The New Evangelism

Many secular theologies seem to be unrealistic about the rich complexity of existence, ending with an outlook upon the world that simplifies issues to the point of insipidity. This has implications for evangelism. Let me illustrate.

In his book Secular Christianity Ronald Gregor Smith speaks of faith as “the very means of true secularity.” He writes:

Faith is not concerned to proselytize. It cannot proselytize, because it carries no equipment, and peddles no wares, which it may offer to the passerby. Its only way is to carry in the body, that is, in the historical existence in the world which it both maintains and endures, the marks of Jesus. But these are not the sacred stigmata of the kind the crowd longs to see and touch. They are the marks of absolute openness, which is absolutely engaged with the historical possibilities of the hour.… The End in Christ is here and now in our present history only in the form of Faith’s openness to the future [Collins, 1966, p. 200].

Now, such a statement leaves me puzzled. I am puzzled by its combination of assurance and vagueness, of willingness to lay down hard-and-fast laws and unwillingness to explain these laws.

Faith will not proselytize (Smith is certain) because it has no wares to peddle. Now, if he means that Christians ought not to haggle in the secular marketplace in secular terms, then I am with him. Christians ought not to ask people to be converted in order to lose their neuroses, gain self-confidence, make friends, or get places. Yet I cannot forget that the fifty-fifth chapter of Isaiah pictures God himself as a peddler crying his wares—wares he alone has to offer; or that Jesus lost no time telling the woman at Jacob’s well that he had wares to give to her (John 4:10). So Smith’s new commandment, “Thou shalt not proselytize,” does not seem to me to weigh very solidly over against the command Jesus made to his followers to “make disciples of all nations” (Matt. 28:19).

Similarly, Smith is very certain that life in Christ is fully exhausted by an attitude of “openness to the future.” Now, the more often I meet this phrase—and I meet it almost every time I open a recent religious book or periodical—the less it conveys to me. Surely, like “accepting the universe,” being “open to the future” is something no one can really avoid, and about which he has little choice. Being closed to the future is really impossible, because the future does not lend itself to manipulation. Even suicide, as Hamlet once said rather well, leaves the future decidedly open. Smith recommends absolute openness. This, surely, is to recommend idolatry. Nothing can be absolute for a Christian except the will of God, which is in itself absolutely “good and acceptable and perfect” (Rom. 12:2). Once, hearing the phrase “Art for Art’s sake,” a wit asked, “What is this Art that it should have a sake?” I would ask, in the same vein, “What is this Future that it should demand of me absolute openness?” The future, like everything else in this created universe, depends absolutely upon God and is in his hands. (That is why Bonhoeffer, incidentally, believed that living from day to day in this world is our education in faith. Just because we do not order our future in advance, therefore we must throw ourselves unreservedly into the arms of God, committing each hour, as it comes, to him.)

Smith has learned, from some unacknowledged source, that the marks of Jesus are the marks of absolute openness to the future. Although he forbids Christians to proselytize, he seeks to make us proselytes to this dogma. If he means by this “absolute openness” absolute obedience to the Father’s will—the active and passive obedience perfectly given by Jesus of which the old dogmatic theologians spoke—then one would not disagree. Nevertheless, it cannot be simply “the future” that receives such openness; it must be the future under God. There is a pagan openness to the future that puts life under the control of Fate and Fortune, and there is a vitalistic openness that sees history as an unfolding of the world-soul or the emergent evolutionary Principle. Moreover, the claim that such openness is the sole embodiment of the marks of Jesus, or that the End of Christ is present only in this, has little support in biblical evidence. The living Christ lays his hand upon the whole of history, past, present, and future. He is the same yesterday, today, and forever (Heb. 13:8).

The Christian awaits the future confidently because, whatever it brings, it cannot separate him from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus (Rom. 8:38, 39). He is enabled to do this because he is also able to confess, “God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself” (2 Cor. 5:19). His openness to the future is based on his being committed to a belief about what God has done in the past. The marks of Jesus carried in the body of his Church are the marks of the One who was obedient and the One who has laid upon his body, the Church, obedience to him, its Head. That obedience includes readiness to confess the faith by which the body lives: “There is salvation in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given among men by which we must be saved” (Acts 4:12).

The paragraph from Gregor Smith’s Secular Christianity brings us, I believe, to the heart of much that goes under the heading “the new evangelism.” Today a theology of the secular is certainly needed to inform and direct evangelistic effort in our secularized world. But a secularizing theology—that is, theology that treats the secular as though it were sacred, or as though the process of history were itself the source of revelation—this theology can only mislead the Christian concerning his proper stance in relation to the world. It will lead him to be silent where he ought to speak, and to be confident about issues where he ought to advance only in fear and trembling.

Writing in 1965, Gregor Smith shied away from all “specific blueprints” for Christian action in society. He declared: “We cannot define any concerted action which could claim to be the manifest Christian course of action” (p. 204). But, since he wrote, the cause of “revolutionary theology” has been taken up with enthusiasm in many quarters. We are widely urged to discover “what God is doing in the world,” and to be “God’s vanguard” in initiating “social change.”

Carl Braaten, writing just recently, asserts that two themes stand out for him: the theme of the future and the theme of revolution. Together they show where Christians can act in freedom and unity. He explains:

The church’s mission to the world is to keep it from getting bogged down in the present.… When the world is swallowed up by hopelessness or is bored by its stagnant present, the church can lift up public symbols of the future that generate new possibilities in the present. The church is needed as the voice of prophecy in the world to regenerate the social and political images that inspire the world to change for the better. The church cannot limit its mission in history to salvaging individuals from a meaningless world; it works not only in history but for history, not only in culture but for culture, not only for persons but for communities, not only in the present but toward the ultimate future [Projections, Doubleday, 1970, “American Historical Experience and Christian Reflection,” p. 107].

Yes, the Church of Jesus Christ is needed in the world; were it not, Jesus would not have founded it, loved it, and given himself for it (Eph. 5:25). But the reason the Church is needed is surely not that the world is apt to get into a rut and needs a little inspiration to get on with the job of building the future. The task for Christians cannot be to act as cheerleaders crying, “On world, on world, on! Change! Change for the Better!” This is really only old-type individualistic self-help and peace-of-mind religion turned inside out. Yesterday we were being told, “Unlock your faith-power. Turn inferiority feelings into creative energy.” Today the message is, “Regenerate the public symbols of hope for the future. Work for genuine community, culture, and a happy tomorrow.”

The Gospel is more than individual. It is also more than social. The first error is the mirror-image of the second, and neither will do very much to heal the real and deep wounds of the world.

The tragedy of the conversion-to-world approach is that, instead of letting the light of Christ shine upon the world’s dark places, it follows the world’s definition of light and promises to get more of that. More than thirty years ago Karl Barth noted that Christianity had become the cultural religion of Western man to the extent that it thought itself most Christian when it was most slavishly echoing cultural trends. Medieval Christendom was a sacral society, said Barth, and so it preached the salvation of souls through the ecclesiastical institutions of that society. The modern world became secular and activist. The traditional churches seemed pale remnants of the old order. So Christians suddenly discovered how, in Barth’s words, “the Church or Christianity might be a useful and usable force for education and order in the service of the new secular glory of Western man” (Church Dogmatics, 1/2, p. 335). “It accepted modern man with his energetic attitude to himself, asking how best Christianity could be commended to that man. It took up the role allotted to it, and was at pains to make itself indispensable to it … pointing out how the doctrine of Jesus Christ … has the secret power of giving to men the inward capacity to seek and obtain the aims and purposes which he has independently chosen” (p. 336).

Not much has changed since Barth wrote those words, except the fashion in slogans. Now, instead of “a useful and usable force for education and order,” we are hearing Christianity recommended as “a revolutionary force to instigate social change.” Energetic Western man is flattered by being called “co-creator” with God, “the steersman of the cosmos,” and is asked to spare time to look at Christianity now that it is “action-oriented.”

Now, it would be foolish as well as ungrateful to pretend that nothing positive has been achieved by the new emphasis upon the social dimension of faith that has stemmed from the secular theologies of the sixties. Anything that stirs us up and prevents us from settling down “at ease in Zion” does us a great deal of good. The determination to be doers of the word and not hearers only was a healthy reaction to the sometimes self-satisfied religiosity of the fifties, when at times religion seemed to fit all too easily into the pattern of the North American way of life. As Christians we believe that God’s providential guidance is constant. In the revival of understanding of the corporate dimension of salvation in the Bible; in the reaction against cheap grace and the churches’ over-preoccupation with internal housekeeping; in the compassion for the underprivileged and the vulnerable in our inequitable society, a compassion that could not stop short of active engagement—in all these things, we may believe that God was leading our age, and still is.

But God’s Providence is always twofold. It meets us in mercy—but also in judgment. When men transfer their belief from the Providence of God to the Process of History, they drop the judgment side, very largely if not altogether. This is the procedure I have been speaking about: the simplifying procedure that will not hold sacred and secular in tension but wants to reduce the one to the other, and on the way loses the complex truth about the world and the searching reality of the Gospel. Why are we so sure that it has been left to us to publish, at long last, the version of Christian faith that really “tells it like it is”—so sure that we can lay down the law about what religion “must be” if it is to win the future and not die? Why are we so ready to accuse previous generations of Christians of not seeing what we see, and of being those who killed the prophets—whereas, of course, our ears are open to the prophetic word today? Can it not be, just possibly, that it is not solely our faithfulness to the Gospel that makes us denounce the “hypocrisy” of earlier days? Could the desire to be on the popular side have something to do with it? No doubt there was recently “a suburban captivity of the churches,” which is still to some extent with us. But is it so very different for Christians to conform when conformity is respectable, and to commend revolutionary Christianity when talk of revolution is in vogue?

I notice that many religious books I open these days quote Karl Marx’s dictum about philosophers’ having explained the world, whereas our task is to change it. The time for words is over, so theologians are saying, and the time for action has begun. Yet all they are actually bringing us is a printed page, full of words. The oldest trick of the demogogue is to shout that he is a man of action, not of words—and then continue orating for two hours. Have Christians never acted before now? And will the substitution of the word “Christopraxis” for the word “theology,” as some suggest, really get us to love and serve our neighbor better? I personally have strong doubts whether it is the Holy Spirit that is leading so many Christian leaders to the conviction that their task is, at every opportunity, to join in vigorous denunciation of the status quo. If that is the prophetic voice needed in our time, the earth has never been so thickly populated by prophets.

Maybe the word that Christians might be injecting into the present scene is a word that, as Bonhoeffer suggested in his day, might sober us up from the intoxication of thinking that we ourselves, and not God, can restore to wholeness a fallen world ruled by death. Maybe they could point out, for instance, that socia’ change does not necessarily mean change for the better. Carl Braaten, having given the standard quotation from Marx, comments: “This is more in line with the Christian spirit that seeks the transformation of that which is, and looks upon the urge to conform to that which is as a manifestation of sin” (Projections, p. 107). He might have added, but does not, that “the body of death” which is the world denying Christ cannot change its nature by manifesting itself in some new form, and hoping that it will do so is equally a manifestation of sin.

Perhaps, too, Christians should sober up to the fact that the secular world, whether clinging to the status quo or bent on revolution, is not likely to be impressed by our pleading “Look at us, and notice how secular and revolutionary we are. We’re just like you.” Secularists, or any sensible non-Christians, are much more likely to be interested in just how and why we are different from our contemporaries. As it is, the outlook of the detached observer who looks at the Christian witness today may well be along the skeptical lines Gerald Sykes has recorded in his book The Cool Millennium. Sykes comments that the churches are trying to make up for their intellectual and moral bankruptcy by taking up popular social causes.

As I see it, the false belief that words are an alternative to action and the half-truth that thinking must be consciously action-oriented are the principal causes of the inadequacy of the “new evangelism.” The new emphasis trusts in “Christian presence” and in Christian service rather than in direct proclamation of the Gospel in words. There is need here of more thinking-through of a situation that calls for tough-mindedness as well as for tenderness of conscience.

The reaffirmation of the Servant Church in our day is something for which we must be profoundly grateful. We have much to learn, in our wrestling with day-to-day events, about the implementation of the servant role of every committed Christian in the ministry of Christ’s Church to a world given over to the worship of force and violence. But comparatively little attention is being given to the role of individual members in the Confessing Church. Yet this is, in its own way, equally important. Here the reaction against the institution of Christendom, and against a narrow pietism concentrating upon “winning souls,” has turned all too many away from attending to an area of faithfulness to the Christian Gospel that is absolutely essential to the wholeness of that Gospel.

The confusion, I believe, is a result of missing the vital connection between witness in word and witness in action, and the impossibility of reducing either to the other. Such a confusion is parallel to the confusion of the relation between the secular and the sacred.

Witness to the Gospel in word through the proclamation of the saving truth of Jesus Christ, his incarnation, atoning death, resurrection, intercession at the right hand of God, and coming again: this is the witness the Church is called upon to give continually, in season and out of season (1 Tim. 4:2). Now, the utterance of words is no proof of living faith in the one who preaches the Gospel of our salvation. Paul knew that, as well as anyone today (1 Cor. 9:27). I may say all the right (orthodox) words, and in my actions belie my words. That is a matter between God and myself, though, of course, like everything I do, it does not involve only me personally, since my hypocrisy may be a stumbling block to others and turn them away from the way of faith. Yet, the faultiness in the preacher gives him no excuse for failing to preach, or the Church would be condemned to dumbness until the end of history.

Nor is action, in itself, proof of faith. Popular worldly wisdom pronounces, “Actions speak louder than words.” And, generally speaking, they do. That is why the martyr is given that name: marturion, witness. His is the supreme witness in life, since he puts all he has to offer and counts it less than enough to give as his testimony of faith. We honor, of necessity, martyrs to faiths that we think to be mistaken or wicked, since it brings us face to face with the poverty of our own faith. Yet martyrdom does not prove the rightness of faith, or even the goodness of the martyr. Because we are human beings, who must seek to relate ourselves to the truth through words, we cannot escape the necessity for bringing words into relation with the one who has given his witness in life, asking: “Why did he die? And for what?” Jesus himself appealed to his actions as confirmation of his message (John 14:11). Yet he taught in words, and told his disciples to repeat those words. Those who rejected him (and today still reject him), rejected equally his words and his actions. Actions and words are not simply separable. Nor can actions replace words, or stand alone securely where words fail.

Were Christian faith merely a matter of words spoken, then Christianity would have faded out of history long ago. Yet the converse is equally true. Were Christian action self-authenticating in the absence of words, then evangelism through words recalling Jesus Christ, God with us in Galilee and Jerusalem, the Victim upon the Cross and the Victor ascending to Heaven—that would have been discovered to be superfluous, and the name of Christ Jesus (mere words, after all) would have disappeared from human memory.

No, Christian presence witnessing in life cannot be enough. The task of the Church is certainly to serve human life, to be secularly active in the secular sphere, to be in the world (as Jesus Christ was) in the form of a servant. But the task of proclaiming the Lamb of God that takes away the sins of the world, Christ crucified and risen, is an equally pressing obligation. And, since no one can claim without presumption to live the life in Christ to the measure of Christ himself, the proclamation in word is primary, in the order of life in the Church—just as, for the individual Christian before God, to be Christ’s true disciple is primary and his duty to proclaim the name of Christ and tell his story is secondary.

The victory that overcomes the world is our faith (1 John 5:4). Faith is lived in the world. In the world it must also be proclaimed.

SLEEPING STARS

“In Asia great

luminaries sleep

who shall rise

again on the last

day” huge & silent

stars burning beneath

the ancient Roman

stonework

their amazing brilliance

seald

in earthen shadow

turns inward

to the central

Light, whose shine

they are, in whom

they sleep

We too “sleep

in Ephesus”

& when the Sun rises

we too shall ascend

& live in

his light flinging brilliance

into brilliance, in

constellations of eternal

love

F. EUGENE WARREN

Kenneth Hamillton is professor of systematic theology at the University of Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada. He received the Th.D. from Emmanuel College, Victoria University, Toronto. He is the author of a dozen books, including “What’s New in Religion?” and “In Search of Contemporary Man.” This article is from an address given at the Canadian Congress on Evangelism.

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