The Fundamentals - 1910: Vol.12

Foreign Missions or World Wide Evangelism 67 capable of sustaining such missions as it has produced. But when men really believe in God in Christ, and know Christ as God, they must, if they are loyal to themselves or to Him, share Him with all mankind. For, child of one race and one time though He was, and that race the most centripetal of all races, Christ thought and wrought in universals. He looked forward over all ages and outward over all nations. The bread which He would give was His flesh, which He would give for the life of the world. He was the light of the whole world. If He should be lifted up He would draw all men unto Himself. His disciples were to go into all the world and make disciples of all nations. His sheep were not of a Jewish fold alone. It was not of a race but of a world that the Father had sent Him to be the Saviour. He did not regard Himself as one of many saviours and His revelation as one of many revealings. He was the only Saviour of men, and His was the only revelation of the Father God. “I have long ago ceased to regard the history of the Hebrew race as unique,” writes a well-known Christian leader of our day. “It was well for us in our early days that our studies were directed towards it, and we saw how the Hebrew people found God in every event in their history, but we believe that Assyria and Babylon, Nineveh and Rome, could have similar stories written of God’s dealings with them.” Now, whether the history of the Hebrew race is unique or not is not a matter of theory. It is a simple question of fact. If it was not unique, then where is its like? What other history produced a vocabulary for a revelation? What other history yielded God to humanity? What other ended in a Saviour? As a simple matter of fact, Christianity, which sprang out of this race and this history, is unlike all other re­ ligions in its kind. As such, it never contemplated anything else than a universal claim. If it shrinks into a mere racial cult, it separates itself from its Founder and life, and utterly abandons its essential character. -

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