Biblical Separation Defended - Far Eastern Bible College

Testament will discover that Jesus attacked hypocrisy and bigotry morethan any other evil. 3 Dr. Ferm’s reasoning here, in line with the contextof his writing which is to defend cooperative evangelism, seeks to assertthat (1) Jesus attacked hypocrisy more than any other sin, (2) therefore,evangelists when not preaching the gospel per se should make the thrustof their “negative” condemnation of sin against hypocrisy and notagainst modernism and unbelief, and (3) therefore any evangelist orChristian worker who is not speaking out against unbelief in the liberalchurches, but who is denouncing hypocrisy in general, is not onlyblameless, but is in fact following the precise example of the Lord. Thiswould seem to fairly represent the thrust of the argument of Dr. Ferm’swords.The basic error in the reasoning above lies in its misapplication ofan implied general rule which states that, “The preacher of today in hispreaching, all things being equal, is wise to devote approximately thesame proportion of time to each biblical subject as the New Testamentdevotes to that subject.” Dr. Ferm’s reasoning calls for an ironcladadherence to this general maxim, and justifies the cooperativeevangelist’s not speaking out against modernism on the grounds that theScriptures, in this case only the pre-resurrection ministry of the Lord, donot devote a substantial proportion of time to this particular theme; andon the contrary, he implies, that fundamentalists ought to spend moretime speaking against hypocrisy instead of unbelief.There are, however, several points of issue which can be taken withthis line of thought—which, incidentally, is not a “straw man” but thevery reasoning behind the thrust of the statement which is beinganalyzed in this section.The first item involves the fact that the genera1 rule of preachingemphasis is predicated upon the circumstance of “All things beingequal,” which words are included in the above statement of the rule.This takes into consideration the fact that there is another ruleconcerning preaching emphasis which goes along with the one justmentioned. This additional rule states that, “A minister is bound beforethe Lord to emphasize any subject which the congregation to whom hespeaks needs to have emphasized to them because of the circumstancesof their present situation.” The guidance for this emphasis should come66