As It Seemed To Me
I no longer receive the Gospel Advocate. I do not think it is worth the price, even at club rates, and no one has sent it to me gratis. But I am told that Brother Tom Warren has written an article soon to appear on the pages of he Advocate about "Roy's Confessions." I suppose this was to be expected. But if you heard the debate, you will not judge Brother Warren too harshly. If you were in his place and felt obligated to say something about Cogdill's Birmingham speeches, what would you say?
I am sure "Roy's Confessions" did not strike me as they struck Tom. I do not "sit where he sits." But, for whatever my appraisal may be worth, if anything, here it is:
I have known Brother Cogdill for a long time and quite well. And as far as I am concerned he has always "sat tall in the saddle." But I never saw him greater; I was never prouder of him, than when he said to that Birmingham audience, in substance: "I intend to be directed in my preaching and practice by what the word of God teaches. If this places me at variance with everything that has ever been written in the Gospel Guardian or anywhere else, then let it be. If it means that I must repudiate some practices in which I have engaged in the past, when I failed to make proper application of the Bible principles for which I have always tried to stand, I will do that too. And if you think that you will embarrass me by referring to these things you are doomed to disappointment."
I don't know whether Brother Warren knows it or not, but in this attitude lies the only hope for pure undenominational Christianity. When gospel preachers are more concerned with being "orthodox" than with being scriptural, they have surrendered the only grounds upon which we have ever had a right to exist as a distinct people. And it is only a matter of time until "we" adopt a creed, and like our digressive brethren lose our identity in the great melting pot of denominational Babylon. When we forsake the authority of the New Testament for the traditional pracices of the "fathers" or our contemporary "smart men," we need to he reminded that we are not a whit smarter than other people.
I thank God for men like Roy Cogdill, who do not keep a moist finger in the breeze of brotherhood opinion; who are not awed by giant paper combines which would destroy the influence of men they cannot control and with their "iron curtain" editorial policy brainwash the rest and fashion their thinking in the traditional wooden shoe of the fathers. It is because of such men that some of the church will be saved from the worldliness, softness, modernistic and institutional flood that now threatens to engulf it.
When Roy Cogdill has gone the way of all earth, and Tom Warren's article about "Roy's confessions," is just a forgotten page in an old dusty issue of an old paper, the unanswerable arguments Cogdill made in Birmingham along with his charts, will be in use by preachers yet unborn; preachers who want to contend for the faith once delivered, and who are fighting, as their predecessors fought, to keep the church of the Lord true to the Book.
So lay it on thick, Tom. It may be that in this you will distinguish yourself even further. After all not many people would have heard of Pilate but for Jesus, or Nero but for Paul.
Editor's Note: These words by Brother Blackmon are worthy of the most serious study of all. They express my sentiments about the matter exactly. — C. A. H