The use of vaccine to prevent the development of smallpox in individuals 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.
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, dead, buried, and risen again. Anything which comes between this basic truth and men can be regarded as an enemy of Christianity itself.
Today the vaccines and antitoxins which prevent a true Christian experience are legion. Homeopathic doses of “religion” are a deadly enemy to a vital experience of and relationship to Jesus Christ, the Son of God and our Redeemer. This confusing of generalities for the Specific of Christ can render young people—indeed all of us—immune to a vital experience with Him as Saviour and Lord.
The Apostle Paul speaks of a time when men will have a form of godliness but deny the power thereof, or, as Phillips translates this: “They will have a facade of ‘religion,’ but their conduct will deny its validity” (2 Tim. 3:5).
Are we in this number? 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 very thing is happening.
The variations of human means of immunization against God’s love and mercy are many. Many of these vaccines have so much in common that their individual characteristics are lost beneath their central ability: to keep man from capitulation to the Son of God.
There is always the danger of being inoculated with humanism, so that we look at the world in terms of physical and material need, forgetting that man does not live by bread alone.
One can be vaccinated through ritual, so that worship is lost in form, the spiritual rejected for the sensuous.
One of the most effective vaccines against Christianity is substituting “doing” for “done,” striving for that which Christ has achieved for us, being concerned with works rather than grace.
There is also the vaccine of “morality,” which leads to the substitution of man’s righteousness for the righteousness of God in Christ Jesus. This makes the one vaccinated proud of his own filthy rags of good deeds when he desperately needs the robe of Christ’s righteousness, imputed by faith.
One of the more common vaccines is labeled “activity,” the preoccupation of being busy to escape being still before the Lord.
One phase of this vaccine is the substitution of programs for a personal walk with the Lord. Its reaction is also expressed in the attempt to do God’s work with the arm of flesh.
Another vaccine is the substitution of human wisdom for divine revelation. This inevitably makes the one inoculated more interested in what man says than in what God has said, causing him to give priority to the opinions 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 is the inoculation of individuals with books about the Bible while the Holy Scriptures are themselves neglected.
These and many other vaccines—and new ones are appearing all the time—have one ultimate effect. They come between man and his God, between man and a vital, personal relationship with the living Christ.
The writer is deeply concerned about the impact of these immunizations on our young people. We find so many of them eager but confused, anxious but not satisfied, amazingly informed about science and space and woefully ignorant about the Creator of all.
That this vaccination against a vital Christian experience occurs only too often in the Church itself is the supreme tragedy. We have before us an official publication of a major denomination, one for the college-age group. From beginning to end it is existentialists in its concept—its art, poetry, dialogue, and impact. In one fragment of dramatic presentation a biblical scene is depicted by characters whose language is profane and degraded. This erudite magazine was put aside with the feeling that “they have taken away my Lord, and I know not where they have laid him.”
The vaccine of relativity is constantly used to inoculate against God’s absolutes. The statement that “there are no absolutes” is obviously absurd, for the one who utters it is himself voicing an absolute. But consistency is not a shining virtue, and one inoculated with the doctrine that the divine attributes, as well as the way to God, may be discarded in favor of new “concepts” of truth, is rarely receptive to the Gospel.
Just as infants have a natural immunity against most diseases for a few months, so all mankind seems to have an ever-present tendency to project itself above God. True, “man is incurably religious,” but only too often this is centered in self, in man and his imagination—and the creature of that imagination is his god.
To overcome both natural and acquired immunities there is needed 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 is exposed. When we sense something of what God has done to supply that need, we are in a position to make the greatest transition possible in life—the transition from death to life, from darkness to light, from time to eternity.
That unregenerate man should resent and resist God’s proffered love is not amazing. There is needed a work of the Holy Spirit which can completely change the situation.
On the other hand, that man should be inoculated with the virus of religiosity which, in the name of “religion,” makes him resistant to Christ and his claims is a major tragedy.
That this condition is not hopeless is due to the love and mercy of God and the work of the Holy Spirit. But as far as Christians and the Church are concerned, we must at all times be alert to those emphases which at any point attempt to bypass the Cross and all that is implied in that event at the center of all history.
We must have cisterns of living water, not broken reservoirs. We must have Christ presented in terms of divine intervention where man is himself helpless. We must have truth illuminated by the Holy Spirit, not dimmed by the rationalization of man.
