Most modern American evangelicals have never heard of Iain H. Murray. And if by chance they had heard of him, it is just as doubtful that they will have read any of this Scottish pastor’s writings. But they should. Murray’s writings provide valuable insights into both theological reasons and historical events of the last half of the twentieth century that account for the abysmal conditions in the evangelical church in both America and the United Kingdom.
Murray was born in Lancashire, England, in 1931 and educated at King William’s College in the Isle of Mann. He later read Philosophy and History at the University of Durham in preparation for ministry in the Presbyterian Church. Following a year of private study, he became an assistant to Sidney Norton at St John’s Free Church, Oxford in 1955–56. While at Oxford, Murray established The Banner of Truth magazine and became its first editor. During the years 1956-1959, Murray became the assistant to Dr. Martyn Lloyd-Jones who pastored Westminster Chapel in London for thirty years. While at Westminster Chapel, Murray and the late Jack Cullum founded the Banner of Truth Trust in 1957. Like Dr. Lloyd-Jones, Murray was strongly opposed to liberal Christianity. During his career, Murray pastored churches in England and Australia as well as managing the worldwide ministry of the Banner of Truth Trust.[1]
In 2000, Murray published Evangelicalism Divided – A Record of Crucial Change in the years 1950 to 2000. In his book Murray explores the reasons why Christian unity has become such a divisive topic in church of Jesus Christ. Over the course of events in the last half of the twentieth century, Murray chronicles the decline of evangelicalism during its long flirtation with ecumenism. [Ecumenicalism and ecumenism are generally considered as having the same meaning and are used interchangeably in this article.]
In the 1950s two movements – evangelicalism and ecumenism – offered differing paths to unity in the church. But as the decades have passed, the influence of ecumenism has exposed a fault line in evangelicalism. Questions of critical importance have been brought to the surface: Is the gospel broader than evangelicals have historically insisted? Can there be unity with non-evangelicals in evangelism and church leadership? Does the gospel have priority over denominational loyalty?[2]
We begin by defining ecumenicalism and identifying the prominent players in the struggle for church unity. Ecumenical is defined as being “…of, relating to, or representing the whole of a body of churches. Promoting or tending toward worldwide Christian unity or cooperation.”[3] The difficulty in achieving ecumenicalism is found in the differences between the fundamental beliefs of the evangelical and liberal wings of the Protestant churches that have sought to achieve unity within and between their churches. Liberal churches generally embrace many if not all of the following beliefs:
• The Bible has errors.
• The virgin birth of Christ is myth.
• Jesus did not rise again in bodily form after his crucifixion.
• Although Jesus was a good moral teacher, the gospels do not accurately depict his life on the earth (such as miracles he was supposed to have performed).
• Most of the authors of the Old and New Testaments are not who they are presented to be because the events written about in the Bible were written many years after the generation present during the events described.
• Hell is a myth.
• Man is not fallen and does not need redemption. Therefore, Christ’s death on the cross was not needed to provide redemption for mankind. Love is all that is needed.
• Liberals reject the doctrine of premillennialism – second coming of Christ that will take place before the establishment upon earth of Christ’s thousand year reign (the millennium).
These liberal beliefs had been growing for centuries and had been aided by the Renaissance (1300s-1500s) and Enlightenment philosophies (late 1600s and all of the 1700s). During the nineteenth century, a significant number in the church abandoned many long held doctrinal understandings of the Bible because of the growth of higher criticism (the Bible is flawed) and the rise of a humanistic worldview propelled by the writings of Charles Darwin, Karl Marx, John Dewey, and others.
The evangelical arm of the church had its beginnings in the late 1600s and early 1700s. The beliefs of evangelicals held since their beginnings were published in 1910 during the early turmoil between the liberal and conservative camps within the various Protestant denominations. These essential doctrines were published in twelve small volumes titled The Fundamentals: A Testimony to the Truth. The books listed the five fundamental doctrines that were vital to being an evangelical:
• The Bible is free from error in every respect.
• The virgin birth of Christ.
• The substitutionary work of Christ on the cross (Christ suffered and died as a substitute for man to satisfy God’s wrath against sin).
• The physical resurrection of Christ following His crucifixion.
• The physical second coming of Christ.
By 1916, the publication and circulation of 2.5 million copies of The Fundamentals had led to sharp controversies between the modernists and the evangelicals in many mainline churches.[4]
Ecumenical movement to 1950
The movement toward worldwide unity among the Christian churches in modern times had its beginnings in the latter part of the nineteenth century. For the first time in four hundred years since the Protestant Reformation and its separation from the Roman Catholic Church that began in 1517, there was talk of a “reunion of Christendom.”[5]
A second push toward unity and cooperation was also occurring within the Protestant realm in latter part of the nineteenth century. This was brought on by the substantial widening of the gap between the theological liberalism of those dominating the mainline churches and the more conservative elements who still wanted to stay in their denominations. Leaders on both sides of the riff sought to preserve denominational unity. The more conservative evangelicals saw this as being possible if there was agreement that the formal constitutions of their respective churches were not changed.[6] Therefore, unity was very much on the minds of the Protestants, perhaps more so than their Catholic counterparts.
The World Missionary Conference at Edinburgh, Scotland, held in 1910 is thought to be the beginning of the ecumenical movement. But from the very beginning, the price of admission to this supposedly wonderful world of Christian unity and cooperation was the abandonment of separate church structures and doctrinal distinctives. For evangelicals, this was a monumental problem, the insoluble Gordian knot that could not be untied through the give and take of conversation and negotiation. It must be cut, and the cutting would require loss of doctrinal purity that made them evangelical.
In 1948, the World Council of Churches was formed, and at its first assembly the WCC invited into membership all “churches which accept our Lord Jesus Christ as God and Saviour.”[7] In 1962, the WCC amended its constitution to describe their organization as “…a fellowship of churches which confess the Lord Jesus Christ as God and Saviour according to the scriptures, and therefore seek to fulfill together their common calling to the glory of the one God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit.” The WCC goes on to say that, “Since the WCC is not itself a church, it passes no judgment upon the sincerity or firmness with which member churches accept the basis or upon the seriousness with which they take their membership.”[8] Verbal acceptance was all that was necessary, and there was to be no judgement or creedal test to determine what the applicant organization meant by acceptance of Jesus as God and Savior. In effect, what the denominational leaders of member churches in the WCC are declaring is that they want to be part of an organization whose members’ beliefs do not matter so long they affirm Jesus as God and Savior regardless of what that means.
But Murray states that this departure from fidelity to the Bible and long-held doctrinal understandings is not of recent origin but has direct links with the dogmas from the age of unbelief, better known as the Enlightenment. As an example, Murray points to Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768-1834), the son of a German Reformed Church minister. Schleiermacher studied at the Moravian centers where piety, faith in the Bible, and its divine revelation were taught. However, Schleiermacher eventually abandoned the Moravians’ teachings and adopted the rationalism of Enlightenment philosophers. Eventually, he came to believe that religion is primarily a matter of feeling, intuition, and experience rather than doctrine.[9]
Summarizing the beginning of Schleiermacher’s first book, Murray wrote that “…true religion belongs essentially to the realm of experience—religion is a matter of a well-disposed heart and devout feelings…It matters not what we believe so long as our hearts our right…”[10] [emphasis added]
Murray stated that this teaching that unbelief does not exclude anyone from heaven was welcome news in a country where the great men of culture had no pretense of being orthodox.[11] This same attitude that beliefs are not vital to a relationship with God had become pandemic in Protestant evangelical churches during the course of the last half of the twentieth century. Many leaders of these Protestant churches will deny this and self-righteously point to their doctrinal statements. But again, it is not what they say or what their doctrinal statements proclaim, it is the outworking of this attitude that dictates what actually is occurring within those churches.
In the modern evangelical world this attitude that one’s doctrinal beliefs are not vital to a relationship with God fits extremely well with the prevailing humanistic relativism of the culture and the Church Growth movement’s seeker-sensitive prescriptions for doing church in which the most important aspect of one’s Christianity is to have a “well-disposed heart and devout feelings.”
As the church lost cultural power and authority during the six decades of 1870 to 1930, the growth and eventual dominance of its liberal beliefs led to a corresponding loss of fidelity to the Bible and long-held doctrinal beliefs of the church. Because of the liberal church’s indifference to doctrine, opposition to the unity movement became less difficult which allowed it to gain momentum. In Part II we shall examine the history of the ecumenical movement between 1950 and 2000 and the consequences of the evangelical church’s devastating loss of faithfulness to the Bible and its doctrines.
Larry G. Johnson
Sources:
[1] Iain H. Murray, Banner of Truth, https://banneroftruth.org/us/about/banner-authors/iain-h-murray/ (accessed February 3, 2017).
[2] Iain H. Murray, Evangelicalism Divided – A Record of Crucial Change in the Years 1950-2000, (Edinburgh, Scotland, UK: The Banner of Truth Trust, 2000), Book Jacket.
[3] “ecumenical,” Webster’s Seventh New Collegiate Dictionary, (Springfield, Massachusetts: G. & C. Merriam Company, Publishers, 1963), p. 263.
[4] B. K. Kuiper, The Church in History, (Grand Rapids, Michigan: CSI Publications, 1951, 1964), p. 388.
[5] Murray, Evangelicalism Divided, p. 2.
[6] Ibid.
[7] Ibid, p. 3.
[8] “The basis of the WCC,” World Council of Churches, https://www.oikoumene.org/en/about-us/self-understanding-vision/basis (accessed February 3, 2017).
[9] Murray, Evangelicalism Divided, pp. 3-5.
[10] Ibid., p. 7.
[11] Ibid., p. 9.
