TE Carlton Wynne: Modernism’s Relentless Compromise of Divine Transcendence

This lecture has been provided to us from the 2023 Reformation and Worship Conference hosted by the Midway Presbyterian Church in Powder Springs Georgia. In this lecture, Teaching Elder Carlton Wynne outlines the incompatibility of Modernism with Christianity. Modernism or Theological Liberalism is fundamentally an assault on the transcendence of God in an attempt to do away with the distinction between the Creator and the Creature. The deepest assault on the Christian faith by the modernist is against the transcendence of God, which is absolutely fundamental to understand God. Dr Wynne helpfully defines transcendence and reminds us that God’s transcendence is not simply an extension of creaturely categories and he fortifies us against some of the errors creeping into Reformed Theology in our own day. In the main portion of his lecture, Dr Wynne identifies four movements in which the modernist attempts to compromise God’s transcendence in order to accommodate God to the culture. If we can understand these four shifts, it provides an excellent framework to diagnose the dysfunction in our current cultural moment. He closes with several applications to guard our own hearts against compromising God’s transcendence and the importance of God’s transcendence to our eternal hope and comfort in the Lord Jesus Christ. Dr Wynne is on the faculty of Reformed Theological Seminary and associate pastor at Westminster Presbyterian Church in Atlanta. https://midwaypca.org/schedule/