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It's emancipated millions from chattel slavery and millions of others from addiction to vice. It has done more to allay the physical ills of disease and famine than any other impulse known to man. By it millions have been lifted from illiteracy and ignorance and have been placed upon the road of growing intellectual freedom and control over the physical environment.

From that brief life and its apparent frustration has flowed a more powerful force for the triumphant waging of man's long battle than any other ever known by the human race. No life ever lived on this planet has been so influential in the affairs of men like the life of Jesus Christ. Look at this conclusion of Kenneth Latourette in his seven-volume work on the history of the expansion of Christianity: Christianity has had an enormous influence on society down through its long and checkered history. It's biblically and historically mistaken. It's ludicrous to say Christians can have no influence in society. If we are pessimists and think we are capable of doing nothing in human society today, I venture to say that we are theologically extremely unbalanced, if not actually heretical and harmful. And the Christian mind thinks in terms of this total purpose of God, which includes the Creation, the Fall, the Redemption, and the Consummation. And we have to allow the creation to be, as it were, qualified by the Fall, and the Fall by the Redemption, and the Redemption by the Consummation. You also think about the creation and about the redemption through Jesus Christ. If you develop a Christian mind, you don't concentrate exclusively on the fall of man and the return of Christ. We believe that when Christ comes again he is going to put things right. Jesus himself said that although you are evil, you are able to do good things and give good gifts to your children. Are they capable of doing no good? The doctrine of total depravity, which means that every part of our human being has been tainted by the Fall, does not mean that we're incapable of doing any good. Indeed they are fallen, but the image of God has not been destroyed. People are men and women made in the image of God. Are they capable of doing no good?īut people are not rubbish.

As Edward Norman, dean of Peter-house in Cambridge, once said in a radio interview, 'People are rubbish.' Everything is hopeless there is no hope but the return of Jesus Christ. They wring their hands in a holy kind of dismay. There is a great deal of pessimism around today that grips and even paralyzes people. Are we powerless? Is the quest for social change hopeless before we begin? Or can Christians exert some influence for Jesus Christ? But it can also be used in an unselfish way of the desire of Christians who refuse to acquiesce to the status quo, who are determined to see things changed in society and long to have some influence for Jesus Christ.

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The word influence can sometimes be used for a self-centered thirst for power, like in Dale Carnegie's famous book How to Make Friends and Influence People. Alienation is the frustration of ordinary people who are excluded from the processes of decision-making.' Have we any influence? Have we any power? That's the question. Jimmy Reid, the well-known Marxist counselor in Glasgow and leader of the Clydeside Ship Workers, when he was rector of Glasgow University, said, 'Alienation is the cry of men who feel themselves to be the victims of blind economic forces beyond their control. Whenever you feel politically or economically powerless, you are feeling alienated.

But nowadays the word alienation has a much broader meaning of powerlessness. When what he produces is sold by the factory owner, he is alienated from the fruits of his work. Alienation was originally a Marxist word, and Karl Marx meant by it the alienation of the worker from the product of his labors.

Hard west four evangelists