French and British armies clashed with Germany at the First Battle of Marne 110 years ago this month, within 30 miles of Paris. The Germans hoped taking Paris would afford them a quick assurance of victory in the larger war. When they were defeated at Marne, they learned two wartime revelations: (1) allied forces are strong together, and (2) there is no quick victory in global warfare.
Southern Baptists co-opted the war terminology through the course of the century’s second decade. L.R. Scarborough argued for a “militant evangelism” in which all Baptists would “go afield and the tread of a mighty spiritual army of evangelists” would be heard in communities across the South and around the world. The 1915 SBC report of the Committee on Home Missions imagined a mighty army of “soldiers of the Cross” that would solve “those vexing problems which hitherto have been the despair of both diplomacy and force.”
Within weeks of the war’s onset, H.G. Wells wrote his famous book The War that Will End War. For Wells, military strategy, artillery, and machinery were but an effect. The cause was deeper and much more insidious. “Rifles do but kill men, and fresh men are born to follow them. Our business is to kill ideas.” Wells argued that the war was not against a people, but a disease of the mind — Prussian Imperialism, which preached a Gospel of “ruthless force and political materialism to the whole uneasy world.” To Wells’ regret, the churches were silent. Instead of leading the way toward peace, church buildings were empty, congregants were scattered, and preachers were passive: “all over Europe there are such pulpits, such possibilities of gathering and saying, and [yet] it gathers nothing and has nothing to say.”
To be sure, we do not look to H.G. Wells for social, political or theological direction. His own philosophies of socialistic, secular utopianism were as antithetical to the teachings of Christ as were those of Prussian Imperialism. But his words of exhortation in the face of world war should not be ignored. The war-ravaged world needed a Gospel of peace. But the church was silent.
In this 21st century, is ours not also a world ravaged by war? One hundred ten years after The War that Will End War, geopolitical warfare persists, and diseases of the mind proliferate. Wells’ social utopianism could not eradicate the sinfulness of mankind. Nor could Prussian Imperialism, English constitutional monarchy, or American federal democratic republicanism. The problem of sin is deeply seeded in all human flesh and is fertilized daily within a fallen temporal ecosystem that is entirely conducive to its growth and propagation.
Nations rage and minds are at war, but the kingdom of Christ deploys an army of evangelists whose feet are “sandaled with readiness for the Gospel of peace” (Ephesians 6:15). Baptists are not averse to just war within nations or between them, when necessary. However, we know that our real battle is not against flesh and blood but against the schemes of the prince of darkness, which plague mankind in every generation with “proud things” that are “raised up against the knowledge of God” (2 Corinthains 10:3-5).
Southern Baptists have launched an all-out war on global lostness. Our entire cooperative mechanism is built for this one worldwide initiative. In our day, will Southern Baptists gather nothing and have nothing to say? I might suggest that in our ongoing warfare we have two lessons to learn. They are 110-year-old lessons learned by an imperial force with an objective exactly opposite of ours. In our day, and in our war against every proud thing, we must learn that (1) allied forces are strong together, and (2) there is no quick victory in global warfare. Southern Baptists must embrace strategic togetherness in our common goal. And we must endure the longsuffering of our common work. To win this global war on lostness, we must be in it for the long haul, and we must be in it together.
