Journal: Grace Journal
Volume: GJ 07:1 (Winter 1966)
Article: The New Doctrines and the New Dangers
Author: Herman A. Hoyt

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GJ 7:1 (Wtr 66) p. 3

The New Doctrines and the New Dangers

Herman A. Hoyt

President, Grace Theological Seminary

The developments of our times have projected a whole host of new things into civilization. More new things have appeared during the last sixty years than in all the previous history of the world. At the turn of the century the automobile was invented. This was soon followed by the airplane. Then came radio, television, atomic fission, electronic devices, space craft, and automation.

As a result new dangers followed swiftly in the wake of these developments. Natural barriers of land and sea separating nationalities melted away before the march of automobile, airplane, radio, and atomic fission. The fierce struggle of two world wars decimated the earth, and the third war is now in the making. Proposed interplanetary travel now accentuates the perils that lie ahead. Automation has introduced new perils into the struggle of class and caste for survival in this industrialized era.

New doctrines too have emerged within the professing church which lie more basically at the root of the perils that threaten society. These new doctrines all purport to be of divine origin, and supposedly rest upon a Biblical foundation. Being a part of the times in which we live, they are vigorously clamoring for attention. Four of these will constitute the substance of this message: the new morality; the new theology; the new eschatology; and the new orthodoxy.

The New Morality Is the Old Immorality with Ecclesiastical Sanction
2 Tim 3:2–4,6,13

The center of this so-called new morality is the exaltation of self. That is where the description begins. “For men shall be lovers of their own selves.” This is clearly the choice of self as the supreme good. This is the very essence of sin. It was the choice of self as over against God that initiated sin into the world. As a result there has developed a psychology which ignores sin and makes the self attractive. In this passage the word for love points to attraction as its basis. Out of this grows a devotion to self that produces a warm, personal, unreasoning bond of emotion and affection.

The course of this so-called new morality can be traced directly to this emphasis upon self. Everything that follows is made moral by exalting the self to the place of supreme good.

GJ 7:1 (Wtr 66) p. 4

The motions and movements of self become the measuring rod for all activity. That this sort of psychology is now in vogue is only too evident as one surveys and analyzes the thinking in the educational world today. In a recent educational conference dealing with student development the freedom of the individual was ...

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