Radicals for Truth
Radicals for Truth
n September of 1965, when I spoke at Wheaton College for
the Spiritual Emphasis Week, my message was "Speaking the
Historic Christian Position into the Twentieth Century." At that
time the youth rebellion, which began at Berkeley in the early
1960s, was underway. There were those at Wheaton, including
the student body president, who were called "rebels," and the
administration was having problems with them. However, it was
this radical group who understood my message that if Christianity is true, it touches all life, and that it is a radical voice in
the modern world. The rebels listened. And there were some of
them who turned around in their thinking.
We need a revolutionary message in the midst of today's relativistic thinking. By revolutionary, or radical, I mean standing against the all-pervasive form which the world spirit has taken in our day. This is the real meaning of radical.
God has given his answers in the Bible-the Bible that is true when it speaks of history and of the cosmos, as well as when it speaks of religious things. And it therefore gives truth concerning all reality. It thus sustains radical rebellion against the relativism and the syncretism which are the hallmark of our own day-whether that syncretism is expressed in secular or religious terminology, including evangelical terminology.
As we have now come to the famed year 1984, what we need in light of the accommodation about us is a generation of radicals for truth and for Christ. We need a young generation and others who will be willing to stand in loving confrontation, but real confrontation, in contrast to the mentality of constant accommodation with the current forms of the world spirit as they surround us today, and in contrast to the way in which so much of evangelicalism has developed the automatic mentality of accommodation at each successive point.
Evangelicalism has done many things for which we can be greatly thankful. But the mentality of accommodation is indeed a disaster. We should note, however, that in holding to the same Bible principles, there could come a time when we will have to lean against an opposite swing of the pendulum. In this fallen world, things constantly swing like a pendulum, from being wrong in one extreme way to being wrong in another extreme. The devil never gives us the luxury of fighting on only one front, and this will always be the case.
However, the problem of evangelical accommodation, in the years we have been considering, and especially at this crucial moment in history, is that the evangelical accommodation has constantly been in one direction-that is, to accommodate with whatever is in vogue with the form of the world spirit which is dominant today. It is this same world spirit which is destroying both church and society. Balance must be considered constantly. But the accommodation we have been speaking of has constantly taken the form of giving in to the humanistic, secular consensus which is the dominant destructive force of our day. And if no change in this comes, our opportunity will be past. Not only will the compromising portion of evangelicalism go down in collapse, all of us will be carried down with it.
We cannot think that all of this is unrelated to us. It will all come crashing down unless you and I and each one of us who loves the Lord and his church are willing to act. And so I challenge you. I call for Christian radicals, and especially young Christian 'radicals, to stand up in loving confrontation, but confrontation-looking to the living Christ moment by moment for strength-in loving confrontation with all that is wrong and destructive in the church, our culture, and the state.
If there is not loving confrontation, but courageous confrontation, and if we do not have the courage to draw lines even when we wish we did not have to, then history will look back at this time as the time when certain "evangelical colleges" went the way of Harvard and Yale, when certain "evangelical seminaries" went the way of Union Seminary in New York, and the time when other "evangelical organizations" were lost to Christ's cause-forever.