Adolf Hitler and World War II delayed the creation of the World Council, but in 1948 the first assembly convened in Amsterdam, bringing together 351 delegates representing 147 denominations from forty-four countries. The principal nonparticipants were the Roman Catholics, many conservative evangelicals, and the Russian Orthodox.
Gone, for many, was rural or small-town life, where the pace of work was determined by night and day, sowing and harvest. In its place people found the precision and the regimen of the factory world. God’s sun was hidden behind the smoke, and in its place was the factory whistle, symbol of man’s time, not God’s.
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Many Christians in the nineteenth century followed Jonathan Edwards in the belief that the knowledge of the Lord would fill the earth as the waters cover the sea, and this spread of the gospel was preparation for the coming reign of Christ upon the earth. This belief in a future reign of Christ was called millennialism.
"Indefinite attitudes to the future explain what’s most dysfunctional in our world today. Process trumps substance: when people lack concrete plans to carry out, they use formal rules to assemble a portfolio of various options. This describes Americans today. In middle school, we’re encouraged to start hoarding “extracurricular activities.” In high school, ambitious students compete even harder to appear omnicompetent. By the time a student
gets to college, he’s spent a decade curating a bewilderingly diverse résumé to prepare for
a completely unknowable future. Come what may, he’s ready—for nothing in particular.
A definite view, by contrast, favors firm convictions. Instead of pursuing many-sided mediocrity and calling it “well-roundedness,” a definite person determines the one best
thing to do and then does it. Instead of working tirelessly to make herself indistinguishable, she strives to be great at something substantive—to be a monopoly of one. This is not what young people do today, because everyone around them has long since lost faith in a definite world. No one gets into Stanford by excelling at just one thing, unless that thing happens to involve throwing or catching a leather ball."
Many in the next generation, the first of the eighteenth century, felt fewer obligations to the Christian past, so instead of trying to harmonize nature and Scripture, they simply set aside revelation. Many intellectuals claimed that the parts of the Bible that agree with reason are clearly unnecessary. The parts that contradict reason—the myths, miracles, and priestly elements—are simply untrue. This more militant attitude against the faith was especially evident in France.
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