"RESPECTABLE CHRISTIANITY"
by William R. Newell
"In these days of 'respectable' Christianity, with its great cathedrals, churches, denominations, colleges, seminaries, 'uplift movements,' etc., you may say, Men no longer have any temptation to be 'ashamed of the gospel.' But lo, and behold, it is not the gospel they preach; but a man-reforming, world-mending message of fallen flesh! Who today preaches of the wrath of God? But Paul speaks of wrath twelve times in Romans, and says: 'If God visit not with wrath, He cannot be the Judge of the world,' Who preaches of the awful things we are about to find true of the Gentile world in the end of this chapter? Who preaches, that even among the moral philosophers, the 'better' classes (in the first part of Ch.2): or the 'religious' world as represented by the Jew (last part of Ch. 2); or in the whole world (3:10-20), that 'none is righteous,' 'none doeth good'? Who preaches that the whole world is under the Divine sentence of guilt, and that no man is able to put this guilt away? that the shed blood of Christ as the vicarious sacrifice for human guilt is absolutely the only hope of man? Who preaches this, today? Here and there, one! It is blessed for you, brother, if you are preaching the gospel Paul preached, and are not ashamed thereof! It is blessed if you are not sucking the poison-honey of Modernism; nor allured by earth's Kagawas* into the fool's paradise of the 'social-gospellers'; nor deceived by the Neo-Romanists... Better be in prison with Paul, with Paul's gospel!
page 23 of ROMANS VERSE BY VERSE
* Kagawa, 1888–1960, Japanese social reformer and religious leader.
