Truth

Our modern Christians want little to do with controversy and I dare say they are likely to shun martyrdom as well. It is certain that such a weak Christianity will never fight for truth until Christians have the nerve to die for it. Benjamin B. Warfield (1851-1921) explains below:

It is the primary claim of Christianity that it is “the truth.” Jesus Christ, its founder, calls himself significantly “the truth” (John xiv. 6), and sums up his mission in the world as a constant witness-bearing to “the truth” (John xviii. 37). It is accordingly as “the truth” that the gospel offers itself to men; and it seeks to propagate itself in the world only as “truth,” and therefore only by those methods by which “truth” makes its way. Not the sword but the word is Christianity’s weapon of defense and instrument of conquest. “Cut me off that old man’s head” was Caliph Omar’s answer to the arguments with which the aged Christian priest met him as he triumphantly entered Jerusalem: and in this scene we have revealed the contrast between Christianity and all other religions. “That old man,” says Dr. James MacGregor, “with no shield but faith, no sword but the word, setting himself alone to stem the then raging lava-torrent of fanaticism, with its brutish alternative of the Koran or death, is typical of the fact that Christianity is an apologetic religion.” Confident that it is the only reasonable religion, it comes forward as pre-eminently the reasoning religion. The task it has set itself is no less than to reason the world into acceptance of the “truth.”

If the world were only as eager to receive the truth as the truth is to win the world, the function of Christian men might well be summed up in the one word, proclamation. But the typical responses of the world to the proclaimed truth are the cynical sneer of Pilate, “What is truth?” and the brutal commend of Omar, “Cut me off that old man’s head!” So, proclamation must needs pass into asseveration, and asseveration into contention, that the truth may abide in the world. “Bear witness to the truth”; “contend earnestly for the faith which was once for all delivered to the saints”: these are the twin exhortations by which every Christian man’s duty is declared for him. How early did the Christian proclamation produce its double fruitage of martyrdom and controversy! The old Greek word “martyr,” “witness” soon took on a specific Christian meaning, and became more and more confined to those who had sealed their testimony with their blood; and everywhere the irritated world complained of these persistent reasoners that they were turning the world upside down. (“Christianity: The Truth”)