CHURCH DOCTRINES

Otago Daily Times, Issue 22257, 9 May 1934, Page 14

CHURCH DOCTRINES

CREED AND CRITICISM . A PROFESSOR'S TEACHINGS DEFENCE BY DR ANGUS .<A further development has occurred in connection with the long-drawn-out controversy regarding the charges brought in the Presbytery of Sydney against Dr Angus, professor of New Testament and Historical Theology at St. Andrew's University of Sydney. His book, "Truth and Tradition," which was published last Thursday, contains a lengthy statement of the author's case against the charges. In the course of his extensive analysis on the various subjects of controversy, Dr Angiis says lie holds that thinking men no longer believe in the wrath and curse of God, in a final spectacular Judgment Day, nor fear the torments of eternal hell. Men, he believes, instead of seeking salvation from imaginary evils, seekto be positive personalities in Christlikeness, which is Godlikeness. • Dr Angus goes on to say: "I maintain that Christianity is not. a • system of dogmas and doctrines, but that it is a way of life; it is the obedience of disciplined wills. I maintain that dogma is not the essence of Presbyterianism or of Christianity, but merely a byproduct. I maintain that Presbyterian : ism is not bound to any fixed system of dogmas as a basis laid down by the great councils of the church, or by its own previous official declarations. It was not a heretic, but the orthodox and. saintly Richard Baxter who, two and a-half centuries ago, complained that 'the plague of the Church for above a thousand years lias been the enlarging of our creed and making more fundamentals than God ever made.' And I would ask again in the words of the translators of our Authorised Version, 'is the Kingdom of God become words and syllables?' . • ATONEMENT AND PROPITIATION. ". '••.'. . These doctrines as stated by my opponents arc —the atonement as a propitiatory all-sufficient 6'acriiice, the Deity of Christ, the physical resurrection, the Trinity* or rather later Trinitarianism, and' the supreme authority of the Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments . ... We are told that the death of Christ is a propiation for the'sins of the world. . ..'-.- Who was propitiated? And what was the propitiation? Certainly, this doctrine neither derives from Jesus, nor is it ever consonant with His mind." Summing up the next chapter on propitiation, Dr Angus says: f There are these two ways of conceiving the forgiveness of sins, that of Jesus, who required only repentance, faith and love; arid that of the Church, which demands an acceptance of the death of Christ as a propitiation." ■ Later, in a chapter of a dozen lines, headed " Mediator," this sentiment is expressed: "The very thought that God would require the violent death of Jesus Himself as a sin offering before forgiveness could be granted would have been repulsive to the mind of Jesus, as it -is to our minds to-day." Dr Angus holds atonement by. propitiation or expiation to be as unethical as it is unnecessary. Jesus, he writes, was not interested in theories about His redeeming Cross. He was concerned whether His followers took up their crosses and by patient cross-bearing showed themselves His disciples. THE DEITY OF CHRIST. Dr Angus next takes up the other'important aspect, the Deity of Christ. This is covered by several chapters, in the first of which he askis: "Whence arose this dogma? What does it mean? Does it mean that Christ was, and is, God? If so, wlio administered the functions of the Godhead during the Incarnation in Jesus, and who. suffered on the Cross? God of Jesus?" Before., taking up argument on the subject the writer observes: " I wonder do my opponents realise what they are claiming in. asserting the Deity of Christ, and of what religious dynamic they arc depriving men? I wonder if they do not really mean the Divinity of Christ, which I assert in the fullest sense in which I understand divine. I wonder if they do not mean the supreme Divine Sonship of Jesus, the glory of which critical inquiry enhances, rather than diminishes or denies."

In a chapter headed "God Is One," Dr Angus asks whether it is not time that the churches should frankly declare to the puzzled. world ." whether we believe in three Gods, each entitled to the name and rank of 'God,' and the three in some mysterious, way constituting only one; or whether the work! is to believe in the words of the Confession as to 'but one living and true God'?" "Jesus," Dr Angus writes, "was utterly unconscious of the belief that.it requires three 'Persons'equal in power and glory to manage the affairs of the universe, or that He Himself w r as a member of such a three-Person unity, or that He was a very and eternal God, of one substance, and equal with the Father.' His faith in God and His prayers to the. Father, as we pray, give the lie to such a complicated and intellectually confusing conception of Deity" BASIS OF PRESBYTERIANISM. Getting down to the basis of Presbyterianism, Dr Angus asks:—"Are the alleged doctrines static? Is it simply a question of deciding whether a.statement is orthodoxy or heresy?" His opponents appear to him to put Presbyterianism before Christianity—" tbe dead Presbyterianism of the past before the living Presbyterianism of the present." He repudiates the contention, gathered from his opponents that to be a Presbyterian, "or even a Christian," it is necessary to believe in certain dogmas and theories. The writer , suggests that the commandment which was first and greatest to Jesus—love of God with all the powers of our personality and love of man as brother—should be taken seriously by all churches, and he asserts that no controversy can ever make doctrine take the place of faith, or theological opinions take the place of religious experience. " I wonder," he writes, " where our Presbyterian creed-building ancestors caught the specimen of the man whom they have depicted as for all time, according to my opponents, the reprusentative Presbyterian?" THE RESURRECTION A chapter which will perhaps excite the minds of churchmen more than any otlier is one on the subject of the physical resurrection of Jesus. " I would assert," says Dr Angus, " that our Christian faith" did not' take its rise in a gravevard outside Jerusalem, but in the divine personality of the Prince of Life. The world is not interested in the body of Jesus as a moral dynamic, but in the spirit of Jesus we expend our energies in wrangling over the physical or metamorphosed body of Jesus? "I believe that thinking religious men are interested, not in what happened in a tomb, but in the worldrenewing fact of what happened in the soul of Jesus in unbroken fellowship with His Father, in that experience of God which constitutes Him as the supreme revelation of the Father, and which will compel every generation of the sons of men to acclaim Him the Son of God in that unique measure in which He has no peer."