Journal: Bibliotheca Sacra
Volume: BSAC 84:333 (Jan 1927)
Article: The Social Teachings Of Our Lord
Author: W. T. McConnell

BSac 84:333 (Jan 1927) p. 40

The Social Teachings Of Our Lord

W. T. McConnell

The civilization of our day is passing through a social crisis of alarming scope and power. The feeling is deepening in many hearts, “that our country is already within circles whose center is a destructive whirlpool, and that our wealth, and education, and material aggrandizements offer not the slightest hope of averting the impending doom.” Our social life is wrecked, “Confusion worse confounded”; until social disorder, political corruption, and the antagonisms between capital and labor have become so threatening and perilous as to awaken a fear that the end of our civilization is near at hand. Men have racked their brains to devise ways and means of diverting the danger, harmonizing the discordant notes, and restoring the social order,—but none has been found a sufficient remedy. They have failed to diagnose the social disease, and consequently have failed to prescribe an efficient cure.

We are now turning to the Bible to discover the social teachings of our Lord, confident that He, and He alone, has discovered and revealed the cause of, and the cure for, the social disorders of His own time, hence, likewise those paralleling them in our own day. For if the testimony of history can be relied on, Christ lived in the midst of social conditions as bad as, or worse than, those of to-day. Oppression, degradation of women, crime and vice, greed and graft prevailed in Rome and other cities of His day, not excelled by the disordered conditions of our own time; yet He announced the principles of a kingdom of righteousness in which peace on earth and good will toward man would prevail.

That His recorded teachings are no mere fiction, no dream of an enthusiast, no concocted fable; but a fact, a palpable, undeniable, workable fact embedded in the history of the world’s most prosperous, intelligent and peaceful nations, cannot be successfully denied. It is the verdict of history. He was the divinely sent messenger of Heaven to bring peace on earth. The manner of His coming, the divinity of His Person, the mission of His life, as well as

BSac 84:333 (Jan 1927) p. 41

the influence of His teaching, issuing ultimately in universal peace on earth, “when all hate should come under love’s supremacy, and war should be no more, and earth’s angry waves should die into hushed stillness at the door of God’s temple, builded at last for all the earth.” This was the prophetic note sounded out through the centuries, and finding its fulfillment in the fullness of the time when God sent forth His Son made of a woman, and made under law, not only to redeem man from its curse, but humanity from the disordered state arising therefrom. Hence, we turn to the teachings of our Lord wi...