Never in the history of the international missionary movement has any world conference gathered around a topic more central than the one chosen by the World Council of Churches’ Commission on World Mission and Evangelism for its second General Assembly. At this gathering in Bangkok December 29 to January 8, the theme is to be “Salvation Today.”

When this topic was announced at Uppsala in 1968, many evangelicals inside the ecumenical movement rejoiced. After the debacle of Section II in Uppsala, they had felt that what conservative brethren outside the concilar movement had been saying was becoming true: the CWME has lost its biblical concept of redemption and thereby betrayed its own constitution, adopted at New Delhi in 1961. Here its goal was said to be to ensure “the proclamation to the whole world of the Gospel of Jesus Christ to the end that all men may believe in Him and be saved.”

But now some people felt new hope. Could not the rallying around “Salvation Today” signalize a return to the true heart of Christian missions? Others, however, remained skeptical. Too often they had seen modernist theologians get hold of basic biblical themes and twist them to fit the slogans of contemporary humanist expectations. Everything, therefore, would depend on the approach in the theological preparation for the Bangkok theme.

The original idea in the minds of the Geneva staff members under the secretaryship of Thomas Wieser was to take a double approach. Exegetical scholars of various traditions would establish the biblical evidence. This would then be confronted by present-day documents of the human quest of salvation, and by testimonies of actual experiences of salvation. Thus the whole study project was to be built on two pillars: Scripture and the contemporary scene.

Evangelical observers could conclude already that this double approach meant an obvious deviation from the Reformation principle “sola scriptura”—not toward the former Catholic alternative of “Scripture and tradition” but toward Scripture and situation.

But it became evident to Thomas Wieser that this plan of approach would not work. The first pillar of the bridge could never be constructed. The exegetical consultants of the CWME, who except for Klaus Westermann in Heidelberg were never named, were unable to settle on one basic concept of the Bible’s teaching on salvation. Instead they produced a great variety of concepts, running parallel to, succeeding, or even contradicting one another.

This pointed up once again the basic problem of the ecumenical movement: the Bible is no longer seen as a solid standard of reference for theological work. Various modern methods used in exegetical work have created a hermeneutical crisis that has destroyed the indispensable conviction of both the unity and reliability of the Scriptures.

Meanwhile, the second pillar was growing beyond any reasonable proportion. Semantic observations, poetic expressions, comparative religion, and above all the mass of material on social-political concern already exhibited at Uppsala provided ample illustration of human yearning for a better world.

In March of this year the Geneva staff published a handsome volume with testimonies about what kind of salvation people of different backgrounds are dreaming about or impatiently demanding. Strangely enough, there was not a single testimony of an authentic experience of redemption in the evangelical sense. Instead we read the witness of a Chinese Communist who was saved by Mao, and the story of a Japanese Catholic priest who on the injunction of a supernatural vision saved his persecuted Christian fellow prisoners by denying his belief in Christ. Here, as at several other places in the preparatory material presented by the CWME, the new quest for salvation “relevant” to today’s needs revealed an openly anti-Christian tendency.

In September the Geneva office produced a second collection of study documents. It is a tiny brochure of twenty-five pages called “Biblical Perspectives on Salvation.” In it are twelve biblical texts of salvation and some interpretative notes. Some of the texts—e.g., Romans 3:23–26—do contain the highlights of the biblical message of God’s saving work through Jesus Christ.

The shock is to discover how the comments succeed in thoroughly forcing the present revolutionary ideology upon the texts. And none of the anonymous theologians who wrote the comments seems to have discovered that most of the Scripture passages cited either point toward or directly speak about that central soteriological event: the offer of peace with God, made available to sinful man through the atoning death of Jesus Christ.

The notes admit that the theme of justification by faith has become a major understanding of salvation since the Reformation, especially in the Lutheran Church. But the impact of this observation is immediately destroyed by what follows:

Today the concern for justice especially in the social and economic sense is very widespread and deep, and it would therefore be important to think out the relationship between the good news of justification of the sinner through faith in Jesus and the struggles for social and economic justice going on in different parts of the world. The emphasis on the fact that men are justified through the free gift of God’s grace has led some Christians to assume a passive attitude towards the concerns for human justice.
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Perhaps the very phrase “Salvation Today” suggests this deliberate estrangement from the Christian message. Can we discuss a salvation today that differs from salvation yesterday and tomorrow? It is true that the application of Christ’s saving work in man’s life happens in a variety of different situations. The individual experiences and external evidences may vary. But whatever the visible fruit of salvation might be, the core of that experience must be an encounter with the saving event of Jesus Christ’s death for us on the cross.

Here we evangelicals, too, ought to test our own evangelistic messages and methods. For example, it is all good if drug addicts are rescued from their suicidal practices. But this event does not bring about genuine salvation if its heart is not the atonement.

The evangelical answer to “Salvation Today” cannot be confined to criticizing the humanistic pseudo-answers. It will have to offer a convincing, biblically founded alternative. And it must be given now, before Bangkok, while the challenge is presented to us.

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