We cannot be oblivious to our situation and still remain faithful Christians. Some facts will call for new apologetic arguments, some for new ways of presenting the gospel; some facts will appear to help, some will appear to hinder. But no fact should make us hide; the moment we hide away we leave God’s world and enter one of make-believe. 

One of the most difficult things at present for the Reformed Christian is to strike a balance between yesterday and today. This is not perhaps surprising. The Reformed Christian believes that in the sixteenth century the Reformers recovered the biblical faith, and that no Protestant ministry has excelled that of the seventeenth century. Reformers and Puritans have together given the churches an enormous wealth of theological learning and pastoral insight. Our attention to the past is reinforced by the present failure of the churches, and by the ways in which the Reformation is ignored by Christians at large. It is enormously beneficial to be made aware of our heritage in this way, for besides educating us in the faith the Reformers and Puritans remind us that in an important sense the Christian message does not change, and is not to be made to change; they counter the half-belief of many of our fellow-evangelicals that the years between Acts 28 and the coming of Moody and Sankey were of little importance; and, in a day of small things, they connect us to the historic Christian faith in an exhilarating way.

The question is, how do we stop this historical interest becoming a strait-jacket for out thought and action? How can the balance be struck between the historic faith and our modern situation? How do we avoid the charge of culpable escapism? For we surely cannot doubt that our day has its peculiar stamp and character, to put it no higher. To mention a few things–enormous wealth, vast urban populations untouched by the gospel, growing leisure, the absence of social restraints, the omni-presence of the mass-media, an enormous variety of thought and outlook on moral and social questions, and, perhaps more important than all these, a society that is rapidly and continuously changing in all these ways. Yet an outsider might be forgiven for thinking that our only pressing problem was the ecumenical movement! To some the very idea of applying the biblical faith anew seems to be anathema, while to other Christians there is no problem–the latest just is the best. But for those who value the biblical and Reformed faith, and wish at the same time to be all things to all men (like the apostles), it is a problem. How is it to be faced? In what sort of terms can we meet it? What sorts of considerations are relevant?

Providence

The first thing to be said is that the Reformed faith in no way sanctions hideaway Christians. How is this? That Christians are to be modern men, i.e. men of their own day, is surely one conclusion that must be drawn from what we confess about the providence of God. ‘God, the great Creator of all things, doth uphold, direct, dispose, and govern all creatures, actions, and things, from the greatest even to the least, by his most wise and holy providence, according to his infallible foreknowledge, and the free and immutable counsel of his own will, to the praise of the glory of his wisdom, power, justice, goodness and mercy’.¹ At first sight it is not clear how the one follows from the other, for we are inclined to think of providence in personal terms (what is providential for us as individuals) and in exceptional terms (particular happenings are providential). Yet it follows from the teaching of the Westminster Confession that, according to Scripture, God is lord of history, and hence lord of our contemporary situation. He has not disowned his world, or retreated from it, or allowed it to ‘idle’. Rather he upholds all things, for his own pure and wise purposes.

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