The use of a vaccine to prevent smallpox was one of the great achievements in the long history of preventive medicine. With the passing of the years, more and more vaccines and antigens have become available, not, as a rule, to cure, but to enable the human body to develop antibodies or other resistant factors against a host of diseases.
But the use of “religion” to vaccinate individuals against Christianity is one of the tragedies of the modern age.
As far as the Christian faith is concerned, there can be no substitute for Christ—crucified, buried, and risen again. Anything that comes between men and this basic truth can be regarded as an enemy of Christianity.
Today the vaccines and antitoxins that immunize men against a true Christian experience are legion. Homeopathic doses of “religion” are a deadly enemy to a vital experience of Jesus Christ, the Son of God and our Redeemer. The confusing of generalities for the specific of Christ can render young people—indeed all of us—immune to a vital experience with him.
The Apostle Paul spoke of a time when men would have a form of godliness while denying the power thereof, or, as Phillips translates it: “They will have a facade of ‘religion,’ but their conduct will deny its validity” (2 Tim. 3:5).
Are we ourselves in the number described here? Are we permitting our children to be vaccinated against a true Christian faith? A study of much of the material offered young people in their youth programs suggests that this is happening.
The variations of human means of immunizing against God’s love and mercy are many. They often have so much in common that their individual characteristics are lost in their central capacity to keep man from capitulating to the Son of God.
There is always the danger of becoming inoculated with humanism, so that we view the world in terms of physical and material needs only, forgetting that man does not live by bread alone.
One can also be vaccinated through ritual, so that worship is lost in form and the spiritual rejected for the sensuous.
A most effective vaccine against Christianity is the substitution of “doing” for “done”—a striving to do what Christ has already achieved for us, a concern with works rather than with grace.
There is also the vaccine of “morality” which leads to substituting man’s righteousness for the righteousness of God in Christ Jesus. This causes the one vaccinated to be proud of his own “filthy rags” of good deeds and oblivious to the fact that he desperately needs the robe of Christ’s righteousness, imputed only by faith.
Mere “busyness” is a common type of vaccine—the preoccupation with keeping busy in order to escape the need to be still before God.
Another type is the substitution of programs for a personal walk with the Lord. It is also expressed in an attempt to do God’s work with the arm of flesh.
Then there is the substitution of human wisdom for divine revelation. This results in a greater interest in the opinions of men than in what God has said, and causes one to give priority to the views of the “wise men” of our day rather than to truths expressed by the holy men of old who spoke as they were moved by the Spirit.
In this same category are people who value books about the Bible above the Holy Scriptures themselves.
These and many other vaccines—and new ones are appearing all the time—have the one ultimate effect of coming between man and his God, between man and a vital, personal relationship with the living Christ.
I am deeply concerned about the effect of all this on our young people. We find so many of them eager but confused and unsatisfied. They are well informed about science and space and woefully ignorant about the Creator of it all.
That this vaccination against a vital experience occurs only too often in the Church itself is the supreme tragedy. I have before me an official publication of a major denomination for the college-age group. From beginning to end, it is existentialistic—in its art, poetry, dialogue, and whole impact. In one fragment of dramatic presentation, a biblical scene is depicted by characters whose language is profane and degraded. I examine this erudite magazine with the feeling, “They have taken away my Lord, and I know not where they have laid him.”
The concept of relativity is continually used to inoculate the minds of men against God’s absolutes. The statement “There are no absolutes” is obviously absurd, being an absolute in itself. But consistency is not the shining virtue of those who believe that the divine attributes, as well as the way to God, may be discarded in favor of new “concepts.” Such conditioned minds are rarely receptive to the Gospel.
Infants have a natural immunity against most diseases for a few months, and this is good. But man’s natural tendency to immunize himself against the things of God is deplorable. True, he is “incurably religious,” but only too often this trait is centered in himself and his own imagination, and the creature of that imagination is his god.
To overcome both natural and acquired immunities requires a confrontation with self in the light of a confrontation with Jesus Christ. When we see ourselves as we are and the Son of God as he is, our own need becomes apparent. When we sense something of what God has done to supply that need, we are in a position to make the greatest transition possible to us—the transition from death to life, from darkness to light, and from time to eternity.
That unregenerate man should resent and resist God’s proffered love is understandable in light of the fact that there is needed a work of the Holy Spirit to change the situation.
On the other hand, that man should be inoculated with the virus of religiosity which, in the name of religion, causes him to become more resistant to Christ and his claims is a major tragedy.
This condition is not hopeless, thanks to the love and mercy of God and the work of the Holy Spirit. But Christians and the Church need to be alert to any emphases that threaten to bypass the Cross and all that is implied in that event, which is the center of all history.
Ours must be cisterns of living water, not broken reservoirs. We must have Christ presented in terms of divine intervention at the point where man is himself helpless. We must have truth illuminated by the Holy Spirit, not dimmed by the rationalizations of man.
