 15:58 to “be steadfast, immovable, always abounding in the work of the Lord, knowing that in the Lord your labor is not in vain.”
This steadfastness is grounded in the objective truths of the gospel and the unchanging character of God. So, how can Christians miss this point?
We now stand right at the century mark of a great theological divide that transformed Christianity in the modern world. The 1920s were the high-water mark of what became known as the Fundamentalist-Modernist controversy in America. This series of titanic theological battles reshaped the American theological landscape and left virtually no major denomination untouched.
What happened? Theological liberalism happened. Rightly understood, theological liberalism was an attempt to remake Christianity to retain the Christian faith’s intellectual credibility and cultural relevance in the modern age. The modernist movement in theology was rooted in the emergence of Protestant liberalism among German scholars, who in the second half of the nineteenth century began to argue that humanity had entered a new and bold intellectual age in which human reason, not divine revelation, would reign. In the wake of the Enlightenment, scholars attempted to reset Christian theology on a purely rational basis. Germany’s most prominent New Testament scholar, Rudolf Bultmann, basically argued that people who use electric lights don’t believe in biblical miracles. In his view, it was that simple.
The liberals, who often called themselves modernists, sought to remake Christianity so that it would be credible in this modern age of autonomous reason and technological marvels. Charles Darwin replaced creation with evolution, Friedrich Nietzsche declared that God is dead, Freud replaced theology with therapy, and Karl Marx called for revolution in the godless age. A minor renovation of Christian theology was not going to work.
Just about one hundred years ago, Harry Emerson Fosdick, the most famous liberal preacher of the age, delivered the Lyman Beecher Lectures at Yale, the oldest endowed lectureship on preaching in the United States (the second-oldest, by the way, are the Broadus Lectures on Preaching at Southern Seminary). Fosdick was a self-declared modernist who believed in absolutely no permanent theological truths. He argued: “All theology tentatively phrases in current thought and language the best that, up to date, thinkers on religion have achieved; and the most hopeful thing about any system of theology is that it will not last.”
Fosdick meant exactly what he stated. In his view, the Christian faith claims no fixed truths, no permanent doctrines, no eternal meaning. Everything is up for negotiation. In his Beecher lectures, Fosdick told young preachers that they had better understand that the world has changed. The old doctrines are outmoded and embarrassing. Fosdick asserted that the Bible is itself an embarrassment, and that is especially true of the Old Testament. How can you expect sophisticated modern people to come to your church if you preach such embarrassing nonsense?
It’s clear enough that Fosdick was determined to cast every old doctrine aside in order to remake the faith. In his view, the Bible was a great embarrassment and a pastoral problem. Congregations still largely saw the Bible as the Word of God, so the up-to-date preacher must take that fact into consideration. He has to say something about the Bible, but “a new approach to the Bible has been forced upon us.” Fosdick’s own view was clear enough: “We know now that every idea in the Bible started from primitive and childlike origins and, with however many setbacks and delays, grew in scope and height toward the culmination in Christ’s thought.” But don’t get the wrong idea—for Fosdick didn’t like the New Testament miracles, either.
The liberals recast Christianity for a new age, shorn of biblical embarrassments, crude doctrines, and troublesome miracles. The conservatives fought back, but generally lost control of the major denominations, especially in the northern regions. The conservatives and the liberals faced off and fought it out, and the conservatives lost—and lost big.
There is another really important part of this story that many people do not connect. Fosdick and so many of the liberals argued that it was Christian doctrine that would have to go so that Christian morality could survive. To put it a bit differently, they were sure that the biblical miracles would have to go, but that the ethical teachings of Christianity could continue. That assumption was ridiculous. They no longer believed that Jesus turned water into wine or that the waters of the Red Sea were parted, but they did believe that marriage was exclusively the union of a man and a woman and that divorce was morally wrong. They were really clear on the sinfulness of homosexuality. Within their own lifetimes, the foolishness of their assumption was made abundantly clear. You know the story now: The churches that abandoned the Bible have also abandoned marriage, Christian sexual morality, and even the essential meaning of male and female. Throw out the authority of Scripture, abandon the faith once for all to the saints, and the rainbow flags will soon fly.
Historian Bradley Longfield observed that the liberals did not only redefine doctrine; they undermined the entire structure: “Liberalism not only departed from the historic Christian tradition on every fundamental doctrine but, most important, denied the value of doctrine itself.”
The lessons from that century-old controversy will be found in many books—and have. But the main issue for Christians today is understanding the call to steadfastness in the faith. We must be steadfast as we stand on the inerrancy and full authority of the Word of God, on the faith once for all delivered, and on the power of the gospel preached to the nations.
And, I hasten to add, we must be joyously steadfast. Jesus Christ is Lord, Jesus saves, and the Word of God stands. In that light, we understand Paul’s command to be steadfast and immovable. Take your stand and hold it, and to God be the glory.