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HERE IS THE
BURDEN of my heart; and while I claim for myself no special inspiration I
yet feel that this is also the burden of the Spirit.
If I know my
own heart it is love alone that moves me to write this. What I write here
is not the sour ferment of a mind agitated by contentions with my fellow
Christians. There have been no such contentions. I have not been abused,
mistreated or attacked by anyone. Nor have these observations grown out of
any unpleasant experiences that I have had in my association with others.
My relations with my own church as well as with Christians of other
denominations have been friendly, courteous and pleasant. My grief is
simply the result of a condition which I believe to be almost universally
prevalent among the churches.
I think also
that I should acknowledge that I am myself very much involved in the
situation I here deplore. As Ezra in his mighty prayer of intercession
included himself among the wrongdoers, so do I. "0 my God, I am
ashamed and blush to lift up my face to thee, my God: for our iniquities
are increased over our head, and our trespass is grown up unto the
heavens." Any hard word spoken here against others must in simple
honesty return upon my own head. I too have been guilty. This is written
with the hope that we all may turn unto the Lord our God and sin no more
against Him.
Let me state
the cause of my burden. It is this: Jesus Christ has today almost no
authority at all among the groups that call themselves by His name. By
these I mean not the Roman Catholics nor the liberals, nor the various
quasi-Christian cults. I do mean Protestant churches generally, and I
include those that protest the loudest that they are in spiritual descent
from our Lord and His apostles, namely, the evangelicals.
It is a basic
doctrine of the New Testament that after His resurrection the Man Jesus was
declared by God to be both Lord and Christ, and that He was invested by the
Father with absolute Lordship over the church which is His Body. All
authority is His in heaven and in earth. In His own proper time He will
exert it to the full, but during this period in history He allows this
authority to be challenged or ignored. And just now it is being challenged
by the world and ignored by the church.
The present
position of Christ in the gospel churches may be likened to that of a king
in a limited, constitutional monarchy. The king (sometimes depersonalized
by the term "the Crown") is in such a country no more than a
traditional rallying point, a pleasant symbol of unity and loyalty much like
a flag or a national anthem. He is lauded, feted and supported, but his
real authority is small. Nominally he is head over all, but in every crisis
someone else makes the decisions. On formal occasions he appears in his
royal attire to deliver the tame, colorless speech put into his mouth by
the real rulers of the country. The whole thing may be no more than
good-natured make-believe, but it is rooted in antiquity, it is a lot of
fun and no one wants to give it up.
Among the
gospel churches Christ is now in fact little more than a beloved symbol.
"All Hail the Power of Jesus' Name" is the church's national
anthem and the cross is her official flag, but in the week-by-week services
of the church and the day-by-day conduct of her members someone else, not Christ,
makes the decisions. Under proper circumstances Christ is allowed to say
"Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy
laden"
or "Let not your heart be troubled," but when the speech is
finished someone else takes over. Those in actual authority decide the
moral standards of the church, as well as all objectives and all methods
employed to achieve them. Because of long and meticulous organization it is
now possible for the youngest pastor just out of seminary to have more
actual authority in a church than Jesus Christ has.
Not only does
Christ have little or no authority; His influence also is becoming less and
less. I would not say that He has none, only that it is small and
diminishing. A fair parallel would be the influence of Abraham Lincoln over
the American people. Honest Abe is still the idol of the country. The
likeness of his kind, rugged face, so homely that it is beautiful, appears
everywhere. It is easy to grow misty-eyed over him. Children are brought up
on stories of his love, his honesty and his humility.
But after we
have gotten control over our tender emotions what have we left? No more
than a good example which, as it recedes into the past, becomes more and
more unreal and exercises less and less real influence. Every scoundrel is
ready to wrap Lincoln's long black coat around him. In the cold light of
political facts in the United States the constant appeal to Lincoln by the
politicians is a cynical joke.
The Lordship
of Jesus is not quite forgotten among Christians, but it has been relegated
to the hymnal where all responsibility toward it may be comfortably
discharged in a glow of pleasant religious emotion. Or if it is taught as a
theory in the classroom it is rarely applied to practical living. The idea
that the Man Christ Jesus has absolute and final authority over the whole
church and over all of its members in every detail of their lives is simply
not now accepted as true by the rank and file of evangelical Christians.
What we do is
this: We accept the Christianity of our group as being identical with that
of Christ and His apostles. The beliefs, the practices, the ethics, the
activities of our group are equated with the Christianity of the New
Testament. Whatever the group thinks or says or does is scriptural, no
questions asked. It is assumed that all our Lord expects of us is that we
busy ourselves with the activities of the group. In so doing we are keeping
the commandments of Christ.
To avoid the
hard necessity of either obeying or rejecting the plain instructions of our
Lord in the New Testament we take refuge in a liberal interpretation of
them. Casuistry is not the possession of Roman Catholic theologians alone.
We evangelicals also know how to avoid the sharp point of obedience by
means of fine and intricate explanations. These are tailor-made for the
flesh. They excuse disobedience, comfort carnality and make the words of
Christ of none effect. And the essence of it all is that Christ simply
could not have meant what He said. His teachings are accepted even
theoretically only after they have been weakened by interpretation.
Yet Christ is
consulted by increasing numbers of persons with "problems" and
sought after by those who long for peace of mind. He is widely recommended
as a kind of spiritual psychiatrist with remarkable powers to straighten
people out. He is able to deliver them from their guilt complexes and to
help them to avoid serious psychic traumas by making a smooth and easy
adjustment to society and to their own ids. Of course this strange Christ
has no relation whatever to the Christ of the New Testament. The true
Christ is also Lord, but this accommodating Christ is little more than the
servant of the people.
But I suppose
I should offer some concrete proof to support my charge that Christ has
little or no authority today among the churches. Well, let me put a few
questions and let the answers be the evidence.
What church
board consults our Lord's words to decide matters under discussion? Let
anyone reading this who has had experience on a church board try to recall
the times or time when any board member read from the Scriptures to make a
point, or when any chairman suggested that the brethren should see what
instructions the Lord had for them on a particular question. Board meetings
are habitually opened with a formal prayer or "a season of
prayer"; after that the Head of the Church is respectfully silent
while the real rulers take over. Let anyone who denies this bring forth
evidence to refute it. I for one will be glad to hear it.
What Sunday
school committee goes to the Word for directions? Do not the members
invariably assume that they already know what they are supposed to do and
that their only problem is to find effective means to get it done? Plans,
rules, "operations" and new methodological techniques absorb all
their time and attention. The prayer before the meeting is for divine help
to carry out their plans. Apparently the idea that the Lord might have some
instructions for them never so much as enters their heads.
Who remembers
when a conference chairman brought his Bible to the table with him for the
purpose of using it? Minutes, regulations, rules of order, yes. The sacred
commandments of the Lord, no. An absolute dichotomy exists between the
devotional period and the business session. The first has no relation to
the second.
What foreign
mission board actually seeks to follow the guidance of the Lord as provided
by His Word and His Spirit? They all think they do, but what they do in
fact is to assume the scripturalness of their ends and then ask for help to
find ways to achieve them. They may pray all night for God to give success
to their enterprises, but Christ is desired as their helper, not as their
Lord. Human means are devised to achieve ends assumed to be divine. These
harden into policy, and thereafter the Lord doesn't even have a vote.
In the
conduct of our public worship where is the authority of Christ to be found?
The truth is that today the Lord rarely controls a service, and the
influence He exerts is very small. We sing of Him and preach about Him, but
He must not interfere; we worship our way, and it must be right because we
have always done it that way, as have the other churches in our group.
What
Christian when faced with a moral problem goes straight to the Sermon on
the Mount or other New Testament Scripture for the authoritative answer?
Who lets the words of Christ be final on giving, birth control, the
bringing up of a family, personal habits, tithing, entertainment, buying,
selling and other such important matters?
What
theological school, from the lowly Bible institute up, could continue to
operate if it were to make Christ Lord of its every policy? There may be
some, and I hope there are, but I believe I am right when I say that most
such schools" to stay in business are forced to adopt procedures which
find no justification in the Bible they profess to teach. So we have this
strange anomaly: the authority of Christ is ignored in order to maintain a
school to teach among other things the authority of Christ.
The causes
back of the decline in our Lord's authority are many. I name only two.
One is the
power of custom, precedent and tradition within the older religious groups.
These like gravitation affect every particle of religious practice within
the group, exerting a steady and constant pressure in one direction. Of
course that direction is toward conformity to the status quo. Not Christ
but custom is lord in this situation. And the same thing has passed over
(possibly to a slightly lesser degree) into the other groups such as the
full gospel tabernacles, the holiness churches, the pentecostal and
fundamental churches and the many independent and undenominational churches
found everywhere throughout the North American continent.
The second
cause is the revival of intellectualism among the evangelicals. This, if I
sense the situation correctly, is not so much a thirst for learning as a
desire for a reputation of being learned. Because of it good men who ought
to know better are being put in the position of collaborating with the
enemy. I'll explain.
Our
evangelical faith (which I believe to be the true faith of Christ and His
apostles) is being attacked these days from many different directions. In
the Western world the enemy has forsworn violence. He comes against us no
more with sword and fagot; he now comes smiling, bearing gifts. He raises
his eyes to heaven and swears that he too believes in the faith of our
fathers, but his real purpose is to destroy that faith, or at least to
modify it to such an extent that it is no longer the supernatural thing it
once was. He comes in the name of philosophy or psychology or anthropology,
and with sweet reasonableness urges us to rethink our historic position, to
be less rigid, more tolerant, more broadly understanding.
He speaks in
the sacred jargon of the schools, and many of our half-educated
evangelicals run to fawn on him. He tosses academic degrees to the
scrambling sons of the prophets as Rockefeller used to toss dimes to the
children of the peasants. The evangelicals who, with some justification,
have been accused of lacking true scholarship, now grab for these status
symbols with shining eyes, and when they get them they are scarcely able to
believe their eyes. They walk about in a kind of ecstatic unbelief, much as
the soloist of the neighborhood church choir might were she to be invited
to sing at La Scala.
For the true
Christian the one supreme test for the present soundness and ultimate worth
of everything religious must be the place our Lord occupies in it. Is He
Lord or symbol? Is He in charge of the project or merely one of the crew?
Does He decide things or only help to carry out the plans of others? All
religious activities, from the simplest act of an individual Christian to
the ponderous and expensive operations of a whole denomination, may be
proved by the answer to the question, Is Jesus Christ Lord in this act?
Whether our works prove to be wood, hay and stubble or gold and silver and precious
stones in that great day will depend upon the right answer to that
question.
What, then,
are we to do? Each one of us must decide, and there are at least three
possible choices. One is to rise up in shocked indignation and accuse me of
irresponsible reporting. Another is to nod general agreement with what is
written here but take comfort in the fact that there are exceptions and we
are among the exceptions. The other is to go down in meek humility and
confess that we have grieved the Spirit and dishonored our Lord in failing
to give Him the place His Father has given Him as Head and Lord of the
Church.
Either the
first or the second will but confirm the wrong. The third if carried out to
its conclusion can remove the curse. The decision lies with us.
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