Later this year the World Congress on Evangelism will convene in Berlin with delegates from many races and many lands. This issue of CHRISTIANITY TODAY goes to readers around the world in advance of that momentous meeting, whose theme will be “One Race, One Gospel, One Task.”
One Race. At this moment in history, the world of men is drastically divided—language against language, religion against religion, nation against nation, color against color. In the midst of all these divisions, the Church must sound the clear note that God sees all men as a single race. Racism is wrong precisely because all men must own Adam as their father, even as all believers must recognize that God fashions the new man created in Christ Jesus, the second Adam from above, with utter indifference to race.
Racism attempts to divide humanity into competing groups on the basis of color. Biblically this is indefensible and absurd. Neither the law of God nor the Gospel of Christ recognizes such a distinction; both are color blind. God himself sees only two classes of persons, the saved and the lost; and the point of division is the condition of the heart, not the color of the skin. Evangelism presupposes the solidarity of the human race, the curse that has come upon every man because of sin, and the universal need of redemption through Jesus Christ. All men love, hate, eat, marry, reproduce, and die. And after that the judgment.
One Gospel. Through the Incarnation God has intervened for the salvation of lost men, and to his Church he has committed the proclamation of the one Gospel to the whole human race. This Gospel is God’s good news to men, the message of the Cross. It proclaims that men, who all have sinned and come short of God’s glory, all need the Saviour. At its heart is the truth that God’s only Son lived a life of perfect obedience in the flesh, bore the penalty for man’s sin in his own body on the Cross, and through his atoning death and resurrection freely offers reconciliation with God to the world of sinners. This is God’s only Gospel, and it is definitively communicated by the Bible, the Word of God written.
The adherents of the true Gospel stand forth-rightly for the integrity of the Bible as a uniquely inspired revelation, as against those who taper the Scriptures to the level of “saga” and “myth” and sever faith from an adequate grounding in historical fact. They believe in the “faith once for all delivered” rather than in creeds that distort the New Testament evangel. They call for the proclamation of the whole counsel of God rather than a message cut and compromised to man’s desires. They champion a message that Peter, Paul, and John would instantly recognize as their own, were they to walk today through the hallways of theological seminaries, the sanctuaries of the churches, and the byways of men. Amid the modern recasting and reformulating of the ancient message of the Cross, they crave the declaration of an undiluted Gospel that enhances and promotes the historic creeds of the Church, that is based upon personal devotion and integrity, and that calls error by its rightful name. They yearn for the warm preaching of a doctrine of reconciliation that brings men face to face with the perils of rejecting the claims of the Gospel and with Christ’s warnings that the wicked perish forever. They want the Church as its primary concern, to proclaim from the housetops the Gospel that Christ established. They seek a new responsiveness and commitment to the written Word of God as man’s only infallible rule of faith and practice.
As the World Congress on Evangelism assembles in Berlin, we cannot forget the stirring words presented by the chairman of the German delegation to the International Missionary Council meeting at Tambaram, Madras, India, in 1939, before World War II broke in full fury: “The Church of Christ … is moving forward into this world to proclaim the redeeming message.… The Church has not to bring into force a social program for a renewed social order, or even a Christian state. It cannot redeem the world from all inherent evils, but it serves to spend itself promoting all good works in obedience to its God-given call.”
One Task. Evangelism is the signal task of the Church: everywhere and always we are to preach the one Gospel, whose relevance to the whole human race is assured by our Lord’s Great Commission. In order to discharge its obligation the Church must recover the great evangelistic truths of earlier ages, truths too often diluted and neglected in our generation. Every evangelist must see in the contemporary desire to modernize the Gospel, the shadow of a new universalism that undercuts evangelism as the primary task of the Church by claiming that men are already redeemed and need only to be informed of their redemption; that an immediate decision, normative for the work of evangelism, should not be demanded of them; and that it is not necessary to speak of eternal life and eternal death when men are confronted with the Gospel, since all will ultimately be redeemed.
Sins that bar men from heaven according to the Scriptures have been validated by those who in their efforts to update the Gospel have lost it. At times, they say, such things as lying, cheating, stealing, adultery, and homosexual acts become legitimate expressions of the “law of love,” which assumes anything is right given the proper circumstances, and that objective and enduring moral standards are to be discarded as cultural primitivisms.
Evangelism’s task is to proclaim that the true Gospel is perennially applicable to man’s whole condition and to every aspect of human life, and that it brings under judgment man’s desires and present way of life. The Gospel cuts across that way of life, pronounces God’s awful judgment upon it, and calls all men to live the new life in the world, even though they are not of the world. It does not compromise to make itself heard; it speaks with the voice of judgment. Those who preach this Gospel are deeply concerned for men to accept Christ and heavily burdened for those who reject him.
Undergirded by the profound conviction that men who die in their sins without Christ are lost, the Church must hasten to proclaim the Gospel to them before they perish from the earth. The task must be performed according to the principles laid down in the Scriptures. Let any method, old or new, that can be validated from the Word of God be used to evangelize the world. Let educated and uneducated, rich and poor, young and old, male and female, clergy and laity, join together in obedience to the divine mandate.
Christ’s continuing commission is to evangelize till he comes again. As Leslie Lyall says in his book Urgent Harvest (London, 1962): “In these apocalyptic times, the urgency is greater than ever. The going will be different, the attitudes changed, the policies revised, the methods altered. The cost will be greater and the dangers increased. The swift current of events is sweeping the people along in its turbid stream. But people are still people with their sins and sorrows, their sadness and sickness, their soul hunger and emptiness: men and women for whom Christ died, needing him above everything else.… Multitudes, multitudes, multitudes, living and dying without Christ. Multitudes in the valley of decision. We dare not forebear to deliver. We must not consider the sky. It is a time to sow and also a time to reap.… The fields are white unto harvest, urgent harvest!” The task is ours. And so, inescapably, is the choice.
A Historian’S Testimony
In this world of men, with its aspirations and its struggles and its many philosophies and religions, there appeared one [Jesus Christ] born of woman and in the stream of one of these traditions. To most of such of his contemporaries as knew him he seemed a failure.… His followers … included few whom the nation or the world counted influential.
Yet front that brief life and its apparent frustration has flowed a more powerful force for the triumphal waging of man’s long battle than any other ever known by the human race. Through it millions have had their inner conflicts resolved in progressive victory over their baser impulses. By it millions have been sustained in the greatest tragedies of life and have come through radiant.… It has done more to allay the physical ills of disease and famine than any other impulse known to man. It has emancipated millions from chattel slavery and millions of others from thraldom to vice. It has protected tens of millions from exploitation by their fellows. It has been the most fruitful source of movements to lessen the horrors of war and to put the relations of men and nations on the basis of justice and peace.…
It is of the very core of the Christian’s faith that the God and Father of his Lord, Jesus Christ, will not be defeated. The Christian holds the resurrection of Jesus also to be fact. The life of Jesus, so he confidently maintains, did not end on the cross. Nor was it continued merely through the growing influence of Jesus, amazing though that has been. The Christian is bold to declare that through the resurrection Jesus entered into a fresh stage of life, glorified, endless, and inconceivably rich in love and power. He holds that in the resurrection God was working, bringing out of the evil of man’s rejection of Jesus a good far greater than could have been possible without that defeat.…
The Christian is certain that Jesus is central in human history. His confident faith is that in those who give themselves to God as they see him in Jesus there is working the power of endless life and that from them God will build, to be consummated beyond time, the heavenly city, the ideal community, in which will be realized fully the possibilities of the children of God. This eternal life and this ideal community are, in the last analysis, not the fruit of man’s striving, but the gift of a love which man does not deserve, and are from the quite unmerited grace of God.—Excerpted by permission from A History of the Expansion of Christianity, by Kenneth Scott Latourette (Harper & Row, Publishers, Inc., 1945), VII, 503 ff.
