Free Republic

Social Reform: Compulsion, conspiracy & misguided idealism stimulate mass movements demanding change, yet are not ultimate cause for societal breakdown. Primary disaster mechanism, the 'unintended consequences,' results from conceptual confusion. Understanding confusion caused by conceptual myopia--the inability to see the forest for the trees--that is destroying the West. Essential difference between Social Reformers (Marx, Lenin, Hitler, Obama) & Political Reformers (Reagan, Thatcher & the Founding Fathers).

A cursory reading of the Fundamentals, a series of papers published in 1917 to define the fundamentals of the Christian faith, do not deal with an evangelical evaluation of social reform. There is an article in the Fundamentals that criticizes reforms as modernists developed them, but nothing is offered to replace these social-gospelers. Of course, it was about this time that the dispensational view of eschatology was making its way on the evangelical scene and its doctrine of the “imminent” return of Jesus. Cyrus I. Scofield’s (1843–1921) note-filled study Bible was first published in 1909 and later revised by Scofield...