Evangelism as Social Therapy

Do your own thing? It’s an often quoted phrase, but poor philosophy. Even hippies know that today’s world cannot afford that luxury.

Modern man tends to view more and more things with an eye to survival. He sees social problems slowly but steadily closing in. Any idea risks scrutiny for its potential to avert chaos.

So with evangelism. With the passing of the live-and-let-live-era, evangelistic efforts are increasingly being obliged to show how they alleviate the world’s ills. The Church rightfully defends evangelism as a mandate given by its Lord, but the world isn’t satisfied with that. Secular man wants a pragmatic rationale.

Christians need not back off at this point. A more than adequate case can be made for evangelism’s potential for social betterment. Evangelism has effects that can be seen and appreciated even by the unbeliever. We can take a cue from the words of Jesus, “Believe me … or else accept the evidence of the deeds themselves.”

How, then, do we show the world that the spread of Christianity is, as the politician would say, “in the public interest”? The primary answer lies in history. The positive social benefits of bygone revivals are well documented. The world’s best-motivated men have been Christians. One can legitimately point to Christianity as the greatest force for good the world has ever known. It is true that some horrible deeds have been committed in the name of Christianity, but no movement is fairly judged by its impostors. The best of Christianity eclipses the best of anything else.

Evangelism has a lot to show for itself on a more personal scale as well. Through Christian influence more lives have been rehabilitated, more homes restored, more charity extended, more disputes resolved, more friendships perpetuated, than by any other means. Christianity has been the greatest cultural inspiration the world has ever known. In short, Christians have a heritage second to none. History is on their side.

It is perhaps a result of this heritage that people question the social worth of Christendom today. We have a lot to live up to, and the world has been unconsciously conditioned to expect so much that it reacts abruptly when large-scale benevolence is not immediately apparent.

To be sure, when a man is converted things should begin to happen. That’s the way it has ideally been, and that’s the way it ought to be now. Evangelism that does not clearly enunciate Christ’s demands upon his followers is something less than biblical. The New Testament calls for individual repentance involving a radical turning around, the product of which is a completely different person whose love for humanity ought to become rapidly apparent.

The lack of interest in evangelism on the part of many church leaders might well be attributed not only to an ignorance of history but to a misunderstanding of evangelism in the best sense. They have erroneously regarded evangelism as irrelevant to the present human predicament. They have therefore gone on to other concerns that they thought were more closely tied in with things as they are. And in their preoccupation with the here and now they have presupposed that the Gospel puts its best foot forward when it identifies itself with corporate, often secular, schemes to make the nation and the world better to live in.

The folly of this neglect of evangelism is gradually being acknowledged, albeit indirectly, in the current revival of transcendence. Peter Berger seems to have begun it with Rumor of Angels in 1968, and New Theology No. 7 has it as its theme in 1970. Does this perhaps presage a fresh emphasis on evangelism during the seventies? It well might, for the idea of divine transcendence necessarily embraces the concept of the supernatural, and the supernatural eradication of sin is what evangelism is all about. A person’s commitment to Christ results in a divine, regenerative work that makes him a new being. Without this act of grace by God we do not have effective biblical evangelism.

Evangelism begins at home. It ought to start with one’s own children and other kin. It ought to be done among neighbors, school friends, and business associates as casually as it was by Jesus and his disciples. But a great deal can also be done at a group level, where coordination can be achieved and specialized apologetics used.

Christians in North America will soon have their greatest evangelistic opportunity ever on a collective scale. The Key 73 effort is a cooperative enterprise, with all the advantages of momentum gained from joint effort, yet one in which great latitude in method is provided for. Each denomination (more than three dozen already are active) will be carrying through its own program, augmented by coordinated promotion. Never before have so many evangelistically minded church leaders committed themselves to work together.

No evangelistic effort can promise to solve all society’s ills. The Christian message does not claim to be a cure-all, for in God’s plan the crooked will not be entirely straightened until Christ himself returns. The Bible shows not so much a way out as a way through. But the Christian Gospel can nonetheless be the most relevant factor on the contemporary scheme if it is examined fairly and preached fully. Christians need not be intimidated into thinking otherwise.

What we need to do is to demonstrate that Christianity works in the lives of those whom God has touched. Living epistles are as crucial today as they have ever been. True repentance and obedience will produce them.

This continent is overripe for evangelism, and Key 73 represents the opportunity for an abundant new harvest of souls. May an evangelical vanguard in every hamlet across North America begin work now. Evangelism is the one thing that can and ought to bring Christians together. Urge your denominational leaders to get in on the action. Let’s show the world!

The Gospel: Lutheranism’s Sine Qua Non

In many respects the fifth assembly of the Lutheran World Federation (see News, page 40) was like the World Council of Churches’ Uppsala assembly in 1968: There were the delegates of varying languages and hues, masses of papers and reports, press releases and conferences, and a general feeling that something exciting and important was about to happen. It never did.

There was a certain vigor to the denunications of capitalism, North American business, and police power in the United States. Such denunciations have become something of a badge of being “in” in liberal society and thus can hardly be compared with Martin Luther’s “Here I stand!” at Worms. But then Luther had a scriptural mandate for the changes he demanded, and the LWF’s fifth assembly, if it had such a mandate, did not present it.

An observer from the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod (not a member of the LWF) remarked at the close of the assembly: “Rome has its hierarchy and the Methodists have their discipline, but Lutheranism cannot live without the Scripture.”

Just so. The LWF assembly lacked power because it was conducted without Scripture, if for no other reason. There were many positive aspects to Evian-Les-Bains. Nevertheless, this Lutheran assembly, representing a constituency of nearly 54 million from eighty-two member churches, proudly bore the motto “Sent into the World.” The question remains: Can one be Lutheran without being evangelical? And, can one be evangelical without the Scripture?

Some things, in some circles, go without saying. But in a secular world, in a Lutheran assembly, it is not enough merely to avoid gainsaying the Gospel. The Good News can’t go without proclaiming.

Eve’s Second Apple

In the beginning, Eve bit into forbidden fruit and fell into subjection to Adam. Her descendants face a lesser temptation—equality with man instead of with God—but they are biting no less eagerly into their forbidden fruit. Although they finally won equal voting rights, women are still fighting for such things as equal pay for equal work. And the troops plan to muster next Wednesday for a strike in honor of the fiftieth anniversary of the amendment that enfranchised females.

The potential consequences, if very many women go on strike, boggle the mind. We think, for example, what chaos would descend on this magazine if our women writers spend August 26 (a final deadline day!) composing picket signs that are transcribed by our secretaries, edited by our copy editor, proofed by our proofreader, financed (at least partially) by the distaff half of our advertising department, and circulated by subscription’s predominantly female staff.

And consider the effect on prayer meetings. If wives of clergymen who still conduct Wednesday evening services go on strike, those pastors will have to come to church after a day of house cleaning, grocery shopping, chauffering kids and refereeing their squabbles, cooking, and washing dishes. They won’t wonder why they nod during a sonorous prayer.

For a day, though, men could probably survive without ladies’ aid. But by the second day, havoc would surely begin to fall from modern Eve’s bite into the established order. Perhaps next Wednesday Christian women and men should strike out for the accord Paul advocated: “Be united in your convictions and united in your love, with a common purpose and a common mind.… There must be no competition among you, no conceit.… In your mind you must be the same as Christ Jesus.”

Fidel The Failure

Before Fidel Castro came to power in Cuba he posed as an agrarian reformer hailed by many, including churchmen, as a healthy counteractor to the dictatorship of Batista. Castro overthrew the Batista regime, uncloaked his role of agrarian reformer and openly acknowledged that he was a Communist.

A few days ago Castro admitted in a long and plaintive speech that he had failed dismally, that Cuba’s economic situation is desperate, and that there is little hope for real improvement in the immediate future. Were it not for the Soviet Union’s imperialistic financial support that has propped up Castro’s shaky economic position, his government would collapse overnight.

It was pathetic to note that Castro blamed his failure not on the Communist system, but on the lack of cadres to carry it out. He ended by saying the revolution must go on. Where it can go from here is hard to say, and one must commiserate with the millions of suffering people who languish under the hand of this tyrant.

What Cuba desperately needs is Christianity and along with it political, economic and social freedom. A good healthy dose of some free enterprise would go a long way toward rescuing Cuba from its doldrums. Witness the remarkable economic improvement of West Germany, Rumania, and Czechoslovakia (before Soviet military might reversed the process) as they moved away from the chains of outdated, anachronistic, Communist thought toward the economic realities that have enabled Western democracies to offer their people a better life.

Fidel the failure apparently hasn’t learned much since he became Cuba’s dictator. What he needs to learn is that Christianity produces free men and free men do a far better job economically, politically, and socially than do slaves whose power to choose is curtailed and whose right to free speech has been abrogated.

From Holocaust To Hope

At 9:20 A.M. (Marianas time) a radio message was received at Tinian Island from the B-29 superfortress, Enola Gay. It said: “Mission successful.” At 3 P.M., the plane returned to Tinian and landed safely. As Colonel Paul W. Tibbets, Jr., alighted, General Carl Spaatz, commander of the Pacific Strategic Air Forces, pinned the Distinguished Service Cross on his jacket.

Hiroshima—the name blazoned to the world twenty-five years ago this month. The atomic age had begun.

Soon, Tibbets and his crew reported what was—up to that moment—the biggest man-made explosion in history. The men in the Enola Gay had seen the great red ball of fire rise and expand, as suddenly the whole city was ablaze with searing flame and boiling smoke. Then the monstrous pillar of atomic cloud spread into a giant white mushroom.

Three days later, August 9, a second atom bomb was dropped on Nagasaki. Japan surrendered August 14. Because of the confusion after the explosions, the exact number of dead and injured will never be known; official estimates said there were 80,000 deaths and as many injuries in Hiroshima, and 45,000 killed and 60,000 injured in Nagasaki. The ethics of dropping the bombs has been and will continue to be debated for years.

But mankind’s attention soon turned from holocaust to hope: the peacetime possibilities of atomic power. Today, atomic power plants abound (despite frequent local uneasiness about their presence), and radioactive isotopes have benefited medicine, science, engineering, industry, and agriculture. Atomic-powered submarines are a well-known example of how the atom has been harnessed for useful purposes. Even archaeology has been aided by the discovery that there is a slight amount of the radioactive isotope carbon-14 in the atmosphere. This knowledge has enabled scientists to determine (although the accuracy of the method has been challenged recently) the age of many archaeological finds. And perhaps we still stand—even twenty-five years after Hiroshima—only on the threshold of the ultimate potential locked within the tiny atom.

That versatile writer, Isaac Asimov, has noted in his book, Inside the Atom:

Nothing in the history of mankind has opened our eyes to the possibilities of science as has the development of atomic power.… If only mankind can avoid destroying himself in atomic warfare, there seem to be almost no limits to what may lie ahead: inexhaustible energy, new worlds, ever-widening knowledge of the physical universe. If only we can learn to use wisely the knowledge we already have.…”

If only. Need we add that the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom (Ps. 111:10)? Or that man can never master the universe until he masters himself, and that that can be done only when he is enthralled by Jesus Christ?

An Arab-Israeli Detente?

We rejoice in the fact that the United Arab Republic and the State of Israel accepted in principle the peace plan for the Middle East and the ninety-day cease-fire that is part of it. This is only a small step in the right direction, but it may be the beginning of a negotiated settlement.

We know that the greater the tension and the more people involved the greater the difficulty to negotiate a viable solution. Essentially this difficulty is at the heart of the Arab-Israeli confrontation. Israel genuinely believes it is fighting for its very existence and wants security and recognition by the Arabs. The Arab world—a conglomeration of competing factions with no essential political unity, no common goals, and no particular love for one another—wants some token of “victory” after military defeat plus the return of the territories seized by the Israelis in their stunning military victory. The Soviet Union is caught in the tentacles of deep military involvement on behalf of Nasser and the possibility of war with the United States if things go wrong. The United States has commitments to Israel and the moral obligation to prevent another genociding of Jews. It is faced with the threat of Soviet imperialist adventurism based on national interests that collide with its own. But it doesn’t want war with the Soviets because nuclear weaponry guarantees that nobody will win—or even, perhaps, survive—such a conflict.

Deep wrongs have been perpetrated; neither the Arabs nor the Israelis have totally clean hands. Justice in an abstract sense is impossible, and any negotiated settlement will necessitate some gains and some losses by both sides. Because Israel is unlikely to give up its holdings in Palestine, the displaced Palestinian Arabs have little hope of repatriation, and the injustice they have suffered must be remedied by providing them with other lands and new hope for a viable and decent life.

It should be apparent that war is no solution for the political and human problems of the Middle East. Reason and diplomacy are the only hope, and if they fail the prospects are too dismal to contemplate. The first stage is the cease-fire that would benefit both Jews and Arabs. This can succeed and progress only if the Soviet Union and the United States work together to hold their respective clients in line. If either lacks the good faith the situation calls for or the determination to secure a modus vivendi, then the picture is dark indeed.

It is in the best interests of the United States and the Soviet Union to work for a negotiated settlement and then to guarantee that settlement as well as to stabilize the situation for the years ahead. The road will be difficult, the obstacles many, and the human element forbidding. Christians, most of whom can personally do little to shape the course of events, ought to pray earnestly that God will work to cool the boiling pot and bring order out of the present chaos.

Evangelical Without Adjectives

The conciliar movement in recent years has been using a label that has become part of the lingua franca. The term is “conservative evangelicals” and is applied primarily to evangelical groups and individuals outside the ecumenical movement. Both the World Council of Churches and the National Council of Churches have indicated their willingness to court and to have dialogue with “conservative evangelicals.”

The term is a misnomer, a label that is a libel, and one that should be discontinued at once. Our reasons for this disclaimer are obvious. The word “evangelical” is defined in Webster’s International as “pertaining to or designating that party or school among the Protestants which holds that the essence of the Gospel consists mainly in its doctrines of man’s sinful condition and need of salvation, the revelation of God’s grace in Christ, the necessity of spiritual renovation and participation in the experience of redemption through faith.” The adjective “conservative” before “evangelical” is superfluous and indeed redundant, provided that the word “evangelical” still is sound currency. The antonym of “conservative” is “liberal.” To say that a man is a “liberal evangelical” is a contradiction of terms, sheer nonsense. If he is an evangelical he cannot be a theological liberal; if he is a theological liberal he cannot be an evangelical. It is of course possible for a man to be an evangelical and at the same time to be a political or economic liberal. But as a theological badge, the term “conservative evangelical” is unnecessary, misleading, and deceptive. No evangelical needs any adjective before the word. It carries its own freight and stands on its own feet.

We are reminded of Kaiser Wilhelm to whom someone was introduced as a German-American. The king replied: “A German I know and an American I know, but a German-American I do not know.” An evangelical we know and a conservative we know, but a conservative evangelical we do not know.

The Spirit Of 1620

Love it or leave it, they decided, though they were scarcely offered that alternative. For their desire to leave the establishment they could not love, they received brickbats; for their efforts to leave the nation that refused them religious liberty, they were called traitors. But finally, to worship simply and purely, in contrast to the ritual of the established church, a group of English dissenters headed for Leyden, Holland, in 1608. There they worshiped freely on Sundays and scratched for a living in menial trades the rest of the week.

The hard life took its toll on their health and that of their children, and it failed to attract others who shared their views. Worse, some of their children, disillusioned by the futility of advancement, “were drawn away by evil examples” of unacceptable codes of conduct. So, 350 years ago this summer, they bade tearful farewells to what one of their leaders called “that goodly and pleasant city which had been their resting place near twelve years.” William Bradford explained their decision—and left a challenge for Christians of all ages: “But they knew they were pilgrims, and looked not much on those things, but lift up their eyes to the heavens, their dearest country, and quieted their spirits.”

Ulster: Who’s A Christian?

More than a dozen persons died in a two-week period last month during the “fraternal” strife engulfing six counties of Northern Ireland where the Protestant majority and the Roman Catholic minority endure peace-on-a-razor’s-edge.

Editor James O. Duncan of the Capital Baptist editoralized in the weekly publication of the District of Columbia Baptist Convention: “We believe that the time has come for the moral persuasive power of Catholics and Protestants around the world to be used to speak to the crisis in Northern Ireland.” Challenging Pope Paul and World Council of Churches chief Eugene Carson Blake to “leave the seclusion of Rome and Geneva,” Duncan called on them, if necessary, to “stand together in the middle of the street where Protestant and Catholic areas come together and seek to bring about some kind of reconciliation.”

“Since when,” Duncan asked, “do segments of the church have to kill and wound and exploit each other? What does Christianity mean to those who keep warring with one another?”

To Captain Charles Ritchie, a 28-year-old career soldier of the First Battalion, Royal Scots, it is a kind of riddle to keep him on good terms with both sides. Like most of the British Army soldiers stationed in Northern Ireland, Ritchie has been on Ulster patrol for four or five months. Before coming there, he told a New York Times reporter, “we never knew or cared whether a man in the unit was Protestant or Catholic. But here it’s the first thing people ask you.”

“I tell them that I’m a Christian,” he added with a smile. “They always love the puzzle. They don’t seem to know what that means.”

Obviously not.

Compassion In The Andes

“Desolation comparable to Hiroshima,” said one observer, describing what he saw in the shadow of the Andes after Peru’s earthquake almost three months ago. Though church relief agencies sped with appropriate cups of cold water—medicine, food, clothing, blankets, money for rebuilding—desolation lingers. To repair the devastation of the forty-second quake will no doubt require at least forty months (see News, page 46).

The spontaneous sympathy of Christians around the world and their willingness to shoulder the Peruvians’ burden is commendable. To carry that burden through the heat of the day, the cool of the night, and the rains of September will demand strong shoulders and inexhaustible compassion.

Quenching A Man-Sized Thirst

Changing times and tastes have taken the fizz out of that “old faithful,” the corner drugstore soda fountain. Marble counters, high stools, and mirrors framed by pyramids of glasses and tall jars of gooey flavoring are now an anachronism.

Soda water, points out the National Geographic Society, was first produced commercially in the United States in the 1830s when John Matthews of New York City sold the first soda-water generator. Chips of marble—many salvaged from the building of St. Patrick’s Cathedral—were added to sulphuric acid in a lead-lined box, generating carbonic acid gas that was then dissolved in water.

While the old-fashioned soda fountain is drying up, the soft-drink industry has swallowed up pinpoint carbonation. Fizzy-water devotees now buy carbonated beverages, ice cream, and a variety of tantalizing toppings at the supermarket. Then, with kitchen blenders, the imaginative whump up their own summer specialties.

All of which proves that man’s styles may change, and his tastes. But his thirst remains. So, too, the places and modes of man’s worship shift with the times. Yet his thirst for the water of life can be quenched from only one source: Jesus Christ. Whoever drinks fizzy water will thirst again, but he who drinks of the water Christ gives will never thirst. As Jesus said long ago to the woman at the local watering spot: “The water I give shall be an inner spring bubbling up for everlasting life” (John 4:14).

Strong Delusion

Ahab was king of Israel at the same time godly Jehoshaphat was king of Judah. Ahab had gathered about him a cluster of false prophets whose business it was to prophesy to him what he wanted to hear. He was not interested in listening to a true prophet, for he didn’t bow before God nor did he want to know the will of God. But God did not leave himself without a witness. Micaiah, a true prophet, was the only link that wicked Ahab had with God. Micaiah, however, told it like it was and generally managed to make Ahab unhappy.

Good Jehoshaphat made a bad alliance with Ahab (for which Jehu, the son of Hanani the seer, later rebuked him saying: “Shouldest thou help the ungodly, and love them that hate the Lord? [1 Chron. 19:2]). When Ahab asked Jehoshaphat to join him in a military venture at Ramoth-gilead, Jehoshaphat agreed. Ahab’s prophets were consulted, and they promised him victory. But Jehoshaphat was not fully satisfied and asked if there was another prophet. Ahab mentioned Micaiah, whom, he said, “I hate … for he never prophesied good unto me, but always evil” (2 Chron. 18:7). When called upon to prophesy, Micaiah did it again. He forecast Ahab’s death and also told Ahab that God had permitted a lying spirit to deceive Ahab and that this lying spirit would prevail.

All Micaiah got in return for his prophecy was a jail sentence. He was to be fed “with bread of affliction and water of affliction” (2 Chron. 18:26). Ahab, on the other hand, got all that Micaiah predicted. He lost his life. What stands out most in this account is not that Micaiah, the true prophet, suffered for his faithfulness, nor that Jehoshaphat was reproved for having an alliance with wicked Ahab. What really stands out is that Ahab, who knew that Micaiah was a true prophet, and who had been told that he would follow a lying prophet, chose to do what Micaiah said he would do. And he perished.

What is it that confirms wicked men in their wickedness and causes them to fly in the face of the obvious, to their own undoing? May it not be what God said would happen in the last days and what seems to be happening with some frequency in our generation?—“God shall send them strong delusion, that they should believe a lie: that they all might be damned who believed not the truth, but had pleasure in unrighteousness” (2 Thess. 2:11, 12).

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