Father, we want to thank you that you are the Lord of all, the universe, the Lord of all truth. We pray, Father, that as we study together, as we think together, that you will teach us, we thank you for this man whom you raised up to speak your word very clearly at a particular point in history and we pray that we may have the same clarity of thinking and the same boldness today and the same prophetic vision to see what needs to be said fearlessly in our own moment of history. We ask it Father for Jesus' sake. Amen. The next section that I want to move on to here is arises from several other articles that Shaper wrote right around the same time that he wrote this little review of Boswell's review of Carnell's apologetics. And this next section really is on the state of the church in the 1940s and in particular on the state of modernism. During the months that Shaper was in Philadelphia or rather Mrs. Shaper was in Philadelphia with the family, he did them the children and he was traveling around the United States. He gave a series of lectures during that period in several different churches which were then reprinted. There are basically four lectures. The whole thing is called here we stand as it was reprinted later by the independent board for foreign missions, but the articles were the need of Europe which was published in Christian life and times, modernism, botanism, and the ecumenical movement which was published in the Baptist Bulletin and then a couple of other articles, revolutionary Christianity and the oneness of unbelief which were published in biblical missions, the organ of the independent board for Presbyterian foreign missions. These four articles which were given first as lectures in many different churches around the United States, both in Presbyterian churches and then in other churches, Baptist churches, Methodist churches all around the states, were published in these different magazines and then brought together in this little booklet here we stand. He also wrote several other articles during that period of several months and in the year or two afterwards, about the state of the church at that time. Some of them are looking at the similarities between Roman Catholicism, Greek Orthodoxy and modernism and we can talk about that later, but today what I want to look at in particular is this article, modernism, botanism, and the ecumenical movement. First published in the Baptist Bulletin in June 1948 and then reprinted in various different forms, in this little booklet here we stand and then also by the American Council of Christian Churches, they also published it as well. Well, what does he have to say in this article? In the introduction, in the introduction, he looks back at the Reformation and shows how that at the time of Reformation, there was both the unity and a diversity in the Reformation churches. There was a unity on basic issues of doctrine of abd, the deity of Christ, the virgin birth, the resurrection of Christ, justification through faith and so on. Above all, he points out the major branches of the Reformation were agreed on the absolute authority of Scripture, on solar Scripture, that we stand under the word of God. They had disagreements about all sorts of other issues which were not so central, which didn't define what the Christian faith is, but they were agreed on, they were united on basic doctrines. He goes on to point out secondly that in all the Protestant denominations, since the time of the Reformation, you find something similar, that is that across all Protestant denominations, there's been an agreement, a unity on basic issues of doctrine. What he calls the stream of historic Christianity, and that was a phrase that he was to use over and over again, from that point onwards, right through the rest of his life, the stream of historic Christianity. And at the same time as having that unity, that agreement on central doctrines, and in particular all undergirded by a commitment to the authority of the Bible, there was at the same time differences on secondary but important issues. And he points out that though sometimes people could be very divisive about these secondary issues, and regard them as if they had the same importance as the central issues on which they were agreed, nevertheless, one can look back through the whole time since the Reformation and see that there was generally a recognition of what the nature of biblical Christianity was, and that all Protestants were really agreed on it in terms of the basic issues. At the third point he makes in the introduction to this article, is that when we come to modernism, we find something completely new, modernism or what is more generally called liberalism today, but at that time was called modernism. He points out that the difference with modernism is that it differs at the points of agreement where all the rest of historic Christianity has agreed on the virgin birth, on the resurrection of Christ, on the deity of Christ, and so on, and particularly with the commitment to the authority of Scripture, but the difference with modernism is that at all these points it has a different position, it has a new position, and especially that modernism rejected the authority of the Bible. Modernism, he says, equals German higher criticism, which was the other way at that time that what we call liberalism was referred to, German higher criticism, that German higher criticism, and he carefully distinguishes between that and textual criticism, looking at the text to see what the genuine text is and what the text has to say, that German higher criticism simply rejected wholesale large parts of Scripture on a literary basis or on a subjective basis, and then he gives a sort of brief historical summary of German higher criticism or of modernism, that he says it's approximately 150 years old, it goes back approximately to 1800, but it's held sway, it's been the dominant force in theology in Germany for a hundred years, from 1850 right up to the time he's writing, 1948, it's held absolute dominancy in the churches in Germany, that it's been tremendously active and more or less dominant in Britain for a period of 75 years, in England for 75 years, going back to about 1875, and that in the United States, particularly since 1900, it's been increasingly influential and he makes the point that in the United States, its primary entrance was through Union Theological Seminary in New York from 1900 onwards, and that's his introduction, and now we come to the main point of his paper. What he does is to suggest that there are three phases of modernism of which his readers, his heroes, should be aware, and this is interesting looking at his analysis of the development of modernism or liberalism, he suggests that the first phase of modernism was the phase of tolerate me, that the liberals or the modernists were saying to the rest of the people in the church, to the Bible believing Christians, that tolerate us, tolerate me in the name of love, and he gives some interesting history on that, and he says during this first phase of modernism, while the modernists were in the minority in the major denominations, and they appealed for toleration of their position, during that first phase there was some discipline carried out by the Bible believing Christians, and the instance that he gives is the instance of the discipline of Charles Briggs, of the Presbyterian Church in the USA. Briggs denied the inerrancy of Scripture, and Dr. BB Warfield led the movement against him to have him disciplined, and he was in fact tried for heresy, and suspended from the church. Schaefer points out that it wasn't that Dr. Briggs wasn't liked personally, or that people questioned the strength of his scholarship, but that in the light of the holiness of God and the obligation to be faithful to God, church discipline was carried out. A biblical separation was practiced, he was disciplined and suspended from his ministry, and this was the first phase of modernism, the phase of toleration, the demand for toleration by the modernists, and this instance of discipline, this one instance of discipline, and then he says basically from the period 1900 to 1920, while the modernists were being tolerated basically after this one instance of discipline, the Bible believing church fell asleep, and that brings him to the second phase, he describes the second phase of modernism as the battle. So by the 1920s, Bible believing Christians woke up again after their 20 years of sleep, and discovered that the modernists were no longer a small minority in their denominations, but in some cases were the majority, and not only with a majority, but had seized control of many of the institutions and organizations of many of the mainline denominations. So by the believing Christians suddenly woke up, became alarmed and joined in the battle to try to do something about the modernists, to try to discipline them, to try to have them suspended from their ministries to make pure their denominations to stand up for the truth, but by the time the battle was joined it was too late to do anything. They had been tolerated for so long, the modernists were tolerated for so long, and there were now too many of them really to do anything about it. And he said in that battle, as you look at it, at first there were thousands and thousands of ministers and teachers, Bible believing Christians, who stood up and fought for the discipline of the modernists. However, he says when it gradually became apparent that they couldn't win, that the Bible believing Christians couldn't win and could not purify their denominations, the thousands dwindled to a handful, and there were very few who kept on in the battle when it became obvious that the battle was a really huge one, that it was really too late to join the battle, and that very little could actually be done. And he says that the consequence here was that the great majority of Bible believing Christians in the mainline denominations dropped separatism up to that point that they had believed in theory in separation, that is the separation of disciplining those who were wolves in the church as Paul uses the expression, those who deny central biblical doctrines. And he points out that that was the position of the church really for the whole previous 400 years to the Reformation, that as you look back all through that time, even though the church was plagued at various times by unitarianism, by daism, by all sorts of other problematic teachings at central points, the mainline denominations and always held firm to the view that it was important to try to maintain the purity of the church, and to discipline those who were teaching falsehood. And he says all through that period, those who rejected those central doctrines had to leave the church, so that unbelief was outside the church. Now there was a new situation, and unbelief was inside the church on all these central issues, particularly with regard to the authority of Scripture. But suddenly he says in the 1920s and early 1930s, many Bible believing Christians dropped their commitment to separation, that is their commitment to the purity of the visible church, simply because they could not win. And now separation meant not disciplining people, what separation ought to have meant was leaving the church themselves when they could no longer purify the church, when they could no longer discipline those who denied cardinal elements of a biblical faith. He says what should have happened was that there would should have been separation in reverse at that point. By separation in reverse, he means if we can't get rid of them, by disciplining them because now they're in the majority or now they have such a dominance, there's nothing we can do. We should practice separation when we can't discipline them by withdrawing ourselves and forming new denominations. He points out that this was parallel to the reformation in three ways, that the second stage of the battle, the second phase of modernism, or the battle, was parallel to the time of the reformation in three ways. A, or first rather, but the whole church had gone astray from the central teachings of God's Word, just as it had at the time of the reformation, when the reformers were faced with basically the whole church at the beginning of the 16th century, having turned away and stopped teaching the central truths of God's Word, about the authority of Scripture alone, salvation through faith alone, and salvation through grace alone. So the whole church had gone, and that it was possible, it would be possible only to stay within the church by forgetting the concept of the purity of the church based on the holiness of God. So the period that the church faced in the 20s and 30s was parallel to the time of the reformation, in that huge sections of the church, more or less the whole of many of the major denominations, had become dominated by teaching which was contrary to biblical Christianity. The second parallel, he draws the reformation is this, but the whole church was lost because the battle was fought too late. Of course, at the time of the reformation, it was different. The battle had been lost hundreds of years before, but the basically the issue was the same that the church woke up too late to do anything about it. And he says, we have the same problem now in the 20th century, in the 1930s and 40s, where in a situation where the battle is lost because we woke up too late to fight the battle and put out those from the church who were teaching unbiblical doctrine. And then he draws a third parallel, and this is a particularly interesting one, he draws a third parallel between the time of the reformation and today. And he says there were many people, and this is third parallel, there were many people at the time of the reformation who agreed with Luther's problems with Roman Catholic church. There were many people who agreed Luther your right to criticize the Catholic church. There are all sorts of real problems here, there's all sorts of corruption, there's all sorts of departure from biblical doctrine. They agreed with Luther's attack, but they did not agree with Luther's way of dealing with the problem, where Luther insisted on standing up for the truth, really outside the church, and we see new denominations forming all over Europe, the Lutheran churches in Germany and Scandinavia, they reformed churches in Switzerland and Holland and Scotland and France, the Anglican church in England. But there were many people at the time of the reformation who disagreed with this way of dealing with a problem, and they said what we need to do is not have a revolution and is not start new churches but rather reform the Catholic church from within. And he said that, of course, is the cry of many people in our day, that even though it's too late to discipline anyone, even though it's too late to put anybody out, even though they may reject every central doctrine of scripture, what we must do is work out reforming the church within. And Schaefer points out, what the reform movement in the 16th century led to, it led, he suggests, not to the transformation of the Roman Catholic church, but to the counter-reformation, and the counter-reformation brought about the imposition, the rigorous persecution of anyone who disagreed with the church of Rome, it brought about the Jesuit order, a new militancy within the Catholic church to promulgate its teachings, and it brought about the cancel of Trent, which strengthened the power of the papacy, placed tradition on an equal footing with the Bible in an authoritative way, and led to a careful definition of Catholicism over against the Protestant position, so that the work of those who wished to reform the church from within led not to what they wanted, but to a tremendously strong reaffirmation and a total domination within the Catholic church of a tremendously strong form of Roman Catholicism, rather than the moving of the Roman Catholic church in a more biblical direction. Now he then asks the question, are those who work for reform today within the denominations now dominated by modernism, doomed to bring about the same kind of result, but those who worked within the Catholic church at the time of the reformation for reform brought about. He says the parallel is very similar, and I quote here, the church is gone, the historic stream for the most part now runs outside the channel of the old established churches, there are those who are staying in, saying that their principles are the same as ours, but we are going about the solution of the problem in the wrong way, they like the counter-reformation want reform, not revolution. Now he then goes on to say very carefully, and I quote him here, I mean it with all my soul, I hope that their effect is not to be read in subsequent history as a chapter, as appalling and tragic as the counter-reformation at the time of Luther. However, to this moment the parallel is strikingly similar, so he's not saying this is what is going to happen, the same kind of thing today, and the parallel today would be an even greater control of liberalism within the main denominations, as time goes by, so I hope that is not going to happen, but there is a parallel with the time of the reformation, that brings him to the third phase of modernism, and he calls that control, so the third phase of modernism in the United States is control, and there are several points he makes here. First of all, he says that the modernists are now in control absolutely in many major denominations, but he says did they build new churches where their churches full? No, he points out that the church in fact was losing its impact, but many of the modernists or liberal churches were dying. He gives the example of New England, and you can see it today very clearly, but you can go around New England already then in the 30s and 40s, there were churches which were dwindling so much in their numbers because of modernism, but they were closing their doors, the churches were being boarded up or being used for other purposes, just as in Western Europe, and of course in Western Europe today that direction has led to the fact that the great majority of people never go anywhere near a church, because the church has nothing to say, but this powerful teaching of modernism in most of the major denominations and in many of the churches had led not only to the churches dying, but a drift towards atheism among young people, because the church wasn't preaching the word of God and wasn't giving the population of the United States or of Europe, the true word of God, that the culture as a whole and particularly its younger generation began to drift towards atheism, towards just rejecting Christianity, rejecting God altogether. And we may say he's absolutely right there that the children of liberals, the next generation, are always almost either humanists, agnostics, or outright atheists, it very rarely carries on more than one generation because there isn't really nothing to carry on. And he said the drift here and the loss of hold of the church on the younger generation became such a huge thing that the modernists themselves began to realize the need for a new and more vital religion, and this brings the second point under control, and this is really the heart of his article. Enter this acknowledged need for a more vital religion, stepped Carbart, and he says Carbart had an idea, and this is a quote, in some ways it was the most stupendous idea that has ever come from the mind of man. Now what was this idea as he spells it out? This idea was to how to reconcile the German high criticism and the need for a more vital religion. How you can have at the same time what were called even then the assured results of modern scholarship, that is the results of the critical approach to Scripture, so that there is no longer a way to reconcile the German high criticism and the need for a more vital religion. How you can have at the same time what were called even then the assured results of modern scholarship, that is the results of the critical approach to Scripture, so that there is no longer any need to or were required by those results to no longer believe what the Bible says in many areas. It is subject to literary, to historical, to subjective criticism, how to reconcile that, and the need for a more vital religion. At this point Schafer makes a little digression, and this is an important digression because it is an idea that crops up again and again in his teaching over the next 35 years up until his death. He points out that in the past all philosophers from whatever school going right back to the Greeks have agreed on a certain principle, and that principle is that there is such a thing as an objective truth. What does he mean by that? He says people may have had all sorts of different ideas about the universe, they may have been materialists or idealists or dualists, but they all agreed that a thing that is true is true, and a thing that is false is false. And he points out that the new direction in modern philosophy, which was called pragmatism in the United States, or sometimes irrationalism, was to believe that something can be true today, but false tomorrow, or that it can be true for you, but false for me. So the truth is no longer regarded as something which is objective, so it's true whether I believe it or not, but truth depends on the individual. Truth is subjective, we might say, it's not an expression he uses here, but the truth is subjective rather than objective, and he gives an example. It has been stated that some of the irrationalists have said that someday somebody will put a kettle on a stove and it will freeze instead of boil. In other words, there are no objective facts, there is nothing which is objectively true. Truth, if you like, is what works for me, or truth is what I think is the truth. What truth is what a particular culture or particular group of people think is true at a certain moment in time, and at a later moment in time, they may reject that and believe something quite different, and then that is true for them. Now, when Schaefer was saying this in the context of the churches, this was a very new idea to be challenging people with. Today, of course, it's just a fundamental part of our whole culture, that people have whatever morality they want to, and it's true for them, and they have whatever belief they want to, and it's true for them. At that time, it was an idea that I think most Christians hadn't even begun to think about when he started talking about this in the 1940s. Today, if you read Habits of the Heart, for example, this book by Robert Bela and others, Robert Bela, heavy pronounces name, which is looking at the values of the American people, the major point of this book, as it goes around and looks at the value systems of Americans today, is that the great majority of American people think that truth is only true for them. It doesn't have to be true for somebody else. Truth is what matters to me, so that our whole culture now has been completely shaped by this idea, but this was a radically new idea, really, in the 20th century, and it marks a departure from the whole previous history of Western philosophy. Now, he says, what Carl Bart has done is to take this kind of thinking and apply it to theology, something can be false in history, but it can be religiously true at the same time. Now, I quote him, now, Carl Bart bought at least some of this thinking over into his theology, and he stated that the thing can be false in history and yet religiously true. To Bart, history doesn't matter, or you may regard the Bible as not being the word of God, and yet you may still find it subjectively true for yourself or parts of it. Now, and again, he quotes him, he says, to Bart, the Bible is not the word of God, it just contains the word of God. What may be the word of God in it to you may not be to me, and what may be the word of God today, to either of us may not be at all tomorrow, thus basically the Bible is under subjective judgment, just as it was, under the older modernism. Now, he has a little parenthesis on Bart here, and I'll quote this paragraph in four because it's important. Now, in fairness, we have to say this, Bart seems to be coming more and more to the Christian position. He personally may be a saved man. It seems very definite that he is now nearer the Christian position concerning the Bible than he was ten years ago. This is 1948 is writing this. That is why I say that perhaps he is a Christian, some Bible believing Christians in Switzerland who know of me, who know him, told me that they believe he is. However, whether this is so or not, this weakness of his concerning history has lost a flood upon the world. So he says, I'm not in a position to judge where Carbart stands personally before God, but without any doubt, his approach to Christianity, his approach to theology, his approach to Scripture has lost a flood on the world, upon the theological world, upon the world of the church, upon the whole society. And he says, the teaching of Carbart is bad, but the teaching of those who followed him is worse. They take Bart not as he is now, but as he was ten years ago, and they go further than Bart ever would have gone. This school of thought we may call neo-Bartianism or what became to be called neo-orthodoxy. These men have carried Bart's position to such an extreme that a woman in Paris last summer taught me that her daughter heard Bart say, I am not a Bartian. The words Bart himself wished to distinguish himself from some of his more extreme followers, like Rudolf Boltman, for example, who said there needed to be no historical basis whatsoever for anything that the New Testament says that we may have a personal faith in Christ, regardless of whether he ever existed or not, regardless of anything that he ever did or not. What is important is our personal response to him, and the transforming effect that has on our lives, not what may be true in history, that we may deem to apologize everything in the New Testament, and we may still hold on to our faith. So, Schaeffer acknowledges that Bart himself would not go to that extreme position, that he himself had been heard to say, I am not a Bartian, when he looked at what some of his followers had done with his position, but he doesn't know where Bart stands personally in terms of his own relationship with Christ. But without any question, the fundamental idea has been had a huge effect upon the Church and has had an enormously destructive effect, basically what it is as an application of the thinking of the world to the Christian faith, that Christianity no longer involves objective truth, but is simply a matter of subjective response. And he gives then several of examples of some of Bart's followers. He refers to Ronald Nieber at Union Theological Seminary in New York, and speaks of him as the most dangerous teacher of this school anywhere in the world. And he says, basically, with this position, it doesn't matter what you believe. It doesn't matter what you believe. To the person who is influenced by this view, and he suggests that this is what dominates in the Federal Council of Churches in the United States and in the World Council of Churches, but it really doesn't matter what you believe. To the person who holds this position, that truth is no longer objective, but simply subjective and relative to the individual, but you can build an ecumenism regardless of what people believe. That whether they're Roman Catholic, whether they're Greek Orthodox, whether they're Old Line Modernists, whether they're Bartians or Neo-Bartians, or Bible-Believing Christians, you can have them all together. They may have completely opposite doctrines, but they're all correct because they all have a valid religious experience. We all share the same faith, in other words, because we all are having our own personal response to Christ, though we may define who he is, what he's done in completely different ways. Now again, this is the way so many people think about Christianity today. It's no longer a new idea. It's just a part of the whole life of the Church today, and it's certainly how the whole culture regards. There is no doubt, but there is hardly a single person, I would think, or, of course, there are some, but the vast majority of American and European unbelievers today assume that it really doesn't matter what you believe, and that even Christians don't think it matters what you believe, as long as you're having some kind of religious response and that's valid for you, that is fine. In other words, he's saying that the ecumenical movement, the new ecumenism, is based on the loss of objective religious truth, and he quotes a pastor he spoke to on the phone in St. Louis. He called this man and he invited him to out have lunch with him, and the pastor said, no, he didn't want to. This is a Neo-Bartian pastor, a neo-modernist pastor. He said, well, why not? Francis said, I had lunch with the Roman Catholic priest last week, and while we disagree about things, we had a very nice time together, and I would be very happy to get together with you, and the guy said, still, no, I don't want to get together with you, and he said, well, why not? He says, well, the fundamental difference is this. He says in a quote, the Roman Catholic priest and you have something in common that we do not have, I asked him what this was, and he answered, you and he agreed that one is right and the other is wrong. We say that you are both right, but, you know, what Schaeffer's point is this, that in one sense, the bubble believing Christian and the Roman Catholic have something in common, which is we are agreed that there is truth about Christ, about salvation, which can be discovered, that we disagree about what it is, but on that point we're agreed that there is truth which can be found, and we disagree about it. Whereas the new modernist, the new orthodox, the neo-Bartian says, you can believe whatever you like, and it doesn't matter, you're all right, everybody is the same, so what is important is your valid religious experience, that it's true for you, so that all religious traditions become equally valid. What is the religious experience that somebody who, let's say, denies the historical resurrection of Christ has? I remember hearing one on the radio once, this was on a program about the resurrection, this is an English theologian who said that the meaning of the resurrection for me is that even though I know that death is the end, that I can have hope anyway, and you may ask, what does that mean? That's because that just sounds like a form of nonsense. It's a very difficult question to answer because people have fundamentally made a distinction between objective fact and religious experience. Let me give an example from the myth of God incarnate, one of the writers in there who teaches I think at Nottingham, Francis Yang, and chapters called the clouds of witness, which is the best chapter in the book, it's really worth reading. What she does is something very similar to what Schaeffer was to do later on in talking about the lower enough of story, which at this point he hadn't developed this idea, but what she basically says is there are two kinds of truth. There is what she calls the trivial, and she borrows this phrase from Arthur Kessler, and these two kinds of truth are the trivial and the tragic. That's Arthur Kessler's phrase, and this person is Francis Yang, the myth of God incarnate. She says the trivial is the things like chairs and tables, the weather, the ordinary facts of our ideally experience. And the things that science can look at, can measure, can understand the things that can be quantified. The tragic is the level of meaning, and she says in the level of meaning, we no longer talking about facts, we're talking about analogy, about metaphor, but not about fact any longer. We're not talking about literal truth, so we don't assign the things in the area of the tragic any literal meaning. So she says I will carry on going to church, and I will carry on taking the sacraments, and I will carry on praying, and saying the creeds, and singing the hymns, and enjoying the religious experience, which those things give. But I will not think that my prayers can actually alter history, so we pray for our nation, we may even pray for the weather, and so on, but we don't believe that our prayers will alter history because the two levels of the tragic and the trivial don't ever come together. This is a completely different area, and to make it very clear that we understand what she's saying, she uses an illustration, and in the way you can only ever understand these things by using an illustration, because when you try to set it down in blunt propositions, you're left with something that doesn't seem to make any sense. Because you're saying basically what she says, you're saying something's both true and not true at the same time, or it's both true and false, but it's all right anyway. And she uses the illustration of barely as this mass for the dead. You some of you may know that piece of music, and I think that's how you spell it, the mass for the dead. She said, I may listen to this piece of music, and it has the power to convict me and terrify me, even though I may assign no literal meaning to the idea of a final judgment to the fact of facing God, to the reality of an afterlife. I know on the level of the trivial that those things are not true, they're not real, they're not facts, they're not literal, but the music has the power to convict me and to terrify me. Sheifer was to use much later the illustration of Heidegger saying, listen to the poet. You can't have any rational meaning in your life, but listen to the poet. Poetry can move you. Now, Francis Young is using exactly the same kind of illustration that music can move you. In the same way, worship, prayer, adoration of God, reciting the creeds, reading the scripture, has the power to move you and even transform you without you necessarily assigning any literal truth to it. It's true only on the level of the tragic, on the level of meaning, not on the level of actuality or a fact or of something literal. Now, our response to that, I think has to be the same as Paul's in 1 Corinthians 15. You know that if Christ wasn't in fact raised from the dead in a way that could be seen, then our faith is in vain, and let's eat drink and be merry for tomorrow we die. That either Christianity is based on actual historical fact, either it is really true in the real world of the trivial, of everyday events, so that if I had been there at the grave of Christ, I would have seen the empty tomb, and if I had been in the garden at the right time I would have seen him raised from the dead, and I could have touched him and eaten fish and bread with him on the lake, either it's true in that sense or it's not true at all. And he's suggesting that essentially what Bart did in a particularly Bart's followers is to say that we can have faith even though it's no longer historically, scientifically, factually true. Now, where Bart's thought I don't know, but I do know not long before his death, he came here to the United States and there was various people who had an interview with him. And Carl Henry, I think it was, who was editor of Christianity today at that time, asked him the question, if there had been a television camera at the empty tomb, would it have recorded anything. And Carl Bart did not answer the question, he said, did you say you were from Christianity yesterday? And his, Carl Henry's response was Christianity yesterday today and forever. In other words, you know, it's really always the same. But Bart simply avoided the question for him that was an irrelevant question, it doesn't matter. It doesn't matter. Now, the New Testament says it does matter that if it didn't happen, well then we should stop being Christians. But if you ask what was somebody's religious experience, it is a purely religious experience. Now, that's why I keep saying, and why Shafi is saying here Christianity stands or falls on the fact that it's true. And why he later started talking about true truth. Here he talks about objective truth. But his point is, you know, if it's not true for everyone, regardless of whether anybody believes it, it's not true at all. And if it's not true tomorrow as well as today, it's not true at all. It's either true or it's false, it can't be both. And that the Christian must not give up that traditional understanding of philosophy and not just a philosophy because it's what ordinary human beings believe. I mean, I know perfectly well when I go outside here that I have to drive on the right hand side of the road. I can't drive on the left as well. You know, I'll get killed in the real world, in the actual world which God has made. Things can't be true in false at the same time. But in modern theology, they are false in the trivial level and true in the tragic level to use that illustration. Which is remarkably similar to Schaeffer's Lower and Upper Story. I mean, it's a perfect illustration of it, that something that in the lower story is false, so you put it in the upper story and have meaning there.