Journal: Grace Journal
Volume: GJ 04:1 (Winter 1963)
Article: General Review: Events Viewed in the Light of God’s Word
Author: Herman A. Hoyt

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GJ 4:1 (Wtr 63) p. 44

General Review:
Events Viewed in the Light of God’s Word

Herman A. Hoyt

President, Grace Theological Seminary

This is a period of peril in the history of the world. All civilization is being threatened. Never before in its history has anything been known on such colossal proportions. It is impossible to glance anywhere at the communications of men without recognizing that men are more or less aware of the gigantic dimensions of this moving avalanche of destruction. Some word of comment concerning world affairs appears in almost every telecast, broadcast, newspaper, magazine, sermon, or address, religious or secular. Some comments aim at diagnosis, others at solution, and yet others at removing the gloom and despair. But one cannot help but detect confusion in most of them. Men are groping in darkness in their attempts to grasp the meaning of the total picture. And this is just as true of men who stand high in position in the intellectual and political levels of the world as it is of men who belong to the lesser known classes.

Arnold J. Toynbee, eminent British historian, in a recent volume from his pen, America and the World Revolution and Other Lectures, comments on current world affairs. From the viewpoint of a historian and prophet, he offers another and more complete analysis of the present discontents, along with possible solutions, and prophetic forecasts. According to Toynbee, the American Revolution initiated a world movement for human rights. But now America is a counter-revolutionary power hostile to revolution such as that demonstrated among Bolsheviks because Communism threatens the wealth of this land. The place of idealism once occupied by the United States is now the position of the Soviet Union. Forsaking materialism is the only way America can rejoin the noble revolution she once spearheaded. When Mr. Toynbee dares to suggest that Judaism and Christianity are the parent religion for Communism in its crusades for social justice it is apparent that he too is confused theologically and historically.

With clear perception, Mr. Toynbee does predict the awful possibility of atomic genocide, from which ultimate peril not even the Soviet Union, the United States of America, or Christianity as it exists today can deliver us. Having eliminated the above sources for solution, this brilliant historian and philosopher suggests that the last best hope lies in a new world-state such as those that rescued past civilizations from destruction. He recognizes what others are seeing with equal clarity that nuclear war may start “at any moment by accident, miscalculation, or madness” as declared by President Kennedy to the United Nations in 1961, and dramatized by the recent Cuban crisis. For this reason every effort should be expended to dis...

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