6 An Open Window 73
As we turn to the evangelical leadership of this country in the last decades, unhappily, we must come to the conclusion that often it has not been much help. It has shown the mark of a platonic, overly spiritualized Christianity all too often. Spirituality to the evangelical leadership often has not included the Lordship of Christ over the whole spectrum of life. Spirituality has often been shut up to a very narrow area. And also very often, among many evangelicals, including evangelical leaders, it seems that the final end is to protect their own projects. I am not saying all, by any means, but all too often that has been the case. I am again asking the question, why have we let ourselves go so far down the road? And this is certainly one of the answers.
Now you must remember, this is a rather new phe nomenon. The old revivals are spoken about so warmly by the evangelical leadership. Yet they seem to have forgotten what those revivals were. Yes, the old revivals in Great Britain, in Scandinavia, and so on, and the old revivals in this country did call, without any question and with tremendous clarity, for personal salvation. But they also called for a resulting social action. Read the history of the old revivals. Every single one of them did this, and there can be no greater example than the great revivals of John Wesley (1703-1791) and George Whitefield (1714-1770).
Concerning Wesley, Howard A. Snyder says:
Migration to the cities had produced a new class of urban poor in Wesley's day. The Industrial Revolution was in full swing, fired by coal. When Wesley preached to the Kingswood colliers he was touching those most cruelly victimized by industrialization. Yet his response among the coal miners was phenomenal, and Wesley worked tirelessly for their spiritual and material welfare. Among other things, he opened free dispensaries, set up a kind of credit union, and established schools and orphanages. His ministry branched out to include lead miners, iron smelters, brass and copper workers, quarrymen, shipyard workers, farm laborers, prisoners and women industrial workers.
To all these people-the victims of society-Wesley offered the Good News of Jesus Christ. But he did more. He formed them into close-knit fellowships where they could be shepherded and where leaders could be developed, and he worked to reform the conditions under which they lived. His efforts went beyond welfare to include creative eco nomic alternatives. Through his pointed and prolific writings he agitated for major reforms. He was convinced that "the making an open stand against all the ungodliness and unrighteousness which overspreads our land as a flood, is one of the noblest ways of confessing Christ in the face of His enemies.i1
The Wesley and Whitefield revivals were tremendous in calling for individual salvation, and thousands upon thousands were saved. Yet even secular historians acknowledge that it was the social results coming out of the Wesley revival that saved England from its own form of the French Revolution. If it had not been for the Wesley revival and its social results, England would almost certainly have had its own "French Revolution." We should sound the names of some of our Christian predecessors with a cry of pride and thankfulness to God: Lord Shaftesbury (1801- 1855), who dared to stand for justice for the poor in the midst of the Industrial Revolution; William Wilberforce (1759-1833), who was the greatest single personal force in changing England from a slave-owning country to a country that turned away legally and totally from slavery long before the United States did. These men did not do these things incidentally, but because they saw it as a part of the Christian good news. God used those involved in the revivals to bring forth the results not only of individual salvation, but also social action.
Jeremy Rifkin, whom some of you will know as a leading counter-culture figure of the sixties, in 1980 wrote Entropy.' In this book he shows that he understands, far better than the evangelical leadership often has, that the old revivals resulted in social action. He quotes Pollution and the Death of Man-The Christian View of Ecology3 at length in the chapter he calls "The Second Reformation," pointing out that there is a different possibility for a Christian answer in regard to ecology. He really understands something, though not as a Christian (for he continues in his pantheistic framework). But he really comprehends that in the days of the revivals and today there are Christian answers for social action and answers in areas such as ecology. Christianity does have answers.
Now when we come nearer to home, Wheaton College stands out as a great name in evangelical circles. In the old days Oberlin College was known as a great Bible-believing college. But it is no longer; it is liberal. Happily Wheaton is not. But what most people do not realize is that Jonathan Blanchard (1811-1892), who was the founder and president of Wheaton College, and Charles Finney (1792-1875), who was the president of Oberlin College, were tremendously interested in the question of social action concerning slavery. They were two great voices in America calling out for social action, and both of them said something very firmly: If a law is wrong, you must disobey it. Both of them call, when it is necessary, for civil disobedience.
Finney in his book Systematic Theology on page 158 has a heading: "I propose now to make several remarks respecting forms of government, the right and duty of revolution." Do note his phrase "The right and duty of revolution." On page 162 he says: "There can scarcely be conceived a more abominable and fiendish maxim than `our country right or wrong.' " He then goes on to stress that not everything the government does is to be supported, and he includes the Mexican War and slavery. On page 157 he says: "Arbitrary legislation can never be really obligatory."4
And we must not forget that Jonathan Kaufman was right when he wrote in the Wall Street Journal: ". . . [it was the] Great Religious Awakening two and one half centuries ago that helped sow the seeds of the American Revolution...."5
Our evangelical leadership seems to have forgotten its heritage. When the book and film series Whatever Happened to the Human Race? came out we observed something very instructive. The call for a public stand against abortion, infanticide, euthanasia, and against the general eradication of the unique dignity and worth of all human beings was not widely accepted at first. Many of the evangelical leadership either were totally silent about abortion, or qualified what they did say about abortion to such an extent that they really said nothing, or less than nothing, as far as the battle for human life was concerned.
The seminars for Whatever Happened to the Human Race? were marvelous seminars certainly. My wife and I both agree we have never seen people go out of seminars or meetings so committed to action. People went out from those seminars and there was a change. Prior to that, to our shame, across the United States and Great Britain as well, there were very, very few evangelicals involved in the movement against abortion. We had left it to the Roman Catholics to such an extent that the battle for human life was being lost by the simple tactic of its being called "a Roman Catholic issue." After this project, happily, there were more evangelicals who saw the importance of the issue of human life and bringing the Lordship of Christ concerning law into this very important area.
But often the seminars were not well attended. We found that it was often because much of the evangelical leadership did not want to become involved. With some it was the prison of their platonic spirituality, and this, of course, makes them incapable of engaging in any such warfare. Franky Schaeffer V writes in Addicted to Mediocrity:
Either God is the Creator of the whole man, the whole universe, and all of reality and existence, or he is the Creator of none of it. If God is only the Creator of some divided platonic existence which leads to a tension between the body and the soul, the real world and the spiritual world, if God is only the Creator of some spiritual little experiential "praise the Lord" reality, then he is not much of a God. Indeed, he is not I AM at all. If our Christian lives are allowed to become something spiritual and religious as opposed to something real, daily applicable, understandable, beautiful, verifiable, balanced, sensible, and above all united, whole, if indeed our Christianity is allowed to become this waffling spiritual goo that nineteenth-century platonic Christianity became, then Christianity as truth disappears and instead we only have a system of vague experiential religious platitudes in its place. 6
With some it was their desire not to have their own projects disturbed. There were cases where some not only did not urge people to come, but where other meetings were planned which hindered people from coming. A very unhappy thing. No, the Christian lawyers, theologians, and educators, indeed, much of the evangelical establishment, certainly have not been in there blowing the trumpet loud and clear.
We must understand that the question of the dignity of human life is not something on the periphery of Judeo-Christian thinking, but almost in the center of it (though not the center because the center is the existence of God Himself). But the dignity of human life is unbreakably linked to the existence of the personal-infinite God. It is because there is a personalinfinite God who has made men and women in His own image that they have a unique dignity of life as human beings. Human life then is filled with dignity, and the state and humanistically oriented law have no right and no authority to take human life arbitrarily in the way that it is being taken.
We must see then that indeed the cry has not been given. We must see that here, on such a central issue as abortion, the true nature of the problem was not understood: Christians failed to see that abortion was really a symptom of the much larger problem and not just one bit and piece. And beyond this as the material-energy-chance humanistic world view takes over increasingly in our country, the view concerning the intrinsic value of human life will grow less and less, and the concept of compassion for which the country is in some sense known will be further gone.
A girl who has been working with the Somalian refugees has just been in our home and told us their story and shown us their pictures. One million-and especially little children-in agony, pain, and suffering! Can we help but cry? But forget it! In the United States we now kill by painful methods one and a half times that many each year by abortion. In Somalia it is war. But we kill in cold blood. The compassion our country has been known somewhat for is being undermined. And it is not only the babies who are being killed; it is humanness which the humanist world view is beating to death.
The people in the United States have lived under the Judeo-Christian consensus for so long that now we take it for granted. We seem to forget how completely unique what we have had is a result of the gospel. The gospel indeed is, "accept Christ, the Messiah, as Savior and have your guilt removed on the basis of His death." But the good news includes many resulting blessings. We have forgotten why we have a high view of life, and why we have a positive balance between form and freedom in government, and the fact that we have such tremendous freedoms without these freedoms leading to chaos. Most of all, we have forgotten that none of these is natural in the world. They are unique, based on the fact that the consensus was the biblical consensus. And these things will be even further lost if this other total view, the materialistic view, takes over more thoroughly. We can be certain that what we so carelessly take for granted will be lost.