Warfield on Division

Here's an interesting piece sent to me by friend of Ref21, Fred Zaspel:

Warfield on Separation:

 

Observing the stir of division caused by the entrance of unbelief in African Anglicanism, Warfield writes:

 

It may sound well to bewail the reproduction in the foreign field of the "unhappy divisions" by which the Church at home is rent, But the only thing clear about this complaint is the multitude of unhappy assumptions on which it is based. Every division (like every war) is of course "unhappy" when considered with reference to those who are in the wrong in it. But equally every division (like every iArar) is "happy" when looked at with reference to those who maintain the right by it,--who by it, let us say for example, preserve for themselves and for the world in which they are placed as the seed of the Kingdom, that purity of faith and life, from which alone the Kingdom of God can be propagated. Where the seed is not pure, what shall the harvest be? Obviously the only justifiable way in which our "unhappy divisions" can be healed is by the abandonment of their error on the part of those whose error necessitates them. To attempt to heal them by abandoning the truth to which their existence is the outstanding- witness, or to mitigate them by ceasing to insist upon this truth, or to cover them up by the suppression of at least all corporate testimony to it in some sort of an amalgam of truth and error, involves the fearful guilt of unfaithfulness to the Gospel with which we have been put in charge, as the one saving force in the world.

 

The "unhappy divisions" by which Reformed Protestants for example are separated from their brethren of other communions are just the external marks and therefore the public witnesses of the purity of the Gospel in which they trust and for the preservation and propagation of which in the world they exist as organized communities. Their brethren in other communions--the existence of which bears witness to other convictions--they have no difficulty in heartily recognizing as Christian brethren, though in error,--oftentimes no doubt serious and in itself considered deadly error; and they have no difficulty in heartily cooperating with than in the whole. range of Christian work, so long as thereby their own particular testimony to the purer Gospel which in God's providence they have been enabled to preserve, is neither abandoned, nor truncated, nor diluted, nor obscured. These "divisions" mean to them just the Gospel; the Gospel that has been maintained by them in this its purity only through struggle and strife, tears, and yes, blood, during two thousand years of Christian history. They cannot undo this history; nor can they in these latter days cast lightly off from them the heritage of divine truth of which through this history they have come to be the guardians in the world, This heritage they must preserve at all costs; and at all costs they must transmit it pure and whole to those, whether at home or abroad, to whom it is given to them to convey the Gospel. They owe the heathen the Gospel; the Gospel in its entirety and in its purity; not a diluted Gospel, nor a truncated Gospel, nor a distorted Gospel, as if a diluted, or a truncated, or a distorted Gospel were good enough for heathen.

 

From "Kikuyu, Clerical Veracity And Miracles

Princeton Theological Review, vol. 12, No. 4 (1914):536-7.