Evangelicalism

 Still another issue is ecumenism. Ecumenism is the desire to get all Christians together under one umbrella, whether or not they hold to the cardinal doctrines of Christianity. Schaeffer refers to a meeting of The World Council of Churches held in Vancouver, British Columbia, that by all objective accounts was a disaster. So much so that even the secular magazines, Newsweek and Time, in particular, said how ironic it is for these men to be calling upon the name of Christ while issuing the kind of proclamations they did.

 In the present system there is no spiritual dimension. In the past there was the idea of God, because nature was made by God, and the laws of nature reflect, in some manner, the nature of God. Man, therefore, fit within that pattern. There was an established order in the universe because it went back to God who had established the universe. Then as God began to be removed, people fell back on the idea of the laws of nature. Because there was no longer an absolute, since God was denied, even the laws of nature became questionable.

 So, we talk about the “Me generation,” which is just a way of saying in popular language what has happened philosophically. Man has become the center of all things. Perhaps to go further than that, man is all things. Or to go even further, I am all things. I am responsible to no one else. The great expressions of this secular spirit are the self-improvement movements and the human potential movements of our time