| Highlights of Dawn | May 1958 |
Honest But Right
WE ARE living in a day which tries men’s souls. It is a day of investigation and exposure. It is also a day of revealment and progress. It is “the time of the end” when knowledge is being increased and when the light of truth is being turned on and is uncovering man-made traditions and Dark Age creeds, showing them to have no solid foundation in the Word of God, and actually no valid right to be called Christian.
In this connection an interesting news item has recently been published with respect to the Unitarian Church. The Unitarian Church is quite unchristian in its beliefs, and always has been. It teaches that Jesus, while a good and kindly man, and always a brilliant philosopher, was not the Son of God in any different sense than other members of the fallen race, and that his death on the cross had no value insofar as the redemption of the human race from death is concerned. With the rejection of the true doctrine of redemption as it is centered in Christ Jesus, the Unitarian Church also rejects the unscriptural doctrine of the trinity, and the blasphemous doctrine of eternal torture. Quite likely it was the inability of the founders of the Unitarian Church to accept and teach these unscriptural doctrines that caused them to reject important true teachings of the Word of God, failing to discern the difference between biblical truth and the traditions of men.
But whatever the motives and reasons of those who founded the Unitarian Church might have been, it has long been looked upon by most other denominations as quite outside the circle of what could properly be called Christian. But Unitarians themselves, despite unbelief in Christian doctrines, have wanted to be within that circle. Their church buildings, their forms of church service, their hymns, have all been patterned after those of “orthodox” churches.
Now that is beginning to change, at least among some Unitarian leaders. This comes to light in a news dispatch out of Washington DC, where one of the largest and most popular Unitarian churches is located. The item, which appeared in Time magazine, is published under the caption, “Unitarians, Come Out,” meaning, as the article reveals, that Unitarians are coming out of Christianity, not at the request of other churches, but by the advice of their own leaders.
This news item reports a sermon delivered in the popular Washington church by Rev. R.W. Stutzman, who, as the report states, “came to Unitarianism from the Evangelical-United Brethren Church.” The transfer from the “Brethren” to the Unitarian Church in itself tells an interesting story. To make this change meant giving up belief in the trinity, and in the doctrine of eternal torture. The inability to continue believing these traditions is in itself commendable.
But Stutzman now wants to go further—further even than the Unitarian Church officially goes. He does not want to be recognized as a Christian at all, and said so to his Washington congregation. In a very loose way the Unitarians have considered themselves Christians because in some respects, at least, they have felt that they were followers of Christ, even as worshipers of other denominations. But now this is no longer satisfactory to Rev. Stutzman. In his Washington sermon he is reported as saying,
“Which Jesus should I follow—the one who said, ‘Turn the other cheek. Love your enemies,’ or the one who said, ‘Do not think that I have come to bring peace, but a sword!’ Unitarians have come out of a Christian tradition, but now I think it is time for Unitarians to face the fact that we have come out of Christianity. If civilization lasts another ten years, the world is going to need a denomination like Unitarians in the midst of the Christian western world. As the major religions of the world begin really to rub shoulders, men of foreign countries are going to find Christianity to have an obnoxious air of superiority.”
Rev. Stutzman seems honest, and certainly has the courage of his convictions. What effect his bold stand will have on Unitarianism in general only time will tell. His honesty is refreshing. He knows that the Unitarian Church does not stand for the teachings of the Bible. Neither does it believe the traditions of the Dark Ages which probably most Unitarians believe are taught in the Bible. He reasons that if the Unitarian Church does not accept the text book of Christianity as authoritative, then honesty dictates that it should not masquerade as being Christian. He is right!
In this day of trial and decision this is a good example to look at and to consider. Recently we reported the case of an Episcopalian minister who has rejected the doctrine of eternal torture, and was honest and courageous enough to say so, He was condemned by his bishop, and by many others of his associates, but there is strong likelihood that if a poll were taken it would be found that the vast majority of the clergy in the Episcopal Church no longer believe the doctrine of eternal torment.
This would also be true in practically all the larger denominational churches, except the strictly “Fundamentalist” groups like the Southern Baptists. This doctrine is no longer preached by the majority of the clergy. Yet there hasn’t been a single denomination that has had the honesty and courage to remove it from their creed. It is allowed to remain on the books as an official doctrine of the church, serving no useful purpose, but making the clergy and the laity alike hypocrites.
Seemingly the “traditions of the fathers” and of the “elders” hold the same superstitious spell over human minds today as they did when Jesus was on earth. And while it is easy enough to call attention to this weakness in others, our only purpose in doing it is that we might all be reminded that we are confronted by the same sinister foe to clear and honest thinking, which alone can lead to wholesome progress in the truth. It is only error that needs to be concealed under a robe of “orthodoxy.” Truth will stand investigation, and welcomes it. We thank God that the time is near when the true knowledge of God will fill the earth as the waters cover the sea.
The People Scattered
“Behold, the Lord maketh the earth empty, and maketh it waste and turneth it upside down, and scattereth abroad the inhabitants thereof.”—Isaiah 24:1
THERE is much in the 24th chapter of Isaiah which seems clearly to be descriptive of one or another aspect of the great “time of trouble” with which the present age comes to an end. Various “spasms” of this destructive trouble have already been experienced, and there is every indication that others and more serious ones are yet to come. Paul wrote that “ye brethren” are not in darkness that that day should overtake you as a “thief” in the night. (I Thess. 5:1-4) The Lord’s people have witnessed and identified the significance of the chaotic and distressing events with which they have been surrounded.
The “earth” referred to in our text and throughout this entire chapter is symbolic of the present social order. In the marginal translation the expression, “perverteth the face thereof,” is substituted for, “turneth it upside down.” To pervert the face is to change the appearance, and certainly the present generation has witnessed a radical change in the appearance of the present social order.
Verse 2 of the chapter describes one of these changes. It reads, “And it shall be, as with the people, so with the priest [margin, ‘prince’]; as with servant, so with the master; as with the maid, so with her mistress; as with the buyer, so with the seller; as with the lender, so with the borrower; as with the taker of usury, so with the giver of usury to him.”
Here is prophetically described a general leveling of society. This leveling is far from complete, but the appearance of the whole social structure has already been greatly changed in this respect; and there is a clamoring on every hand by individuals, groups, and nations that the process be continued and accelerated.
Significant among the many hardships occurring in connection with the disintegration of the present social order is, as our text declares the scattering abroad of the “inhabitants thereof.” We think that in part at least this is having a fulfillment in the very distressing refugee problem that is plaguing the world today, and has been for the last fifty years.
It is estimated that during the last half-century more than 148,000,000 people have been ruthlessly uprooted from their homes by war or by political, racial, and economic problems. To realize the enormity of this, one needs only to remember that this is almost as many people as live in the entire United States. Think of all the people in our large cities—Nevi York, Chicago, Detroit, Philadelphia, Los Angeles, San Francisco, to name a few. Add to these the populations of all our other cities, large and small; our towns and villages; our rural districts; and it is this grand total of persons who have been “scattered abroad” during this great time of trouble.
The refugee problem is not a new one in the world, but it has never been so acute and so widespread as in the last fifty years. Experts who have made a study of this problem concede that now it is far in excess of anything in the past. One of the reasons is that today modern means of transportation have made it easier for refugees to travel from one place to another in order to escape oppression. So, in this respect, as in many others, the present “time of trouble” is such “as never was since there was a nation,” with the increase of knowledge in this “time of the end” contributing to it.—Dan. 12:1,4
It is estimated that by the close of the first World War there were five million refugees. This included 250,000 Armenians who escaped massacre in Turkey. There were a million refugees from the Balkan wars, while 3,500,000 persons were uprooted from their homelands by the first World War.
But this seems small compared with the number who have been made refugees since. Before the second World War was over, more than 79,000,000 people in Europe and Asia had been forced into the status of refugees, and in the post war period more than 57,000,000. Millions of this total have by now found homes in countries other than their own, but at this moment there are still 17,000,000 living in refugee camps, and subjected to all the hardships possible for humans to bear. In fact, many of them are not able to endure, and succumb to sickness and death.
Only within very recent months 300,000 Dutch residents have been forced to leave Indonesia, and every year 250,000 East Germans flee from behind the Iron Curtain and seek refuge in West Germany. The refugee problem in the Middle East is as a cancerous growth which almost continuously threatens the peace of those countries. The Far East is also afflicted by the same problem. It is virtually world wide.
Surely the inhabitants of the world have been scattered abroad. But it is possible that what has been experienced thus far along this line is only the beginning. What would happen in the event of an all-out hydrogen bomb war is difficult to imagine. Certainly attempts will be made to evacuate cities, and with the cities reduced to rubble, with even the rubble made deadly with radio activity, where will the evacuated go?
There is no point in dwelling on this possible tragedy yet to come, except to emphasize that some of the Bible’s prophecies of this time of “great tribulation” may have a more literal fulfillment than we have in the past imagined. It is only as we remember the final outcome of it all that we can “look up, and lift up our heads” with faith and encouragement, knowing that our deliverance into the kingdom of Christ, and the deliverance of the world from death by the kingdom, is near.—Luke 21:28
In many instances in the Bible, especially in the Old Testament, prophecies describing the great “time of trouble” which results in the destruction of this “present evil world” are followed with promises of kingdom blessings to follow. These kingdom promises serve as a “silver lining” to the “dark clouds” of distress which the “end of the world” prophecies forecast.
We have an example of this in the 24th and 25th chapters of Isaiah. As we have noted, the 24th chapter is almost exclusively a symbolic prophecy of the trouble which destroys Satan’s social order, referred to figuratively as the “earth.” Here in prophecy we see the “earth” “utterly broken down,” “clean dissolved,” and “moved exceedingly.” We also see it “reel to and fro like a drunkard” and “removed like a cottage.”—vss. 18-20
Then in the next chapter we find the literal earth still in existence, and the Lord’s kingdom, figuratively described as the “mountain of the Lord,” established in it. The promise is that in “this mountain shall the Lord of hosts make unto all people a feast of fat things, a feast of wines on the lees, of fat things full of marrow, of wines on the lees well refined.”—ch. 25:6
The prophecy continues, “And he will destroy in this mountain the face of the covering cast over all people, and the veil that is spread over all nations.” (vs. 7) Here the “face of the covering” and the “veil” symbolize the blinding influences of satanic deceptions which have prevented the people of the earth from understanding and serving the true God. But then Satan will be hound, and the knowledge of God’s glory will fill the whole earth.
Verses 8 and 9 continue with a further description of kingdom blessings, assuring us that “death will be swallowed up in victory,” tears wiped away, and the rebuke of God’s people taken away from the face of the whole earth. Then the people will say, “This is our God; we have waited for him, … we will be glad and rejoice in his salvation.” What a glorious solution for all the problems which now confront a distressed world!