‘False ideas are the greatest obstacles to the reception of the gospel.
‘We may preach with all the fervour of a reformer and yet succeed only in winning a straggler here and there if we permit the whole collective thought of the nation or of the world to be controlled by ideas which, by the resistless force of logic, prevent Christianity from being regarded as anything more than a harmless delusion.’ Quoted by Randy Newman in his excellent book Questioning Evangelism, these words were actually spoken over 100 years ago by the American theologian J. Gresham Machen, in an address to Princeton Theological Seminary.
They could not be more appropriate to our contemporary situation, except that the word ‘harmless’ would now be replaced by many with ‘harmful’. Christian faith is widely regarded as a negative influence in our secular society.
