A Condition of Low Visibility

 "Presenting an issue sharply is indeed by no means a popular business at the present time; there are many who prefer to fight their intellectual battles in what ... has [been] aptly called a 'condition of low visibility.'"

J. Gresham Machen (Christianity and Liberalism, 1923)

Important Things

"In the sphere of religion, as in other spheres, the things about which men are agreed are apt to be the things that are least worth holding. The really important things are the things about which men must fight."

J. Gresham Machen (Christianity and Liberalism, 1923)
 

Masters of Thought

Justin Taylor just shared a great quote from J. Greshem Machen:

We are all agreed that at least one great function of the Church is the conversion of individual men. The missionary movement is the great religious movement of our day. Now it is perfectly true that men must be brought to Christ one by one. There are no labor-saving devices in evangelism. It is all hard-work. 

And yet it would be a great mistake to suppose that all men are equally well prepared to receive the gospel. 

It is true that the decisive thing is the regenerative power of God. That can overcome all lack of preparation, and the absence of that makes even the best preparation useless. 

But as a matter of fact God usually exerts that power in connection with certain prior conditions of the human mind, and it should be ours to create, so far as we can, with the help of God, those favorable conditions for the reception of the gospel. 

False ideas are the greatest obstacles to the reception of the gospel. 

We may preach with all the fervor of a reformer and yet succeed only in winning a straggler here and there, if we permit the whole collective thought of the nation or of the world to be controlled by ideas which, by the resistless force of logic, prevent Christianity from being regarded as anything more than a harmless delusion. 

Under such circumstances, what God desires us to do is to destroy the obstacle at its root. . . .
What is today a matter of academic speculation begins tomorrow to move armies and pull down empires. In that second stage, it has gone too far to be combated; the time to stop it was when it was still a matter of impassioned debate. 

So as Christians we should try to mold the thought of the world in such a way as to make the acceptance of Christianity something more than a logical absurdity. . . . 

What more pressing duty than for those who have received the mighty experience of regeneration, who, therefore, do not, like the world, neglect that whole series of vitally relevant facts which is embraced in Christian experience—what more pressing duty than for these men to make themselves masters of the thought of the world in order to make it an instrument of truth instead of error?

I found this quote to be especially helpful to my thinking as a followup to what we are learning at church in our Ephesians study.

If you had the mental endurance to make it through that quote, please share your thoughts.

Reading Classics Together (With Tim Challies)

Tim Challies, over at Challies.Com, used to do a series of blog posts titled "Reading Classics Together."  While doing these posts, he would invite his readers to... well... read a classic together.  I always wanted to follow along with his posts, but I never had the book and/or I didn't have the time to add  another book onto my current reading list.

A couple of days ago he posted again that he was going to start another classic.  He posted a poll for his readers to decide which classic to read, and the one that was decided upon was Christianity and Liberalism by J. Gresham Machen.

At first I was disappointed because I just don't have the funds to purchase another book, but at the end of his post he had a link to reformedaudio.org that has a free pdf version of the book and a free audio book version of the book.  (Click here to go to the Machen page to download the audio book or the pdf.)

Challies is planning on starting this book on June 2.  To read more about Reading Classics Together, go to his site and read this post.