It's Deja Vu All Over Again ... Again

The more things change, the more they stay the same. There are no new heresies, just old ones redressed in new garb. The so-called "tolerance" lauded in today's postmodernism is virtually indistinguishable from the liberal heresy that made war on Christianity only a hundred years ago. Listen to a voice from the past as posted at Gospel Web Site ...

The only thing recognized in matters of morals, the only standard for the definition and measure of God and things divine will be personal experience. Those who attempt to bind the conscience, direct the soul, and set before it a definite concept of God and a fixed line of conduct in respect to Him and to one another will be looked upon, not only as narrow bigots, but as intolerable tyrants, as criminal hinderers to all true knowledge. The new generation is intoxicated with the rallying cry of 'self-expression.'

The new generation is letting itself go. If it has any standard, it is the standard of exalted personalism and self-pleasing at any cost to old law and old custom, or old manners . . . With the weakening down of law and self-restraint, there is the over-leaping race for material pleasures.

This is the inspiration of the 'get rich quick' movement; get money that may be spent on pleasure and more pleasure . . . No one has time; all are pressed, life is too short to stop and think . . . 'On with the song' and 'on with the dance,' these are the cries, and the music goes faster and more furiously. The very sounds of the music are barbaric, appealing to the animal, to the brute sense within, stirring the blood, adding fuel to the fire till passion is at white heat . . .

The life that now is' forms the horizon of the vast army of young men and women coming out of school and college. All their instruction, all their equipment is for this world . . . Let modernism continue its work of near pantheism, its agnostic attitude concerning the soul and the other side of death, and in a few hurrying years the moral and spiritual ruin of the coming generation cannot be imagined.

To raise a cry against this as 'divisive,', to appeal to compromise for the sake of 'brotherhood' and 'Christian charity' and to talk about love being more important in the church than correctness of doctrine, is emotional weakness and fallacious folly . . .

The word 'toleration' must be cut out of the church vocabulary. You cannot find it in the Bible. It is not a nice word. It is not to be found in good company. It is a word much used by middle-of-the-road men. It has in it, no matter how much dissimulated, the crawling, creeping movement of surrender . . . Why should the Church tolerate men who no longer tolerate the Bible as God gave it to us?"

I.M Haldeman - "A Kings' Penknife, or Why I am opposed to Modernism" - 1929

Sound familiar? It ought to. Just hang onto your old heresies - they'll be back in fashion before you know it!