Turning From the Sins of our Fathers

Reformation in our Day

The seeds of our current prevailing secular idolatry were sown three hundred years ago by church leaders.  They wanted to assure their world that the Christian faith was grounded, not in God and the work of His Spirit in the hearts of men, but in human reason.  This necessitated making room for reason--giving it a locus of authority independent of God.

The sphere in which human reason was authoritative, and in which it could bring God to the bar, was the study of creation.  Nature was no longer seen first through the pre-interpretive lens of Scripture, but first (and last) through the ratiocinations of man.  These ratiocinations purported to "prove" the existence of the God spoken of in the Bible.  The Bible everywhere, but particularly the Psalms, speak of God's ceaseless, total and complete involvement in the entire creation.  Even the brute beasts of the forest cry to the Lord for food, and thank Him when He provides it.  Teaching such as this church leaders covered over, then eventually denied.

Reformation, and a return to the cultural dominance of Christendom, will not be possible until the Church recognises these sins and repents of them.  It is critical that the Church rediscovers and re-proclaims that all the created realms came into existence in the first place and continue to exist only because God spoke and continues to speak their existence.  Only by God's continual speaking do atoms exist and the structures of Nature hold. It is critical that the Church rediscovers this God--the only God--and returns to worship Him for Who is truly is.   

This is, and was, the historical Christian faith.  The last three hundred years have been a departure, a defalcation from orthodoxy at this point.  This is why we charge the modern and post-modern church in general with the sin of idolatry--of worshipping a god of its own devising, not the God revealed in the Scriptures. It is essential that the Church repent of these things and return once again to believe in the God of ex-nihilo creation and exhaustive, total providence.

Here is the orthodox doctrine, now largely lost to the Church, as recapitulated and applied by B. B. Warfield:

It is because we cannot be robbed of God's providence that we know, amid whatever encircling gloom, that all things shall work together for good to those that love him.  It is because we cannot be robbed of God's providence that we know that nothing can separate us from the love of Christ--not tribulation, nor anguish, nor persecution, nor famine, nor nakedness, nor peril, nor sword. . . . Were not God's providence over all, could trouble come without his sending, were Christians the possible prey of this or the other fiendish enemy, when perchance God was musing, or gone aside, or on a journey, nor sleeping, what certainty of hope could be ours?

"Does God send trouble?"  Surely, surely.  He and he only.  To the sinner in punishment, to his children in chastisement.  To suggest that it does not always come from his hand is to take away all our comfort.  [B. B. Warfield, "God's Providence Over All,"  Selected Shorter Writings of Benjamin B. Warfield, 2 vols., ed. John E. Meeter (Phillipsburg, NJ: P&R Publishing, 2001), 1: 110.]

Note Warfield's allusion to Baal, as lampooned by Elijah in I Kings 18.  We either worship the God of all-governing, all-conditioning, all-disposing providence, or we worship is an idol--a creature of human fabrication.