Excerpt from The Biblical World, Vol. 49
Evangelizing The Inevitable
Men who take the gospel hopefully believe in an inevitable future. They do not believe that the world is coming to an end, but that it will continue. They see changes constantly impending, and with whatever wisdom they can assemble they undertake to bring the gospel to bear upon the forces that are making the changes.
They mean to evangelize the inevitable.
Christianity has never been effective when it has endeavored to evangelize forces which are reactionary. It has always centered around those persons by whom history is actually being made. The current of real history carried Paul away from Antioch and Ephesus and other cities that were soon to be only symbols of the past, and flung him across the sea into creative history at Rome. When Paul came to Rome, Christianity began to evangelize the inevitable.
So, too, Luther was caught up by the new forces which made modem Europe, and carried into these forces the gospel.
Every man who has been of religious significance in history has had an intuitive readiness to throw in his lot with the inevitable while it was in the making, and to leaven it with the gospel.
Our own day calls for similar evangelization. The church must win the loyalty of the men who are actually making tomorrow.
The current of the inevitable future does not run through the comfortable folk who want things to stand as they are because it is too bothersome or costly to make them better - the complacent householders who live where rents are moderate and living expenses are still susceptible to the manipulations of thrift.
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