Misplaced Emphasis

Review and Herald Publishing Association · Takoma Park Station, Washington, D. C. · Aug 14, 1913

Misplaced Emphasis

UNDER this head the Northwestern Christian Advocate of July 16, 1913, gives expression to the following sensible remarks regarding the present tendency to drift away from the fundamental principles and simplicity of the gospel:—

The tendency of the age is to put a lessened emphasis upon Jesus Christ as the only efficient Saviour from sin, as the one sure and indispensable source of moral victory in every conflict with evil. So much attention has been placed upon certain helpful agencies in moral reform, such as temperance, sanitation, hygiene, pure air, athletics, playgrounds, eugenics, legislation, political reform, social uplift plans, child training, etc., that religion is lost sight of. It does not have that conspicuous place that it ought to have, and the subtle feeling is creeping in that it is not quite so necessary as men imagined. Heredity and environment properly conserved are very good substitutes for conversion.

The drift is away from the central to the outlying themes of the Bible, in sermons, in books, and religious journalism. Our camp-meetings are coming to be places devoted to entertainment and intellectual discussions rather than to the old-time struggle to save sinners. Semi-religious sermons, the themes of which lead the people to believe that religion is only remotely treated, are those we see advertised in the daily press. There is danger that the cultural in our Sunday-school work may be so pushed to the front as to occupy the minds of teachers and workers to the exclusion of the salvation part.

So on every hand Jesus Christ is obscured by the growths he has promoted. The inmost cry of hungry hearts, “We would see Jesus,” is not met in any broad and capacious way. People are shown where he has been rather than where he is; what he has done rather than what he is doing. Sin is a derangement to be cured by change of circumstances rather than a malignant growth that must be removed by the surgeon’s knife. The doctor has gone, and his office is filled with nurses.

The mind of the minister is so apt to be crowded with plans, schemes, and methods of social reform, the books and papers he reads are so crammed with near-religious themes, that the great facts of sin and of Christ are overlaid in his consciousness, and have not their legitimate commanding positions in his ministrations.

The freedom and feeling with which people once spoke of their religious experience and of their comfort and triumph in Christ have given way to entire loss of testimony, to brief and stereotyped forms of expression that ring of emptiness and insincerity, or to little preachments that present Christ rather as a valued acquaintance than an indwelling Saviour, and our prayer and social meetings have lost the charm and power they once had.

We would not decry the great importance of many of these things, genuine fruits of the gospel, that are moving so conspicuously in the forefront of religious thought; but we do lament the disproportionate emphasis that is placed upon them as compared with Christ crucified. We regret to see them usurping the place that Christ ought to occupy. The vitality will die out of the moral advance of the race, if Christ is neglected or forgotten. In him all fullness dwells, and without him was not anything made that hath been made, or will be made, or will endure.

Let him fill our private devotional hours; let us be supremely conscious of him in pulpit, in pew, and in choir; let him speak to us out of the words of Holy Writ; let him be with us in the Sunday-school hour; let him shine out of our faces, ring sweetly in our voices, and glow in our human touch as we walk along life’s highway, and we shall find that the old gospel has lost none of its attractiveness and power.