SOCIAL RELIGIOUS INFLUENCE 



BY JOSIAH STRONG 



[Josiah Strong, President of American Institute of Social Service, b. Napervillo, 

 Du Page County, Illinois, 1847. B.A. Western Reserve College, 1869; S.T.D. 

 ibid.; Post-graduate, Theology, Lanes Seminary, 1869-71. Chaplain and 

 Instructor, Natural Theology, Western Reserve College; Pastor, Sandusky, 

 Ohio; General Secretary, Evangelical Alliance for the United States, 1886-98. 

 Author of Our Country; The New Era; The Twentieth Century City; Religious 

 Movements for Social Betterment; Expansion; The Next Great Awakening; and 

 many others, some of which have been translated into foreign languages.] 



" GOD and one man," says Dr. Parkhurst, " could make any other 

 religion, but it takes God and two men to make Christianity." This 

 characterization justly emphasizes social relations as constituting 

 an essential part of the Christian religion, but overlooks the fact 

 that Judaism also has its social aspects. As Christianity, however, 

 includes all the social teaching of Judaism, adds others, and vitalizes 

 the whole, we may confine our discussion to the social influence of 

 Christianity, or more exactly, to the influence of the social teachings 

 of Jesus. 



It becomes necessary to define what is meant by the social teach- 

 ings of Jesus. They are embodied in his doctrine of the kingdom 

 of God, which was the great burden of his teaching. Until recently 

 this doctrine has been generally misunderstood. Many have sup- 

 posed that the "kingdom of heaven" was the home of the blessed 

 dead. Others have confounded it with the visible Church, while 

 still others have thought it was identical with the invisible Church. 

 But it is an error, and a very mischievous one, to make the kingdom 

 of God synonymous with any one of these, for it is more compre- 

 hensive than any one or all of them. 



Speaking exactly, God's kingdom is, of course, as wide as his 

 dominion, but in Scriptural usage the expression " kingdom of God" 

 is generally employed to designate a redeemed world. The matured 

 prophetic conception of that kingdom fully come in the earth was 

 that of a world-wide society in which universal obedience to the 

 divine law, administered by the Lord's Anointed, would bring 

 universal blessings, spiritual and temporal; or, in one word, the 

 kingdom of God realized would be an ideal world. 



It is to be observed that while this kingdom was spiritual, was 

 a kingdom of righteousness, it was also, in the conception of the 

 Hebrew prophets, a kingdom of physical well-being. It distinctly 

 included nature. All natural phenomena are constantly represented 

 in the Old Testament as expressions of the divine will. Of course 

 modern science was unknown to the ancient Israelites, and our 



