From Canada to Mexico runs the continental divide, along which two raindrops falling just a few inches apart can end up in two different oceans. There is also a continental divide in contemporary theology. Certain truths and doctrines characterize historic Christianity and, if rejected, necessarily involve its repudiation.

The present state of contemporary theology is certainly one of confusion. Whom are we to believe? Weimann with his natural theism? Bultmann with his demythologized New Testament but existentially impassioned kerygma? Barth with his massive tomes quarried from a dozen different pits? Berkouwer with his scintillating restatement of Calvinism? Bishop Robinson with his theological first-aid kit? Ebeling with his vast historical learning used to buttress the new hermeneutic? What makes the situation really confusing for the layman, the seminary student, and the average minister is that all these theologians use the same Bible and the same or similar terminology, tackle the same or similar problems, teach in historic Christian schools, work in the same historic denominations, and practice the same sacramental life.

In a preliminary way we can find three different strands in contemporary theology. (1) There is the orthodox strand, which includes the Roman Catholic and the Eastern Orthodox theologian, the traditional Calvinist, and the Methodist. It is characterized by the belief, common to all versions of orthodoxy, that Christianity is essentially a religion of supernatural salvation wrought by the death and resurrection of Christ and appropriated through faith (and the sacraments). (2) There is the modernist strand, which believes centrally that Jesus revealed perfect spirituality; this may be interpreted according to Schleiermacher as perfect God-consciousness, or according to Ritschl as perfect filial trust, or according to Tillich as the norm of new being. In modernism there is no supernatural salvation to be appropriated by a definitive act of saving faith. (3) There is also liberalism, religious faith which is built on some form of philosophical idealism or existentialism but which denies that there is anything crucial in the person of Christ or the Holy Scriptures. The liberal may include Jesus and the Bible in his system, but only because he shares in Western culture—not from principle or necessity.

It is obvious that, though modernists differ from liberals in that they insist on the centrality of Jesus to their theology and with it some normative status for the Bible, nevertheless modernism and liberalism are one in rejecting orthodoxy as the only valid version of Christianity. In a sense the modernist believes that all versions of Christianity are true. In so far as every version of Christian theology attempts to preserve the Jesus mystique (using the term, as Betty Friedan does in The Feminine Mystique, for something very real but yet so elusive that it defies precise definition), it is true Christianity. It may be surrounded with the heavy timber of antiquated theology, as in Roman Catholicism, or by experiential phenomena, as in Pentecostalism. But it is still there. And it is this pervasive Jesus mystique in all Christian bodies that is the rationale for the modernist’s participation in the ecumenical movement. We are all Christian brothers, because each in his own way embodies the Jesus mystique. But of course the modernist believes that his version is the best to date as it is supposedly freest from those elements that offend educated and cultured people.

According to modernism, all men really or potentially have this mystique. In the “unchurched” it lies dormant, but the Christian is the person who has positively responded to the Jesus mystique and conducts his life accordingly. God is every man’s Father, and each man is brother to every other man. The human race is thus one great household of God divided into the obedient sons and the ignorant or even disobedient sons. The historic notion of men as lost sinners is rejected. The world is not divided into saved and lost, regenerate and unregenerate. The “new look” in evangelism is not reaching the lost or rescuing the heathen by Christian missions. Evangelism and missions are now creative sharing! Thus according to Tillich all men share to some degree in new being. Therefore, all men (in the older terminology) are saved; evangelism is the attempt to stir up a little more new being in the Christian West, and the missionary enterprise is creative sharing with non-Christian religions our mutual experience of new being.

On one side of the continental divide in contemporary theology stand the orthodox; on the other stand the modernists and liberals in their common rejection of supernatural salvation. But theologies do not come neatly labeled. Criteria must be used to evaluate them. The following criteria are meant to be representative rather than exhaustive as guides for finding this divide in theology.

1. Revelation. Theologians have tried to show that revelation is dynamic, not static; event, not information; existential, not intellectual; God’s personal presence, not a piece of writing; holy history, not holy writings. Certainly no orthodox theologian wants a dry, flat rationalistic, intellectualistic view of revelation. If the orthodox doctrine of revelation was becoming arid because doctrinaire, it can profit from recent writings on revelation and correct its deficiencies. But what is the critical issue in any theology of revelation? It is this: Revelation may be many things but it must at least be truth. There must be a conceptual or a propositional element in revelation or otherwise revelation is no more the Word of God as truth.

Orthodox theology in all its versions believes that theology can originate only in truth, be the explication of truth, and be controlled by truth. If revelation is not at least truth, then Christian theology is impossible, for no reliable and authentic theology can be built from non-truth materials. There can be no logos of that which is by principle non-logos. The frequent attack in contemporary theology on “propositional revelation” never gets around to explaining how theology can be written from “non-propositional” revelation. Thielicke in Between Heaven and Earth sees the fundamentalists’ drive for verbal inspiration and inerrancy as a fanatic bid for religious certainty, but he fails to see that pulsing beneath this doctrine of Scripture is a tremendous passion for truth.

Whenever revelation is defined exclusively as insight, or religious experience, or existential communication, or a felt Presence, then that view is unorthodox. It is not true that the orthodox theologian is an unreconstructed rationalist and therefore fears the existential, the symbolic, the mythological, the divine as a Mysterious Presence. The orthodox theologian believes that religion may have many such overtones, and he would not wish to rob Christian faith of depth by being an unreconstructed rationalist. His point is that theology is logia and that a logia is possible only when there are logia materials. No logia is possible from the non-logia of intuition, religious experience, existential leap, or encounter. Therefore, he insists that revelation must at least be the Word as truth.

Certainly Tillich with his notion of revelation as ecstatic and Bultmann with his notion of revelation as a new self-understanding have broken with the historic doctrine of revelation. Barth and Brunner have a theology of the cracks! In that Barth stresses revelation as the personal presence of God, God as subject, as encounter and not as knowledge, his view is in the Ritschlian tradition and therefore is modernist. In that he stresses the objectivity of revelation in the Incarnation and the authoritative witness to revelation in Holy Scripture, he assents to revelation as truth. Thus his view of revelation is in the crack between modernism and orthodoxy.

In that Brunner emphasizes God as mystery, God as subject, revelation as address and encounter, he continues the modernists’ view that revelation is not truth. In that he insists on the Incarnation as the supreme event of revelation and sound doctrines as the necessary presupposition for Christian faith, he assents to revelation as truth. So his theory of revelation also is in the cracks.

2. The Incarnation. The Incarnation is the unpredicted and unpredictable, sovereign, gracious, and absolute entrance of God into this world and our humanity in the person of Jesus Christ. It is God the Son freely, sovereignly, graciously uniting himself with a specific human nature. The verb taking (Phil. 2:7—labōn) affirms that he who was in the form of God and equal with God did of his own sovereign decree determine to enter the human race as Jesus of Nazareth. This has been the orthodox stance in Christology in all the various communions.

This doctrine of the Incarnation was spelled out at Chalcedon. Charges that Chalcedon is the product of the corruption of Christian theology by Greek metaphysics do not weigh seriously with the orthodox. The orthodox believe that Chalcedon can be reconstructed from the exegesis of the New Testament. Tillich and a host of modern theologians with him believe that the term “two nature” Christology is almost a dirty expression.

The real issue is not whether Chalcedon represents a timeless statement of Christology but whether contemporary theologians have remained true to the New Testament in shooting down Chalcedon. We can illustrate this briefly at one point: “the Word became flesh” (John 1:14). Here we have the divine expressed by “the Word,” the human expressed by “flesh,” and a union expressed by “became.” It would seem that shooting down the “two nature” Christology of Chalcedon also manages to shoot down John 1:14.

Orthodox theologians believe that contemporary theology is riddled through and through with adoptianism, the belief that Jesus was a Palestinian Jew who existed in his own right, with his own parents, in his own family, and in his own vocation, and that God elected him and adopted him and called him to be the Christ. Thus the ordinary Jesus becomes the special Christ by God’s gracious adoptive act. Orthodox theology resists this with all its power, because this Christology negates the entire scheme of supernatural salvation obtained by the incarnation, crucifixion, and resurrection of Jesus Christ.

Schleiermacher’s Jesus as the model example of God-consciousness is adoptianism; the Ritschlian version of Jesus as the model example of filial piety is adoptianism; the Hegelian Christology which sees in Jesus the principle of divine-human continuity is adoptianism; Tillich’s Christology of the man Jesus surrendering himself to the Christ of new being is adoptianism: Bultmann’s Christ-event as the perfect existential example of dying to the world and rising to openness to the future is adoptianism; the new hermeneutic with Jesus as the perfect example of “the word” of existential communication is adoptianism; and all the recent expressions of young theological Turks who destroy traditional Christology but still find some kind of mystique in Jesus are adoptianism.

3. Sin. In orthodox theology, sin is primarily an offense against the holiness of God. It therefore excites the wrath of God. Few concepts of the older theology have been so belittled or so categorically rejected as the wrath of God. In the caricature God is pictured as a peeved deity, or a blood-thirsty deity, or a terrible-tempered Mr. Bang. To the modernists the wrath of God is an unfortunate imputation to God of a human weakness—namely, uncontrolled and ugly temper.

To the orthodox theologian the wrath of God is the proper response of the holy God to the human infraction of the good, acceptable, and perfect will of God. To the orthodox theologian the denial of wrath in God is a denial of all moral fiber in God. The wrath of God stands for the moral integrity of God, and thus, for the orthodox, to deny the wrath of God is to render ambiguous the moral integrity of God.

No orthodox theologian would deny the personal and social evil of sin. The liar damages himself. The racially prejudiced person creates great social evil. The international evils of Stalin and Hitler beggar description. But the essence of sin is not its destructive effect on the self nor its cancerous influence in society but its defiance of the good, acceptable, and perfect will of God. David committed adultery with Bathsheba and caused the death of Uriah, yet in his anguish cried out, “Against thee, thee only, have I sinned” (Ps. 51:4). He furthermore recognized the rightness of God’s wrath toward him for his sin, for he said that God’s sentence was justified and his judgment blameless.

In the modernist, liberal, and existentialist view, sin appears as an expected human foible. It is like making an error in mathematics, or a mistake in an experiment, or a blunder in social conduct. The game of life is complicated; no man can pick his way through it without some mishap. Man is really more a victim of sin than an agent of sin. It is hardly fair to blame a teen-ager for being unruly, if he comes from a broken home; the professional thief is a product of inner-city decay; the drunkard is the hapless victim of destructive psychodynamics; and the homosexual is the pitiful product of a pathological home.

This is to say nothing new. Chapters 4–11 of Genesis have been called the greatest theological tract on sin in the Old Testament. They reveal that, once sin is let loose in the race, man as a matter of fact is as much victim of sin as he is agent. This does not lessen our view of sin but reveals its tragic character.

Because man is both victim and agent of sin, the final assessment of a man’s life can be made only by God. God alone can sort out a man’s life and determine that which is victim and that which is agent. An inhuman and graceless moralism or legalism in regard to sin is not part of the orthodox view of sin. No orthodox theologian wishes to minimize the destructive effects of sin in personal and social life. No orthodox theologian wants to judge heartlessly the poor victims of the destructive forces of sin. But the orthodox theologian insists that those theologians who see in sin only human foible, only human error, only human miscalculation, only existential unauthenticity, who do not see sin as defiance of the good and perfect and holy will of God nor the wrath of God as that which corresponds to this defiance, do not measure up to historic orthodoxy or to the biblical revelation. Thus as long as Barth and almost all neo-orthodox and existentialist theologians along with him teach that the wrath of God is merely the inverse side of his love, or, with C. H. Dodd, teach that the wrath of God is merely the personal, social, and historical consequences of sin, they fail the biblical revelation of the wrath of God.

4. Salvation. In all versions of orthodoxy, salvation is the person and work of Christ, particularly his vicarious death and his resurrection. Personal salvation is the faith response to the supernatural salvation in Christ. The entire process from incarnation to regeneration is through and through supernatural.

In liberalism it is meaningless to talk of salvation, for there is nothing to be saved from except an attitude of irreligion, and that cannot be very serious if there is no such thing as lostness or damnation. In modernism, salvation is not really being saved but is merely the arousing of a religious potential that lies dormant. Preaching the perfect spirituality of Jesus sparks to life the religious element in men who previously were irreligious. Thus the difference between Christian and non-Christian becomes relative rather than absolute.

Representative of much current thought is the theology of Paul Tillich. All men have ultimate concern and therefore “new being,” or, in more conventional existential language, “authentic existence.” If they did not have some ultimate concern, some new being, they would cease to be men. Buddhists, Communists, and atheists have ultimate concern in their lives and hence new being. Christians differ from them only in that they believe that in Jesus as the Christ we have the norm for judging all instances of new being. In short, modernism in all its forms is universalism. Nobody is really counted out. As one modernist phrased it, the difference between Hitler and Ghandi was purely relative; Hitler was way down on the scale of spirituality (but not lost!) and Ghandi was way up (but not because he was justified or regenerated).

The continental divide in modern theology is revealed in the varying answers to the Philippian jailer’s question: “What must I do to be saved?” One would say, “Make the existential leap and thou shalt be saved.” Another would say, “You are saved, you fool. Just start living that way.” Another would say, “Clean up the conditions in the jail and go to work on the social injustices in Philippi, and you are being saved.” Still another would say, “My dear man, in view of our present knowledge of the Bible and the modern mentality you have asked a meaningless question. This selfish business of personal salvation was a bit of primitive nineteenth-century evangelism. Christianity is not being saved—perish the thought; it is identifying oneself with the forces of love and justice in the reconstruction of society.” According to such answers, Paul never could have been more wrong than when he replied, “Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ and thou shalt be saved.”

5. Sacramental theology. Orthodox theology in all its versions believes that the sacraments either convey supernatural grace or witness to supernatural grace imparted by the Holy Spirit. Sacramentalism and non-sacramentalism in orthodoxy are both grounded in the supernatural grace of God founded in the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.

The consistent liberal must deny the sacraments. His “naturalistic theism” takes the ground from under them. The modernist believes that Christian fellowship must include the liturgical, and so he retains the sacraments as a form of Christian fellowship. But only the most naïve person would ever believe that a modernist intends by baptism and communion what an orthodox person does. When a Lutheran or a Presbyterian in the orthodox tradition baptizes an infant, it is within the schema of the supernatural salvation obtained by Jesus Christ or the covenant relation of God’s supernatural grace. But a modernist Lutheran or modernist Presbyterian cannot baptize the infant on these grounds. To him infant baptism represents the Christian estimation of children, or the responsibility of parents in Christian nurture, or the place of the whole family in the Christian Church. But it is not a witness to the supernatural salvation of Christ realized in the infant by the supernatural power of the Holy Spirit.

One has to ask what a sacrament can possibly mean to Bultmann or to Tillich or to Ebeling, because all these men deny a supernatural act of God either in the deed of Christ or in the sacrament.

6. The Church. In historic orthodox theology of all versions, the Church is based upon the supernatural salvation wrought by Christ in his death and resurrection and communicated in a supernatural act by faith in regeneration and justification, and the supernatural binding of believers together by the mystical but real bond of the Holy Spirit. When modernists deny a supernatural salvation in Christ, deny a supernatural act of salvation by the Holy Spirit, and deny the supernatural connectedness of all believers by the mystical union of the Holy Spirit, they destroy the historic, orthodox Christian understanding of the Church.

What takes its place? The Church becomes a society, a natural, human, non-supernatural religious community. It is bound together by purely natural ties, such as a common heritage in the Bible, a common belief in some sort of uniqueness in Jesus, a common belief in the historical continuity of Christians, and a common ethic of love. Now the Church is a society. But this is secondary to its being the supernatural body of Christ. Modernism in all its forms, the older Fosdickian version or the new hermeneutic, reduces the Church to a religious society, nothing more, nothing less; for it denies the entire supernatural foundation upon which the historic doctrine of the Church was built.

The conclusion is that there is a continental divide in contemporary theology. Despite all the confusion that exists, this divide can be located in “Jesus Christ the same yesterday, and today, and forever.” Those who really know the cardinal doctrines of the Christian faith can differentiate the kind of theology which falls on the right side of this continental divide from that which falls on the wrong side.

The service in the Free Church Assembly Hall, Edinburgh, on May 21, 1874, had centered on the theme of “The Good Shepherd.” Messages by Dwight L. Moody, Horatius Bonar, and others emphasizing the shepherd work of Christ had greatly impressed a responsive audience.

Then Moody turned to his associate, Ira D. Sankey. “Have you a solo appropriate for this subject, to close the meeting with?”

Sankey felt impelled to use a poem by Elizabeth C. Clephane that he had clipped from a paper just the day before on the train, though that would mean composing music, playing, and singing simultaneously.

“Placing the little newspaper slip on the organ in front of me,” he said afterwards, “I lifted my heart in prayer, asking God to help me to sing so that the people might hear and understand. Laying my hands upon the organ, I struck the key of A flat and began to sing:

There were ninety and nine that safely lay

In the shelter of the fold,

But one was out on the hills away

Far off from the gates of gold—

Away on the mountains wild and bare,

Away from the tender Shepherd’s care,

Away from the tender Shepherd’s care.

“After the first verse I was glad that I had got through, but overwhelmed with fear that the tune for the next verse would be greatly different from the first.” But he continued to look to the Lord, who “gave me again the same tune for all the remaining verses. As the singing ceased, a great sigh seemed to go up from the meeting, and I knew that the song had reached the hearts of my Scotch audience.” Years later he recalled, “Note by note the tune was given, which has not changed from that day to this.…”

Thus was born one of the most effective gospel songs of all time. Perhaps it is the most famous of Sankey’s more than eighty compositions. Stories about “The Ninety and Nine” are numerous. One concerns a service in 1875 when, because of overflowing crowds, Moody preached outside the Northfield (Massachusetts) Congregational Church. Sankey then sang this song for the first time in the United States. A Mr. Caldwell, seated on his porch across the Connecticut River, heard it, was brought under conviction, and was saved soon afterward. Some years later, at the laying of the cornerstone of the new Congregational Church building, Sankey again sang “The Ninety and Nine.” Mr. Caldwell, who now lived near the church, lay dying. He called his wife to open the south window, because he “thought he heard singing.” Together they listened to the song that had been used to lead him to Christ, and soon after he died.

“The Ninety and Nine” helped link and publicize the names of Moody and Sankey throughout the English-speaking world. For nearly thirty years they were inseparable, though Sankey’s failing health curtailed his ministry during the last few years.

It was a far cry from Edinburg, Pennsylvania, to Edinburgh, Scotland. Sankey was born in that small western Pennsylvania village in 1840, and at the age of fifteen was converted during revival services. Later the family settled in New Castle, Pennsylvania. Here young Ira joined the Methodist Episcopal Church and became Sunday school superintendent as well as president of the local YMCA.

Brought up in a musical family, he had early learned to read music and was soon exercising his talent. He led the church choir and sang at Sunday school conventions and political gatherings. After serving in the Civil War, Sankey returned to New Castle to take a place as assistant to his father, who was collector of internal revenue, and presumably to lead a quiet life in business and Christian service.

But that was reckoning without the whirlwind of the West, D. L. Moody.

When Sankey journeyed to Indianapolis in 1870 for the YMCA convention, he had no idea that he was soon to begin a career of world prominence. According to the familiar story, it was in Indianapolis that D. L. Moody, the dynamic young Sunday school and city mission worker from Chicago, first met Sankey and heard him sing. Immediately Moody accosted him with a series of rapid questions about his family and business, climaxed by the abrupt order, “You’ll have to give that up.”

Amazed, Sankey asked, “What for?”

“To come to Chicago and help me in my work.”

Further discussion culminated in Sankey’s perhaps half-hearted promise to pray about the matter. But Moody was irresistible, and as Sankey later put it, “It took him only six months to pray me out of business.” A trial period in Chicago clinched the matter. Sankey resigned his Pennsylvania position and joined Moody.

In 1873 the two sailed for the British Isles without fame or fanfare, and with only a vague “invitation.” At York, England, a bare handful attended the first service. The number grew, but with no pronounced results at first. Yet from this small beginning grew one of the greatest revivals of all.

Within two years Moody and Sankey were preaching to multitudes in the British Isles and were seeing great numbers of conversions, consecrations, and other evidences of blessing. Churches, YMCA’s, missions, and similar organizations sprang up or were revitalized. The total attendance at London, 2,530,000, stands as the record for a single city campaign, except for Billy Graham’s 1955 Glasgow crusade. J. C. Pollock calls the estimated 20,000 nightly attendance at Agricultural Hall “unprecedented; to the England of 1875, fantastic.”

The prayers, attendance, and support of men like F. B. Meyer, the Rt. Hon. W. E. Gladstone, and many others were significant factors in the success of the meetings. So also was the singing of Ira D. Sankey.

Early in this campaign, a tremendous demand arose for copies of the sacred songs, especially the solos, used by Sankey. At first he would lend his notebook to others, but this was highly unsatisfactory; it could never make all the rounds, and sometimes it failed to get back to its owner on time. Next he had cards printed, but the supply was exhausted immediately.

Then R. C. Morgan, editor of the Christian, visited the meetings to gather material for his paper. He offered to prepare a small paperbound hymnbook, and thus Sacred Songs and Solos was born. The first edition of 500 copies at sixpence each sold out within twenty-four hours. After later printings, the popular volume was advertised and sold not only in bookstores but even at grocery and dry goods stores.

In The Golden Multitudes, the late Frank Luther Mott says, “Perhaps the best selling song book of modern times was Ira D. Sankey’s Sacred Songs, for which the compiler claimed a distribution of 50 million copies the world over.” This of course included many inexpensive paper-bound words-only editions.

But if the phenomenal distribution of the book helped publicize the Moody-Sankey meetings, it also furnished ammunition for the critics who imagined the evangelists amassing riches from royalties and even from the sale of organs. The fact is, however, that neither Moody nor Sankey profited personally. Wisely foreseeing this very charge, they set up a trust headed by William E. Dodge, Jr., New York businessman and philanthropist, to handle hymnbook royalties. The first disbursement from the fund helped complete the Chicago Avenue (now Moody Memorial) Church, an outgrowth of D. L. Moody’s early Sunday school work in Chicago. Later, funds went to other organizations, especially the Northfield and Mount Hermon Schools, which Moody also founded. In escorting visitors around the schools, Moody would point to a building and declare, “Sankey sang that one up.” At Moody’s death in 1899, the total hymnbook royalties were estimated at $1,250,000.

Sankey came in for criticism on other scores. Some Scottish Christians objected at first to his small reed organ as a “kist o’ whistles”; others complained that “solo singing is not worship.” In this country Walt Whitman called Sankey “vociferous and voiceless”—and many other things. Vanity Fair and other periodicals lampooned the bulky 220-pound figure with the magnificent muttonchop whiskers.

What did Ira D. Sankey’s singing sound like? Was it like that of George Beverly Shea or other famous evangelistic soloists today? It is difficult to tell, even if one carefully listens to all known recordings of Sankey’s voice. Recording facilities in that day were so primitive by today’s standards that comparisons are almost impossible. The voice is perhaps best described as an unexceptional “strong baritone of moderate compass.” He had little or no professional voice training. Yet unbiased critics agree on his ability to move audiences profoundly. Generally he accompanied himself on a small reed organ, singing simply but with careful enunciation and much feeling and expression.

A dramatic incident occurred in Agricultural Hall, London, during the great 1875 campaign. After his sermon, Moody asked the audience to bow while Sankey sang the powerful invitational hymn, “Almost Persuaded.” Just before the last word of the final stanza, the singer paused and then prayed aloud, “Oh God, grant that no one in this building tonight will be—lost.” The stillness of death prevailed while many made decisions for Christ.

Sankey was not only a singer but a personal worker as well. A drunkard in Scotland had been greatly affected by hearing “The Ninety and Nine.” After the service Sankey dealt with him and found that he was the lost sheep of his family and wanted to stop drinking. After counseling and prayer, the man trusted Christ. “He was said,” Sankey recalled, “to have been one of the most wicked men of his town, and had given the police more trouble than any other man there, but he became a humble follower of Christ.”

During a Torrey-Alexander meeting in Sheffield, England, about 1905, a man gave this testimony: “I found Christ in this hall in 1882, when Moody and Sankey were preaching the Gospel; I was brought face to face with God, and in the after-meeting Mr. Sankey led me to Christ, and I am happy in Him today.” Alexander added, “As we have gone around the world we have found that the best workers, as a general rule, are either workers or converts of the Moody and Sankey meetings.”

Of course, not all interviews were so successful. During the Hartford, Connecticut, meetings, Sankey dealt with P. T. Barnum, the famous showman, who observed, “Mr. Sankey, you go on singing ‘The Ninety and Nine’ and when you get that lost sheep in the fold we will all be saved.” Sankey later learned that Barnum was a universalist.

But undoubtedly Sankey’s most lasting contribution to the cause of Christ was his writing. He composed some eighty numbers and compiled about ten hymn-books and other volumes. Sacred Songs and Solos is still widely used today, though it is not now published in the United States. Besides “The Ninety and Nine,” Sankey’s best-known hymns include “Hiding in Thee,” “Faith Is the Victory,” “Beneath the Cross of Jesus,” “Under His Wings,” and “Trusting Jesus, That Is All.”

In his later years, Sankey’s gradually failing health curtailed his ministry, and Moody used D. B. Towner, George C. Stebbins, and other musicians increasingly. As J. C. Pollock says, “Sankey in his prime had lasted entire campaigns with few breaks, but now Moody would wear out two or three singers on a tour. Moreover, none had that extraordinary, indefinable quality which could still cause a hearer to exclaim, ‘I would rather hear Sankey with his worn-out voice than the greatest prima donna in the world.’ ”

Not only his voice failed. For his last five years Sankey was completely blind, confined to the seclusion of his home in Brooklyn, only a shadow of the giant who had helped stir two continents for God.

Richard Ellsworth Day, in Bush Aglow, tells poignantly of a ray of light that brightened Sankey’s life one day in 1907 when Dr. F. B. Meyer visited him: “They talked over the golden days agone, when D. L. was with them.… As Meyer arose to go, he led Sankey over to the little melodeon and whispered, ‘Sing again, beloved.’

“The shrunken fingers touched the yellowed keys; the old voice warmed slowly into something like its ancient beauty. And Meyer sobbed like a child when the faithful words filled the room: ‘There’ll be no dark valley when Jesus comes!’ ”

Life on earth ended for Ira D. Sankey on August 13, 1908. But what a time of rejoicing there will be when the words of one of his own favorite songs, “There’ll Be No Dark Valley,” are gloriously fulfilled.

MICHELANGELO’S STATUE OF DAVID

From the recalcitrant marble his sure hand

Shaped this live image: See young David stand

Armed for the final conflict, poised to fling

That fateful pebble from the shepherd’s sling

Hung over his strong shoulder: See his brow

Prayer-lifted facing old Goliath now—

The foe of ages to be overthrown.…

Here is the trust of Israel set in stone.

M. WHITCOMB HESS

THE EDITOR

Evangelical Christianity today confronts a “new theology,” a “new evangelism,” and a “new morality,” each notably lacking in biblical content. A “new social ethics” has also emerged, and some ecumenical leaders mainly interested in politico-economic issues speak hopefully of a “new breed of evangelical” in this realm of activity. The red carpet rolls out when even a few evangelicals march at Selma, when they unite in organized picket protests and public demonstrations, when they join ecclesiastical pressure blocs on Capitol Hill or at the White House, or when they engineer resolutions on legislative matters through annual church meetings.

Since most evangelical churchmen traditionally have not mobilized their social concern in this way, non-evangelical sociologists are delighted over any and every such sign of apparent enlightenment. Moreover, they propagandize such church techniques as authentically Christian, and misrepresent evangelical non-participation as proof of social indifference in conservative Christian circles and as a lack of compassion. This favorite device of propagandists is effective among some evangelicals who desire to protect their genuine devotion to social concern from public misinterpretation. The claim that evangelicals as a whole are socially impotent, moreover, diverts attention from the long-range goals of social extremists by concentrating attention on existential involvement on an emergency basis.

That Christians are citizens of two worlds, that a divine mandate enjoins both their preaching of the Gospel and their promotion of social justice, that the lordship of Christ over all of life involves socio-cultural obligations, that Christians bear a political responsibility, are historic evangelical emphases. Evangelicals regard government and jurisprudence as strategic realms of vocational service to humanity. They stress that government exists for the sake of all citizens, not simply for certain favored groups, and that a just or good society preserves for all citizens equal rights before the law. This emphasis has equally critical implications for a society that seeks special privilege for one race above another and for any church that seeks partisan and sectarian benefits from government.

The heritage of evangelical Christianity includes both Jesus’ sermon on the mount and his delineation of the Good Samaritan, and Paul’s account of civil government as an agent of justice. Evangelical Christians recognized the moral claim of these scriptural elements long before Protestant liberalism distorted them into a rationalistic politico-economic perspective. The Evangelical Revival in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Britain attested the devotion of believers, not only to the observance of public statutes, but also to the vigorous promotion of just laws. The seventh Earl of Shaftesbury headed the movement in Parliament that led in 1807 to the abolition of slavery in the British Empire. As a result of his own conversion Wilberforce led great reform programs, including child-labor laws. The Evangelical Revival placed evangelicals in the forefront of humanitarian concerns, not only for an end to the slave trade, but also for child labor laws, prison reforms, improved factory labor conditions, and much else in the sphere of social justice. It was evangelical social concern, in fact, that preserved the shape of Anglo-Saxon society from tragic revolutionary onslaught. An eminent church historian writes: “No branch indeed of the Western Church can be refused the honor of having assisted in the progress of humane ideas, and non-Christians have participated largely in the work of diffusing the modern spirit of kindness; but the credit of the inception of the movement belongs without doubt to that form of Protestantism which is distinguished by the importance it attaches to the doctrine of the Atonement.… History shows that the thought of Christ on the Cross has been more potent than anything else in arousing a compassion for suffering and indignation at injustice.… The later Evangelicalism, which saw in the death of Christ the means of free salvation for fallen humanity, caused its adherents to take the front rank as champions of the weak.… Prison reform, the prohibition of the slave trade, the abolition of slavery, the Factory Acts, the protection of children, the crusade against cruelty to animals, are all the outcome of the great Evangelical revival of the eighteenth century. The humanitarian tendencies of the nineteenth century, which, it is but just to admit, all Christian communities have fostered, and which non-Christian philanthropists have vied with them in encouraging, are among the greatest triumphs of the power and influence of Christ” (F. J. Foakes-Jackson, “Christ in the Church: The Testimony of History,” in H. B. Swete, Cambridge Theological Essays, New York, 1905, pp. 512–14).

Liberal Impact And Evangelical Reaction

For two generations liberal social ethics has been markedly influential in American public life in the areas of education, government, and labor. Liberal ecclesiastical reformers have only themselves to blame for the present lack of fixed governing principles in public policy, and for the declining spiritual influence of their churches in the private sector of national life. One theologian addicted to a radically secular version of Christianity—Professor William Hamilton of Colgate-Rochester Divinity School—tells us candidly that “we are well into the opening phase of the breakdown of organized religion in American life, well beyond the time when ecumenical dialogue or denominational mergers can be expected to arrest the breakdown” (The Christian Scholar, Spring, 1965). Professor Hamilton fails to recognize, however, that the modernist dilution of historic Christian theology was largely responsible for compromising the message and power of institutional Christianity. In no century of recent history have public structures been so directly influenced by American churchmen as they are in our time through the pressures of liberal social thought. Churchmen have increasingly manipulated the machinery of ecumenical Christianity in support of socio-economic objectives, including specific legislative proposals. Not even the breakdown of the League of Nations or the deformation of the United Nations, each endorsed as the world’s best hope for peace, has encouraged “second thoughts” about the efficacy or legitimacy of the nature of their social activity.

This does not mean that evangelical Christians have reason to boast about social alertness on the explosive frontiers of public life. They were undeniably concerned with personal behavior in public social life, and with responsible community involvement in keeping with the standards and vocations of believers. To their further credit they realized that not an ethic of grace but rather an ethic of justice should govern social structures (including international relations, national government, and legal institutions generally). But evangelical Christians elaborated no Bible-based ethic impinging on the basis, method, and function of social structures and groups such as the state, labor movements and business corporations, minorities, and so on.

If excuses for neglect are in order, this may be the right place to note them. Evangelicals could plead, of course, that the “social gospeler’s” neglect of God’s good news of salvation for sinners imposed upon conservative Christianity the burden of biblical evangelism and missions throughout a perishing world—a staggering task indeed. Evangelical capability was decimated by liberal control of denominations, schools, and other ecclesiastical resources. But evangelical withdrawal from the arena of public life came mainly in reaction to the Protestant liberal attempts to achieve the Kingdom of God on earth through political and economic changes. The modernists so excluded supernatural redemptive facets of the Christian faith and so modified the proper content of the Christian ethic that, as evangelicals saw it, they had altered the very nature and mission of the Church. Evangelical Christianity reacted against the liberal Protestant concentration of effort in this area of concern by non-involvement, and this withdrawal yielded the field to the speculative theories of liberal churchmen and largely deprived evangelicals of an ethical witness in the mainstream of public life.

Fallacies Of Liberal Ethics

Precisely what is objectionable in liberal social ethics from the evangelical viewpoint? This is no small matter, for criticism extends to presuppositions, methods, and goals.

The theological presuppositions of liberal social ethics are hostile to biblical theology. A generation ago the “social gospel” theologians deleted the wrath of God and dissolved his righteousness into benevolence or love; today the revolt has been extended. Dialectical and existential moralists surrender the objective being of God, while secular theologians disown his transcendence and, for that matter, his relevance as well. What passes for Christian social ethics in such circles dispenses with the supernatural essence of the Christian religion as foreign to problems of social justice and public righteousness. Evangelicals who insist on obedience to divinely revealed precepts, and who hold that redeemed men alone can truly fulfill the will of God and that only men of good will can enlarge the boundaries of God’s Kingdom, are caricatured as “rationalists,” despite the fact that Scripture specifically associates Jesus’ mission with an era of good will on earth. Yet while existentialists reject the absolutes of a transcendent morality for an absolute of their own decision, thereby making each person his own church, and reject an ethics based on principles because they consider it impossible to achieve moral obedience by decree, they nonetheless agitate for laws to compel others to act in a predictable, principled way.

It may seem pedantic, if not picayune, in a secular society so perilously near doom, to surround the moral demand for agape with a complex of theological distinctions. After all, is not agape itself the central Christian moral motif? But the reply is simple: “agape” stripped of supernatural elements is no longer biblical agape. For biblical agape is first and foremost the love of God. Biblical agape is nowhere simply a matter of humanistic charity toward one’s neighbors. “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and your neighbor as yourself”—love them, as a well-phrased prayer reiterates, “with a pure heart, fervently.” Although just laws are desirable and imperative, law has the power only of outward restraint; it lacks power to ensure outward obedience and inner conformity to its command. In the absence of moral men—of men willing to do the good—no body of law, however just, can ensure a good society. Authentic Christian ethics concerns what is done through a desire to do God’s will, in obedience to his command; this is made possible only by spiritual regeneration. No other motivation can counter the selfish drives that haunt the noblest of unredeemed men and correct the faulty vision of an unredeemed society. The current existential appeal for everyman’s “identification with others” naïvely presupposes that the “identifiers” are morally equipped with motivations unthwarted by selfishness. But universal love, even in diluted forms, is a requirement that far exceeds the capacity of unregenerate men; for a Jew to have loved Hitler must have posed a problem not unlike that involved in a Selma marcher’s love for the governor of Alabama, or a Birmingham demonstrator’s affection for the local sheriff. The modern devotion to mankind in place of God, on the premise of “the infinite worth of the individual,” indicates the inability of some Western intellectuals to assimilate the basic lessons of recent history. They blandly overlook the power of evil in human nature and man’s limitations in coping with it—witness not only the patent egoism of individuals and social collectivities and the barbarism of the dictators, but also the tragic fact of two world wars at the pinnacle of Western scientific development and the unresolved threat of imminent universal destruction. As George F. Thomas says, “man is neither infinite nor perfect, and his ideal ends are worthy of devotion only insofar as they are subordinated to the purpose of One who is both” (Religious Philosophies of the West, New York, Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1965, p. 351).

The evangelical Christian mobilizes for social action in the spiritual context of transcendent justice, supernatural law, revealed principles, concern for God’s will in human affairs, and love of God and man. Against ecclesiastical “young Turks” who propagandize the notion that social concerns cannot be expressed within the inherited theology, the evangelical contends that in so far as social concerns are authentically biblical, they can be adequately expressed and fulfilled only within scriptural theology. What the evangelical does in the social order, as in every other realm of life, he does as a matter of principled spiritual obedience to the Lord of life.

Differences In Goals

It is, moreover, a gross underestimation of differences in social action between evangelicals and non-evangelicals to imply that, beyond motivation, they agree wholly on goals and differ only in method. The liberal Protestant identification of Christian love with pacifism, then with socialism, even with Communism by some modernists in the recent past, is too fresh a memory to allow one to blunder into the notion that the Bible sanctions whatever social goals the liberal moralists endorse. Even the Communist hostility toward supernatural religion as an unscientific myth has moderated into tactical tolerance of religion as useful for promoting a social consciousness agreeable to the Soviet politico-economic ideology. Repudiation of private property, of the profit motive, and of inequality of wealth, and other Marxist ideals have been arbitrarily promoted by liberal social reformers in supposed devotion to the biblical vision of the Kingdom of God. Even their emphasis on equal rights has cheaply surrendered property rights as a fundamental human right, and also man’s right to work apart from compulsory union membership.

Whenever the Church advances a political ideology or promotes partisan legislation, its ecclesiastical leaders are soon forced into the position of impugning the integrity of influential Christians who sincerely dissent from the official views. It should surprise nobody, therefore, that as the National Council of Churches comes under increasing fire, its spokesmen tend to demean critics of its political commitments as reactionary advocates of arrogant nationalism and of social, economic, and racial privilege.

Not a few goals approved by modern social theorists are wholly desirable, and evangelical differences in such cases concern the means of achieving these ends. Elimination of poverty, opportunity for employment, racial equality, and many other goals that stand at the heart of contemporary social agitation are not only acceptable but highly desirable. Evangelicals are not indifferent to the desirability of such objectives even if liberal social ethics mistakenly conceives the Kingdom of God as basically a politico-economic phenomenon and tends to dilute redemptive spiritual forces into sociological ingredients. In fact, as evangelicals see it, such features of social life are essential to a just and good society.

Evangelicals no less than liberals recognize social justice as an authentic Christian concern, despite serious differences over definition and content. If evangelicals came to stress evangelism above social concern, it was because of liberalism’s skepticism over supernatural redemptive dynamisms and its pursuit of the Kingdom of God by sociological techniques only. Hence a sharp and costly disjunction arose, whereby many evangelicals made the mistake of relying on evangelism alone to preserve world order and many liberals made the mistake of relying wholly on socio-political action to solve world problems.

Conflict Over Method

It would be naïve to argue from this, however, that liberals and evangelicals need each other for complementary emphases. Over and above differences of motivation and of goals stand the differences between evangelical and liberal ethics in respect to methodology. Most evangelicals reject outright the liberal methodology of social reform, in which more and more liberals call for a “new evangelism” that substitutes sociological for spiritual concerns. Just as in his theological view of God the liberal dissolves righteousness into love, so in the political order he dilutes social justice into compassion. This kind of merger not only destroys the biblical view of God on the one hand but also produces the welfare state on the other. This confounding of justice and love confuses what God expects of government with what he expects of the Church, and makes the state an instrument for legislating partisan and sectarian ideals upon society. Ideally the purpose of the state is to preserve justice, not to implement benevolence; ideally, the purpose of the Church is to preach the Gospel and to manifest unmerited, compassionate love.

Many sociologists and political scientists dislike this way of stating the case. But it is noteworthy that these particular disciplines are especially barren of evangelical perspectives; they tend to be theologically illiterate in respect both to eschatology and to a basic theology of justice. Current proposals to detach the Gospel from “right-wing” social reaction and current pleas for “political compassion” are rooted in leftist political ideology more often than in an authentic spiritual view of the role of government.

But in the present explosive era of history the problem of acting on an acceptable methodology is an urgent one for evangelicals. It is one thing to deplore ministerial marches and picket lines and well-publicized public pressures; but if evangelical conscience is to be a remedial and transforming social force, then evangelical convictions require articulate mobilization on their own account.

Evangelicals And Social Concern

Despite the present confusion caused by ecclesiastical intervention in political affairs, evangelicals have something socially relevant to say to both the secular man and the church man. The Christian has social duties not simply as a Christian but as a man, and his sanctification therein does not come about automatically without pulpit instruction in sound scriptural principles. Evangelicals as a people consider themselves bound to the Word of God; for this reason they consider themselves a spiritual people with a divine message for themselves and for others in regard to social action. Evangelicals acknowledge a divine call to identify themselves with others—not with social customs or social vices or social discontents, but rather with persons in their survival needs: physical and moral and spiritual. These survival needs include material help in destitution, social justice, and the redemption that is in Christ Jesus.

Surely evangelical Christianity has more to offer mankind than its unique message of salvation, even if that is its highest and holiest mission. While it rightly chides the liberal for regarding the world as a unity (rather than divided into unregenerate and regenerate), it also has a message for all men as members of one society. The Christian is not, by his church identification, isolated from humanity, or from involvement in the political and economic orders. Not only is he called to identify himself with society: he is identified, by the very fact of his humanity, and as a Christian he bears a double responsibility in relation to the social needs and goals of mankind. Social justice is a need of the individual, whose dignity as a person is at stake, and of society and culture, which would soon collapse without it. The evangelical knows that spiritual regeneration restores men to moral earnestness; but he also knows the moral presuppositions of a virile society, and he is obligated to proclaim the “whole counsel” of God. He may have no message for society that insures unrepentant mankind against final doom—nor even against catastrophic destruction in our own time, while its leaders insist upon arbitrary human authority at the expense of the lordship of Jesus Christ. But he can and ought to use every platform of social involvement to promulgate the revealed moral principles that sustain a healthy society and that indict an unhealthy one. More than this, the evangelical Christian should be represented, in his personal convictions, on the frontiers of government and in the corporate processes of society. Convinced that the cooperation of godly men in the social and collective order can be decisively influential, he should be concerned about relations between nations and about minority rights. There is no reason at all why evangelical Christians should not engage energetically in projecting social structures that promote the interests of justice in every public realm; in fact, they have every legitimate sanction for social involvement.

Of course the Church is to be ruled distinctively by an ethic of grace. But the Church is also in a world that is to be ruled by justice, an ethic of justice that does not per se require regenerate social structures. In this context, a positive ethic and corrective principles enunciated on the broad world scene by regenerate believers who are engaged in the social struggle can have decisive influence. Such an ethic will include (1) the Church’s faithful exposition of divinely revealed standards of human justice as the only basis for a stable society and as the criteria by which the world will be finally judged; and (2) the Christian’s energetic promotion and support of just laws as the formal hallmark of a good society. When Christian believers become thus involved in the struggle for justice, the world may recognize in a new way the presence of regenerate realities; noting the community of twice-born men that sees the restoration of sinners to fellowship with God and to holiness as the aim of the Gospel, the world may even recognize the validity of regenerate structures through their moral impact.

Any Christian engaged in the pursuit of social justice is painfully aware that, in a tragic world of fallen men, government decisions often involve a choice between greater and lesser evils rather than between absolutes of good and evil, and that only the Church of Christ can witness to a manifestation of absolute good in history. He will, however, avoid both the liberal error of “absolutizing relatives,” as if these were identical with the will of God, and also the fundamentalist temptation to consider any gain short of the absolute ideal in history as worthless or unworthy.

Law And Gospel

But evangelicals must not perpetuate the liberal Protestant failure to distinguish between the social concerns of Law and the social concerns of Gospel. In law and justice—that is, the province of government—all men are obliged to support man’s God-given rights as universally due to human beings whatever their race, color, or creed. The evangelical knows that no improvement can be made on a government that assures every man his rights, and that limits the freedom of citizens where and when it intrudes upon the rights of others. Evangelicals do not view government as an instrument of benevolence or compassion, since love is preferential and shows favor or partiality. Constantly pressing the question, “Don’t you care?,” liberals enlist support for legislating programs of benevolence. Such an appeal to “compassion” in support of legislative programs commits a twofold error, however: it diverts government from an ideal preservation of equal human rights before the law, and it shifts to the state a responsibility for compassion or benevolence that belongs properly to the Church. By concentrating on government to achieve the goals of both state and Church in a “benevolent partnership,” liberalism reflects a reliance on political techniques in society to the neglect of the redemptive dynamisms inherent in Christianity. This reliance on political techniques to achieve ecclesiastical objectives means the loss of a genuine supernatural grounding of ethical concerns, the loss of the Church as Church in society, the loss of the redemptive evangel in deference to secular solvents of social malformity, and the loss of evangelical loyalties in the congregation.

What distinguishes evangelical Christianity is its refusal to impose sectarian obligations upon government, upon government which then employs compulsion to enforce a program of benevolence that individual citizens might or might not approve. Even if they did approve, they might consider the provision of such benevolences moral only if performed voluntarily; or they might consider it immoral to use taxation to compel others to do what they do not think to be right. While liberals justify their breaking of laws that appear unjust on the grounds of sensitivity to conscience, they nonetheless promote other laws that some persons regard as preferential and unjust.

To the evangelical Christian, the best alternative to the “welfare” state is the just state, and the best alternative to political demonstrations is civil obedience. The evangelical champions and strives for just legislation, and for obedience to law and respect for judicial process rather than for directly coerced action. The evangelical sponsors a principled ethic whose course is determined by divinely revealed moral principles. Much of contemporary liberal social action is not a matter of obeying laws; rather, it is a case of everyone’s being on his existential own. Dialectical-existential ethics cannot indicate in advance what the moral agent ought to do, and looks upon any structured objective ethics as mere rationalism.

The evangelical holds that all persons are divinely obligated by the Scriptures to love their neighbors. While progress has been slow in the area of race tensions, nonetheless there has been progress. Yet even evangelical believers fall short of their highest moral aspirations, and laws are necessary to hold just social standards before Christians and non-Christians alike. All citizens should strive to replace discriminatory laws by non-discriminatory laws. The evangelical recognizes, however, that without public enthusiasm only moral earnestness vouchsafed by spiritual conviction and renewal assures the necessary devotion to right that guarantees social fulfillment. While the glory of ancient Rome was its genius for universal law, through its lack of heart for righteousness the Roman Empire sank into oblivion. The problem of racial discrimination can be permanently met only by Christian behavior that faces up to the ugliness of bias, the evils of immorality and delinquency, and the whole complex of problems that surrounds race feeling. The predilection for public issues over personal holiness in liberal social ethics is all the more disconcerting in view of this fact. Although liberal churchmen will throw their energies behind a public health program, they tend to remain silent about many of the personal vices; such concerns are left to the “purity nuts.”

The history of Christian mission in the world makes it clear that evangelicals were interested in education, hospitals, care for the aged, and many current social concerns long before modern secular theory was ever born. Evangelicals were active in social work not only in the slums of America but also on distant mission fields a full century before the rise of modern welfare programs. To this day, rescue missions all across the land reflect a long-standing inner-city missionary concern for people in material and spiritual poverty. Evangelicals have not been as active as they need to be in the social arena; on the other hand, they have been far more active than they are sometimes said to have been.

The weakness of public demonstrations as the approved means of Christian social action is its limitation and externalization of Christian concern. It is arbitrary to imply that only those who demonstrate at a given point manifest authentic social concern. Moreover, since local demonstrations gain national significance through radio and television, the implications of massive civil disobedience are the more distressing. Ecclesiastical demonstrators who never persuade observers to become disciples of Jesus Christ ought to ask how effectively Christian is such amorphous “witness by demonstration.” The motivations for demonstrating are internal, and apart from verbal interpretation might equally well be sub-Christian, non-Christian, or anti-Christian. As a matter of fact, Jews and humanists resent a Christian interpretation of their demonstrating. If authentic social concern demanded the ecumenical chartering of planes to officially designated out-of-town points, it would require a large expense account to enable everybody to travel to somebody else’s home town “to identify.” If every supporter of an item of disputed legislation had to march to Capitol Hill, if every Christian citizen had to put in a personal appearance to let legislators know what laws he thought God specially wanted, what would tourist-jammed Washington be like then? If the representative role of congressmen were superseded by the group pressures of ministers, the whole machinery of American government would soon collapse. The question remains, moreover, Whose conscience answers for whom? These clergy are received by congressmen, not on the premise that they speak only for themselves, but as voices for their churches. No one disputes a clergyman’s right as an individual to picket or demonstrate anywhere he wishes (the right of conscience is a Protestant principle). It is unlikely, however, that pastors can wholly detach themselves from responsibilities to their congregations. When prominent churchmen parade as Reverend Church, moreover, they are simply encouraging future counter-demonstrations at 475 Riverside Drive or the Witherspoon Building.

What many socially sensitive ministers especially deplore is the implication left by the well-publicized minority of marchers that non-marchers are lacking or inferior in social concern. “I don’t mind another minister’s marching if he must relieve his conscience that way,” said one Washington minister, “but I don’t see why my social concern—never before questioned—should now be in doubt because I didn’t engage in this form of exhibitionism.” In Copenhagen, when Evangelist Billy Graham opened his crusade, a heckler interrupted him with the cry: “Why didn’t you march in Selma?” But Graham had been integrating meetings in the South long before some of the marchers had become existentialized and, moreover, had done so in the context of biblical Christianity. It is a neat propaganda device to imply that evangelical social concern is immobile because it does not conform to liberal methods—it merely proves that political propagandism is a technique in which liberal ecclesiastical leaders have become adept. In some ecclesiastical circles, the defense of this one controversial method of action has apparently justified the repudiation of all theological grounds of social concern.

Evangelical Distinctives

When evangelicals manifest social concern, they do so first by proclaiming the supernatural revelation of God and the historical resurrection of Jesus Christ. Thus they emphasize the transcendent basis of justice and the divine basis of the Gospel. They declare both the standards by which Almighty God will judge the human race and the redemption from sin unto holiness that is to be found in Jesus Christ. They affirm God’s institution of civil government to preserve justice and order, and the Church as a spiritual fellowship of redeemed men who esteem their neighbors in holy love and dedicate themselves to social righteousness.

The evangelical Christian’s social concern is first directed towards the family as the basic unit of society. He finds a hollow ring in the social passion for “one world” that simultaneously lacks indignation over divorce, infidelity, and vagrancy in the home. Because liberalism fails to see society as a macrocosm of the family, it is bankrupt to build a new society. Liberalism changes ideological loyalties and social perspectives every generation; evangelical Christianity treasures the family bound to the changeless will of God and to the apostolic faith. Hence evangelical Christianity regards the Sunday school, the prayer meeting, and the family in the church as a cohesive social unit that reflects in miniature the ideal social order. No new era of brotherliness and peace is likely to emerge in the absence of a new race of men. Evangelicals consider alliances of nations uncommitted to transcendent justice to be as futile a foundation for future mutuality as premarital promiscuity. As evangelical Christians see it, the vision of One World, or of United Nations, that is built on geographical representation rather than on principial agreement is as socially unpromising as is a lawless home that neglects the commandments of God. Walter Lippmann has somewhere said: “We ourselves were so sure that at long last a generation had arisen, keen and eager to put this disorderly earth to right … and fit to do it.… We meant so well, we tried so hard, and look what we have made of it. We can only muddle into muddle. What is required is a new kind of man.”

Evangelical Christianity finds the most natural avenue for social witness beyond the family circle in the world of work when it is viewed as a divine calling. How sadly liberal Christianity, during its past-generation domination of ecclesiastical life, has failed in the organized church’s social witness is nowhere more apparent than here. Almost all political leaders of the race-torn states are church members; Alabama’s Governor Wallace belongs to the Methodist Church, which is in the forefront of liberal social action programs. Almost all congressmen are church members. Either the religious social activists have failed miserably in inspiring churchmen in political life to view their vocations as avenues for the advancement of social justice, or an elite ecclesiastical cadre is pressuring leaders to conform their political judgments to the partisan preferences of a special bloc of churchmen—or perhaps both are true. Since everyone lives in a world of labor and economics, evangelical Christianity emphasizes that man’s work is a divinely appointed realm in which man is to glorify God and invest his talents for the good of his fellows; it is not only a means of livelihood but also an avenue of service.

This concept of divine vocation, of work as a calling, has all but vanished from the work-a-day world at the very time in modern history when liberal social action commissions have conspired with the labor unions in their skyrocketing material benefits. Meanwhile evangelical Protestants have organized a Christian Medical Society, Christian Business Men’s Committee, Christian Professional Women’s Club, Christian Law Society, Christian Teachers Association, Officers Christian Union in the Armed Forces—even a Christian Labor Union—in order to emphasize the spiritual responsibilities of vocation. It must be conceded that many of these Christian organizations serve mainly an evangelistic role, or one of vocational fellowship; only a beginning has been made in the equally urgent task of shaping an ethic for the social structures in which these groups operate. Beyond fulfilling person-to-person Christian opportunities, such agencies have an opportunity to supply guidance to both Christian and non-Christian on what is implied in a specified social order in the way of justice.

Evangelical Christians consider this recognition of the priestly nature of daily work to be more basic to social renewal than is a reshuffle of economic features that locates the fundamental flaws of society in man’s environment rather than in man himself and his works. The importance of just laws is not in dispute, since civil government is divinely designed as a coercive force to restrain evil, preserve order, and promote justice in a fallen and sinful society. Because there is no assurance that all men will repent and seek the will of God, and because even Christian believers must contend with the remnants of sin, just laws are indispensable in human history, and God’s common grace in the lives of men everywhere matches conscience with law in the interest of social preservation. But evangelical Christianity is not so infatuated with the external power of coercion as to exaggerate its potentialities, nor so skeptical of the spiritual powers of regeneration as to minimize its possibilities. Precisely because law does not contain the power to compel obedience, evangelical Christianity recognizes that a good society turns upon the presence of good men—of regenerated sinners whose minds and hearts are effectively bound to the revealed will of God—and upon their ability under God to influence humanity to aspire to enduring values.

Although society at large has seldom been overwhelmed by the Church’s proclaiming the Gospel from the pulpit, the obedient fulfillment of the Great Commission has called new disciples one by one into the circle of regenerate humanity. The voice of the Church in society has been conspicuously weaker whenever the pulpit of proclamation has been forsaken for mass pressures upon the public through the adoption of resolutions, the promotion of legislation, and the organization of demonstrations. Whenever the institutional church seeks public influence by mounting a socio-political platform, she raises more fundamental doubts about the authenticity and uniqueness of the Church than about the social aberrations against which she protests.

To evangelical Christianity, history at its best is the lengthened shadow of influential men, not the compulsive grip of impersonal environmental forces. A change of environmental forces will not transform bad men into good men—let alone into a good society. But transformed men will rise above a bad environment and will not long be lacking in a determination to alter it.

At the present time, involvement in the race problem is the crucial test of devotion to social justice. Of the evangelical Christian’s love for men of all races the long-standing missionary effort leaves no doubt; from Adoniram Judson and David Livingstone to Hudson Taylor and Paul Carlson, the story is one of evangelical sacrifice of creature comforts, even of life itself, that men of every land and color might share the blessings of redemption. In mid-twentieth-century America, humanism and liberalism and evangelicalism alike were slow to protest political discrimination against the Negro, although evangelical missionaries have deplored the incongruities of segregation. Regrettably, the Negro’s plight became for some liberal reformers an opportunity for promoting social revolution, and for some conservative reactionaries an occasion for perpetuating segregation and discrimination. Evangelical Christianity has a burden for social renewal but no penchant for revolution or reaction. Because it champions the redemptive realities inherent in the Christian religion, evangelical Christianity will in the long run vindicate the judgment that the Negro is not only politically an equal but also spiritually a brother.

Some Governing Principles

A new breed of evangelical? Yes, indeed! But not because evangelicals are switching from proclamation of the good tidings to pronouncements, picketing, and politicking as sacred means of legislating Christian sentiment on earth. Rather, evangelicals are a new breed because redemptive religion seeks first and foremost a new race of men, new creatures in Christ. Whenever Christians lose that motivation, they surrender more than their New Testament distinctiveness; they forfeit the New Testament evangel as well.

In summary, evangelicals face the social predicament today with four controlling convictions:

1. The Christian Church’s distinctive dynamic for social transformation is personal regeneration by the Holy Spirit, and the proclamation of this divine offer of redemption is the Church’s prime task.

In the twentieth century the ecumenical movement has failed most conspicuously in its mission to the world by relying on political and sociological forces, and by neglecting spiritual dynamisms.

2. While the corporate or institutional church has no divine mandate, jurisdiction, or special competence for approving legislative proposals or political parties and persons, the pulpit is responsible for proclaiming divinely revealed principles of social justice as a part of the whole counsel of God.

3. The most natural transition from private to social action occurs in the world of daily work, in view of the Christian’s need to consecrate his labor to the glory of God and to the service of mankind.

4. As citizens of two worlds, individual church members have the sacred duty to extend God’s purpose of redemption through the Church, and also to extend God’s purpose of justice and order through civil government. Christians are to distinguish themselves by civil obedience except where this conflicts with the commandments of God, and are to use every political opportunity to support and promote just laws, to protest social injustice, and to serve their fellow men.

Twenty Christian leaders met in New York City ten years ago, over Labor Day weekend, and decided that the moment had come to launch a Protestant fortnightly called CHRISTIANITY TODAY. This issue marks the beginning of the magazine’s tenth year. With a press run of just under a quarter of a million copies, CHRISTIANITY TODAY has the largest circulation of any magazine directed to the Protestant clergy. A competent staff, aided by an energetic company of contributing editors and correspondents, has given the magazine international, transdenominational appeal and has made it a sturdy forum supportive of evangelical Christianity.

The pressure of editorial tasks permits the editors to accept only a small number of the many speaking invitations extended by ministerial and campus groups. But such participation invariably involves a stimulating discussion of theological issues. The main editorial on the new morality reflects the contribution made by Assistant Editor James Daane to a spirited dialogue on the campus of Elmhurst College.