The
following is an excerpt out of “
I am not Ashamed” by Dr. Martyn Lloyd-Jones, in
which he describes the problem with modern Christianity quite skillfully.
“Christianity
us something that can be defined. It is something specific, not something vague
and nebulous. It is something that can be stated, and must be stated, in
propositions. Now here, you see, we com to the very heart of the modern
confusion. We are forever reading in the papers about this new theology and
this new morality and so on and how it is no use coming to the twentieth century man with an old gospel.
Modern man, we are told, thinks in new terms, he is a scientific man and so on,
and he must have a new gospel, and the idea is that the gospel is something
that cannot be defined. Christianity, we are told, is just some vague spirit.
There was a slogan a few years ago that put it like this: ‘Christianity is
caught not taught’. In other words, you do not know what it is, but suddenly
you find yourself taken up by this thing, you ‘catch a spirit’. You do not know
what has caught you nor what you have caught, but you feel differently and you
want to do this, that and the other.
Or put it in
the present time, Christianity is nothing but love and goodness. So if you want
to find it you do not go to a place of worship, you do not listen to preaching,
you do not read the Bible, you go mix with the common people, and there, as you
mix with them, you find a great deal of kindness, a great deal of love and a
great deal of goodness, and that is God. That is God! That is Christianity! You
see, they tell us that we can be Christians without knowing it. It does not
matter what a man believe; as long as he has this idea of goodness in him and
wants to do good, he is a Christian, though he knows nothing – nothing about it
at all.”
