Since William Booth Was Right, What Now?

The Prescience of William Booth

The name, Salvation Army will be known to most of our readers.  The members of the Army are affectionately known as the Sallies.  They are highly regarded for their works of charity, kindness, and working hard to bring a practical ministry of help to the poor and disadvantaged in society.

Whilst the work of the Sallies will be well known.  Less well known would be the name, William Booth, who was the founder of the Salvation Army.  Booth's brief bio states:

William Booth (10 April 1829 – 20 August 1912) was a British Methodist preacher who founded The Salvation Army and became its first General (1878-1912). The Christian movement, with a quasi-military structure and government - but with no physical weaponry - founded in 1865, has spread from London, England, to many parts of the world  and is known for being one of the largest distributors of humanitarian aid.

Booth once considered what were the greatest dangers facing Christianity at the turn of the nineteenth century to the twentieth.  He wrote:

The chief danger that confronts the coming century will be religion without the Holy Ghost, Christianity without Christ, forgiveness without repentance, salvation without regeneration, politics without God, heaven without hell.

Working through Booth's list shows that his warning proved prescient: all of the dangers he enumerated have come to pass.
 As the secular gospel has gained strength the empty vanities of secularist religion have taken hold.  The seven plagues identified by Booth have ravaged the West and continue to do so.  What this means is that when genuine Christianity and true faith are found it is so shocking, so different, and so distinct that the pillars of the immediate society shake.

In the first half of the twentieth century virtually everyone in Western nations considered themselves to be a Christian.  Of course they were not, but they considered themselves to be so.  But their self-belief had strayed far from the fundamentals listed by General Booth.  They did not know the Holy Ghost, let alone knew what it was to be filled by Him.  Their Christianity was an anemic, skin deep moral code that knew very little of Jesus Christ.  Repentance was unknown and not experienced.  Salvation was a matter of doing a few good works.  Politics was increasingly focused upon one major concern: how to use the Parliament to get more of other people's money and property.  Salvation was assured because hell did not exist.

The latter part of the century saw the triumph of the natural outcome of such a false religion: the rising control and dominance of secular Baalism, where the State was the only true god. Because of that, now, when genuine Christian faith is found in a community, it is like an earthquake within the Force.  The first reaction is incredulity: "you can't believe that Jesus Christ rose from the dead, can you?"  The second is to parse you and the Christian church where you worship as ignorant, superstitious cave-dwellers.  "These ignorant fundamentalists actually believe that a god created the earth in six days!" blah, blah, blah.  But when that makes no impact, as it were, the slander can quickly burgeon into calumny.  But, as that proves to have no more effect than water on a duck's back the head shaking begins.  Both parties reach ready agreement that we appear to be living in parallel universes.

In some critical ways we are.  But ironically this makes the situation more clear and "honest".  In the first half of the last century the biggest obstacle was for the average person-in-the-street actually to realise he or she was not a genuine Christian.  In fact, even to suggest they were not was considered an insult.  Now the dichotomy between Christian and pagan is much more obvious, much clearer.

We prefer it that way.  People have an increasingly clear choice: the "foolishness" of Christ or the wisdom of our pagan world.  As the decades unfold it will be increasingly seen as a choice between life and death--which it is.