Fundamental Doctrines of the Christian Faith is a 1918 book by Reuben Archer Torrey published by Doran in New York. 328pp

Preached during the first world war to his own congregation at the Church of the Open Door, these fifteen sermons show what Torrey thought was most important for a congregation to understand. The combination of theological scope and practical application make this one of Torrey's best books.

Preface

"The author of these sermons has had a feeling for a long time that the great need in our churches in this day is systematic indoctrination. He put his theory into practice last winter in his own church, and these sermons are the result." v

Excerpts

I. INSPIRATION, OR TO WHAT EXTENT IS THE BIBLE INSPIRED OF GOD?
"We see in this the folly, a folly so common in our day, of seeking to test the statements of Scripture by the conclusions of human reasoning, or by the intuitions of the 'Christian consciousness.' The revelation of God transcends human reasoning, and therefore human reasoning cannot be its test. Furthermore, a consciousness that is truly and fully Christian is the product of the study and absorption of Bible truth. It is not the test of the truth of the Bible, --it is the product of meditation on the Bible. If our 'consciousness' differs from the statements of the Bible, it is not as yet a fully 'Christian consciousness,' and the thing for us to do is not to try to pull God's revelation down to the level of our consciousness but to tone our consciousness up to the level of God's Word." 18

(interesting schleiermacher ritschl language; probably aimed more at american preachers)

"If you have an exact and logical mind, you must take your choice between Verbal Inspiration and bald infidelity." 27

"To a superficial thinker the doctrine of Verbal Inspiration may appear questionable or even absurd, but any regenerate and Spirit-taught man who ponders the words of the Scripture day by day, and year after year, will become thoroughly and immovably convinced that the wisdom of God is in the very words used as well as in the thought which is expressed in the words." 28-29

"It is only the man who has such amazing and stupendous conceit that he thinks he knows as much as God, in other words, that he is infinite in wisdom, who will give up an explicit statement of God's Word simply because he has a difficulty in the way of the acceptance of that statement, which he in his limited knowledge cannot solve." 30

"When I was in England a high dignitary and scholar in the Church of England in a private correspondence tried to call me down by saying that the Bible nowhere claimed to be 'the Word of God,' but I replied to him by showing him that not only did the Bible claim it, but that the Lord Jesus Himself said in so many words that the law given through Moses was 'the Word of God.' proofs follow from Mark 7:13, I Thess 2:13, etc.

II. THE CHRISTIAN CONCEPTION OF GOD, OR THE GOD OF THE BIBLE AS DISTINGUISHED FROM THE GOD OF CHRISTIAN SCIENCE AND THE GOD OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY

"...by the statement in I John 4:8 and I John 4:16, "God is Love," is not meant that God is an abstract quality, 'love,' and that the abstract quality of love is God, but what is meant is that God is a person whose whole being and conduct are dominated by the quality of love, that is, by a desire for and delight in the highest welfare of others." 39

"And oftentimes the God of modern philosophy is not only 'in all things' but is all things and all things are God. Such a God is no God at all. Whereas the God of the Bible, as we shall see as we proceed, is a Divine Person who exists apart from the world which He has created and Who existed before the world He created, Who bears definite relations to the world He has made and Who works along definite and clearly revealed lines." 41

"Furthermore still, though God is essentially spirit, God has a visible form." phil 2:6 "Now as Jesus existed originally 'in the form of God,' it is evident that God Himself must have a form, this form in which our Lord Jesus is said to have existed originally." 44

"That God in His external form, though not in His invisible essence, is seeable, is also clear from // Acts 7:55,56..." stephen's vision 44/5

"God is, as we shall see later, everywhere; but God is not everywhere int he same sense. There is a locality where God is visibly and manifestly present in a way in which He is not present anywhere else. There is a place where He is present visibly and manifests Himself as He does not elsewhere. The place of God's visible presence and full manifestation of Himself is Heaven, though in His spiritual presence He pervades the universe." 45

"...God is in heaven locally present. There is no escaping this by any fair, honest interpretation." 47

"The Kaiser may rage, armies may clash, force and violence and outrage may seem triumphant for the passing hour, but God stands back of all; and through all the confusion and discord and the turmoil and the agony and the ruin, through all the outrageous atrocities that are making // men's hearts stand still with horror, he is carrying out His own purposes of love and making all things work together for good to those who love Him." 54/55

III. THE CHRISTIAN CONCEPTION OF GOD: THE INFINITE PERFECTION AND UNITY OF GOD
let there be light: "There is here a // sublimity of thought in the setting forth of the omnipotence of God's mere word before which any truly intelligent and alert soul will stand in wonder and awe. There is nothing in poetry or in philosophical dissertation, ancient or modern, that can for one moment be put in comparison with these sublime words." 58/59

"There are no after-thoughts with God. Everything is seen, known, purposed and planned for from the outset." 64

IV. THE DEITY OF JESUS CHRIST
"If a man really holds right views concerning the person of Jesus Christ he will sooner or later get right views on every other question. If he holds a wrong view concerning the person of our Lord Jesus Christ, he is pretty sure to go wrong on everything else sooner or later. What think ye of Christ? That is the great central question, that is the vital question." 73

"When I studied the subject of the Divinity of Christ in the theological seminary I got the impression that there were a few proof-texts in the Bible that conclusively proved that He was Divine. Years later I found that there were not merely a few proof-texts that proved this, but that the Bible in many ways and in countless passages clearly taught that Jesus Christ was God manifest in the flesh. Indeed I found that the Doctrine of the Deity of Jesus Christ formed the very warp and woof of the Bible." 76

believe in God, believe also in me. "If Jesus Christ was not God this is shocking blasphemy. There is absolultely no middle ground between admitting the Deity of Jesus Christ and charging Christ with the most daring and appalling blasphemy of which any man in all history was ever guilty." 86

come unto me, ye that labor. "Now any one that makes a promise like that must either be God, or a lunatic, // or an impostor. No one can give rest to all who labour and are heavy laden who come to him unless he is God, and yet Jesus Christ offers to do it." 88/89

"Questioning a fact or denying a fact never changes it, regardless of what Mary Baker Eddy may say // to the contrary." 92

V. JESUS CHRIST A REAL MAN
"We are sometimes asked was it the human nature of Jesus Christ that died or was it the divine nature that died. It was neither the one nor the other, natures do not die, a person dies. It was Jesus who died, the Person who was at once God and man." 100 they crucified the lord of glory, i cor 2:8

"He partook of human nature that we might become partakers of the Divine nature." 105

"But some one may ask, 'How shall we reconcile the Bible doctrine of the true Deity of Jesus Christ with the Bible doctrine of the real human nature of Jesus Christ, the doctrine that He was real God with the doctrine that He was equally true man?' The answer to this is very simple. Reconciling doctrines is not our main business. Our first business is to find out what the various passages in the Bible mean, taken in their natural, grammatical interpretation. Then, if we can reconcile them, well and good; if not, we should still belive them both and leave the reconciliation of the two apparently conflicting doctrines to our increasing knowledge as we go on communing with God and studying His Word. It is an utterly foolish and vicious principle of Biblical interpretation that we must interpret every passage of the Bible so that we can readily reconcile it with every other passage. It is this principle of interpretation that gives rise to a one-sided, and therefore untrue, theology. One man, for example, takes the Calvinistic passages in the Bible and believes them and twists and distorts the other passages; that teach the freedom of man, to make them fit with those that teach the sovereignty of God, and he becomes a one-sided Calvinist. Another man // sees only those passages that clearly teach man's power of self-determination and seeks to twist all that teach the sovereignty of God and the fore-ordaining wisdom and will of God to fit into his ideas, and he becomes a one-sided Arminian, and so on through the whole gamut of doctrine. It is utter foolishness, to say nothing of presumption, to thus handle the Word of God deceitfully. Our business is to find out the plainly intended sense of a passage that we are studying, as determined byt he usage of words, grammatical construction and context; and when we have found out the plainly intended meaning, believe it whether we can reconcile it with somehthing else that we have found out and believe, or not. We should always remember that in many cases two truths, both clearly true, that at one time seemed utterly irreconcilable or flatly contradictory to one another, are now, with our increased knowledge seen to beautifully harmonise. So we should have no difficulty in recognising the fact that truths that still seem to us to be contradictory, do now perfectly harmonise in the infinite wisdom of God, and will some day harmonise to our minds when we approach more nearly to God's omniscience. The Bible, in the most fearless way, puts the absolute Deity of Jesus Christ in closest juxtaposition with the real manhood of Jesus Christ." 106/7

"Do you believe in a Saviour that is a man and man only? Then you do not believe in the Saviour that is presented in the Bible. On the other hand, do you believe in a Saviour that is God and God only? Then you do not believe in the Saviour of the Bible. The Lord Jesus, our Lord and Saviour, presented to us in the Bible, is very God of very God and at the same time He is our brother, our fellowman, and is not ashamed to call us brethren." 111

VI. THE PERSONALITY OF THE HOLY SPIRIT
"If you think of the Holy Spirit as an influence or power and then fancy that you have received the Holy Spirit, the inevitable result will be that you will strut around as if you belonged to a superior order of Christians." 115

VII. THE DEITY OF THE HOLY SPIRIT AND THE DISTINCTION BETWEEN THE FATHER, SON AND HOLY SPIRIT
"It has oftentimes been said that the doctrine of the Trinity is not taught in the Bible. It is true that the doctrine of the Trinity is not directly taught in the Bible in so many words, but the doctrine of the Trinity is simply the putting together of truths that are clearly and unmistakably taught in the Bible." 158

"He cannot be three in one in the same sense, nor does the Bible teach that He is." 159

"God is Spirit and numbers belong primarily to the physical world..." 159

"There is one God, eternally existing, and manifesting Himself in three Persons --Father, Son and Holy Spirit." 159

"The ease with which one can grasp the Unitarian conception of God is not in its favour but against it. Any god who could be thoroughly comprehended by a finite mind would not be an infinite God. It would be impossible for a thoroughly intelligent mind to really worship a god whom he could thoroughly understand. If God is to be really God, He must be beyond our complete understanding." 160

"The doctrine of the Trinity is not merely a speculative doctrine. It is a doctrine of tremendous daily practical importance. It enters into the very warp and woof of our experience, if our experience is a truly Christian experience." 160

"For example, in our prayer we need God, the Father, to Whom we pray, we need God, the Son, through Whom we pray, and we need God , the Holy Spirit, in Whom we pray. So also in our worship we need God, the Father, the very centre of our worship, we need the Son, through Whom we approach Him in our worship, and we need to worship by the Holy Spirit. But all three -Father, Son and Holy Spirit- are the objects of our worship." 160

VIII. THE ATONEMENT: GOD'S DOCTRINE OF THE ATONEMENT VS. UNITARIAN AND CHRISTIAN SCIENCE DOCTRINES OF THE ATONEMENT

"Without the Bible Doctrine of the Atonement you have no Christianity, but the Devil's substitute for Christianity. Without the Bible Doctrine of the Atonement you have no real gospel, but an utterly false and soul-destroying philosophy." 162

"Any doctrine which is not true for everybody is not for anybody true, and any doctrine which is true is true for everybody." 166

"...the incarnation was for the purpose of the death." 168

"If the Unitarian or the Christian Scientist or the New Theologian should get to heaven they would have no song to sing. The glorious song of that wondrous choir would sound to him like a song 'of the shambles.' He would be very lonesome and feel that he had got into the wrong pew." 170

"The doctrine is often misrepresented and caricatured as being that 'God, a holy first person, took the sins of man, the guilty second person, and put them on Jesus Christ, an innocent third person,' and it is objected that this would not be just. No; this would not be just, and it is not for a moment the doctrine of the Bible, for the Bible clearly teaches that Jesus Christ was not 'a third person,' but was Himself God, and that He was Himself man, so He is not a third person at all, but both the first person and the second person, and // the doctrine is that God Himself, the offended first person, substitutes His atoning action whereby He expresses His hatred against sin, for his punitive action whereby He would express the same thing; that God, instead of visiting the sins of the sinner upon the sinner, takes the punishment upon Himself. This certainly is something more than just, it is wondrous love." 175/176

"All of God's dealings in mercy with any man are one the ground of Christ's death. Only on the ground of Christ's death could God deal in mercy with any man." 178

"No man needs to make his peace with God, Jesus Christ has already made peace by His atoning death, and all we have to do is to enter into the peace which Jesus Christ has made for us, and we enter into that peace by simply believing in the One who made peace by His death upon the cross." 181

"Justification is more than forgiveness. Forgiveness is negative, the putting away of our sins, manifested in God's treating us as if we never had sinned. Justification is positive, the reckoning of us positively righteous, the imputing // to us the perfect righteousness of God in Jesus Christ, not merely the treating us as if we had never sinned, but the reckoning us clothed upon with perfect righteousness. By reason of Jesus Christ's atoning death there is an absolute interchange of position between Jesus Christ and His people. In His death upon the cross Jesus Christ took our place of condemnation before God, and the moment we accept Him we step into His place of perfect acceptance before God." 181-2

"The atonement of Jesus Christ has an immense sweep --far beyond the reach of our human philosophies. We have just begun to understand what the blood that was spilled on Calvary means. Sin is a far more awful, ruinous, and far-reaching evil than we have been wont to think, but the blood of Christ has a power and efficiency, the fullness of which only eternity will disclose." 185

IX. THE DISTINCTIVE DOCTRINE OF PROTESTANTISM: JUSTIFICATION BY FAITH

"Works have nothing to do with justification except to hinder it when we trust in them." 194

rom. 10:8-10 "God here tells us that the faith that appropriates justification is a faith with the heart, i.e., a faith that is not a mere notion, or opinion, but a faith that leads to action along the line of that faith, and it is therefore a faith that leads to open confession witht he mouth, of Jesus as our Lord." 195

"The faith which God sees and upon which He justifies, leads inevitably to works which men can see." 197

"We are justified by faith alone, but we are not justified by a faith that is alone, but a faith that is accompanied by works." 198

"Forgiveness is negative, the putting away of sin; Justification is positive, the reckoning of positive and perfect righteousness to the one justified. Jesus Christ is so united to the believer in Him that God reckons our sins to Him. The believer, on the other hand, is so united to Christ tha tGod reckons His righteousness to us. God sees us, not as we are in ourselves, but as we are in Him and reckons us as righteous as He is. When Christ's work in us is completed we shall be in actual fact what we are already in God's reckoning, but the moment one believes, as far as God's reckoning is concerned, he is as absolutely perfect as he ever shall be. Our present standing before God is absolutely perfect, though our present state may be very imperfect." 200-1

(quotes here, as often,
"Near, so very near to God,
Nearer I cannot be
For in the person of his son
I'm just as near as He." )

X. THE NEW BIRTH
"In the New Birth God imparts to the one who is born again His own wise and holy nature, a nature that thinks as God thinks ...; he feels as God feels, loves the things that God loves, hates the things that God hates, wills as God wills. It is evident then that regeneration is a deep thorough-going change in the deepest springs of thought, feeling and action...." 208

"Many an apparently thorough conversion is a temporary thing because it did not go deep enough, but regeneration is a permanent thing. When God imparts His nature to a man, that nature abides in the man."

"Nothing else will take the place of the New Birth. Men are trying to substitute education, morality, religion, orthodoxy, baptism, outward reform, 'new thought,' 'theosophy,' or the knowledge of God, and other such things, for the New Birth; but none of these, or all of them together, are sufficient, you must be born again. There is absolutely no exception to this rule." 218

XI. SANCTIFICATION
"The subject of Sanctification has given rise to such bitterness and such extravagances in some quarters that many even dread the use of the word 'Sanctification.' But the word is not only a Bible word, but a deeply significant word, a word full of precious meaning; and it would not be the part of wisdom on our part to give up this good Bible word simply // because the word is so often abused." 225-226

"The whole controversy about 'the eradication of the carnal nature' arises from a misapprehension and from using terms for which there is no warrant in the Bible. The Bible nowhere speaks about 'the carnal nature,' and so certainly not about 'the eradication of the carnal nature.' There is such a thing as a carnal nature, but it is not a material thing, not a substance, not a something that can be eradicated as you pull a tooth or remove the vermiform appendix. 'A carnal nature' is a nature controlled by the flesh."

"Every believer in Christ is a saint, a saint not in the sense in which that word is oftentimes used in modern usage, but in the Bible sense, as being set apart for God and belonging to God and being God's peculiar property." 240

"It is not int he life that now is, and it is not at death, that we are entirely sanctified, spirit, soul, and body. It is at // the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ." 243-4

XII. THE RESURRECTION OF THE BODY OF JESUS AND OF OUR BODIES

"Yet there are many who call themselves Christians and who say that they believe in the Bible, and who consider themselves perfectly orthodox Christians, who do not believe in the Resurrection of the Body, they merely believe in the immortality of the soul." 246

"Our not having 'blood' in our resurrection bodies involves many great and glorious possibilities, upon which we cannot dwell now." 254 ????

"We are perishing every day and every minute. My present body is disintegrating while I talk to you. But the bodies that we shall receive in the resurrection will be absolutely free from the liability to corruption or decay." 254

"The redeemed body will be a perfect counterpart of the redeemed spirit that inhabits it. No deafness, dimsightedness nor blindness, no tired hands and feet, no maimed soldier boys coming home from the war." 256

XIII. THE DEVIL
"When men and women begin to question the existence of a personal Devil it is pretty s ure that before long they will be questioning a good many other things regarding which a true child of God should have no questions." 263

"If we ever doubted before that there was a Devil, and just such a Devil as the Bible pictures, we can scarcely doubt it now, when we consider the action of the rulers of the earth in this present mad world war. How could beings so intelligent in matters of science and philosophy and econmics as the present rulers of Gemany are, ever be guilty of plunging hte nations of the earth into this mad war? There is but one reasonable answer: because there is a Devil who rules the present Kosmos, or world order, and he controls the Kaisers and the Reichstags of the world and will until the true Prince comes, the Prince of Peace, our Lord Jesus Christ." 272-3

"Satan's most effective mode of work is by leading men into doubt and into error on fundamental points. The saloons and the gambling hells and the brothels are not the cheif spheres of Satan's activities, but the schools and colleges and theological seminaries where he is inducing men and women, and callow youths and maidens, to doubt the truth of God's Word, and to reject the fundamental truths of God's Word and accept Satan's errors in their place. Satan knows well; that, if he can get men to doubting God's Word, it is easy to lead them into the vilest sins. False doctrine has been a more prolific source of the vilest sins than even the saloons." 276

"I have been a Christian for forty-three years, but I would not dare to neglect the study of God's word for one single day. Why not? Because there is a Devil..." 281-2

XIV. IS THERE A LITERAL HELL?
"I am going to preach about hell to keep as many of you as possible from going there." 284-5

"Man never appears more foolish than when he tries to reason out what an infinite God must do." 286

"On a subject like this one ounce of God's revelation is worth a thousand tons of man's speculation." 287

"Before Christ ascended Paradise was down, now it is up." 288

"Death means wrong existence rather than non-existence. It is just the opposite of life, and life in the New Testament usage does not mean mere existence, it means right existence. God-like existence, holy existence. It mens the ennoblement and glorification and deification of existence; and death means just the opposite, it means wrong existence, debased existence, the ruin, the shame, and the ignominy and the despair of existence." 298

XV. IS FUTURE PUNISHMENT EVERLASTING?

"I wish all men would repent and accept Christ. If any one could show me one single passage in the Bible that clearly taught that all men would ultimately repent, accept Christ and be saved, it would be the happiest day of my life, but it cannot be found. I once thought it could, and I so believed and taught. These ideas so widely noised about to-day as something new, these theories of "Pastor" Russell, formerly of Pittsburgh, // Mr. Gelesnoff of this city, and Dr. Mabie of Long Beach, and Mr. Pridgeon of Pittsburgh, and many others, are not at all new to me. I held and taught substantially the same views regarding ultimate universal salvation years before htese men were heard of, indeed nearly fortyyears ago." 323-4

"Shallow views of sin and of God's holiness and of the glory of Jesus Christ lie at the bottom of weak theories of the doom of the impenitent." 325

"Nothing but the fact that we dread suffering more than we loathe sin, and more than we love the glory of Jesus Christ, makes us repudiate the thought that beings who eternally choose sin should eternally suffer, or that men who despise God's mercy and spurn His Son should be given over to endless anguish." 325

"All we know as to how God is to act is what God has seen fit to tell us." 326

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Fundamental Doctrines of the Christian Faith

Contents

Preface

Excerpts