Toward a Theology of Evangelism: First of Two Parts

One of the marks of the Church in our time is a new awareness of the world. The Church exists for the world, as a servant community living in the fellowship, and by the power, of a Servant Lord. The ministry of the Church is to the whole man in his total environment.

This awareness has had a strong effect on modern views of evangelism. The mission of the Church is seen as larger than helping individuals to go to heaven when they die. It is to try to smash all the barriers that alienate men from one another and to break all the shackles that bind men’s bodies and spirits in this world, as well as to offer hope for the world to come. Evangelism, therefore, is seen in terms of two great Christian words—reconciliation and freedom. The Confession of 1967 of the United Presbyterian Church focuses on these terms, and the meeting this summer to constitute the World Alliance of Reformed Churches has as its theme, “Christ Reconciles and Makes Free.” A genuine theology of evangelism is all inclusive, dealing with the total human situation. It encompasses the whole range of man’s reconciliation to God and to his fellow man, and concerns itself with the unshackling of men’s bodies, minds, and spirits.

This has been said so often and so clearly by so many people that there seems to be quite general agreement at this point. But sweeping generalizations tend to become mere fads if they are not carefully examined. Furthermore, despite a rather widespread agreement at this point, evangelism does not seem to be a prosperous enterprise in our day. It may be that we must look deeper into the true meaning of the words reconciliation and freedom.

The “subjectivity” characteristic of our time tends to empty words of any “objective” or communicable meaning. Sensation has taken the place of genuine experience. The “expanding inner consciousness” has become focal to many. This means there is no distinctive content to experience that may be isolated, defined, and communicated to others. On this view, the visual artist conveys nothing. He merely creates a medium of sensation into which the viewer may read his own meaning. The playwright does not convey any precise message. His work becomes a vehicle whereby the audience creates its own content.

This relates to contemporary Christian thought in that often our words do not convey any distinctively Christian meaning, confronting modern man with the options for faith that are posed by Scripture and the Christian tradition. The tendency is to read into the Christian terminology subjective gropings after meaning, to confuse the faith with our own inner states of consciousness. Three years ago Arthur Cochrane warned against “speaking of a God whose existence is dependent upon the vagaries of human history, culture, language, and experience, a God who has no existence apart from our consciousness, who is the reflector of ourselves, of our hopes and fears and ultimate concern.”

It is well to keep this caution in mind, for both reconciliation and freedom are frequently denuded of any distinctively Christian meaning. Reconciliation is often confined to the level of alienated human beings finally deciding to get along with each other. Freedom, too, is often secularized, so that it refers solely to “the realization of one’s true humanity,” to “the right to participate in the decisions which affect one’s own life,” to man’s ability “to create his own future,” to “the fullest realization of one’s own potential.”

Both reconciliation and freedom, then, are often thought of in merely humanistic or in sociological, economic, and political terms. Granted that such terms are certainly relevant to our understanding of the distinctively Christian meaning of them, we must guard against making these decisive. The Church has always perforce interacted with its environment. Although it is that community of faith which is called “out of the world” (John 17:6), and whose source of life is “not of the world” (John 17:16), nevertheless it lives out its destiny “in the world” (John 17:11), and is sent “into the world” (John 17:18). Yet the faith has always had, in the words of Donald T. Rowlingson, “its own dynamic which absorbed and turned to its own genius the influences of its environment.” The problem today, in a world where the human longing for reconciliation and freedom is unquestionably widespread and deep, is to Christianize this authentic urge. It must be saved both from becoming a new idolatry by absolutizing the human natural desires and capacities for good will and freedom, and from becoming a delusive hope that will end in tragic disillusionment and despair.

The words reconcile and reconciliation are not frequent in the New Testament. The three Greek words so translated are used only thirteen times. The word itself, therefore, is not decisive in determining its meaning. Its meaning must be found in its associations in the passages where it is used. In these passages reconciliation is related to Christ’s reconciling act in “the cross” (Eph. 2:16); to “the blood of his cross” (Col. 1:20); to “his death” (Col. 1:22); to “the death of [God’s] Son” (Rom. 5:10); to the fact of God’s “not counting their trespasses against [men]” (2 Cor. 5:19); and to God’s making Christ “to be sin who knew no sin” (2 Cor. 5:21). In the New Testament, reconciliation seems always to be closely related to atonement or redemption. The subjective personal quality of the human experience of reconciliation, therefore, is associated with the objective act of God in Christ, which suggests that the reconciliation of sinful man with a holy God involves more than may be seen in the reconciliation of estranged human beings with each other.

Furthermore, the passages in which reconciliation appears suggest that although it is ultimately a mutual thing, the mutuality is an outgrowth of an act of God that has no mutuality about it. Those who were “separated,” “alienated,” “strangers,” “having no hope and without God in the world,” were “reconciled” in “the blood of Christ” (Eph. 2:12 ff.), “in his body of flesh by his death” (Col. 1:22); man may receive the effects of this historic act, but he did not participate in it, nor did he contribute anything to it. It is “God, who through Christ reconciled us to himself” (2 Cor. 5:18). It is “by his death we are now put right with God” (Rom. 5:9a, Good News for Modern Man). Reconciliation is even spoken of as that which we have “received” (Rom. 5:11), which suggests it is the prior work of God on our behalf that comes to us solely as a gift.

Very effective and attractive attempts have been made to negate this. It is argued that the word reconciliation should be interpreted solely in terms of its “richly human core.” It represents, says one writer, “a perennially moving and a very human occurrence: that of two alienated persons finding each other again, opening their hearts to each other again, and sharing each other’s confidence again, after a period of alienation and reproach or even bitterness and incrimination” (Amos N. Wilder, “Reconciliation—New Testament Scholarship and Confessional Differences,” Interpretation, April, 1965, p. 209). This writer suggests it is “at this secular human level of experience” that we should seek to test “the adequacy of our … dogmatic formulations.”

But how can we avoid facing the fact that whatever is entailed in the reconciliation of estranged human beings, both of whom stand on the same level as sinners, it is something other than the reconciliation of sinful man with a holy God? Does not what Paul hinted at when he said that there was no human parallel by which to illustrate the love of God, because “God shows his love for us in that while we were yet sinners Christ died for us” (Rom. 5:8), suggest that in dealing with the New Testament view of reconciliation, we cannot really illustrate it from human experience? Since the alienation of man from God is “more bitter than anything that man can feel against man,” because it involves such hate “as only holiness can produce,” so God’s gift of reconciliation “is so great a miracle that it is strange, remote, and alien to our natural ways of thinking and feeling” (P. T. Forsyth, The Work of Christ, p. 28).

Another attempt to sever the relation between reconciliation and atonement is very old but has recently been resurrected by a responsible theologian. This writer refers to the parable of the prodigal, “who finds the father willing to receive him, though there is no special machinery to make possible a reconciliation.… No historical event changes God’s attitude, or makes Him from a wrathful God into a gracious God, or allows His reconciling work to get started—such thoughts are utterly to be rejected” (John Macquarrie, Principles of Christian Theology, p. 283).

One is surprised to read this as recently as 1966, when as early as 1909 P. T. Forsyth, at least in my judgment, successfully slayed the ghost of this argument. He wrote: “If that were so the wonder … is, first, that the apostles never seem to have used it; and, second, that having delivered this parable Christ did not at once consider His mission discharged and return to heaven. Or, on the other hand, why did He not continue to live to a ripe and useful age, reiterating in various forms and in different settings this waiting (but inert) love and grace of God?” (The Work of Christ, p. 106). If “reconciliation is not a separate … activity of God but is present in all his activity,” then the Cross would hardly be necessary to effect reconciliation; it merely “brings to light in a signal way” the hidden mystery of God’s love (Macquarrie, Principles of Christian Theology, p. 283). The Cross, then, would he revelatory but not redemptive, informative rather than atoning.

Even in the setting of this parable in Luke’s Gospel it is difficult to subject it to such a reductionist status. Luke explicitly points out at 9:51 that Jesus had “set his face to go to Jerusalem.” This motive is not biographical nor chronological, for the longest section of the Gospel, the so-called Travel Document, intervenes before he arrives at Jerusalem. This is Luke’s way of saving the parable of the prodigal son, and all the other parables in the long central section of his Gospel, from being misinterpreted as a mere “bringing to light” of the heretofore hidden mystery of God’s love. It was what Jesus was to “accomplish” (Luke 9:31) at Jerusalem that gives the parable its meaning. It is the decisive act of the Cross that makes it possible for prodigals to come home. If the parable embodies all we need to know about God’s relation to sinners, then the Gospel is truncated indeed, for this parable does not even suggest that God is seeking sinners. He simply sits at home until they come to themselves and return! This will hardly do. As Forsyth saw so clearly, the parable of the prodigal son has one point and one only—namely, the “centrality, the completeness, the unreservedness, freeness, fullness, wholeheartedness of God’s grace”; it says nothing about “the method of its action” (The Work of Christ, p. 107; italics mine). Nor should it, for “the time was not full during Christ’s life for preaching an atonement that life could never make” (p. 108).

Furthermore, there is no doctrine of the Holy Spirit in the parable of the prodigal son. Are we, therefore, to conclude that prodigal “came to himself” on his own? Even on the basis of empirical observation, it would seem that neither individuals, nor groups, nor nations, nor the world ever “come to themselves” by themselves. The same inner disposition that drives the prodigal from home would keep him away from home forever, were it not for the activity of the living Spirit of him who came “to seek and to save the lost” (Luke 19:10). It is only as the Holy Spirit enables us to come to ourselves, and opens our hearts to the mediatorial work of Christ in our behalf, that we are at all disposed to seek and accept a reconciliation with God.

Also, anyone who knows in the slightest the plague of his own heart knows that even if he came to himself, his very return to a holy God would be his undoing. The whole history of priestly mediation, in spite of its attendant evils, witnesses to this. As Edwin Lewis put it, we cannot deal with reconciliation without reckoning with “the eternal immutabilities in respect of the necessary divine judgment on sin” (“Creator and Creature,” Interpretation, April, 1950, p. 154). “… The creature cannot stand before his Creator in his own right other than as a creature, and as a creature he cannot but know ‘dread’.… Mediation, for all its sad history, is implicit in the God-man relationship” (p. 147).

A doctor once said to me, “I work with sin every day, but I do not have to deal with it.” This, in my judgment, was a theologically sound distinction. God not only has to work with our sin; he must deal with it before there can be any real reconciliation between him and us. And by the very nature of our sin, we cannot assist him in dealing with it. He must do this himself. When Peter wanted to contribute his part to his Lord’s work, Jesus could only say: “Where I am going you cannot follow me now; but you shall follow afterward” (John 13:36). Jesus had to do his work in our behalf alone; then a reconciliation would be possible that would enable the disciple to “share his sufferings” (Phil. 3:10). James Denney was not far from the mark when he wrote: “A finished work of Christ and an objective atonement … are synonymous terms; … unless we can preach a finished work of Christ in relation to sin, a … reconciliation or peace which has been achieved independently of us, … we have no real gospel for sinful men at all” (The Death of Christ, p. 105).

God achieves reconciliation not as an arbitrator or an umpire in disputes, nor as a diplomat or negotiator who seeks to bring an agreement among competing interests. He is reconciler solely as redeemer through his Son. The distinctive role of the Church in being a reconciling community, then, is to confront men with the “good news” that God has already “broken down the dividing wall of hostility” between men, bringing their mutual hostility to an end “through the cross” (Eph. 2:12–16). It is to remind men that they may be truly reconciled to each other only as they are first reconciled “to God” (Eph. 2:16). It is to invite men to respond in faith to the fact that “he is our peace,” because “through him we both have access in one Spirit to the Father,” so that we may become “fellow citizens with the saints and members of the household of God” (Eph. 2:14–22). The role of the Church is not merely to try to reconcile men as citizens of this world, but to summon them into God’s new order created in Christ, whereby they may be “rescued … from the power of darkness and brought … safe into the kingdom of his dear Son, by whom we are set free and our sins are forgiven” (Col. 1:13, 14, Good News for Modern Man).

This last passage, with its reference to freedom, leads quite naturally into a look at the New Testament view of freedom, for here freedom is set in the framework of God’s redemptive work in Christ in the forgiveness of sins; indeed, freedom is here synonymous with “the forgiveness of sins.” As we shall see more in detail later, however much the New Testament doctrine of freedom may have implications for man’s social, economic, and political existence, these implications must be worked out by Christian ethicists against the background of the deeper theological dimension—that of man’s true predicament, which robs him of his freedom, and of God’s act in Christ, which restores to man his true humanity. It is necessary to stress this at present, inasmuch as the Church seems to be in danger here, as elsewhere, of losing its distinctive role in society and becoming just another agency for human betterment. There is, of course, nothing wrong with being an agency for human betterment, and woe betide the Church when it is not that. But a far greater woe on it if it becomes only that! For then it is joining in an exercise in futility, in poulticing the surface manifestations of a deep infection, rather than dealing radically with man’s real need.

If the Church is to remain the Church, and in a genuine sense to be “for the world,” it may have to do so by quite consciously resisting the world at this point. The world’s call to the Church to join in its emancipation may, in the form in which it now comes, be the call refused by Jesus in his temptation, and the call of the reviling thief on the cross whose demand that Jesus solve his problem at the superficial level of release from his political bondage was answered with silence. The Church may also have to resist those within its own fellowship who seem to deal with the problem of freedom in terms that do not plumb the depths of the New Testament faith.

An example of what I mean by resisting the world in an effort to be for the world may be seen in a moving letter that came from a Czechoslovakian in the midst of that country’s crisis. In an appeal for world understanding of the true situation within that forlorn country, one of her ablest philosophers, who had sincerely worked hard to give to socialism a “very human countenance,” even in the face of the catastrophe still insisted that humanism is “the sum of all spiritual and moral values.” “There is no other generally acceptable program for humanity than the program of humanistic socialism with regard for national differences,” he said. He ended his poignant appeal to the Russians: “Learn at home how to live communistically, and that means to open up all the values and depths of human life and life together for every human being.”

One seldom finds such courage and deep commitment to a worthy goal. Christians can most certainly join with him in sympathy for his country’s need, in hope for its liberation, in admiration for his goals, and in penitence that we do not seem to be as committed to our faith as he is to his. But can all that is here hoped for come from “humanism”? We as Christians shall still have to believe what Dr. John Mackay said a few ago in another Communist country: “Jesus Christ and not Karl Marx will have the last word in history.… Marxism, with however much realism and concern it faces the problem of the world’s disinherited masses, has no answer for the ultimate striving of the human spirit. That striving, for which Christianity does have an answer, is man’s hunger for spiritual freedom and the eternal God” (“Cuba Revisited,” The Christian Century, February 12, 1964).

The challenge from within the Church to divert it from its true task in giving men freedom is made very clear in an article in which a churchman suggests that it will not be long until theological seminary training will be shortened to about an eighteen-month grooming of a sort of sociological task force, that knowledge and awareness of God’s presence will be a thing of the past, that there will be little, if any, stress on belief in Jesus as divine Lord and Saviour, that sermons will make little mention of God, Jesus Christ, the Bible, the Holy Spirit, or the Church, and that belief in prayer, the Scriptures, and the preaching of the Word will be all but extinct (“Pinpointing the Issue—The Ministry for the ’70’s,” Trends, September, 1968). If this happens, the Church will be powerless to give men true freedom.

Whether such views be propounded in the name of communism or of pseudo-Christianity or any other “ism,” they do not reckon with the deep sickness of human nature; they do not realistically assess the true human predicament. I have no quarrel, of course, with a Christian “humanism” that places the Christian on the side of true human values. Nor, for that matter, do I quarrel with a non-Christian humanism insofar as its aims are concerned. What I do stumble over, however, is the theory that humanistic goals may be ultimately achieved by forces generated purely within man. Essential humanism is man’s rebellion against and alienation from God. This is man’s slavery. How can that which produced man’s slavery set him free from it?

In the first chapter of Romans Paul analyzes the human predicament and finds it arises from three roots: man’s refusal to acknowledge God as God, leading to a failure to render him gratitude, and issuing in a trust in man’s own wisdom. This Paul sees as the negation of man’s humanity. All man’s efforts to possess a self-contained freedom, to find the meaning of life by his own wisdom, to build a worthy human society without God, are self-defeating, for they are a denial of man’s essential nature.

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