Wherever Christians meet these days one word is sure to be heard constantly repeated” that word is revival. …
So strongly is the breeze blowing for revival that scarcely anyone appears to have the discernment or the courage to turn around and lean into the wind, even though the truth may easily lie in that direction. Religion has its vogues very much as do philosophy, politics, and women’s fashions. Historically the major world religions have had their periods of decline and recovery, and those recoveries are bluntly called revivals by the annalists.
Let us not forget that in some lands Islam is now enjoying a revival, and the latest report from Japan indicates that after a brief eclipse following World War II Shintoism is making a remarkable come-back….
A religion, even popular Christianity, could enjoy a boom altogether divorced from the transforming power of the Holy Spirit and so leave the church of the next generation worse off than it would have been if the boom had never occurred. I believe that the imperative need of the day is not simply revival, but a radical reformation that will go to the root of our moral and spiritual maladies and deal with causes rather than with consequences, with the disease rather than with symptoms.
It is my considered opinion that under the present circumstances we do not want revival at all. A widespread revival of the kind of Christianity we know today in America might prove to be a moral tragedy from which we would not recover in a hundred years.
Here are my reasons. A generation ago, as a reaction to Higher Criticism and its offspring, Modernism, there arose in Protestantism a powerful movement in defense of the historic Christian faith. This, for obvious reasons, came to be known as Fundamentalism. It was a more or less spontaneous movement without much organization, but its purpose, wherever it appeared, was the same: to stay ‘the rising tide of negation’ in Christian theology and to restate and defend the basic doctrines of the New Testament Christianity….
Falls Victim to Its Virtues
What is generally overlooked is that Fundamentalism, as it spread throughout the various denominations and nondenominational groups, fell victim to its own virtues. The Word died in the hands of its friends. … An unofficial hierarchy decided what Christians were to believe. Not the Scriptures, but what the scribe thought the Scriptures meant became the Christian creed. Christian colleges, seminaries, Bible institutes, Bible conferences, and popular Bible expositors all joined to promote the cult of textualism. The system of extreme dispensationalism which was devised relieved the Christian of repentance, obedience, and cross-carrying in any other than the most formal sense. Whole sections of the New Testament were taken from the church and disposed of after a rigid system of dividing the Word of truth.”
All this resulted in a religious mentality inimical to the true faith of Christ. … The basic doctrines of the Bible were there, but the climate was just not favorable to the sweet fruits of the Spirit.
The whole mood was different from that of the Early Church and of the great souls who suffered and sang and worshiped in the centuries past. The doctrines were sound but something vital was missing. The tree of correct doctrine was never allowed to blossom. The voice of the turtle [dove] was rarely heard in the land”…. Faith, a mighty, vitalizing doctrine in the mouths of the apostles, became in the mouth of the scribe another thing altogether and the power went from it. As the letter triumphed, the Spirit withdrew and textualism ruled supreme….
In the interest of accuracy, it should be said that this was a general condition only. Certainly, there were some even in those low times whose longing hearts were better theologians than their teachers were. These pressed on to fullness and power unknown to the rest. But they were not many and the odds were too great” they could not dispel the mist that hung over the land.
The error of textualism is not doctrinal. It is far more subtle than that and much more difficult to discover, but its effects are just as deadly. Not its theological beliefs are at fault, but its assumptions.
It assumes, for instance, that if we have the word for a thing we have the thing itself. If it is in the Bible, it is in us. If we have the doctrine, we have the experience. If something was true of Paul it is of necessity true of us because we accept Paul’s epistles as divinely inspired. The Bible tells us how to be saved, but textualism goes on to make it tell us that we are saved, something which in the very nature of things it cannot do. Assurance of individual salvation is thus no more than a logical conclusion drawn from doctrinal premises, and the resultant experience is wholly mental.
Revolt from Mental Tyranny
The human mind can endure textualism just so long before it seeds a way of escape. The result over the last twenty years has been a religious debauch hardly equaled since Israel worshipped the golden calf. Of us Bible Christians it may truthfully be said that we ‘sat down to eat and to drink, and rose up to play.’ The separating line between the Church and the world has been all but obliterated.
Aside from a few of the gross sins, the sins of the unregenerate world are now approved by a shocking number of professedly “born-again’ Christians and copied eagerly. Young Christians take as their models the rankest kind of worldlings and try to be as much like them as possible. Religious leaders have adopted the techniques of the advertisers; boasting, bating and shameless exaggerating are now carried on as a normal procedure in church work…..
The holy faith of our fathers has in many places been made a form of entertainment, and the appalling thing is that all this has been fed down to the masses from the top.
That note of protest which began with the New Testament and which was always heard loudest went the Church was most powerful has been successfully silenced. The radical element in testimony and life that once made Christians hated by the world is missing from present-day evangelism.
Christians were once revolutionists– moral, not political — but we have lost our revolutionary character. It is no longer either dangerous or costly to be a Christian….. We are busy these days proving to the world that they can have all the benefits of the Gospel without any of the inconvenience to their customary way of life. It’s ‘all this and heaven too.’…
For this reason, it is useless for… believers to spend long hours begging God to send revival. Unless we intend to reform, we may as well not pray. Unless praying men have the insight and faith to amend their whole way of life to conform to the New Testament patterns, there can be no true revival.
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