Will Virginia Baptists Go the Way of English Baptists of the Last Century?

                                                                                                               Vol. VIII, No. 10, Nov./Dec. 1995

[The following is excerpted from Dr. John MacArthur's book Ashamed of the Gospel, pp. 201-2. Dr. MacArthur quotes from an article written by Robert Shindler as published in Spurgeon's The Sword and the Trowel, April 1887, concerning the decline toward liberalism of Spurgeon's fellow English Baptist churches.]

"How did so many Bible-believing churches go astray? And why does this happen again and again in human history? Shindler raised these questions:

 In the case of every errant course there is always a first wrong step. If we can trace that wrong step, we may be able to avoid it and its results. Where, then, is the point of divergence from the ‘King's highway of truth'? What is the first step astray? Is it doubting this doctrine, or questioning that sentiment, or being skeptical as to the other article of orthodox belief? We think not. These doubts and this skepticism are the outcome of something going before.

"What was that ‘something'? What was the common denominator between all those who started on the down-grade?

The first step astray is a want of adequate faith in the divine inspiration of the sacred Scriptures. [As long as] a man bows to the authority of God's Word, he will not entertain any sentiment contrary to its teaching. ‘To the law and to the testimony,' is his appeal concerning every doctrine. He esteems that holy Book, concerning all things, to be right, and therefore he hates every false way. But let a man question, or entertain low views of the inspiration and authority of the Bible, and he is without chart to guide him, and without anchor to hold him.

In looking carefully over the history of the times, and the movement of the times of which we have written briefly, this fact is apparent: that where ministers and Christian churches have held fast to the truth that the Holy Scriptures have been given by God as an authoritative and infallible rule of faith and practice, they have never wandered very seriously out of the right way. But when on the other hand reason has been exalted above revelation, and made the exponent of revelation, all kinds of errors and mischiefs have been the result.

“Then [Shindler] closed [his] article with an appeal to the centrality and sufficiency of God's Word:

But leaving men and their opinions, the Word of the Lord standeth fast forever; and that word to every one who undertakes to be God's messenger, and to speak the Lord's message to the people, is ‘He that hath my word, let him speak my word faithfully. What is the chaff to the wheat? saith the Lord.'

The Lord help us all to be `steadfast, immovable, always abounding in the work of the Lord, forasmuch as we know our labour shall not be in vain in the Lord.'”

[Above reprinted from the Blue Ridge Conservative Fellowship News, October 1995.]