From Modernism to Conservatism

To you who know the Lord Jesus Christ, who have been awakened to the awfulness of sin and have felt the cleansing power of his blood, to you who have now found life, I bring this message: “For the time is come that judgment must begin at the house of God: and if it first begin at us, what shall the end be of them that obey not the gospel of God?” (1 Pet. 4:17).

We note that the verse begins, “The time is come.” Many devout Christians feel that we are living in the last days. The conviction that “the time has come” seems particularly compelling just now. This feeling—that we may well be in the last times and the Lord will tarry no longer—strikes a responsive note in hearts.

Some are saying that the time has come for a great revival. Hyman Appelman has said that once in a hundred years the time seems ripe for a great awakening. This time of jubilee has come, he feels. And many others are seeing the beginnings of a great movement of commitment to Jesus Christ as Lord and Saviour. The time has come for a revival that will save us from atheism and materialism, and the terrible evils of our time.

Whether, of course, we are living in the closing days, or whether we are sharing in a movement that will shake our country and the world with revival, we do not assuredly know. But we do know that judgment has begun.

Empty Modernity

A symptom of this judgment is the current widespread interest in religion. People sing about thanking God “together on our knees,” not because they have suddenly repented and accepted Christ for what he is, but because the secular life they have known has been found wanting. Our culture has been judged. The judgment of God is upon our novels, our movies, our family life, our morals in general. Even our refinements, the richness of so-called “American culture,” have left a great emptiness in the hearts of men and women. In great America, rich America, educated America, people have found that the total meaning of their lives adds up to nothing. Editor of Fortune magazine, Russell Davenport, sensing the temper of our times, wrote:

O my country

It is nothing that we fear; the thought of nothing;

The sound of nothing in our hearts like the hideous scream

Of fire engines in the streets at midnight;

The belief in nothing.

From Culture To Christ

I was a product of the culture of our age. It seems as though it had done its worst upon me. In my shallowness and ignorance, I had drunk the heady draught of selfish conceit and grandiose dreams of success. Selfish success and nothing else dominated my life. I sailed through school with outspread sails for success.

Then the hour of judgment came. Did you ever compare the experience of great insight and awakening to a ride on the subway? You are hurtling through the dark, uncertain, unknown; suddenly you come into a station full of light. It was exactly that way with me. On a Friday afternoon at the 72nd Street express stop on the west side subway in New York City—suddenly, out of the darkness of the pit in which I had been trying to live—the train burst into the station’s blinding light.

As I stood there on the platform with the train pulling away, I saw in an instant the past and future in a true light. He beset me behind and before and placed his hand upon me! I felt the hand of God on my shoulder. I was overcome. What was success? What was this false sort of thinking that had been driving me? Where did it lead? Quick as a flash of light, as the vanishing train left its sparks flying from the third rail, I saw the emptiness and the nothingness of it—the horror of selfish conceit and of my striving for success.

Like thousands of others in our time, I turned away from the cultural ends in which I had been steeped. And there was no one to whom I could turn except Jesus Christ. I knew very little of him. But who else had deep answers? I cannot say I “waited patiently,” but I waited for the Lord, and he “inclined unto me and heard my cry; he brought me up out of the horrible pit, out of the miry clay, and set my feet upon a rock, and established my goings.” I had felt blinded and confused, but that Friday night I took the first unforgettable step toward the most wonderful life one can live—a life with Jesus Christ as Lord and Saviour.

The Concealed Gospel

Judgment has begun. Our culture is under judgment as our country and other lands feel the blighting effects of nihilistic philosophies. But this verse from I Peter reminds us that “judgment must begin at the house of God.” First our culture, and second our church is under judgment.

I think of the church in which I grew up in a little village in Vermont to which I still have strong ties of love. There, boys like myself found no faith and hope. For it was a church, like so many others, that concealed the saving Gospel from its people.

Where were the people of God when liberalism began to gather power until it blew like a gale over New England? Those who had been “born again” were pushed aside and trampled down by the heavy boots of liberal doctrine. The Bible and its teachings were a subject for ridicule in countless colleges and universities, even in institutions which had been established through the sacrifices of God’s servants for the sole purpose of training preachers and teachers in the Word of God. The school I attended had as its seal an open Bible and underneath the words Terras Irradient. Many members of the faculty made sport of this seal. Not one professor was available to supply needy churches on a Sunday. No one believed that much in the Gospel.

Only Christ Can Save

Thousands of educated and respectable people are now living in spiritual paralysis because of infection by this liberal teaching years ago. More and more people comprehend that modern medicine cannot save us from ultimate death. The man on the street, and even more the man in the academic robe, knows that psychiatry cannot save a man from his sins. But men need to learn that only Jesus Christ, who gave his life a ransom for many, can save them.

The winds of liberalism are blown out and now the storm of neo-orthodoxy beats upon us. Few liberals have repented for those sterile days or asked forgiveness for having led men astray. Many liberals have slipped into various forms of neo-orthodoxy. I cannot be unsympathetic to this movement. While I was a student at Union Theological Seminary, it was neo-orthodoxy that gave me, a confused liberal, the Bible. I remember the day I first saw Karl Barth’s The Word of God and the Word of Man. We were so sick of humanistic notions, we longed for the Word of God.

I sat at the feet of Reinhold Niebuhr, for whom I have great respect and affection; and he delineated the sin and bankruptcy of man from history and social patterns. That we have all sinned and fallen short of the glory of God seemed a wicked understatement as we beheld the colossal sinfulness of modern society. As time went on, more and more thinkers began to grant that Niebuhr was reading history aright. Mussolini and Hitler had come and gone; men thought about the gas chambers, the mass murders; and they began to ask again “What is man?” This was the beginning of a turn toward orthodoxy.

But just as liberalism had misread history, neo-orthodoxy was reasoning entirely from history and the social scene. The neo-orthodox thinker was making the mistake of forgetting that the Word of God speaks to us, and that a doctrine is to be believed because it is according to Scripture.

Finding The Bible Anew

I believe that the grave danger of neo-orthodoxy is that it sounds to the common man like the old-time religion. As he draws nearer to it, he finds himself quite confused by its dialectic, its involved reasoning. The power of evangelism and the joy of salvation seem to be missing. For several years I have served on a committee which passes on students coming up for ordination. I will say that most of them have returned to orthodoxy. They know what the Gospel is—they know that man is a sinner and needs redemption through Jesus Christ. God has burst into sinful history and sent his Son to earth that through him man might be reconciled to God. Yet these ministerial candidates have been shaky about the Bible. Just what its place is they are uncertain. They have been led to the Gospel not through studying Scripture, but by the assertions of professors who have been led to Bible doctrines by the study of history. But the point I make here is that we cannot build an adequate faith on an interpretation of history, true as it may seem at the moment.

As for myself, I at long last came back to the Bible. God who loved the world would not leave himself without a witness. God being God communicated his will to man. And that communication is the Holy Bible, the absolute Word of God to us.

God’S Sweeping Judgment

Liberalism has obviously come under judgment. Every university man knows this today. Neo-orthodoxy in all its many forms stands under the judgment of God also. It depends too much on history and the interpretation of the social scene. It misleads the seeker, and does not build him up in the fullness of the stature of Christ. I want to pay honor to fundamentalism. The courage and saintliness of so many of its followers point to something we cannot pass over lightly. Yet fundamentalism too is under the judgment of God. There is a lack of repentance there. The fundamentalist often feels proudly that he is the custodian of the Scriptures, and that no man can gainsay his comments.

The danger of fundamentalism is that it does not see history aright. The fundamentalist is in danger of believing in the American dream of “upward and onward forever” for this great United States. He has had a tendency to stamp uncritically his approval upon modern capitalism, for instance. While I am a firm believer in capitalism, and believe that some form of it is implicit in the Scriptures, it must also come under the judgment of God. A popular blanket approval of any phase of American life has its dangers. I read a sermon once in which a Christian preacher sought to show that the Bible approved segregation. Fundamentalism, much as it deserves our praise for its courage in preserving the Gospel, must also be repentant and humble. It must not say with pride, “Thank God, I am not as these others are, liberals and neo-orthodox.”

The time has come that judgment must begin at the house of God. With love toward all men, we must unflinchingly maintain that the way of salvation is a strait and narrow way. Christ is the door and Christ is the way. Life is with Jesus Christ and there is only death without him.

The Issue Is Salvation

The issue at stake, as we think of our times, is salvation. It is not simply Communism or Capitalism; it is not simply Roman Catholicism or Protestantism. The Church passes from death to life because it is the body of Christ. Every church must be the church of the Saviour. And the mission of every true church is to spread the Gospel and help its people grow in it. I repeat that the issue is salvation—salvation through Jesus Christ. The blood of Jesus Christ cleanseth us from all sin, now and forever.

The time has come and it is a time of crisis. Neo-orthodoxy is right in speaking of it as a crisis. I am told the Chinese translate crisis into two words meaning dangerous opportunity. The time of dangerous opportunity has come to the Church. Judgment has begun and the Church of Christ must be repentant as it views the liberalism of the past, the neo-orthodoxy of today and the equally grave dangers that have existed in fundamentalism. The issue before us is very clear. It is salvation—salvation through Jesus Christ made known to us through God’s Holy Word.

Maurice O. Mahler is Pastor of First Church (Congregational) in Sterling, Massachusetts. He was a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Amherst College in 1929, and received the B.M. cum laude from Union Theological Seminary, New York, in 1932. The church he now serves, said to be the largest rural congregation in New England, has 855 members in a community of 2500 population. Dating from 1742, First Church is a united Church (Baptist, Congregational and Unitarian).

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