Journal: Bibliotheca Sacra
Volume: BSAC 86:342 (Apr 1929)
Article: Does Jesus Meet The Social Need Of Man?
Author: George Hibbert

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BSac 86:342 (April 1929) p. 213

Does Jesus Meet The Social Need Of Man?

George Hibbert

One of the signs of the times is the marked and increasing modern tendency to divide life up into antithesis. We boast of our ability to see life and to see it whole, but we content ourselves with seeing one corner or angle of it. We do not carry around life’s interests in watertight compartments, but we sometimes act as if we did. Any one character of life does not maintain itself in a vacuum, but we withdraw many interests from their natural associations. The Hegelian philosophy admits the antithesis as well as the thesis, but the operations of its dialectic consummate in a synthesis. We cannot omit its advantage to-day. Thus, we have the liberal and the fundamentalist, we have the materialist—markedly; and somewhere (?) we have the spiritual. And we have the “personal Gospel,” and we have the “social Gospel.”

These latter connotations have come, of late, under the rapid-fire of discussion, and the damaging hits have been made on the armor of the social message of Christianity. Readers of the Christian Century will readily remember the accusative evidence as set forth in the editorial “Since Rauschenbusch—What?” of the decline in the social note in the pulpits of the church. As a Congregationalist, as it chances, the writer can feel—yet—its searching criticism, if not its heartsearching appeal. Now comes that honored contributor to the solution of our social problems, Charles Stelzle, with the further suggestion that the leadership in religious and social reform organizations is wobbling and slipping away from the standards set up by Rauschenbusch, Gladden, and others of the earlier social prophets of the church, because of a fear of “hearing the other side,” a fear of facts.

An enquiry here will not down, as to whether after all the proponents of the exclusively social aspect of the Gospel do not merely feel afraid to hear the other side of the question, but feel reluctance to concede to its evidence the weight it is properly due. If the main emphasis does

BSac 86:342 (April 1929) p. 214

not with increasing volume fall on the social implications of the Gospel, is it possible by any means that the obvious reason is that such main emphasis does not belong there?

Some echoes from the summer gatherings of Christian young folk are a starting-point. We learn in another connection that from the wide-sweeping observation of one of the leaders in such conferences, in a denomination holding, in all parts of the country, no less than thirty-six such assemblies, representing an enrollment of something near four thousand attendants most of whom were young people of high school age, that there is among these chosen gr...

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