Stand for the Truth

Dr Peter Masters

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This booklet gives the biblical arguments for separation from false teaching, and shows the positive value of this. Ten commonly-heard arguments in defence of ‘inclusivism’ (co-operating in Bible-denying denominations, or with false teachers in evangelism, etc) are answered.

Extract

Readers who have come into the faith in recent years may not realise just how much the evangelical scene has moved from its ­traditional moorings. For most of church history, born-again people have zealously guarded the fundamental principles of the Gospel, maintaining a clear and distinctive witness, and refusing to ­endorse or commend those who teach ‘another gospel’. The evangelical tradition used to be a courageous story of loyalty to the Truth.

Throughout the Dark Ages before the Reformation, successive groups of ‘separatists’ held aloft the light of the Gospel in the face of unrelenting persecution from the Roman Catholic Church. Then came the Reformation at the beginning of the sixteenth century, with Martin Luther’s heroic stand for the soul-saving doctrines of the ­Bible. Following Luther, as the Reformation spread throughout Europe, there was a ‘noble army of martyrs’, ready to ­defend those doctrines with their lives.

The Puritan movement arising in 1560 marked another marvellous period of clarity and conviction for biblical Christianity, including the courageous sailing of the Mayflower pilgrims in 1620. Generations of nonconformists have loved the Lord and his Word more than their own comforts, contending for ‘the faith which was once delivered unto the saints’.

When the so-called Oxford Movement arose in the nineteenth century (the ‘tractarians’), spreading Catholicism in the Church of England, Bible believers rallied as one to the defence of the Gospel. Then, as another great attack on biblical faith reached its zenith in the early 1900s, a massive response was mounted by the well-known names of evangelicalism in America and Britain, leading to a famous publication (then read by ­virtually all evangelical pastors) – The Fundamentals.

We make ­mention of these things only to show that in the past true evangelicals were always great defenders of the Gospel, never selling out to error, no matter what the gains. If these stalwarts of the past were to reappear among us today, they would be appalled at the compromises of many evangelical leaders and teachers. Those of us who sound these alarms are not a maverick fringe, but are those who stand where all evangelicals stood until quite recently.

Today, however, numerous evangelicals are willing to surrender the vital heart of the faith, having adopted a much vaguer definition of what it means to be ‘saved’, and even to think that evangelical conversion is not absolutely essential. They have come to think that Catholics and theological liberals (who deny the inerrancy of Scripture and all fundamental doctrines such as the atonement) are truly saved no matter what they believe. Never ­before have evangelicals been so ready to blur the line between saved and unsaved, true and false. Where do we stand on these matters? Are they of grave concern to us?


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