Journal: Bibliotheca Sacra
Volume: BSAC 100:399 (Jul 1943)
Article: The Need for a Vigorous Apologetic in the Present Battle for the Christian Faith: Part 1
Author: Wilbur M. Smith

BSac 100:399 (Jul 43) p. 407

The Need for a Vigorous Apologetic in the Present Battle for the Christian Faith:
Part 1

Wilbur M. Smith

[Editor’s Note: The Centennial Celebration of Bibliotheca Sacra was held in connection with the annual commencement exercises of Dallas Theological Seminary, May 10, 1943. At this time Dr. Smith gave the address which is reproduced here in condensed form. A revised and enlarged form of the Centennial Address will be published this summer in a brochure of about 25,000 words. It will not be possible to include Dr. Smith’s regular contribution on The Prophetic Literature of Colonial America with the present number of the quarterly, since the space is lacking. So the October-December Number must resume this serial, D.V.]

That evangelical Christianity is not only under a more terrific attack at the present time than probably at any period of history since the persecution of the first three centuries, but that it is steadily losing ground, is admitted by all students of contemporary religious tendencies, conservatives and modernists alike. The findings of the Madras Meeting on Evangelism, at the great International Missionary Council held at Tambaram, Madras, India, December, 1938, frankly stated that “There is more organized opposition to the Christian church than at any time within the past one hundred years. On a scale never before seen in the world, there is in Europe a concerted, organized attempt to secularize the minds of millions of Christian people. There is a real danger that if the work of the Church is not intensified, the adverse movement will become so strong as seriously to threaten the whole work of the Church in the world.... The Church must either make its impact upon the secular world of today and win it for Christ or the secular world will increasingly encroach upon the spiritual life of the Church.”1

BSac 100:399 (Jul 43) p. 408

Evangelical Christianity is retreating numerically, ecclesiastically, theologically. That there are fewer evangelical Christians in the world today than there were at the beginning of the twentieth century, due to whatever causes one may suggest-whether it be the persecution of the Church in Russia, the abandonment of the faith in Germany for the new German pagan religion, or the rise of unbelief and the indifference of the working classes, the fact remains that evangelical Christianity is numerically losing ground. The tragic decline in attendance in the Protestant churches of Western Christendom indisputably bears testimony to this fact.2 Dr. Adolf Keller, who probably knows the conditions and problems of the Christian Church of Europe better than any other one man, ...