Aggressive Christianity
Catherine Booth 1880: Co-founder of the Salvation Army
Go ye into all the world and preach the Gospel to every creature. Holy Bible Mark 16:15 KJV
And I said, Who art Thou, Lord? And He said, I am Jesus whom thou persecutest. But rise, and stand upon thy feet: For I have appeared unto thee for this purpose, to make thee a minister and a witness both of these things which thou hast seen, and of those things in the which I will appear unto thee: Delivering thee from the people, and from the Gentiles, unto whom now I send thee, to open their eyes, and to turn them from darkness to light, and from the power of Satan unto God that they may receive forgiveness of sins, and inheritance among them which are sanctified by faith that is in me. Acts 26:15-18
I was thinking, while I was reading the lesson, that, supposing we could blot out from our minds all knowledge of the history of Christianity from the time of this Inauguration Service, from that Pentecostal Baptism, or, at any rate, from the close of the period described in the Acts of the Apostles, suppose we could detach from our minds all knowledge of the history of Christianity since then, and take the Acts of the Apostles and sit down and calculate what was likely to happen in the world, what different results we should have anticipated, what a different world we should have reckoned upon as the outcome of it all.
A system that commenced under such auspices, with such assumptions and professions on the part of its Author (speaking after the manner of men), and producing, as it did, in the first century of its existence, such gigantic and momentous results. We should have said, if we knew nothing of what has intervened from that time to this, that, no doubt the world where that war commenced, and for which it was organized, would have long since been subjugated to the influence of that system, and brought under the power of its great originator and founder!
I say, from reading these Acts, and from observing the spirit that animated the early disciples, and from the way in which everything fell before them, we should have anticipated that ten thousand times greater results would have followed, and, in my judgment, this anticipation would have been perfectly rational and just.
We Christians profess to possess in the Gospel of Christ a mighty lever which, rightly and universally applied, would lift the entire burden of sin and misery from the shoulders, that is, from the souls, of our fellow-men, a panacea, we believe it to be, for all the moral and spiritual woes of humanity, and in curing their spiritual plagues we should go far to cure their physical plagues also. We all profess to believe this. Christians have professed to believe this for generations gone by, ever since the time of which we have been reading, and yet look at the world, look at so-called Christian England, in this end of the nineteenth century!
The great majority of the nation utterly ignoring God, and not even making any pretence of remembering Him one day in the week. And then look at the rest of the world. I have frequently got so depressed with this view of things that I have felt as if my heart would break. I don't know how other Christians feel, but I can truly say that 'rivers of water do often run down my eyes because men keep not His law,' and because it seems to me that this dispensation, compared with what God intended it to be, has been, and still is, as great a failure as that which preceded it.
Now, I ask, how is this? I do not for a moment believe that this is in accordance with the purpose of God. Some people have a very convenient way of hiding behind God's purposes, and saying, 'Oh, He will do His own will.' I wish He did! They say, 'You know God's will is done after all.' I wish it were! He says it is not done, and over and over again laments the fact that it is not done. He wants it to be done, but it is not done! 'It is of no use to stand up and propound theories that are at variance with things as they are.' There has been a great deal too much of this, and it has had a very bad effect. The world is in this condition, and here is a system launched under such auspices, with such purposes, with such promises, and with such prospects, and yet nearly nineteen hundred years have rolled away and here we are. How little has been done, comparatively. What a little alteration has been effected in the habits and dispositions of the race.
But some of you will say, 'Well, but there is a good deal done.' Thank God for that. It would be sad if there were nothing done; but it looks like a drop in the ocean compared with what should have been done. Now I cannot accept any theory that so far reflects upon the love and goodness of God as to make Him to blame for this effeteness of Christianity, and, so far as my influence extends, I will not allow the responsibility and the blame of all this to be rolled back upon God, who so loved the world that He gave His only Son to ignominy and death in order to redeem it. I do not believe it for a moment.
I believe that the old arch-enemy has done in this dispensation what he did in former ones, so far circumvented the purposes of God, that he has succeeded in bringing about this state of things, in retarding the accomplishment of God's purposes and keeping the world thus largely under his own power and influence, and I believe he has succeeded in doing this, as he has succeeded always before, by Deceiving God's own people. He has always done so. He has always got up a caricature of God's real thing, and the nearer he can get it to be like the original the more successful he is. He has succeeded in deceiving God's people:
First: As to the standard of their own Christian life.
And, Secondly, he has succeeded in deceiving them As to their duties and obligations to the world.
He has succeeded, first, in deceiving them as to the standard of their own Christian life. He has got the Church, nearly as a whole, to receive what I call an 'Oh, wretched man that I am' Christianity! He has got them to lower the standard that Jesus Christ Himself established in this Book, a standard, not only to be aimed at, but to be attained unto, a standard of victory over sin, the world, the flesh, and the Devil, real, living, reigning, triumphing, Christianity!
Satan knew what was the secret of the great success of those early disciples. It was their wholehearted devotion, their absorbing love to Christ, their utter abnegation of the world. It was their entire absorption in the Salvation of their fellow men and the glory of their God. It was an enthusiastic Christianity that swallowed them up, and made them willing to become wanderers and vagabonds on the face of the earth, for His sake to dwell in dens and caves, to be torn asunder, and to be persecuted in every form.
It was this degree of devotion before which Satan saw he had no chance. Such people as these, he knew, must ultimately subdue the world. It is not in human nature to stand before that kind of spirit, that amount of love and zeal, and if Christians had only gone on as they began long since, the glorious prophecy would have been fulfilled, 'The kingdoms of this world' would have 'become the kingdoms of our Lord and of his Christ.'
Lowering The Standard
Therefore, the archenemy said, 'What must I do? I shall be defeated after all. I shall lose my supremacy as the god of this world. What shall I do?' No use to bring in a gigantic system of error, which everybody will see to be error. Oh, dear no! That has never been Satan's way; but his plan has been to get hold of a good man here and there, who shall creep in, as the Apostle said, unawares, and preach another doctrine, and who shall deceive, if it were possible, the very elect. And he did it.
He accomplished his design. He gradually lowered the standard of Christian life and character, and though, in every revival, God has raised it again to a certain extent, we have never got back thoroughly to the simplicity, purity, and devotion set before us in these Acts of the Apostles and in the Epistles. And just in the degree that it has approximated thereto, in every age, Satan has got somebody to oppose and to show that this was too high a standard for human nature, altogether beyond us, and that, therefore, Christians must sit down and just be content to be 'Oh, wretched man that I am' people to the end of their days.
He has got the Church into a condition that makes one, sometimes, positively ashamed to hear professing Christians talk, and ashamed also that the world should hear them talk. I do not wonder at thoughtful, intelligent men being driven from such Christianity as this. It would have driven me off, if I had not known the power of godliness. I believe this kind of Christianity has made more infidels than all the infidel books ever written.
Yes, Satan knew that he must get Christians down from the high pinnacle of wholehearted consecration to God. He knew that he had no chance till he tempted them down from that blessed vantage ground, and so he began to spread those false doctrines, to counteract which John wrote his epistles, for, before he died, he saw what was coming, and sounded down the ages, 'Little children, let no man deceive you: he that doeth righteousness is righteous, even as He is righteous. He that committeth sin is of the Devil; for the Devil sinneth from the beginning. For this purpose the Son of God was manifested, that He might destroy the works of the Devil.' The Lord revive that doctrine! Help us afresh to put up the standard!
Oh, the great evil is, that dishonest-hearted people, because they feel it condemns them, lower the standard to their miserable experience. I said, when I was young, and I repeat it in my mature years, that if it sent me to Hell I would never pull it down. Oh, that God's people felt like that. There is the glorious standard put before us. The power is proffered, the conditions laid down, and we can all attain it if we will; but if we will not, for the sake of the children, and for generations yet unborn, do not let us drag it down, and try to make it meet our little, paltry, circumscribed experience. Let us keep it up. This is the way to get the world to look at it. Show the world a real, living, self-sacrificing, hard-working, toiling, triumphing Christianity, and the world will be influenced by it; but anything short of that they will turn round and spit upon.
Duties and Obligations
Secondly, Satan has deceived even those whom he could not succeed in getting to lower the standard of their own lives with respect to their duties and obligations to the world. I have been reading of late the New Testament with special reference to the aggressive spirit of Primitive Christianity, and it is wonderful what floods of light come upon you when you read the Bible with reference to any particular topic on which you are seeking for help. When God sees you are panting after the light, in order that you may use it, He pours it in upon you. It is an indispensable condition of receiving light that you are willing to follow it. People say they don't see this and that, no, because they do not wish to see. They are not willing to walk in it, and, therefore, they do not get it; but those who are willing to obey shall have all the light they want.
It seems to me that we come infinitely short of any right and rational idea of the aggressive spirit of the New Testament saints. Satan has got Christians to accept what I may call a namby-pamby, kid-glove kind of system of presenting the Gospel to people. 'Will they be so kind as to read this tract or book, or would they not like to hear this popular and eloquent preacher. They will be pleased with him quite apart from Christianity.' That is the sort of half-frightened, timid way of putting the truth before unconverted people, and of talking to them about the Salvation of their souls. It seems to me this is utterly antagonistic and repugnant to the spirit of the early saints: 'Go ye, and preach the Gospel to every creature', and again the same idea, 'Unto whom now I send thee.'
Look what is implied in these commissions. It seems to me that no people have ever yet fathomed the meaning of these two Divine commissions. I believe we of The Salvation Army have come nearer to it than any people that have ever preceded us. Look at them. Would it ever occur to you that the language meant, 'Go and build chapels and churches and invite the people to come in, and if they will not, let them alone'? 'Go ye.' If you sent your servant to do something for you, and said, 'Go and accomplish that piece of business for me,' you know what it would involve. You know that he must see certain persons; and run about to certain offices and banks and agents, involving a deal of trouble and sacrifice; but you have nothing to do with that. He is your servant. He is employed by you to do that business, and you simply commission him to 'Go and do it.'
What would you think if he went and took an office and sent out a number of circulars inviting your customers or clients to come and wait on his pleasure, and when they chose to come just to put your business before them? No, you would say, 'Ridiculous.' Divesting our minds of all conventionalities and traditionalisms, what would the language mean? 'Go ye!' To whom? 'To every creature.'
Where am I to get at them? Where they are. 'Every creature.' There is the extent of your commission. Seek them out; run after them, wherever you can get at them. 'Every creature', wherever you find a creature that has a soul, there go and preach My Gospel to him. If I understand it, that is the meaning and the spirit of the commission.
And then again, to Paul He says, 'Unto whom now I send thee, to open their eyes, and to turn them from darkness to light, and from the power of Satan unto God.'
They are asleep, go and wake them up. They do not see their danger. If they did, there would be no necessity for you to run after them. They are preoccupied. Open their eyes, and turn them round by your desperate earnestness and moral persuasion and moral force. Oh, it makes me tremble to think what a great deal one man can do for another! 'Turn them from darkness to light, and from the power of Satan unto God.' How did Paul understand it? He says, 'We persuade men.' Do not rest content with just putting it before them, giving them gentle invitations, and then leaving them alone. He ran after them, poor things, and pulled them out of the fire.
Take the bandage off their eyes that Satan has bound round them; knock and hammer and burn in, with the fire of the Holy Ghost, your words into their poor, hardened, darkened hearts, until they begin to realize that they are in danger; that there is something amiss. Go after them. If I understand it, that is the spirit of the Apostles and of the early Christians, for we read that when they were scattered by persecution, they 'went everywhere, preaching the Word.' The laity, the new converts, the young babes in Christ. It does not mean always in set discourses, and public assemblies, but they went after men and women, like ancient Israel, 'Every man after his man,' to try and win him for Christ.
