Where Is Evangelical Initiative?

The other day brought a letter from a student in one of our leading Christian colleges. “I ‘explode’ because I don’t feel I want to identify myself with it,’ he wrote of the way our evangelical cause is addressing—or rather, failing to address—the world crisis. “Perhaps that is my biggest reason for not going into the ministry,” he added. “As I look at the world situation I wonder if it is even worth giving one’s life to the Church anymore. In terms of long-range prospects, I am sure the answer is yes. But I now find that those who think make the mission held or ministry the last thing on their agenda of possible vocations.… I don’t think Christian education is going to succeed.… My heart is really in politics.… If one has a real passion for the world and for lost souls, he must pick a medium which interacts with society and people.”

That letter didn’t come from a young radical. It came rather from the son of a seminary professor and Christian editor. It came, in fact, from the writer’s own son. He is a symbol of a generation of evangelical youth who feel that organized evangelical structures today are so unconcerned for the world dying around us that legislative and political dynamisms now seem more potent channels of social change than our sacred evangelical and spiritual dynamisms. He writes: “I realize that politics is not the ultimate factor in changing society” (and I am thankful that he well realizes that regeneration is the decisive factor), but, he adds—and this mood is to be found among quite a few of our young evangelicals—“the organized church as we know it today has had it.”

It is not only our children who wonder where we as evangelical Protestants are in the world conflict today. Who has not himself awakened at three in the morning, restless with a conviction that, if we are really going to get a fresh hearing for the Gospel, we must address the trial and trouble of the needy masses in a way that links the emptiness of their lives to the suffering agony of Christ’s cross? What threatens our evangelical witness today is not lack of enduring doctrine and principle, for we have held fast what has been delivered once-for-all. What threatens our witness is lack of spiritual power, reliance on past achievement that stifles creative concern, and lethargy and inertia in applying our sacred convictions.

The big debate over American goals carries sobering lessons for evangelical Protestants. The Protestant vision once supplied the sense of ultimate purpose and the reservoir of regeneration that held off and healed the social disorders in this privileged land. That vision has long since faded: the dominant climate is no longer Protestant, and it is less evangelical than ever.

A sense of dissatisfaction, among evangelicals themselves over organized evangelical structures, now runs deeper than before. There is dissatisfaction over our evangelical churches, over evangelical education, and over the evangelical image. This dissatisfaction calls for new power to face our terrible era, not merely a holding operation in a time of unusual disorder. Not a few of the young evangelicals of the oncoming generation shock us by swift and sure judgments on much of what our own generation has taken for granted.

When we answer back only with the old clichés, as if this atomic age were no different from any other, as if a century with communism on the march calls for nothing new, as if a generation with Romanism threatening to reverse most of the gains of the Protestant Reformation is just like any other, as if a decade in which the direction of Protestant theology (in its movement from Barth to Bultmann) may be sealed for our lifetime makes no special demands upon us—then our sons and daughters are prone to prize existentialism above evangelical theology and to share the mood (if not the intention) of the Communist verdict that “the Church has had it!… It’s time for another day!” A religious commitment without flaming significance for a world whose walls are daily pushed out by rockets and missiles and whose inhabitants are daily threatened with extinction, or for a world in which communism is daily on the loose, or in which Romanism reaches daily for power with new vengeance, or in which the daily theological engagement has to do only with reaction to the initiative of others, holds little appeal for the next generation of Christian youth, and may God bless them for that!

We stand at one of the most important crossroads in modern times for the evangelical witness. Evangelical patriarchs are prone to exaggerate our gains, while evangelical youth are prone to exaggerate our losses. Both mistakes are costly. While the younger generation grows pessimistic over the broken dynamic displayed by organized evangelical structures, the older generation becomes optimistic because larger doors are now opening to evangelical leaders on the American scene. It is easy to forget how much of this development represents the mere semblance of progress, how much of it represents actually a freer expression of a proportionate voice once denied evangelicals by liberal ecclesiastical strategists when Protestantism was still the majority mood in America and when in fact evangelicals were the Protestant majority. There is no need for evangelical self-congratulation if the larger “acceptance” of the evangelical voice takes place in a society which year-by-year becomes more pluralistic, and less evangelical, and which welcomes evangelicals simply because their god is one of the many curiosities in the gallery of American faith. What is really at stake, in this decade of the twentieth century, is whether the “Golden Sixties” will mark an end-time in which the period from the Protestant Reformation to the Russian Revolution is closed off as an historical parenthesis, after which paganism once more becomes the controlling subject of Western thought and life.

We hear so much about “trends facing evangelicals today.” Everything is facing us today—theological trends, social trends, politico-economic trends; the world has the initiative, and we seem resigned forever merely to react to that initiative. When the evangelical movement begins instead to face the trends, searching them to their depths, laying bare their weaknesses, taking them by storm, flashing the Gospel’s power with the Apostle Paul’s courage in the mighty pagan Roman Empire of his day—fashioned for a Nero or a Khrushchev (“there is none righteous, no not one”), a rejoinder to Stoics and Epicureans and no less to Marxists (“God … hath determined the times before appointed … and now commandeth all men everywhere to repent”)—then our young people will lose their semi-paralysis in the face of competing theologies and philosophies; they will glory in a mightier than Khrushchev; and they will detect in history the sure hand of the eternal God no less than the grasping fingers of modern tyrants. One of the Communists has said, “The Christian Church is dead; it just does not know how to lie down and be buried.” There is profound wisdom in our ignorance of how to conduct a funeral for Christ’s Church, and it springs from the glory of the Resurrection. Christ’s resurrection took place in a graveyard. As long as we live in fallen history the Empty Tomb is the promise of a new day. We are thrust into the world as light and life, not to grovel about like moles in a subversive underground.

PERSONAL FORGIVENESS AND THE DESTINY OF NATIONS

Billy Graham’s ministry in Manchester calls to mind a welcoming message for the evangelist in St. Michaelis Cathedral, Hamburg, in which Bishop Karl Witte noted that reading the Book of Revelation today will save one from many illusions. “Who reads the Revelation of St. John,” he said, acquires an ability “to see the temporal against the background of the eternal, to see the horrors of time in the light of the victory which has already been won.”

Stressing the words “The Lamb, that was slain,” Bishop Witte depicted the Church today “pressed together into the narrowest confines.… We see all positions of power—political, military, commercial, clerical, technical, propagandistic—in the hand of the antichrist, not only in the East, but across the world.” “But judgment in the world,” the bishop added, “has been given to the Crucified and the Resurrected One.… He is the Lord, in the midst of the uproar of the world.… And while He is the true witness, we are also required to witness.…”

“And now it should be said plainly,” added the bishop softly, speaking to the St. Michaelis throng of our heritage in Christ, that “we can only qualify for all this, when we are certain of the forgiveness of sins. This article of faith is decisive for all else.” Turning then to Dr. Graham, Bishop Witte added, “Dear Brother, announce to us how one can receive forgiveness of sins, and how he can come into grace and into peace. All else is but the consequence and the power issuing from this occurrence.”

In his book This Freedom—Whence?, J. Wesley Bready notes that John Wesley little realized that “his conversion would change the whole tone and tenor of history throughout the English-speaking world.” In that very year, 1738, Bishop Butler in the preface to his Analogy complained that “amongst all people of discernment” it was “taken for granted” that “Christianity was fictitious.” As Billy Graham’s world ministry touches modern Manchester, the prayers of Christians in many lands will unite that the Good News may once more stir England with the contagion of a holy and transforming power.

THE MISSIONARY’S ROLE AS EDUCATOR OF AFRICA

Stories of heroic missionaries once satisfied the Christian hunger for adventuresome and melodramatic reading. The deeds of William Carey, David Livingstone, Sir Wilfred Grenfell, or of a contemporary like Albert Schweitzer of Lambaréné have, over the years, captivated popular imagination: each in his own way blazed a trail or transformed some dark spot on the face of a continent.

But few persons seem now to realize that missions have been a potent force in the education of the African. Indeed, in many parts of Africa they still fulfill a major role in leading Africa into a new day.

Take the vast new state of Nigeria as an example, for it is illustrative of many other sections of Africa.

Out of nearly 3 million children at school in Nigeria, only 250,000 belong to the 19 million population of the Northern region. More than two and a half million are from the 17 million people of the East and the West. Why? Ministers of state, educationalists, and missionaries will give the same answer: the Northern region is Muslim and Christian missionaries therefore have been unable to penetrate it as they did the Western and Eastern regions. They were severely restricted from founding schools for children in the North. Even this present year, the state is responsible for only 35 per cent of the teaching of the 250,000 scholars in the whole Northern Region; Protestant churches and societies provide another 35 per cent, and the Roman Catholic church supplies 30 per cent. Thus missions again are providing the inadequate teaching facilities that exist in the North. But were it not for Muslim resistance to Christian missionary work, how different would be the whole educational picture!

Now consider the situation in the two other regions, the East and the West. How can it be explained that these areas (with only one million more inhabitants than the North) have nearly two and three quarter million children in their schools? Again the answer is Christian missions. These once pagan areas were more easily penetrated by Christian missions than was the Muslim sphere, and missionaries, often welcomed from the very first, have been at work in these areas for more than a century. The result is that not only are two and a half million children to be found in the schools of the “South,” that is, the Eastern and Western regions, but almost 75 per cent of these scholars are the responsibility of Christian missions and churches.

The Nigerian state is deeply aware of what missionaries and churches have done and are doing, and wishes they might do more. Many leading Nigerian statesmen are the products of mission schools and many openly profess Christianity, among them the Governor General and the leader of the opposition (Dr. Hzikiwe and Chief Owalowo respectively), as well as leading members of the Cabinet and many members of Parliament.

With the great backlag of the North, only about 40 per cent of all Nigerian children are in school, but probably 70 per cent of these in turn are there as a result of missionary endeavor and enterprise. Had the North responded as the South did, Nigeria would today have almost five million children in school. One cannot think of the new state without the influence of these missionaries, the educators of a people “who once walked in darkness.”

The University College of Ibadan not only has an excellent university campus, with pleasing buildings, but a student corps of well over a thousand. Where do they come from? More than 80 per cent are from Christian or church schools—Protestant or Roman Catholic—and almost the same percentage belong to Christian churches. These are the leaders of the new Nigeria of tomorrow. The latest census (1953) lists 22 per cent of the Nigerian population as “Christian.” Through the medium of education, missionaries have trained most of the leaders of the new state. Some day Nigeria, this land of the mighty Niger, of the Bights, of Calabar Coast, of Mary Slessor, Anna Hindner and Bishop Crowther, the first West African bishop and a freed slave, may build a national monument for Christian missions! These men and women came from Europe and America to give the Gospel to a dark land. Many of them died with malaria, yellow fever, or because of the slave trader. But they did not turn back.

I Believe …

Strangely enough, the very lack of cohesion in contemporary theology discloses its uniform character.

Some scholars major in always looking for “some new thrust.” In Paul’s day pursuit of “the latest novelty” was the disease of speculative philosophy; today it is a theology infecting virus.

While the multiplicity of modern views may be championed as evidence of theological “creativity” for a season, demand for “mediation” between diverse and divergent theories, or for their “consolidation,” is eventually to be expected. But what they reject of biblical doctrine holds these theories together more than what they affirm in common.

It should surprise no one, therefore, that the modern “revival of theology” can claim little credit for whatever “evangelical revival” there is in our time. The specially “contemporary” theologies do not, in truth, support evangelical regeneration and revival in the historic Christian sense. This fact further indicates that twentieth-century theology is undergoing revision rather than revival.

WHAT IS THE TARGET: COMMUNISM OR ANTI-COMMUNISTS?

This magazine refuses to champion reactionary radicals who combat world evils by questionable methods. Effective propagation of good causes requires constructive leadership, objective evaluation, sound principles, wise strategy, and positive alternatives to false isms.

Yet some current propaganda trends disturb us. Some churchmen and church agencies seem to deplore Communism less (in the right way) than they deplore radicals who alertly but crudely warn against the Communist menace.

We have no sympathy with wild generalizations, whether made by the McIntires, the Hargises or others. The best way to handle those who spend half-time denouncing churchmen and half-time denouncing Communism is hardly to major in denouncing anti-Communists. While eschewing objectionable methods, there is always the temptation to use those same methods (more subtly) in the condemnatory process. Let’s get on with the Christian challenge to Communism.

LORDSHIP OVER SPACE AND RELIGIOUS FAITH

With Alan Shepard’s 15-minute 115-mile space trip the United States momentarily caught its breath in the space race, called for more funds to conquer space, and set its sights next on a man orbiting the earth in 1961 and another landing on the moon by 1970.

The spirit of the age was clearly reflected in the self-congratulatory mood. Determined to keep up with and to surpass Nikita, and to outwit the dictator seeking dominion over the globe, Americans seemed more relieved and proud than grateful. Man’s conquest of space remained the pervading theme; serving man (what do we conquer space for?) lagged far behind, and the glory of God as a motive seemed scarcely in view. Every penetration into outer space seemed a victory for the spirit of secular scientism and posed a greater challenge to Christian proclamation.

Welcomed to Washington by President Kennedy and a million well-wishers, Astronaut Shepard was asked by the press: “Commander, during the war there was a rather famous pilot who wrote a book called, God Is My Co-Pilot. Do you feel the same way?” Speaking for himself and his fellow spacemen, Shepard in the prevalent American mood shifted emphasis to subjective belief: “I think that all seven of us have that religious faith which we express in our own individual ways. I think that is about all I care to comment.”

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