Wednesday, October 23, 2013

Dissent for Mere Dissent's Sake or Dissent for Truth's Sake? Reformergents or New Calvinists Could Learn from Spurgeon

Dissent for mere dissent's sake would be the bitter fruit of a wilful mind. Dissent as mere political partisanship is a degradation and travesty of religion. Dissent for truth's sake, carried out by force of the life within, is noble, praiseworthy, and fraught with the highest benefits to the race. Are we to have the genuine living thing, or are we to have that corruption of the best from which the worst is produced? 

Conformity, or nonconformity, per se is nothing; but a new creature is everything, and the truth upon which alone that new creature can live is worth dying a thousand deaths to conserve. It is not the shell that is so precious, but the kernel which it contains; when the kernel is gone, what is there left that is worth a thought? Our nonconformity is beyond measure precious as a vital spiritual force, but only while it remains such will it justify its own existence.

~Spurgeon

I suspect this is where Walter Martin got his notion of "controversy for controversy's sake is sin; controversy for the sake of truth is a divine command" from.


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