p. 4 | The Inadequacy of the Sociological Gospel

Review and Herald Publishing Association · Takoma Park Station, Washington, D. C. · Mar 25, 1909

The Inadequacy of the Sociological Gospel

AMONG the many publications which come to our table, we are glad to find one occasionally which attempts to defend the original gospel as revealed in the Scriptures and taught by Christ and his disciples. Nearly all the religious and semireligious papers and magazines of the present day have adopted, to a greater or less degree, the evolutionary scheme as an explanation of both material and spiritual things, and are therefore led inevitably to such a modification of old-time views concerning the Bible and the gospel message as is practically equivalent to the substitution of human philosophy for revealed truth. It is therefore especially pleasing to find occasionally such paragraphs as the following, which we take from a recent issue of the Christian Herald:—

The cross of Christ has been very aptly called “the stumbling-block of the New Theology,” and the statement is literally true. These reconstructive theologians, while accepting Jesus as a great teacher and even as quasi-divine, insist that his philosophy—not his works, his miracles, or his sacrifice on Calvary—is what concerns us. What the human race needs, they tell us, is enlightenment to free men from the bondage of ages of superstition. They must lift themselves, en masse, up from the depths of ignorance. They are advised to attach no importance to the story of a race sunk in sin, the path to whose redemption has been opened by God’s plan of divine love and atonement. As to the message of inspiration, and the way of salvation, it is to such teachers what it was to the ancient Greeks—foolishness.

Such teaching confuses sociological and spiritual things. It is utterly incapable of reaching the heart and transforming the life. If Nicodemus had applied to some such adviser, he would never have learned of the new birth. It is simply a case of men who are themselves unfortunately still in spiritual darkness, yet who profess to enlighten others. The moment one of our new theologians takes hold by faith of the real gospel truth, that moment he will become emancipated, and will have his eyes opened to what the Christian religion really means. He will understand something of its tremendous power over the hearts and lives of men and women, and why people hold it as the most precious of their possessions, and are willing to suffer and even to die for it. Until we attain to the truth ourselves, it is impossible to convey it to others.

No one thing has contributed more to this confusion of sociological and spiritual things than the rejection of the doctrine of the personal second advent of Christ. The members of the early Christian church were taught to look to the return of Christ as the time for the establishment of his kingdom and the permanent cure of the evils of this present world, but the exploiters of the modern gospel are themselves attempting to establish the kingdom of Christ in this world by their own methods, depending upon evolution rather than upon the revelation of the Son of God in the clouds of heaven. The outcome will be a shock and a terrible disappointment.