Page 6391 – Christianity Today (2024)

The news release from the World Council of Churches’ Central Committee meeting in Nyborg, Denmark, last August to the European press made understandable headlines, particularly that portion which indicated that a segment of the Committee went on record as favoring a free world surrender on the terms of the enemy in case of a threat of hydrogen warfare. No indication was given, in the German press at least, of the percentage of the Committee that went thus on record. Coming at the same time as the discussion of “Planning for Surrender” in Washington, it could hardly have failed to excite some comment, both on the Continent and in the United States.

In considering such a matter, we must separate the two questions, namely whether the military (which presumably must consider all eventualities) should give serious thought to the question of what terms and conditions, if any, should prompt a surrender on the part of the United States; and whether the Christian Church herself should make plans to advocate national surrender if hydrogen warfare was threatened. The answer to the first question must be left to others; the answer to the second vitally concerns us as Christians.

Among thoughtful Christians, opinions vary as to whether the Red World could be influenced by the growth of such Free World sentiment to the point of seeking control of the West by a master stroke of blackmail. Some feel that the danger lies not here but upon whether our policies may lead to disaster of another kind. Others feel that in a time in which, it is said, the older concepts of courage and freedom are not relevant, some considerable number might advocate the course of surrender under blackmail, as the only alternative to obliteration of the race. Those who might, now or in the future, propose such a surrender would doubtless do so upon idealistic grounds. The ideal of passive resistance, and of love-the-enemy-into-returning-love is sometimes held to be the only real outcome of the application of the principles of the Gospel. Taken in isolation, such idealism may appear as both noble and ultimately workable.

Pacifism And The Nation

But before any individual or group of individuals should propose this as a national policy, he or they should weigh with the utmost realism the meaning of such a surrender. In fairness it ought to be recognized, first of all, that such idealism will never appeal to more than a minority. When this minority recommends to a nation that it adopt a policy of far-reaching significance for all, it is in danger of forgetting that a government has obligations to its nonpacifist majority too. It is doubtful whether even a tiny percentage of our population could consistently follow a pacifist strategy during a period of foreign occupation. Certainly as a nation we have no background for so doing.

Communism And Peace

The advocates of planned surrender under a threat of obliteration warfare forget also that the very existence of such a “peace movement” in the West may afford the greatest possible encouragement to the “peace loving” Soviet universal state and to the so-called people’s democracies to develop a program of international blackmail. They operate in a cynical and highhanded disregard of any standard of integrity like that which we have known in the West. It would be helpful for our theorists to read “the Communist Bible” a bit. Many once refused to take Mein Kampf at face value—it was too monstrous. Will our people make a mistake with respect to the writings of Marx, Engels, Lenin, and Stalin? (It goes without saying that the “peace” theorists are inconsistent in even suspecting that the “peace loving” people of the Red-dominated world would ever consider waging hydrogen warfare!)

The peace-at-any-price movement also rests upon a romantic view of human nature. Love, say its advocates, impresses even the hardest and most disciplined of aggressors. Can it be that such people have no knowledge of what Red imperialism is, or of the manner in which it systematically roots out of its human instruments considerations of humaneness and decency? They seem to forget that in Soviet expansion in Europe, rape and physical violence have been systematically utilized to break the spirit of invaded peoples. They forget that for years people in the Soviet state and of the people’s democracies have been virulently conditioned to hate America. In the case of occupation after a pacifist surrender, this hatred would be vented against our population, particularly women and girls, to a degree which we cannot now comprehend.

From India To Hungary

Again, the planned surrender of the theorists rests upon a romanticizing of the work of Gandhi in India, and latterly of integrationists in the Montgomery bus controversy. Without minimizing the achievements of either of these, we would point out that there is simply no proper parallel between the British administration in India on the one hand, and what would occur if the Soviet Union or Red China were allowed to occupy the United States on the other. Great Britain governed India through agreements with the local princes, and Great Britain had a conscience which was profoundly touched by Christian principles—however far removed her imperialism might seem at times from Christian ideals. Gandhi and his Indian countrymen operated within a framework of civil liberties which compared favorably with our own, and within which free expression was possible. This kind of situation would vanish at the moment of Communist occupation of America.

It must be observed that there was communication between London and Delhi over ideals which is utterly lacking between national ideals in America and those of Communist expansionists. We need expect to find no ally in the conscience of the Soviet-type man as Gandhi found in the traditions of Great Britain, or as Martin Luther King found in the municipality of Montgomery. And in the face of these facts, the success of Gandhi’s program of passive resistance to British rule is pathetically irrelevant to the consideration of resistance to a Red-occupied United States. Hungary, not India, should be the example to study as the prototype of Communist reaction to resistance. It was there, not in India, that Red tanks demonstrated their ability at murderous revolt in the streets.

Dealing With Masters Of Deceit

The ideal of “passive resistance” is one which has been grossly overglamorized. Peace theorists dream of a role of sitting cross-legged in the American equivalent of a loin cloth, and bringing the Communist aggressor to heel. They forget, however, that in our civilization there is little of the passivity which India has developed over tens of centuries. What it would mean in the United States is that most of the nation would be forced into a vast underground. This is not a pretty picture. The author has known members of the Dutch, French, and Belgian underground. Some of them have privately testified to the erosion of character that acted upon them as they were forced to lie, to steal, to sabotage, and to kill. Such would perforce be the situation in a Red-occupied United States of America in the face of pyramiding murders and enslavement.

It is the profound conviction of this author that to doom an entire people to years of such activity would be no less damaging than to expose them to the horrors of actual modern warfare. Moreover, no minority could depend upon carrying the majority with them. The number of morally nondiscerning and opportunistic persons who joined the Communist party in America in the “thirties,” simply because times were difficult, leads us to expect that large numbers of people would take the opportunist way again were there an occurrence of surrender and occupation. Some have already developed means of protecting themselves and their associates, and this has often been under the protection of our courts. With the existence of “people’s courts,” all manner of ethical deviations for self-protection would arise.

Those who advocate a planned surrender romantically assume that occupying Communists would reverse their oppressive tactics when they saw a morose and unco-operative people. But they forget that the Soviet universal state has had 41 years of experience with sullen peoples. They know how to wait, how to starve millions, bludgeon countless more, and deport masses of peoples and import others. How long is it going to take us to learn the lessons of Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania, and Hungary?

The Victory Of Our Era

But, say the theorists, if the American people refused to obey any Communist directives, the occupation of industrial America would bog down, and the whole Red strategy would fail. These speculators forget that the so-called people’s democracies do not measure success as we do. To capture the United States intact without dropping a bomb would be the major victory of this millennium! This would be the grand prix, and after getting it, the Red occupiers could afford to muddle through a generation or two of inefficiency, until they could import their own corps of technicians (complete with chauffeurs and bootblacks) and their own labor force from those ‘democratic’ areas where the population is threatening to explode.

Peace theorists further their argument by claiming that an occupying nation could only engage in so much imprisonment and mass executions, and, with a passive population, they would soon become satiated with bloodletting. Now, as the tally of unnatural deaths continues to come in from “curtained countries,” it is clear that the number of murders for which the Soviet state and people’s democracies are guilty runs into scores of millions.

Advocates of planned surrender assume the false premise that survival is the greatest human value. This is to be expected among those in whose thinking the Christian faith has no profound place. But to those who reckon with the realities of life as the Christian knows them to be, that value does not stand. It is better to come to the end of one’s life with integrity than to mark time with temporal survival, while eternal values are eroded away under a régime of absolute materialism. Families who have fled the so-called German Democratic Republic (East Germany) are discovering this the tragic way. We would be wise to learn from them and at the same time remember that they have a refuge to which they can flee. Planned surrender, under blackmail, of the United States of America would leave no haven of refuge under the sun for these millions of hopeless victims of the hammer and sickle.

END

Harold B. Kuhn is Professor of Philosophy of Religion at Asbury Theological Seminary. A member of the Ohio Yearly Meeting of Friends, he has ministered in France in the mission to Russian emigres maintained by Irish Friends, in the Netherlands to Hutterite Brethren in exile. Since 1947 he has been active in Christian refugee work in West Germany and Austria.

A Carol for Palm Sunday

A Prophet you declare?When only peasants cry And wave some blighted palm leaves in the sky;When children scream “Hosanna!” at some homeless Nazarene?That silent fellow Never came from God!

A Prince you say?A Son of David’s seed?A borrowed ass’ colt his only steed?Can sweaty garments Tossed hysterically upon the dusty way Become a carpet?You cannot form a prince Of just a man!

A King you cry?This lowly carpenter of Galilee Who walked with fishermen beside the sea And smiles sadly from a throne of coats While fools scream raw their parching throats To bless the Lord?How can you make a King To bring you peace,And gain from Rome immediate release From just a man?

You call Him “thief?”Who made the blind to see And set the lifelong cripple free To leap for joy?Who offered life unto a widow’s boy,And now walks bleeding up the blackened road Bent with a cross of curses And a crown of hate?I call Him great!

“Traitor” you cry?And lift His agony into the raven sky That cannot weep for shame?You curse His name And sell the innocence of love For tarnished silver and a noose above Eternity?I weep your chosen end And hear His whisper echo through the stillness,“Friend?”

You thunder “Liar!”In a brazen acid choir While laughter rolls intentional His mocking, grim recessional From deep corroded throats To blind your ears As through His bloody tears He gasps, “Forgive!”

“A Man,” you echo From your hollow song As from his patient eyes there rolls A sad cascade of broken love To mingle with His crimson blood.

“A man,” you drone?Who fashions from a cross a throne And forms a coronet from thorns Transposing thunder into horns That echo triumph through the gloom?You cannot fashion out of God A man!

CHARLES WAUGAMAN

“There are only two choices, that we force ourselves into the effort of imagination necessary to become what we are capable of being, or that we submit to being ruled by the office boys of big business or social bureaucrats … and the end of submission is that we shall blow ourselves up.”

This interpretation of the plight of the civilized world supplies the common motive for the writings of a group of young authors and dramatists that have been called the “Angry Young Men.” To find a further common factor is almost impossible. For example, the above quotation comes from the pen of a woman, Doris Lessing, not a young man. These writers strongly object, moreover, to being called Angry Young Men, for it groups them with other writers with whom they have little desire to associate; one protests that he is not young, and that his neighbors think him mild. Many people, in trying to assess the “movement,” as it may be described, have said that all these writers have come from the lower classes and are bitter with the way life has treated them. But this is true only of some; others have been to Cambridge and Oxford, and come from a background that is middle class or even higher. So here is a group of young writers, mostly under 35, both men and women, who represent a fair cross section of society, with a desire expressed in their books and plays to force people to face the danger that threatens civilization and do something about it.

This is, of course, no new aim among writers. But the fact that mankind is “haunted by the image of an idiot’s hand pressing down a great lever … as the fiery dance of death spreads over the earth” gives a new element of desperation, urgency and anger at the supineness of most people in the face of this danger.

These writers point out at length what aspects of life they believe to be at the root of the modern predicament, and what accounts for this supineness. John Osborn notices a lack of feeling, so he wants to teach people to feel. He wrote the play “Look Back in Anger” to make people feel the triviality of the lives they live, especially those of the upper classes: “Mozart, good manners, conventional religion, academic insulation from the world, the drabness of the Welfare State.” In contrast, the play reveals the reality of life, poor housing conditions, the boredom, the struggles and pressures of life which drive the hero and his wife (who couldn’t bear the pain of living as human beings any longer) to “retreat into an unholy priest hole and become little furry creatures with little furry brains …”

Colin Wilson, in a symposium called Declaration, enlisting many of these writers, gives a good insight into their thought. Man is pictured as trying to escape from present reality, but also as having a thirst for the meaning and purpose of life. Unable to find the answer, some people seek to simplify life by living as if they were animals, free of moral complications, but most will flock to the films and football matches, or go to hear the latest crooner, to forget their troubles. This escapism is fostered by the press and by national leaders. The view given by the Times and the New Statesman “is debilitated by a habit of languid conformity that is attacking Britain like dry rot.” Our leaders are “those little half men we see on the news reels with their self-consciously democratic faces.” They regard government as a game of cricket and treat the H-bomb as a new toy. It used to be men of genius that shaped our thinking; now it’s the advertising kings, radio, television, films and magazines.

Symptoms such as these the so-called Angry Young Men see as indicative of a nation of people who in the last 50 years have run a marathon race and found that no trophies are to be won. People are now physically and mentally exhausted and alas, the blood, sweat and tears have achieved nothing, for now there is even a greater threat. Hence “the dry taste of futility lingers in the mouth of all.”

A Marathon Race

What is it these last 50 years that has made the people a marathon race, a race which has exhausted the nation? Why do people find that they are unable effectively to meet the demands of twentieth century living? Some say it is due to the persistence of irrational beliefs, such as that Christ is Son of God, a belief in a sense of guilt and original sin and St. Paul’s views on marriage. But some, interestingly, advocate a return to some form of religion as the only solution, and so regard the lack of religion in England as the cause of this predicament. Religion, they say, has been stifled by the domination of the nation’s thinking by rationalism and materialism. Man, it was believed, could be explained totally in terms of Darwin’s and Freud’s theories.

Logical Positivism tends to degrade man into merely a tool who functions in the interests of knowledge, which makes for a detached view of life completely unaware of the crisis of human existence. This domination by reason has reduced man in stature, in fact, to “an ingenious little animal.” Thus we need something more than reason. Bill Hopkins says we must envisage “man as possessing an inner compass of certainty beyond all logic and reason and ultimately more valid.” If man is not more than rational he is finished, for, he maintains, “belief is an instrument for projecting oneself beyond one’s innate limitations; reason on the other hand will have us acknowledge them even when this recognition is disastrous, as now.” Stuart Holroyd blames rationalism for increasing the trivialization of our lives “and subsequent upon this, a loss of relationship with anything beyond ourselves; alienation from God.” With a loss of religious dimension, a person fails to have a true understanding of himself, for he becomes a social or political animal, a mere member of the crowd, no longer standing “absolutely responsible for his actions before God.”

Expanding The Ego

Though these particular writers see a real need for religion, it is because they regard it as the only means for increasing the importance of the individual. For it will make him feel more important if he knows that God is interested in him, make him realize that he is unique and immortal and therefore should “with all his power will to be immortal.” Thus, in spite of frequent references to God and religion, ultimately the solution still lies for them in the ability of man to save himself. Some hope that desperation will drive man into saving himself, others that an existential analysis of human experience will provide man with beliefs that will change his life.

Surely the beliefs that alone can change a man’s outlook and life need to be of such a radical nature that they must come from outside human experience. For once the validity of logic and reason is denied, there is only intuition or a “hunch” left for guidance. This possibly is the reason why some of these writers put forward no solution at all, as they have lost faith in the ability of man to save himself. John Osborn makes his hero say “there aren’t any good, brave causes left. If the big bang does come, and we get killed off, it won’t be in aid of the old-fashioned, grand design—it’ll just be for the Brave New-nothing-very-much-thank-you.” It is not enough to bring God in just to give the individual a bigger sense of his importance, for I believe that unless God is conceived of as acting in men to change their lives and as intervening to alter the course of history, the future will precisely be a “Brave New-nothing-very-much-thank-you.”

The Wonderful Prospect

I find myself agreeing with the basic assumptions of this “movement,” that we do live in crisis times which are driving people into seeking various forms of escape and making them lose faith in the religious and moral foundations upon which so much of Western civilization has been built. I accept, too, the observation that the rationalism of the age and the pressures of life have exhausted mankind, making him virtually an animal, a “smashed radio set”—to quote Colin Wilson. But if my radio set does go wrong I take it to the maker who will remake it. “And the vessel was marred in the hand of the potter and he made it again … And the Lord said … cannot I do with you as this potter?” This is the wonderful fact of Christianity that “if any man be in Christ, he is a new creation.” A man can have the renewing power of Christ in his life as “an inner compass of certainty.” He can have the belief and also the strength of Christ which over-came even death itself, to enable a man living today to “project himself beyond his innate limitations.”

But why do these so-called Angry Young Men fail to realize that Christianity can remake people, a need which they regard as man’s greatest, and prefer to put their hopes on a new religion yet to be devised?

John Wain observes that in order to communicate, a “touch” must be found that will reach society. To find this touch we must become involved in the flux of life. Judging by the success of some of the books and plays of this “movement,” we who endeavor to communicate Christianity might well be able to learn from the criticism these men make of the Church’s witness.

Colin Wilson admits that in previous centuries Christianity did provide the ordinary man with a meaning and purpose for his life, but though Christianity is still widely accepted and believed, “it is no more accepted nowadays than the Greek gods were in the time of Socrates or the Roman gods in the time of Marcus Aurelius.” This, I think, reflects on the weakness of the witness of the Church over the main lines of communication.

It means that Wilson has never heard, read or seen a Christian who has convinced him that God to him is more than a fairy story. John Osborn gives a reason for this. He finds Christianity as presented to the public in the press, on radio or television, as insincere and unconvincing because after “half a century of watching groups of wealthy theologians publicly turning their backs on Jesus,” the British public slowly began to realize that Christianity was just another “word game like politics.” Emil Brunner has said that “the fate of the Bible is the fate of Christianity,” and surely the giving way to certain aspects of biblical criticism has taken the conviction and the power out of the Church’s witness.

Stuart Holroyd says people regard Christianity as a series of actions—do good, love your neighbor—which do not spring from an inner condition. Hence he sees the exhortation to the good life, so common in pulpits today, as applying a “lotion to the body in order to cure a deep rooted inner disease.” Yet Christ himself said “except a man be born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God.” Though the new birth I believe, is the vital message for our modern predicament, it is apparently not getting through to the people.

Bill Hopkins says that “the Church died after the passing of its first visionaries” because soon orthodoxy, tradition and custom crucified the once living statements of Christ. The Church does not rely on tradition and the efforts of men to preserve its life, but upon the action of the risen Christ and his life-giving Spirit. The Church should be the most alive community on earth, yet according to Hopkins this life is not much in evidence.

Even if the diagnosis and the above criticisms of these writers and dramatists are only partly right, they give us a picture of a world full of uncertainty, bewilderment and fear, a world where the strength, the presence and guidance of Christ are not only not known, but are also regarded as quite irrelevant. The only way to make him relevant is to present the Gospel with the authority and conviction that come from knowing that it is the Word of God and that our churches become akin to the potter’s house where men may see God at work in remaking the lives of men, women and children.

END

Preacher in the Red

It was a raw November Sunday night in London, and the Men’s Lodging House common room was crowded with the flotsam and jetsam of the metropolitan streets. Most were dozing or talking. A few were listening to the service conducted by a Mission Band based on Methodism’s West London Mission, Kingsway Hall. As an exceedingly raw but earnest teenage recruit to the ranks of “local preachers,” it was my turn to attempt the address. With ambition only equalled by an entire lack of discretion, I had chosen the well-known text “Thou art Peter, and upon this rock, etc.” “Of course,” I asserted with more assurance than learning, “Jesus was in fact punning upon the word “Peter,” which in the Hebrew tongue is ‘petros,’ a rock.” Came a sudden commotion. A man in a rusty black suit, by the fireplace, shook himself and called loudly “No!” I felt the blood rush to my face. My interrupter continued with unabated vigor, to shake his head and disagree vocally, throughout the rest of what rapidly became a foreshortened and increasingly incoherent attempt at preaching. The service finished hurriedly, and my critic bore down authoritatively upon me. His suit was in tatters, he was an authentic down-and-out, but his voice had overtones of much better days gone by. “You’re quite wrong,” he said decisively. “It’s not Hebrew at all, it’s Greek. And it’s not ‘petros’, it’s ‘petra’. And you really shouldn’t talk about things you know next to nothing about.” I’ve tried to avoid doing so, ever since.—The Rev. LEONARD P. BARNETT, Methodist Youth Department, Ludgate Circus House, London, England.

Peter Hudson is a divinity student at Westcott House, Cambridge. He is training for the Church of England ministry, following the steps of his father, Dr. A. W. Goodwin Hudson. He completed the B.D. at King’s College, London University.

In the Bible, reconciliation is a change of personal relations between human beings (1 Sam. 29:4; Matt. 5:24; 1 Cor. 7:11) or between God and man (Rom. 5:1–11; 2 Cor. 5:18 f.; Col. 1:20; Eph. 2:16). By this change a state of enmity and estrangement is replaced by one of peace and fellowship.

The change between man and man is a twofold or mutual matter. When David is spoken of as reconciling himself with Saul, what is primarily meant is the change in Saul’s attitude and relation to David. Again, when separation between a man and his wife occurs, a change in both parties to the marriage relationship is envisioned.

God The Reconciler

In making peace between God and man, it is not a case of equal adversaries reconciling one another. Rather in the whole work of restoring the ruptured relationship between himself and rebellious man, “all things are of God” (2 Cor. 5:18, cf. Eph. 2:4; John 3:16). And while God’s wrath is called forth by man’s sin, his reconciling grace wells up spontaneously from his own great heart of love. In the miracle of grace, his everlasting love reaches out even for his enemies. Men do not reconcile God, but he so changes the situation between himself and man that he reconciles the world unto himself. God is the subject of the whole reconciling process. He sent forth his Son for this cause, he acted in him to remove the obstructions to peace, he established the ministry of reconciliation, he places men before the decision as to reconciliation, and he sheds abroad his love in our hearts that we may receive his reconciliation.

God wrought this reconciliation for us in Christ, so that apart from the Prince of Peace and his passion, God would not be to us what he is. We were “reconciled to God through the death of his Son” (Rom. 5:10; Col. 1:22), “through the blood of his cross” (Col. 1:20; Eph. 2:16). Moreover, in Romans 5:1–11 reconciliation so strictly parallels justification that they seem to be different expressions of the same event. As Christ died for the ungodly so are we justified by his blood and reconciled by his death. Likewise in Second Corinthians five, reconciliation means that instead of imputing to the world its sins, God made him who knew no sin to be sin for us that we might become the righteousness of God in him. Thus reconciliation primarily signifies the removal of guilt, the pardon of sins.

Man’S Enmity And God’S Wrath

Sinful man is full of enmity against God (Col. 1:21; Rom. 8:7 f.). Our rebellious opposition to God has, moreover, called forth his holy enmity against man (1 Cor. 15:25 f.; Rom. 11:28; Jas. 4:4), his wrath (Rom. 1:18; 2:5, 8; 3:5; 5:9; Eph. 2:3; 5:6; Col. 3:6), his judgments (Rom. 1:24–32; 2:3, 16; 3:6, 19; 2 Cor. 5:10), his vengeance (or punishment) (Rom. 12:19; 2 Thess. 2:8), and the curse of the broken law (Gal. 3:10). In Romans 5:9–10, the wrath of the final judgment stands in immediate connection with the enmity which is removed by the reconciliation. Thus reconciliation means God so acted in giving his Son to be made sin that his wrath was averted and his righteousness made manifest in forgiveness (Rom. 3:25–26).

The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ averts but it does not destroy the wrath of God (1 Thess. 1:9). Those who continue to smile at the wrath of the Almighty will not praise him eternally for his grace. Those who explain away the wrath of God end in universalism. Only the man who knows the divine wrath seriously grasps the grace of God. The grace of the Lord Jesus gives the believer the assurance that the sentence of condemnation is no longer against him.

The Holy Spirit makes the reconciliation effective by shedding abroad in our hearts God’s love for us revealed in Christ’s reconciling death. Thus reconciliation is perhaps more comprehensive than justification. It brings man back from self-seeking rebellion into grateful, loving obedience. The prodigal is brought back into the family of God to live for him who died for men, and is called to give his life in ministering this word of reconciliation to others.

END

William Childs Robinson is Professor of Historical Theology at Columbia Theological Seminary, Decatur, Georgia. He holds the Th.D. degree from Harvard University, has studied at University of Basel, and is the author of several books.

During the Middle Ages there was a superstitious regard for fourteen saints as the “defenders from all evils.” They were called the fourteen of consolation, and silver tablets with their images were placed above the altars in the churches. Spiritual comfort became a matter of gaining (through prayers and penitential works) the protection of these saints for they were revealed—in a vision to a Franconian shepherd—to have power over diseases and evils of various kinds.

When Frederick the Wise was stricken in 1519 with a serious illness from which there seemed little hope of recovery, an Augustinian at Wittenberg, brother Martin Luther, served as his intercessor by preparing a little treatise of spiritual comfort which he called The Fourteen of Consolation. As over against the medieval saints Luther substituted fourteen other defenders and arranged them artificially as an altar tablet, only, instead of this being of silver, it is constructed of the Word of God. Here in this area of pastoral care Luther just as radically departed from medieval superstition and works-righteousness as he did in every other area of church life. Instead of offering pastoral comfort by appealing to the saints, Luther brings to his patient the Word of God in all its truth and purity. And a living Word it is, sharper than any two-edged sword, cutting in order to cure, hurting in order to heal, and slaying in order to make alive!

Modern Magic Rites

It is a curious little treatise, curious to an age in which the passwords to life are motivational research, interpersonal relationships, and togetherness. One must realize, of course, that one may lose entré into the select coterie by not reading the latest issues of the sociological and psychiatric journals. After all it was only yesterday that the elite vocabulary included such magic words as organization man and other-directed society. And was it the day before yesterday or the day before that that we were all talking about inferiority complexes and power drives and the libidinous urges of the ego in the sublimal recesses of human subconsciousness? Luther’s approach to pastoral care was quite different.

When we consider what we have gone through in the past 50 years we are reminded of Kierkegaard’s Professor who desperately had to have the truth: “Is Jesus the Lord of my life,” he asks, “or is he an impostor?” And so he goes to Pilate, and he spreads out his handkerchief so as not to soil his knees as he bends before the procurator to ask his desperate question, but just then someone hastens into the court with a new piece of evidence. It seems that Jesus is a Nazarene and therefore outside the jurisdiction of Pilate. The Professor then rushes to Herod to see if the king of Galilee can give him a final decision on the Lord of his life. But just as he is spreading his handkerchief Herod is reminded that Jesus was born in Bethlehem, and so he is a Judean under Pilate after all. Once more the Professor scurries to Pilate only to reach into his pocket for his handkerchief and then hear Pilate say: “I find no fault in this man. He is a Jew. See to him for yourselves!” And so the Professor is tossed from Herod to Pilate and from Pilate to Herod and he never gets a final word on this desperate matter because the world is always bringing in new evidence. And here we are 2,000 years later still being interrupted by Bedouin shepherds poking their noses into abandoned caves or by bright young medics with new techniques on child rearing, and always someone is whispering into the ear of Pilate or Herod and upsetting the court. Yet we desperately need the Truth!

The Control Of Persons

Let us just for curiosity go back and see what Luther said in his Fourteen of Consolation. There he shows us the many evils that beset us on all sides, but he consoles us in that the evil we bear is demonstrated to be nothing compared with the evil which is borne by our friends to the right or our enemies to the left and especially by Christ above us. “Look and see if there is any sorrow like my sorrow which was brought upon me.” And after facing evil squarely Luther moves to a positive approach in which he shows us the many blessings which come to us from all sides, from within and before and behind, and to the right, and to the left, and from below, and from above. And always it is Christ the living Lord who is both the answer to evil and the content of blessing.

This proclamation of the living Word was Luther’s pastoral care in answer to the superstitious magic of holy relics and the legalism of the confessional booth. I submit that this same Word must be our answer to the Freudian superstition and the behavioristic magic of our own day. Both of these philosophies parade in the guise of science and as such they claim to have a corner on the truth. But when it comes to relations between persons, which is the kind of thing that concerns us in pastoral care, scientific knowledge is not only inadequate but dangerously deceptive.

Science, whether it is Freud’s analysis or Dewey’s experimentalism or any of the newer revisions of these views, must necessarily deal with its subject as if he were an object. To know in the scientific sense means ultimately to have power over, it means to control, it means to predict and then arrange conditions to gain a desired result. This is a highly valuable kind of knowing but it is only fully valid for things. It is only partially valid for living organisms since any living thing is more than a physicochemical event even though Huxley dourly says that man is nothing but a protoplasmic agglomerate on the way to becoming fertilizer. And when this kind of scientific knowing is applied to persons it is not only invalid but to seek it is positively immoral! This we must never do in pastoral care. We must never seek to control, have power over, or even influence, for to do so is not to know our neighbor but merely to name him, and it is not to love our neighbor but merely to use him. In pastoral care we are concerned with an altogether different kind of knowing. As W. H. Auden says: “To the degree that it is possible to know a person in the scientific sense he is not a person.… Propaganda, commercial or political, and much that passes under the name of scientific psychology and education are immoral because they deliberately try to keep human beings on or reduce them to a subpersonal level at which they can be scientifically controlled, and it is no longer possible to know them in the poetic sense.”

Nothing Is Hidden

In pastoral care we must learn to know one another in the sense of the psalmist when he says: “O Lord, thou hast searched me and known me. Thou knowest when I sit down and when I rise up; thou discernest my thoughts from afar.… For thou didst form my inward parts, thou didst knit me together in my mother’s womb.… Thou knowest me right well; my frame was not hidden from thee, when I was being made in secret, intricately wrought in the depths of the earth.”

Before such knowing we can understand why the poet could cry in anguish: “I fled him down the nights and down the days; I fled him down the arches of the years; I fled him down the labyrinthine ways of my own mind and in the mist of tears I hid from him.” But where can the soul hide from the hound of heaven? As Luther says in his Commentary on Romans: “God going out from himself brings it about that we go into ourselves; and making himself known to us, he makes us known to ourselves.” First we must understand that God knows us as we really are, more intimately than we can ever know ourselves. Before him we stand naked with no fustian robe or tinselled diadem to hide our shame, no sensitive radar screen to warn us of God’s coming, and no scented cosmetics to deceive him when he comes. He knows us before we speak and he knows us in our inward parts.

And secondly we must understand that God knows us in the sense that he is mindful of us. This indeed is the consolation of Israel for it means that God visits us in his Son. This is a salvatory kind of knowing, while the first kind of knowing is a judging kind. Notice how many meanings the word mindful has. We speak of a mother minding her child and we mean that she cares for the child in loving sacrifice. We also speak of the child minding his parents and we mean that the child is obedient. We speak of a man being mindful of some future event and we mean that his mind is full of the knowledge of the anticipated moment. In every case we are dealing with knowledge, not in the scientific sense but in the biblical sense, for which we might say the symbol is: “And Adam knew his wife Eve.” What a wealth of understanding there is in the knowledge of such a personal relationship!

The Word Of Reconciliation

Such must be the knowledge in care, the knowledge in obedience, the knowledge in mindfulness, and the knowledge in loving trust in all our pastoral relationships. Only a relationship of knowledge in Christ can bring the consolation that brought tears of joy to the eyes of old Simeon when he sang, “For mine eyes have seen thy salvation which thou hast prepared in the presence of all peoples, a light for revelation to the Gentiles, and for glory to thy people Israel.” And such a relationship will do the two things of which Luther spoke: free us from all evils and unite us in blessed reconciliation with God our Father.

Christ, the living Word, is then the defender from evil, and not the techniques and gimmicks of an anthropocentric methodology. The modern man is looking for adjustment or acceptance because he finds himself to be alone in an unfriendly society. Consequently we develop techniques which will manipulate both the individual and society in the direction of acceptance. Inevitably, however, this manipulation destroys the person by appealing to the selfish ego instead of driving out the old Adam to make room for Christ. If the sickness of the soul is to be diagnosed we must do it in terms of the Word of God, and in that Word we find our trouble to be nothing less than a warring in our members due to the death struggle between Christ and Satan. Not simple psychiatrics with all its arbitrary symbolism and allegory but the earth-shaking conflict between two kingdoms is at stake here.

And also, Christ, the living Word, brings us into a living, creative communion with one another as members of his body the Church. Too long we have been thinking of pastoral counselling as the role of the unctuous individual practitioner who brings soothing soul therapy to a number of other individuals who are somewhat less than unctuous. Soon we must learn that pastor and people belong through one Spirit to one body. All our pastoral care must then center in the sacrament of the Church where we participate in the body and blood of Christ. It is not by the talk of any old words that happen to spill out of us, whether from pastor or from people, whether by direction or nondirection, that we are saved; it is by the Word of God and this Word becomes flesh for us in the sacrament. Here we become free both from the past and for the present and future, because in this great entrance of the elements as the ancient liturgies used to sing, Christ is here among us, he is and he will be! If he is here, then we are free from all enemies both past and present; if he will come, then we are free from all dangers in future. Because Christ has come we can be holy, and because he will come we must be holy. This is both our consolation and our exhortation.

Robert Paul Roth is Dean of the Graduate School and Professor of New Testament Theology at Lutheran Theological Southern Seminary. He served for some years as Professor in Luthergiri Seminary, Rajahmundry, India. He holds the M. A. from University of Illinois, B. D. from Northwestern Lutheran Seminary, and Ph. D. from University of Chicago.

One characteristic of mid-century evangelical Christianity is its greater conversation with non-evangelical viewpoints. We say “conversation” to indicate an exchange of opinion and serious discussion based thereupon. We do not say greatest “rapport,” which would indicate that this conversation is necessarily congenial. There are some evangelicals who are calling this willingness even to converse, the “new evangelicalism,” and therefore distrust it. They suspect it in an implicit abandonment of true evangelicalism. Those who participate in and encourage this conversation, as this magazine does, do not intend thereby to yield any evangelical ground either explicitly or implicitly.

This willingness to discuss has been noted by non-evangelicals some of whom cordially welcome the evidence of it in our ranks. Some of these men have thought, somewhat unfairly, of evangelicals as being unwilling to discuss vital issues with dispassionate academic objectivity. There is no denying that some evangelicals, more so in the past than in the present, have provided some basis for this charge. Our tradition has known some in its fellowship to be obscurantist in their outlook, to produce little literature or speech of solid character, and to be addicted to impugning the motives of non-evangelicals. While we do not admit that this has characterized evangelicals universally, we do acknowledge, with shame, that it has been all too much with us and in each of us.

It is interesting to see some of the signs that non-conservatives (or persons associated with non-conservative institutions) are recognizing this willingness and ability of evangelicals to speak to the modern situation. A few straws in the wind may be noted. When Religion in Life (Winter 1955–56) ran a feature article entitled “Where Do We Go From Here in Theology,” one of the invited contributors was Dr. Cornelius Van Til representing distinctly conservative theology. In a more recent article in The Christian Scholar (June 1958), “Contemporary Theology and Christian Higher Education,” Nels F. S. Ferré presents a serious consideration of “fundamentalism.” He dismisses it, to be sure, as an inadequate view for reasons which this writer does not find compelling. But, the point is that he first gives it fair and respectful evaluation. Incidentally, Ferré comments:

A few years ago even mention of this position might have seemed quite irrelevant to the problems of higher education both because of Fundamentalism’s external standard of authority and because of its belonging to a bygone era.

Dr. Sydney Ahlstrom of Yale University (Church History, September 1958) states this on “Fundamentalism”:

[This is a] term I wish to limit strictly to those large areas of America’s church-membership which for economic, social, and ecclesiastical reasons in general and an exaggerated emphasis on revivalism in particular became almost totally estranged from the ongoing intellectual enterprise of the Atlantic community during the nineteenth century. (Without this estrangement and ignorance and its attendant insecurity and hostility, there is no ‘Fundamentalism’ by my definition of the word.)

In a footnote he continues:

Obviously no term like ‘Fundamentalist’ ever has a single, definite, invariable, agreed-upon, meaning. Because this term is so often used with pejorative connotations, however, I have purposely delimited its application. My sharply restricted use of the name reflects a conviction that the Fundamentalist movement should be understood as the historically-rooted obverse of the Liberal-Modernist movement and that no form of theological ‘conservatism’ is ipso facto ‘Fundamentalist.’ Accordingly I exclude Jonathan Edwards, Charles Hodge, and J. Gresham Machen as well as contemporary theologians like Van Til, Berkouwer, Carnell et al who are frequently referred to as Fundamentalists, or even so refer to themselves. To my mind, a person is not a Fundamentalist if he speaks to the issues, is aware of the problems, is well-informed, and is in communication with those from whom he dissents. I recognize that nobody can legislate the meaning of such a word; I merely wish to emphasize an important qualitative distinction between two types of conservatism.

It seems to us that there are many advantages in academic conversation by persons of profound differences of opinion. From the evangelical viewpoint it spells nothing less than an evangelistic opportunity. Academic matters have to do with truth and truth has to do with salvation. Believing that evangelical truth is nothing less than the truth which justifies and redeems, we covet every occasion to proclaim it. Speaking this truth in the language of the scholar is a distinct duty and high privilege which we must not forfeit by incompetence. Secondly, reaching the scholars in a theoretical way is of the greatest conceivable practical value. The masses are ultimately far more affected by the scholars than by the masses. This effect may be very indirect but it is very real. Third, for evangelicals this interchange of debate and friendly argument has great intrinsic value. It subjects our thought to thorough, unreserved, devastating, competent criticism. This may not be at all pleasant but it is undoubtedly salutary. Like the judgment of God (which it may well be) these academic rods of his anger may well humble and purify the weak and halting presentation we make of the Word of God. Whatever may be the positions, or even the motives, of our opponents, the method of frank criticism is nothing less than a blessing of God.

But, there are formidable dangers in candid academic give-and-take. How have the mighty fallen in intellectual combat. If you debate at all, you must debate honestly. If you debate honestly you run the risk of losing. The truth, of course, will never lose to error; but the defender of truth may lose to the defender of error. That is to say, one man may put forth a better case for a worse cause; another man a worse case for a better cause. This tends to detract from truth itself in the eyes of many. The poor defender of a good cause may himself lose confidence in truth because his own defense of it has been justly exposed. Or, to put it another way, a person may hold a right conclusion on wrong premises. These premises may be exposed in this interchange, and the person may suppose that the very Gospel has been intellectually tried and found wanting. Another hazard is that Christians may be driven into an intellectual underground which they call “faith,” and wrongly think of it as opposed to all thought. And even when Christians emerge successfully from scholarly encounter, they may, while refuting most, still be infected by some error.

Theological Education Today

Theological Education in America: (1) “The Situation in 1958,” by Charles L. Taylor; (2) “Training for the Parish Ministry,” by Paul W. Hoon; (3) “Training of Teachers of Religion for College and University,” by Robert Michaelsen; (4) “The Cosmos and the Ego,” by Keith Bridston, Religion In Life (Winter, 1958–59), are reviewed by Ned B. Stonehouse, Dean of Faculty, Westminster Theological Seminary.

The significance of the publication of these articles on theological education does not lie, in the first place at any rate, in the novelty of the ideas presented or in the disclosure of earnest concern for the present state of such education on the part of these leaders in the field. Professional concern for theological education has found noteworthy recent expression in the books, The Purpose of the Church and Its Ministry, by H. R. Niebuhr (1956), The Ministry in Historical Perspectives, edited by H. R. Niebuhr and D. D. Williams (1956), and The Advancement of Theological Education, by H. R. Niebuhr, D. D. Williams and J. M. Gustafson (1957). And to a substantial extent the thoughts and perspectives of these articles reflect the ideas and point of view of these volumes. But these articles are significant, as the editors of Religion in Life say in introducing them, because “the interest in theological education is no longer confined to an inner circle. The wider public has come to realize how deeply the future of the whole Christian movement depends on the quality of training of its leadership.”

All four articles are well written, informative, challenging and provocative, and thus fulfill rather well the purpose which the editors had in view. As will be pointed out below, their common viewpoint will not commend itself to every reader. Nevertheless, they contain many admirable features. There is little or no complacency among these writers. Thus Dr. Taylor, Executive Director of the American Association of Theological Schools, calls for “rigorous self-criticism” as the order of the day. And he includes in his analysis of the goals of theological education the following:

“The theological schools must become centers of learning summoning all Christian people to serve the Lord better with all their minds. The faculties of these schools must be thoroughly equipped for their positions and adequately supported in them. The professors must be given

opportunity through writing and speaking to educate not only a group of students but through them and beyond them a whole church. Isolation must be overcome, but proper withdrawal from restless coming and going also provided. Standards must be recognized and goals far beyond these standards constantly kept in view: standards of prior preparation for theological students, standards of faculty load and responsibility, standards for libraries and finances, standards of sabbatical leaves and academic freedom” (p. 10). In similar vein Dr. Hoon says: “It is heartening that one does not find much boasting among the more sensitive theological educators; one finds rather sober, honest, steady-eyed concern” (p. 19).

Even if we feel called upon to differ from these writers in some basic respects, we should not make this an occasion for vaunting self-congratulation and complacency. Theological education conducted by evangelicals contains no built-in guarantee of the presence and realization of adequate goals and standards. And it must be admitted that our own efforts at self-criticism may be fruitfully stimulated if, from time to time, we receive the benefit of criticism of others.

Among the various aspects of theological education touched upon in these articles, the problem of the curriculum appropriately comes in for its share of attention. There remains continuing concern with such traditional features as biblical studies, church history, and theology, and in many quarters this concern has received new impetus in recent years. But for many a day there has been a strong tendency to multiply courses of a “practical” nature—not only courses in worship, education, counseling, and evangelism, but also many others including religious drama and the ecumenical movement. A widely recognized consequence is that the curriculum has been overloaded, studies in the “classical” fields have been sharply reduced, and a tragic dualism between the “theoretical” and the “practical” disciplines has often resulted. Moreover, there has understandably been a desire to integrate theological education with education in general, and thus the curriculum is often expanded to include courses in psychology, sociology, anthropology, and other studies intended to give the student a comprehensive insight into the world of which he is a part and to which he is called upon to minister. Finally, seminaries find it difficult to restrict their program to the traditional function of training preachers and pastors. Missionaries, chaplains, and especially teachers of Bible and religion in colleges and universities cannot be blamed if they charge that the traditional theological curriculum has not kept their special tasks sufficiently in view. On all sides, therefore, there must be a recognition of the need of adjusting the curriculum to the modern situation. Even in such a seminary as that in which I serve, in which in the interest of maintaining unity of direction the traditional Bible-centered curriculum is still basically maintained, there is constant concern with the question of modification and expansion of the curriculum to meet more fully the needs of the day.

Questions concerning curriculum and faculty, however urgent and pressing they are, are not the key to the advancement of theological education. For prior to such questions, and indispensable to genuine progress in solving them, is the question of theology itself. Will theological education be actually theological? Will it be God-centered and so discover its basic subject matter in divine revelation? Or will it be essentially concerned with an understanding of human existence from within human experience, and thus be occupied with anthropology rather than theology? Or again will it attempt a synthesis of the gospel and the “modern minds,” the latter being interpreted in terms of the ultimacy and autonomy of man?

The theological issue is not in the foreground in the articles, but it is touched upon. In the main, I regret to say, this issue is not faced in a thoroughly incisive way. From time to time there are echoes of Dr. Niebuhr’s polemic against the idea of “handing down the truth” (The Advancement of Theological Education, p. 136). Thus Dr. Taylor, apparently reflecting an essentially liberal theological point of view, sets up a sharp disjunction between “loyalty to a person” and “conformity to fixed ideas and set codes.” Loyalty to Christ he further describes as finding expression where “the fresh winds of the unbound Spirit are blowing through not a few theological halls” (p. 8).

The essentially liberal slant of these articles is also found in their common insistence that theological education must be ecumenical. Dr. Hoon speaks boldly of “the coming great ecumenical church as providing part of the broader perspectives that are needed” (p. 23). A plaintive note is heard at times to the effect that the ecumenical ideal is threatened by “the resurgence of denominational loyalties.” And the final article by Dr. Bridston treats the ecumenical question in a happily forthright and critical manner. Theological education in both denominational and interdenominational seminaries, he says, “are still largely determined by pre-ecumenical categories” (p. 36). One encounters refreshing frankness as this writer castigates “the fuzzy religiosity which identifies the ecumenical movement with sentimental togetherness, or even with jet-propelled church leaders clutching well-filled brief cases” (p. 40). The true ecumenical ideal, he maintains, is that of wholeness. He expresses the fear that the ecumenical movement “may ‘jell’ prematurely; that it may, reflecting the consolidating and centripetal trend of our age, become a movement of uniformity rather than unity, of conformity rather than cohesive diversity” (p. 44). His plea is for concern with truth rather than primarily with ecumenism, and he calls for a genuine theological encounter among the spokesmen for various theological points of view. This should result eventually in “a new dogmatics.” This frank appraisal is encouraging.

Dr. Bridston’s eloquent and hard-hitting article is accordingly of exceptional interest and importance for the understanding of the ecumenical approach to theological education. Much of what he says is worthy of more than passing mention and reflection. I find room for only one criticism, but that is a basic one. Truth is indeed a unifying factor; but since men, as individuals and in community are finite, imperfect, and evil, truth may also be a divisive factor in the relationship of men. Church history gives witness of the divisiveness of truth, as comprehended by fallible men. Being greatly concerned for the truth demands that one shall also be greatly opposed to error. In any case, apart from clarity and unity in understanding the Lordship of Jesus Christ as coming to expression in the Holy Scriptures, there can be no theological wholeness and no lasting assurance of advancement in theological education.

NED B. STONEHOUSE

Sustaining Grace

The Hour Had Come, by Go Puan Seng (Douma Publications, Grand Rapids, 1958, 228 pp.), is reviewed by Horace L. Fenton, Jr., Associate General Director of Latin America Mission, Inc.

Early in December, 1941, the “f*ckien Times,” largest and most widely-circulated Chinese newspaper in the Philippines, carried a banner headline: “One Hundred Japanese Warships Heading for Philippine Waters, Rome Reports.” When the editor of the paper, Go Puan Seng, saw this report, it seemed fantastic to him, too fantastic to be worthy of belief. A few days later the incredible had happened, and Mr. Go, long an outspoken opponent of Japan’s plans for aggression, was himself a fugitive from the advancing Nipponese forces.

His book tells the story of the long years that followed—of hiding in the jungle, of near-capture on several occasions, of separation from family and friends, and of hardship and suffering almost without limit. But the emphasis here is not on what he endured, but on the sustaining grace and matchless goodness of God to him through this long period.

The author is a converted Buddhist, whose faith in the Son of God was inestimably deepened and strengthened through the long months that he lived like a hunted beast. The story is one of turning again and again to the Word of God in moments of great despair, and of finding just the message for which his needy heart was crying out. His relationship to the Lord was a sweet, intimate one, as in the occasion when, racked by sickness, he collapsed while brushing his teeth: “Dear God, even my knees refuse to support me,” was his simple prayer (p. 134), and somehow, strength came to him in his weakness.

The book is studded with Bible verses and hymns which, to this harassed man and his family, were intensely meaningful. Some of these verses are so familiar that they almost lose their meaning for many believers; not so, however, for these who went through the furnace of affliction. “‘What we need is a word from God,’ my wife said calmly. ‘So long as we have a divine promise to cling to, we need not be frightened’” (p. 149). For three years, they proved the literal truth of our Saviour’s assurance that man shall live by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God.

There is plenty of heroism in this story and an abundance of exciting detail. But the record is above all what the author most wanted it to be—a moving testimony to the faithfulness of God. As such, it should refresh and bless many.

HORACE L. FENTON, JR.

Regional History

The Presbyterian Valley, by William W. McKinney (Davis and Warde, Inc., Pittsburgh, 1958, 639 pp., $3.95), is reviewed by Richard L. James, Minister of Riverside Ave. Christian Church, Jacksonville, Fla.

Here is a regional history of Presbyterianism published by the Presbyterian Historical Society, an auxiliary of the Historical Society of the Presbyterian Church in the U. S. A.

Assisting William W. McKinney with various sections of the book are Dwight W. Guthrie, Edward B. Welsh, Daniel J. Yolton, Walter L. Moser, George F. Swetnam, and Frank D. McCloy.

The authors trace the development of Presbyterian influence from its beginnings in the vicinity of Pittsburgh and later along the Upper Ohio River Valley. This is “The Presbyterian Valley.”

There are three chronological sections: “The Foundation Years, 1758–1802,” “The Years of Growth, 1802–1870” and “The Years of Fruitage, 1870–1958.” Under the above sections the spread of Presbyterian churches through western Pennsylvania, West Virginia, and Ohio is described. In addition to the formation of churches, the development of auxiliary organizations and equipment is explained. Colleges, women’s groups, theological seminaries, hospitals and libraries have their place in the story presented in this work.

The book was intended to celebrate the 200th anniversary of Presbyterianism in the Upper Ohio Valley, a year (1958) which saw the union of two branches of Presbyterians in the ceremonies at Pittsburgh in May.

While interesting, both in design and style of writing, its value is more for the student of church history than to the general reader. It presents in graphic form the story of a great religious movement in one section of our nation.

RICHARD L. JAMES

NEWS

CHRISTIANITY TODAY

Roman Catholicism

Aged Pope John XXIII continues to make the early designation of “caretaker pope” look very premature. In his announced intention of calling an “ecumenical council,” he continues to gamer tremendous publicity for Roman Catholicism, giving the Soviets a run for their headlines, Lunik and Mikoyan notwithstanding.

Since 1563 there has been only one such gathering, the Vatican Council of 1869–70, and it created in Christendom a universal stir which prompted publication of a multitude of books and pamphlets even before the council’s assemblage. And the forthcoming council may not convene until 1961, due to the vast preparations demanded. But when it does occur, presumably in Rome, it will be big and exceedingly colorful with more than 3,500 ecclesiastics expected to attend. Apparently their chief consideration will be means of bringing about unity between their own church and other Christian communities.

There was a day when popes avoided church councils like the plague, for they regarded them as rivals to their own authority. But the Vatican Council changed this by absolutizing the pope’s power and thus making councils practically superfluous.

Early ecumenical councils were very different. Current papal domination was unknown. Such dangerous heresies as Arianism and Pelagianism, among others, were condemned. Of the twenty councils considered ecumenical by the Roman Catholic church, the Eastern Orthodox church accepts the first seven, and Anglicans have recognized as ecumenical the first four—sometimes the first six. The Trinitarian definitions of the first four councils are common property of Roman, Orthodox and Protestant alike.

The two most important and definitive councils for modern Romanism were the Vatican Council and the Council of Trent, the latter meeting intermittently from 1545 to 1563. Necessitated by the Protestant Reformation, it was called to settle doctrinal controversies and reform church discipline. Theologically, the character of exclusive Romanism was here engraved upon medieval Catholicism.

Pope Paul III reluctantly opened Trent under pressure from Emperor Charles V, but once in session it was under papal domination. At Charles’ urging, Protestants were invited, but in answer the evangelical princes and divines pointed out that the council would be “neither free nor Christian, nor ecumenical, nor ruled by the Word of God.”

Despite the claim of ecumenicity, the council was really a Roman synod. The Eastern church was never invited; the Protestants were anathematized without a hearing.

What Trent did to the Protestants, the nineteenth-century Vatican Council was called to do to modern liberalism and rationalism. Orthodox and Protestant representatives were invited by the pope. The Eastern Patriarchs considered this an insult to their avowed equality with the Bishop of Rome, while the evangelicals chose to ignore or decline the offer.

Papal control of a council was never greater. Gallicanism fell before Ultramontanism, with the crushing of the Episcopate’s independence. Papal absolutism was completed in the proclamation of the pope’s infallibility. This led some to believe that any improbable future council would simply be an empty ritualistic extravagance.

And now there is to be another.… This one seems aimed at church unity and perhaps against communism.

Seemingly overlooked was the fact that such Roman overtures to Orthodox and Protestant as are being predicted are not new. In fact, the Roman hope for the Vatican Council was that it might become a general feast of reconciliation of divided Christendom.

Also neglected was the fact that councils have often been more creative of division than unity. The early ecumenical councils produced Eastern schisms which exist to this day. The Council of Basel, Ferrara, and Florence (1431–45) failed to solve Latin and Greek differences. The Trent and Vatican Councils, with their hardening of Roman dogma and the pronouncement of papal infallibility, have only widened the breach between Rome, on the one hand, and Constantinople, Canterbury, Wittenberg, and Geneva, on the other. Indeed, the Vatican Council gave rise to the Old Catholic Church, formed by some of Rome’s ablest divines who saw in the papal infallibility dogma a false innovation but who were outnumbered and outmaneuvered in council proceedings.

Orthodox and Protestant reaction has this time been friendlier than it was to some previous Roman proposals. But this was mingled with marked caution and much skepticism. How ecumenical would the council be and on what basis would it be called? These were oft-repeated questions voiced to the press by ecclesiastics who had not yet received their invitations.

Reunion with Eastern Orthodox bodies appeared to be the primary goal of Pope John, who has seen years of service in Eastern territories. But major obstacles exist, chief among them being papal supremacy (versus conciliar supremacy) and the doctrine of the procession of the Holy Spirit (being, according to Eastern Orthodoxy, from the Father only and not Father and Son as taught by the Western churches).

Orthodoxy has known many sorrows under the domination of Mohammed and Marx. She would be seriously handicapped at a council with Rome if the Soviets stood in the way of attendance, for the bulk of her some 150 million members is behind the Iron Curtain.

Anglican efforts toward reunion with Rome have been rebuffed by Roman refusal to recognize the validity of Anglican episcopal consecration. What status then would Anglicans have in a council with Rome?

Romanism regards the Orthodox churches as schismatic but the Protestant churches as heretical, which makes participation by the latter in the proposed council very dubious. Dr. Edwin T. Dahlberg, president of the National Council of Churches and no hater of ecumenism, has insisted in effect that the Protestants be treated as equals. Protestant agreement on this point thus far would appear to make an International Council of Churches prediction of departure of Protestant apostates for Rome unrealistic (though some observers sense the possibility of Protestant defections).

For the pope has made it clear that his supremacy is not to be questioned, that Rome is “in possession of the truth.” Concessions could be made only in the realm of canon law, liturgy, and discipline—certainly not in infallible dogma. Only the week before, special prayers had been said the world over for return of non-Romans to the authority of the pope. But Pope John said, “Let us reunite; let us end discussions.”

Somehow this all was strangely reminiscent of Rome’s foe Mikoyan, whose smile seemed to promise so much, but who could concede so little because of prior commitments. The Roman frown was still to be seen in Spain and Colombia, where there were reminders that Foxe once wrote a Book of Martyrs.

As one leaves the church in Trent where the council sat, he looks up to see a comely row of hills. He wishes the delegates of old had looked, as the Psalmist, to these and beyond for their help and guidance rather than to Rome and down musty Vatican corridors of heretical accretions. The Tridentine errors loom large across the face of Christendom.

F.F.

Protestant Panorama

• Danish archaeologists working in the British protectorate of Bahrain claim to have found the site of the biblical Garden of Eden.

• An elderly couple donated last month some 17,280 acres of West Texas farmland to Wayland Baptist College. The land, valued at more than two million dollars, represents one of the largest individual gifts ever made to Christian education.

• The Mississippi Baptist Convention board plans to use property which once was the site of the U. S. Maritime Academy for a year-round assembly ground. The site was purchased at auction last month for $455,000.

• An assembly of the Rhode Island Council of Churches rejected last month an amendment to its constitutional preamble which would have excluded from membership Protestant churches not accepting Christ as “Divine Saviour and Lord.” The present constitution states belief in the deity of Christ but does not bar opposition.

• The Canadian Baptist, official organ of the Baptist Convention of Ontario and Quebec and the Baptist Union of Western Canada, is observing its 100th anniversary of continuous publication under its present name.

• The Supreme Court of Canada ruled in a four-to-three vote last month that the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation cannot be prosecuted under the Lord’s Day Act for broadcasting on Sunday.

• Churches in the United States have received about $410,000,000 in financing from life insurance companies, according to a survey by the Institute of Life Insurance.

• In Milwaukee, the Concordia College Conference of the Lutheran Church—Missouri Synod approved church-sponsored social dancing “under careful supervision and guidance.” Missouri Lutherans traditionally have opposed social dancing, but this was the second synod group to liberalize its stand in recent months. In November, the St. Louis Lutheran Pastoral Conference stated that social dancing would be permissible if properly supervised.

• At its 64th annual convention, the Episcopal Diocese of Los Angeles voted unanimously to accept a goal of $1,300,000 as its share in a four-million-dollar capital funds drive for additional buildings at the Church Divinity School of the Pacific in Berkeley, California.

• Plans were announced this month for a one-million-dollar expansion of church work in urban renewal by the Board of National Missions of the United Presbyterian Church in the U. S. A.

• Dallas Theological Seminary held a ground-breaking service February 8 for a $325,000 library building.

• Religion in American Life, which campaigns for regular church attendance, received space and radio-television time valued at more than eight million dollars last year.

• A new adoption agency and family counselling service has been instituted in New York state as an affiliate of the National Association of Evangelicals. Pending issuance of a charter, the Evangelical Child and Family Welfare Service is limiting activities other than adoptions.

• His magazine, edited by Joseph Bayly, was named “Periodical of the Year” by judges at an annual meeting of the Evangelical Press Association.

• A “stay-at-home-and-enjoy-your-family night” was held by the Young Married Peoples Society of Concordia Lutheran Church in suburban St. Louis. The special “night” was prompted by concern over an increasing number of religious and other types of meetings. Participation was checked by telephone calls.

• A 17-man military contingent at the South Pole dedicated a 16-foot-square chapel last month. “Now it can truly be said the earth turns on a point of faith,” said naval Lieutenant Sidney Tolchin, officer-in-charge.

Nation’S Capital

Catholics In Congress

Official inquiries by the Library of Congress reveal that Roman Catholics are the most numerous in some two dozen religious categories represented in the Senate and House this year.

The Library of Congress reports that 103 members of Congress, 91 in the House and 12 in the Senate, list membership in the Roman Catholic church. In both houses Protestants as a group still outnumber those of other faiths, but the 1959 totals represent an increase of eight Catholics when compared to tabulations for the 85th Congress. Back in 1937 Catholics in Congress numbered 110, but it was not certain whether they held a plurality.

The present Catholic representation bears nearly the same proportion to the total membership of Congress as the total of baptized Catholics bears to the whole U. S. population.

The 86th Congress has three ordained ministers, all Democrats: Representatives Merwin Coad of Iowa (Disciples of Christ), Walter H. Moeller of Ohio (Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod), and Adam Clayton Powell of New York (Abyssinian Baptist).

Here is a summary of religious affiliations or preferences expressed by members of Congress in response to the Library of Congress inquiry:

Supreme Court Survey

The U. S. Supreme Court bench has three Presbyterians, two Baptists, an Episcopalian, a Methodist, a Jew, and a Roman Catholic.

Chief Justice Earl Warren comes from a Methodist family background, but now attends a Baptist church.

Justices William O. Douglas, John Marshall Harlan, and Tom C. Clark are Presbyterians.

Justice Hugo L. Black retains membership in a Baptist church in his home state of Alabama, although he often attends a Unitarian church in Washington.

Justice Felix Frankfurter is Jewish and Justice William J. Brennan Jr., Catholic.

Justice Charles Evans Whittaker is a Methodist and the newest member of the court, Justice Potter Stewart, is an Episcopalian.

Graham On Television

North Americans will be able to witness the Australian crusade of evangelist Billy Graham via television beginning Saturday night, February 28.

The initial telecast will be an hour-long film of one of the nightly meetings scheduled to begin in Melbourne, February 15. It will be beamed over the American Broadcasting Company television network at 10 p.m., Eastern Standard Time. Some stations will schedule the telecast for a later time.

Drys Try Again

Among some 5,000 bills introduced in the first three weeks of the 86th Congress was a proposal which would ban liquor advertising in interstate commerce. The bill sponsored by Democratic Representative Eugene Siler of Kentucky is similar to a number which have been introduced in recent years. Such a measure has yet to come out of a Congressional committee. Last year an anti-liquor advertising bill sponsored by Republican Senator William Langer of North Dakota created a stir in public hearings but died in committee. Langer was expected to re-introduce the bill.

Other bills already introduced would:

—Create a “Medical Advisory Committee on Alcoholism” within the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare.

—Allow income tax credit for tuition paid for higher education in public and private schools.

—Make the bombing of churches, synagogues, and schools a federal offense.

—Eliminate civilian chaplains for the U. S. Military Academy at West Point.

—Exempt from the Social Security program members of the Old Order Amish Mennonites who object to it.

—Among resolutions proposed in Congress are measures which would (1) amend the U. S. Constitution to recognize “the authority and law of Jesus Christ, Saviour and Ruler of Nations”, (2) establish “National Prayer for Peace Day” and “National Family Day.”

A so-called “Christian Amendment” has been introduced by various sponsors in the last three Congresses but it never has gone beyond a public hearing.

In The Public Interest

Resolutions approving compulsory radio and television time “in the public interest” and condemning “liquor advertising” were passed unanimously by National Religious Broadcasters, Inc., in their annual convention at Washington’s Mayflower Hotel, January 21–22.

Some 150 broadcasts are represented in the 16-year-old body, including such programs as the “Lutheran Hour,” the “Hour of Decision” and the “Old Fashioned Revival Hour.” They spend an estimated 12 to 15 million dollars annually in broadcasting the evangelical gospel message. They reach multiplied millions of listeners and viewers in America and around the world.

Three years ago NRB took a strong stand for the sale and purchase of radio and television time for the broadcasting of religion and achieved a notable victory. This year a more subtle attack on the principle had been made in a proposal of T. A. M. Craven, Federal Communications Commissioner. Under the present code, licenses to operate stations stipulate that time must be given to programs “in the public interest” (involving religion, art, music, education, public welfare, politics, etc.). Mr. Craven, backed by a considerable sector of the industry, proposed that this public interest license requirement be eliminated and that the Federal Communications Commission refrain from checking station programming practices. The Washington meeting of NRB went on record as strongly opposing the Craven plan. Evangelicals believe that American air waves belong to the American people, that the public has authority through its duly constituted FCC to protect the rights and the freedoms of broadcasters of religion.

Speaking personnel at Washington were indicative of the esteem in which NRB is held. Mr. Harold Fellows, president of the industry’s National Association of Broadcasters, spoke in the opening session. Mr. John Charles Doerfer, FCC chairman, addressed a noon-day luncheon. Dr. William J. Millard gave a series of technical addresses. Network notables participated.

Vice President Richard M. Nixon received a citation and bronze plaque for his contribution to world peace. Other citations went to Mr. Fellows and to Dr. Billy Graham, whose “Hour of Decision” broadcast was recognized as the outstanding religious program of 1958.

Forward steps taken by NRB at Washington included (1) authorization of the immediate opening of a national office in the capital, (2) inauguration of a series of workshops for the improvement of broadcasting techniques, and (3) promotion of better station-management relations.

The convention closed on an international note with addresses by the Rev. Ralph Freed of the Voice of Tangier, Tangier, Morocco and the Rev. William J. Roberts of the Far East Broadcasting Company in Manila. It was disclosed that evangelical broadcasters now belt the globe with gospel messages in more than 100 languages and dialects. Remarkable evangelistic results are being achieved even in Iron Curtain and Bamboo Curtain countries.

J. D. M.

Clergy Vs. Conscription

The National Council of Churches reiterated its stand opposing a peacetime draft when a representative joined a number of other Protestant churchmen in protesting continued conscription before a House Armed Services Committee hearing.

Testifying in behalf of the council last month—against a four-year extension of the military draft—was Dr. Henry C. Koch, president of the National Capital Area Council of Churches.

New York

Death At The River

Three clergy members of the Methodist Radio and Film Commission were listed among victims in the crash of an American Airlines plane early this month. A Lutheran pastor also was killed when the craft, a new Lockheed Electra bound from Chicago, plunged into the East River while approaching LaGuardia Airport.

The Methodist ministers were en route to the annual meeting of the commission in New York. All were from Nashville, Tennessee. They had attended another meeting in Chicago. They were identified as the Rev. William A. Meadows, 39, the Rev. W. C. Walton Jr., 41, and the Rev. Royer H. Woodburn, 46.

One of the first bodies recovered from the river was that of the Rev. Francis C. McGrath, pastor of the Bethany Lutheran Church at Elmhurst, Long Island, New York. McGrath, 31, was returning from a visit to Concordia Teachers College, River Forest, Illinois, where he was to teach a two-week course in audio-visual aids next summer. He had been working on a doctor’s degree at Columbia University.

Communist China

Crippling Unity

All Protestant denominations on the Chinese mainland are being merged into a single church body and the majority of local churches are being forced to close, according to reports received by the China Committee of the National Council of Churches. Dr. Wallace C. Merwin, executive secretary of the committee, said last month that 16 long-established denominations in China are involved in the merger.

Typical of the closing of churches was the shutdown of all but 12 of 200 Protestant churches in Shanghai and all but four of 65 in Peiping, he said. Closed churches are being turned over to the government as “patriotic gifts,” he added.

These crippling blows to Protestant Christianity are being carried out by constituents of the Three Self Love Country committee, the only Protestant agency recognized by the Red Chinese government, Merwin said.

“By leaving the churches little choice except to join the committee,” he said, “the Chinese authorities are succeeding in maintaining closer controls over the churches and their members.”

In addition to churches, the committee has acquired Protestant schools, hospitals and other institutions. Merwin said that as a result “it is not so much a persecuted church as a captive church.”

The reports from China indicated that during the first six months of 1958 church workers underwent an intensive course in “education for socialism” as part of a general “thought-rectification” campaign.

Congregations are constantly urged to carry out self-reform and to take an active part in China’s “giant leap forward,” Merwin said. Church leaders everywhere were reported pledging obedience to the government and the Three Self group.

“Today Chinese Protestants are told that church division and denominational names are ‘vestiges of Western colonialism aimed to divide and rule,’” Merwin said. “It is also the first time that Protestant congregations have had to surrender their properties and funds on such a large scale,” he added.

Merwin collected his data from personal letters which have come out of Red China and from material which appeared in a Communist periodical.

Another view behind the Bamboo Curtain is supplied by David H. Adeney, who previously worked on the mainland, first for the China Inland Mission then for Inter-Varsity Christian Fellowship.

“The persecution of Christians never comes directly from the government,” says Adeney, who now lives in Hong Kong and who regularly talks with refugees from Communist-held territory. “It is always from the Communist elements from within the church.”

In the March issue of His magazine, Adeney notes a complacent attitude toward the 600 million living under the Peking regime:

“It is only a few miles to the border of China, yet the Christians in Hong Kong and in Western countries seem to stand on the sidelines, almost unmoved by the spiritual battle which does not affect them. We know so little of sacrifice in our own daily lives and we often fail to realize that the Lord is … calling us to cast off the lethargy and love of ease.”

Reader Poll

Results of a CHRISTIANITY TODAY reader poll, which showed opposition to U. S. recognition of Communist China by more than an eight-to-one margin, have been formally submitted to Secretary of State John Foster Dulles as a matter of information.

An aide said the information would be brought to the personal attention of Dulles, who at the time was preparing to go to Europe for talks on the Berlin Crisis.

CHRISTIANITY TODAY instituted the poll in its December 22nd issue, which contained an editorial criticizing suggestions advanced by the National Council of Churches World Order Conference last November. A coupon was printed and readers were invited to mail in their own views before January 10.

A total of 1212 replies expressed opposition to U. S. diplomatic recognition of Red China while 145 were in favor of such recognition.

On the question of whether or not to admit the Peking regime into the United Nations, 1,221 said they would oppose such action while 146 said they would favor it.

Great Britain

New Translation

Top British scholars are turning out a new translation of the Bible. They are working from original texts, rendering them into contemporary English.

The New Testament, to be published jointly by Oxford University Press and Cambridge University Press, is expected to appear early in 1961. The Old Testament will require several more years to complete. Work got under way in 1947 with formation of the Joint Committee on New Translation of the Bible.

General director of the translation is Dr. C. H. Dodd. Represented on the committee are the Churches of England, Scotland, Ireland, and Wales, plus the Methodist church, the Congregational Union, Baptist Union, Presbyterian Church in England, Society of Friends, the British and Foreign Bible Society, and the Bible Society of Scotland.

West Germany

Slander Charge

West German church leader Martin Niemoeller, long a campaigner against nuclear arms, was formally charged with insulting the Bonn army last month.

The president of the Evangelical Church of Hesse and Nassau had been quoted as stating at a pacifist meeting in Kassel that “the training of soldiers and the training for leading positions in the military command posts must be regarded as a higher school for professional criminals.” He denied the statement. He claimed he had merely said that the training of commando units of the former German army was a school for potential war criminals.

Belgian Congo

Escape For Protestants

Protestant missions and missionaries in the Belgian Congo were reported operating normally despite a month of rioting and demonstrations.

Part of the rioting, which killed 175 early in January, was directed against Roman Catholic property, apparently because the uprising was in protest against the Belgian colonial government and most Catholic missionaries in the Congo are Belgian citizens.

Confused by tribal rivalries, political aspirations of small minority groups, and the undercurrent of growing nationalism, Congolese at Leopoldville saw across the river at Brazzaville a new and unexpected freedom from French colonialism. Dormant feelings erupted with tragic results in the Congo capital.

Belgian authorities were unprepared for the uprisings, first at Leopoldville and

later at Matadi. Panicky police fired prematurely, some observers said, and orderly demonstrations turned into bloody fighting.

The original riots were blamed on the Abako movement, headed by a former Roman Catholic seminarian who was subsequently charged with violation of state security and inciting racial hatred.

The outbursts were not limited to religious properties. Commercial and government establishments were attacked with resulting damages estimated in millions of dollars.

Continent Of Australia

Saturation Evangelism

A four-point program of “saturation evangelism” was projected for Australia on the eve of the scheduled opening of Billy Graham’s Melbourne crusade. It was the most thorough and well-integrated plan ever advanced for a Graham campaign.

Coordinator of the program is the Rev. Leslie Green, formerly associate minister at the First Christian Church, Fort Worth, Texas.

Green, now ministering in a Sydney church, is “federal director of visitation evangelism” under a continent-wide liaison committee of churchmen cooperating with the Graham team.

Elements of the program:

1. Utilization of crusade counsellors and other volunteers in door-to-door visitation prior to the crusade. (Goal is to reach every home with a personal invitation to attend the crusade.)

2. The witness of the mass meetings (with “Operation Andrew” transit pools).

3. Personal counseling of inquirers.

4. Follow-up, to include another door-to-door visitation project.

People: Words And Events

Deaths: Lutheran Bishop Eivind Berggrav, 74, formerly a president of the World Council of Churches and Primate of the Norwegian state church, in Oslo … Cecil B. DeMille, 77, outstanding producer-director of Bible films, in Hollywood … Methodist Bishop John W. Branscomb, 53, in Orlando, Florida … Professor Wilhelm Neuser, 70, retired head of the Evangelical Reformed Church of Lippe, Germany, in Detmold … the Rev. Jacob R. Perkins, 79, retired minister, author, and former warden of the Iowa penitentiary, best known as co-author of the Rotary International code of ethics, in Council Bluffs, Iowa … Dr. George L. Robinson, 94, retired professor of Hebrew and Old Testament at McCormick Theological Seminary, in Chicago … Dr. R. A. Forrest, founder and president emeritus of Toccoa Falls Bible Institute … Melvin Loptson, 28, American missionary to Lebanon under the Christian and Missionary Alliance, in an airliner crash near Amman, Jordan … the Rev. Andrew H. Argue, 90, evangelist of the Penetcostal Assemblies of Canada, in Willowdale, Ontario … Mrs. Robert S. Denny, 44, wife of the associate secretary of the Baptist World Alliance, in Washington.

Elections: As Episcopal Bishop of Washington, the Rev. William F. Creighton … as president of the Men’s Council of the Presbyterian Church in the U. S., J. W. Baldwin … as president of the National Association of Schools and Colleges of the Methodist Church, Dr. Edward W. Seay.

Appointments: As first Lutheran bishop of Southern Rhodesia, the Rev. Dean A. H. Albrektson … as pastor of Calvary Baptist Church, New York, the Rev. Stephen F. Olford, for the past five years pastor of the Duke Street Baptist Church in London, England … as president of St. Paul Bible College, the Rev. Harry T. Hardwick.

MORE FORTNIGHT BOOKS

In enthusiastic response to our Book of the Fortnight plan (see Eutychus, Jan. 19), offers of books from authors and publishers are outnumbering subscriptions ten to one. We are happy to review a selection of the latest offerings. Look for our seal of inspection, the coveted FB brand.

KirKit, prepared by the Interchurch Service Consultants, Hybrid, Nebraska. This amazing complete idea file has everything the busy pastor or church worker needs. Sermons, mid-week talks, dinner speeches are furnished in three forms: (1) manuscript, typed on three-ring notebook stock (with penciled annotations for authentic appearance), (2) outline notes, punched to fit loose-leaf Bible, (3) audio tape to be played on our new stereo-pillow system. No other service relieves you of all preparation. KirKit makes a master sermon part of you while you sleep! Also supplied: programs for the church year, menus for church suppers (our stocked freezer plan is extra), gala parties and hilarious ice-breakers, pastor’s salary suggestions for the board of trustees, etc. Sparkling sermon titles do double duty as bulletin board aphorisms. Example: “Whoever lives it up must live it down!”

Mgkykyii Returns, by S. S. Peters-Smith. Mgkykyii, the mysterious witch doctor, appears again on the upper Congo. Can Nkrubezi and Mwawa find Bwana Schultz before jungle drums summon the tribes? If you can’t guess the answer, this book is a must.

Inspirational Recipes, compiled by Manse Kitchens, Inc. Intriguing old-fashioned recipes are concealed in bright, sunshiny meditations. Hours of fun in discovering and testing the hidden formulas. For example: “From the lion’s carcass of slain fears, dip a spoon of sweetness”=take one teaspoon of honey. Printed on indesructible miracle-foil; may be machine-washed or roasted.

Ghost Nations of the Bible, by J. Z. Obermacht. A scholarly study of the fabulous peoples mentioned in the Old Testament. Like the “Rephaim” of the patriarchal narrative (the word means “shades”), these shadowy nations had no historical existence, concludes Dr. Obermacht. This edition is an unabridged reprint of the original translation from the German in 1868. Invaluable for O.T. criticism. (Dr. Obermacht’s demonstration of the non-existence of the Hittites may require slight modification in view of excavation of Hattusas the Hittite capital, and the growth of modern Hittitology. Similarly, the Rephaim seem to be mentioned in administrative texts from Ugarit.) Librarians will welcome this definitive work, long out of print.

The Tweeter Twins in Dead Man’s Gulch, by J. D. Wrangler. To quote a comment from the sparkling dialogue of the Tweeters, “Ain’t dis neat, Pete?” Peter and Skeeter Tweeter run out of gas in the historic dry gulch when they borrow a parked car to investigate the strange behavior of the ranch foreman. Thrills, chills, no frills, with an outstanding message (in bold-face type). Drawings by a teenager. J. D. Wrangler is a leading juvenile author.

THE CHRISTIAN YEAR

“The Revival of the Christian Year” (Jan. 5 issue) is strongly advocated by F. R. Webber, who lists four advantages in his closing paragraph, which he alleges are gained by following the pericopes. I wonder if all these advantages may not be recaptured by use of the verse-by-verse plan of preaching, which is suggested by Harold John Ockenga (“How to Prepare a Sermon,” Oct. 13 issue). Ulrich Zwingli was a biblical preacher, departing from the traditional selections and pursuing the consecutive Greek text. He doubted that the Bible prescribes fasting during Lent, etc., and so just preached the whole counsel of God.

I am continually thankful for your publication, which is a long-awaited boon to the considerable, yet often unvocal, out-flanked, and disheartened conservatives of the English-speaking world.

The Pearl Presbyterian Church

Jackson, Miss.

I do not so much wonder how I became one of the “slaves to a series of unrelated free texts,” i.e. the Bible in its entirety, as I do how Mr. Webber has fallen back to the observance of times and seasons every bit as binding and contrary to the spiritual worship of the Church as the observances which Paul forbade (Gal. 4:9, 10). There is something radically wrong when nominal Christians will misappropriate the Christian Sabbath and yet be utterly horrified at the thought of not observing Christmas or Easter. It is imperative for the health of Christians, the Church, and the nation that we return to diligent observance of the one day in seven which is commanded to the exclusion of times and seasons which are not commanded.

By the way, surely Missouri Synod Lutheran Webber knows better than to juxtapose these two statements: “Today Episcopalians, Lutherans, and Roman Catholics observe the full Christian Year as they have been doing for centuries,” and “It is almost impossible to hear anything but Christ-centered preaching in churches where the Christian Year is followed.” Doesn’t he observe Reformation Day?

Philadelphia, Pa.

The minister who follows a Christian year pattern slavishly may know what he is going to preach, but he will never bother to find out what the Holy Ghost would have him to preach. Personally as a minister some of my most precious moments with the Lord in prayer have been those times when “I” did not know what to preach.

Calvary Baptist

Paynesville, Minn.

I am a United Lutheran clergyman and therefore one who follows the church calendar consistently, 52 Sundays out of all 52. However, I think Mr. Webber overlooks the vital fact that an occasional departure from the calendar enhances one’s appreciation of its features far more than the type of legalistic adherence to it that he seems to advocate. Many times I must treat texts or topics immediately relevant to the life of my people, yet not provided for at all by the appointed texts and prayers of the specific Sunday in question.

Dongola Lutheran Parish

Dongola, Ill.

Fine article.… I felt … the impression was left that the principle or chief worship service in a Lutheran parish was only that of a “preaching” service. While the sermon in the Lutheran Church certainly is important … the focus in classical Lutheranism is not only the sermon.… The Lutheran Service, or the Lutheran Mass, finds expression in Word and Sacrament. The Word is never separated from the Sacrament in Lutheran thought.

Saint John’s Lutheran Church

Antioch, Calif.

It is good to note that more and more of Protestantism is recognizing the need for a Christian year.… It wasn’t only the Puritan movement that curtailed the use of the Church year in many churches in America, but also the rise of Pietism.… In the central part of the Atlantic coast in the rise of early Protestantism the movement of Piety curtailed the liturgical movement and the pericope.… The criticism that the … Christian year does not lend itself to the Old Testament isn’t altogether true. Each Sunday has secondary lessons which include one Old Testament lesson.

Brownback’s Evangelical and Reformed

Spring City, Pa.

Very informative and interesting. The article contained ideas and information that were new to me.

Ridgeway, Mo.

SCIENCE AND SCRIPTURE

As editor of a recent symposium by 40 American scientists (The Evidence of God in an Expanding Universe, 1958, Putnam) I was naturally profoundly interested in Dr. Panay’s remarks on science and evolution (CHRISTIANITY TODAY, Dec. 22 issue). Dr. Panay approves the thought processes of a considerable group of present day scientists and scientist-philosophers. I shall not discuss the larger part of his comments [but] comment on his very last paragraph. On the subject dealt with in that paragraph Dr. Panay and our 40 scientist-writers sound a different note. Here is the final Panay paragraph: “One who believes in scriptural authority should be careful not to construe the text, under pretext of interpretation, as having a meaning not derived from the text with certainty; an interpretation should not be presented as the exclusively possible one, when it is only probable, and other probable interpretations have been or can be advanced as well.”

That is all Dr. Panay says under the head of scriptural authority. But that “all” is not enough. My objection to the paragraph (and I think I am speaking for all the writers of “The Evidence of God,” including many prominent physicists) has to do with its incompleteness, its tentativeness, its lack of express distinction between exegetically controversial and non-controversial Scripture passages. The great variety of Scripture texts related to Dr. Panay’s subject should be so divided; namely under the heads of controversial and non-controversial, so far as interpretation is concerned. An illustration of the former is the very text Dr. Panay refers to in his comments, Ecclesiastes 3:11. The English translation of that verse is poor, unprecise. Translations of it vary. So do interpretations. An illustration of the latter (non-controversial) is the very first verse of the Bible. There it stands, in serene majesty. No Bible exegete worth his salt has ever tampered with it.

For another illustration of non-controversial texts I refer to Romans 1:20, a non plus ultra among scriptural untouchables. Here the Holy Spirit states, “For the invisible things of him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even his eternal power and Godhead; so that they (unbelievers) are without excuse.” No exegetical capers, no philosophical fancies, no scientific ignoramus ignorabimus, can impair or in any way affect the Apostle’s straight-from-the-shoulder words. This Gibraltar rock rises sheer, unperturbed, age after age, from the turbulent waters of the strait, until the blessed amalgam is reached of knowledge “in part” and knowledge illimitable. Many of our science students long, with a really pathetic longing, to have the firmness and massiveness of that rock under their feet.

It may console and really help them to know that even today we have with us many first-rank scientists whose view of scriptural authority is clear, positive, and unqualified.

Grand Rapids, Mich.

A WOODEN HORSE

Cogently and concisely you have raised the voice of alarm in your editorial … on Government Intrusion Widens in American Education (Dec. 8 issue). Education is not the province of the federal government. In the division of powers set up by the Constitution the field of education was left to the states and to private institutions and individuals. That allocation of responsibility has been amply justified in these past 170 years. Education is fostered and furthered at the local level. Federal bureaucracy will prove a blight and not a blessing. Federal aid is an illusion since it is merely a return of taxes taken from the states less the staggering cost of bureaucracy. Federal aid decreases state and personal reesponsibility. No sensible American decries the need for national defense, but that program does not need federal funds for education. In this case, national defense is the wooden horse to achieve federal control of education, public and private, and thoughtful Americans should oppose such tactics.

President

Wheaton College

Wheaton, Ill.

SUGGESTING A DANGER

Thank you very much for J. D. Murch’s judicious article, “The Church and Civil Defense” (Dec. 22 issue), an excellent contribution to a relevant but under-discussed issue. I agree with Mr. Murch that, all things considered, there is probably no critical danger to our principle of separation of church and state in an eyes-wide-open cooperation with the OCDM program as currently envisioned.

I suggest that the real, and present, danger is the very rationale which the OCDM has put forth as a basis for the whole program itself. It treads dangerously near … using religion as a means for government ends; it has hints of an idolatrous identification of patriotism and our religious faith; and it eliminates completely from our faith any notion of God’s judgment.…

Chicago, Ill.

THE SYNOPTIC PROBLEM

I have just finished reading, underlining, and thanking God for … “New Light on the Synoptic Problem” (Nov. 10, 24 issues). I wish every seminary student would think it through before swallowing whole “the assured results of higher criticism.”

Mt. Pleasant Christian Church

Bedford, Ind.

I do not believe that he has solid understanding of Form Criticism. He, for example, seems to judge that Form Criticism is rather exclusively concerned with Mark. He also seems to identify the Markan Hypothesis simply with the idea of the priority of Mark. He is far from taking account adequately of the arguments which have been presented on behalf of the priority of Mark, seeming to say that it is largely a matter of words used, whereas the argument is based upon many other considerations including especially subject matter and order of materials. His contention that the theory is strongly astray in terms of percentages is incorrect since the assertion is not that 90 per cent of the words of Mark are found in Matthew but rather that 90 per cent of the subject matter of Mark is found in Matthew. My impression also is that the appeal to manuscripts of Judges overlooks the fact that we have to do with essentially different situations when, in one case, scribes copy a manuscript or even translate a manuscript and so might use many of the same words and, in the other case, authors are understood as making substantial use of another work. The use of the term “plagiarism” seems to me to be out of place in this situation.

Westminster Theological Seminary

Philadelphia, Pa.

I found “New Light on the Synoptic Problem” … all the more refreshing since I have arrived at the conclusion that the traditional Christian view, which also Dr. Ludlum favors, is still the most satisfactory.

Concordia Seminary

St. Louis, Mo.

I was greatly pleased with the courage shown by the author.…

Medina, Ohio

• In an early issue, an article by George E. Ladd on “More Light on the Synoptic Problem” will appear.—ED.

BATTLE FOR A HERITAGE

Dr. Cording’s article on “Music Worthy of God” (Nov. 24 issue) makes me hope that you will be interested in the Wesley Hymnbook which is shortly to be published. Part of our battle for the recovery of the Wesley heritage in modern Methodism is precisely on the lines which he suggests: for the solid good hymns against the cheap “gospel song” variety. And those of us who have parishes as well as chairs realize that it is a very tough battle indeed. We have to wage it on our own—the Wesley Hymnbook had to be published privately. But we are convinced that Charles Wesley belongs to the whole Church and therefore concerned that this book should reach the church public beyond the confines of Methodism. It contains 154 hymns, mainly Charles Wesley’s, with different tunes for each (music and words interlined) and suggestions of familiar alternatives. The price is one dollar per copy, plus postage, and the first limited edition will be distributed from Drew University with the help of student volunteers. The publication date will be some time towards the end of February, and orders should be placed with Mr. Max Tow, Box 275, Drew University, Madison, N. J.

The Wesley Society

President

Madison, N. J.

ROME

In 1941, Archbishop Jos. Rummel of New Orleans estimated that “4,000,000 Catholics in the United States are drifting towards religious indifference and that approximately as many lose their faith annually. Against this figure we can boast only of an annual increase through conversions to the Catholic Church of between 60,000 and 70,000 persons.” … The figures for the past 50 years do not show any appreciable change in Roman Catholic percentage of the total U. S. Population; nor do they in Canada.… Your contributor (Lowell, Oct. 27 issue) has overlooked the tremendous leakage from the Roman Catholic church through efforts of evangelical groups mainly, and from disillusionment of tens of thousands of others—mainly migrants from Europe.

Toronto, Ont.

The Catholic Church encourages each family to have a Bible, especially during the annual “Catholic Bible Week.” The Church grants indulgences for reading Holy Scripture for, at least, fifteen minutes each day.

De Mazenod Scholasticate

San Antonio, Tex.

We are living in days when the very foundations of our freedom are being challenged as never before in … America.

Philadelphia, Pa.

An incident is mentioned in connection with … Theodore Roosevelt’s visit to Rome (“Eutychus,” Dec. 8 issue). Dr. Walter Lowrie was the rector of St. Paul’s American (Episcopal) Church from 1908 and not minister of the American Methodist Church.

Crisfield, Md.

The … discussion … prompts me to add … notes written by … very wise men:

“You have no right to attack others upon a matter with regard to which you think yourself to be anassailed”—Abelard; “The man who says to me, ‘Believe as I do, or God will damn you,’ will presently say, ‘Believe as I do, or I shall assassinate you.’ By what right could a being created free, force another to think like himself?”—Voltaire.

It seems that the freedom of expression is for us Americans our greatest right. This is one right which the Roman church demands for itself in the name of democracy but denies to others in the name of the church.

Ames, Iowa

Just before the election here in Indianapolis, a local independent Baptist minister and several others called a meeting at the World War Memorial in this city at which time Joseph Zachello, a former Roman Catholic priest, was the main speaker. At this meeting his tracts were distributed. The Baptist minister subsequently printed a list of all political candidates including their religious affiliations. The local press latched on to it and made a great thing of it, calling the ministers involved bigots.… The Baptist minister, Mr. van Gilder of Devington Baptist Church, realized his mistake of printing this information on his church’s stationery. He apologized to his church board after a great furor. Things settled down somewhat until last week. Warren Frederick Mathis, minister of the Fountain Square Christian Church, and I obtained permission from CHRISTIANITY TODAY to reprint [Dr. Lowell’s] article in our church papers.… The Fountain Square paper came out first and fell into the hands of Mr. Irving Leibowitz, a local columnist for the Indianapolis Times. In his column of Tuesday, December 2, he said, “I am surprised that the Warren Frederick Mathis of the Fountain Square Christian Church has taken it upon himself to revive an anti-Catholic Campaign in his church’s official publication.” The reaction surprised Mr. Leibowitz, who is a Jew. Many letters have been pouring in this week criticizing his statement and commending the article as it was reprinted. Even a local official of the Church Federation called Mr. Mathis to commend him, to encourage him, and to assure him of his personal backing. Many other persons are requesting copies of the article for reading and distribution.

East 49th Street Christian Church

Indianapolis, Ind.

CONSPIRACY OF SILENCE

Thank you for mentioning in “Protestant Panorama” (Nov. 24 issue) the annual meeting of the National Association of Congregational Christian Churches.… So far as I have learned, CHRISTIANITY TODAY is the only religious journal apart from the National Association’s own publication “The Congregationalist” so much as to recognize the existence of the National Association. There seems to be a conspiracy of silence both in the religious press and in the religious columns of the secular press, intended to keep the public ignorant of the fact that not all Congregational Christian Churches are giving up their heritage to get aboard the ecumenical bandwagon.

Editor

The Congregationalist

Melrose, Mass.

THE THREE BRANCHES

Nonconformists are by their teaching and doctrine heretical, having neither valid orders nor apostolic authority, yet presuming to do the work of a priest even to attempting to administer the most holy sacrament.… The Holy Roman Church, to give it its proper name, does possess all the “marks” of the true Catholic faith and is a part of The One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church. There are three divisions of this—The Holy Church: Roman, Anglican, and Byzantine. There can be no Oecumenical Council until these three branches of the One Holy Church are united. Nonconformism must, by its very nature, always remain outside.… Since [Wesley’s] day Methodism has cut itself off from the Church altogether and has lapsed into a yearly diminishing sect.

Swallow Rectory

Lincoln, England

Most of us [Anglicans] look to our Oxford Movement as the great spiritual liberation of our church, asserting her divine commission to preach the gospel. To such of us your stand for the gospel doctrines is heartening.

The Vicarage

Caistor, Lincoln, England

As an Anglican priest, in a Catholic-minded diocese, I shunned what I reckoned was an “evangelistic, interdenominational, Protestant” magazine. One day the Holy Spirit led me to give one edition serious study. As a result, I recognize this paper of yours to be of unimpeachable orthodoxy, and showing forth a theology pure and historic of our holy Christian faith. I’ve experienced new vigor in my priestly work, which I knew only study in the Word of God would give and by using the Bible with your guiding articles have set about that study. The Vicarage

Booval, Queensland, Australia

Frequently during our short existence we have had occasion to pinpoint the more unsatisfactory features in the modern ecumenical movement. There has been no desire to be critical merely for the sake of a negative obstructionism. But it has seemed impossible that a genuine or fruitful unity could be achieved on the basis of the vague goodwill, the amorphous theology, the unthinking expansiveness, the evasion of real problems and the ecclesiastical maneuvering which have so often appeared to be the characteristics of ecumenical speech and action. The criticism of the movement has been in the name and for the sake of a true but solidly grounded ecumenicity which must surely be the desire of every real disciple of our one Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ.

With particular interest and some anticipation we view certain more recent developments in ecumenical affairs, particularly in relation to the work of the commissions of Faith and Order on theological and liturgical matters. Pursuing the basic theme enunciated at Lund, the commission on the interrelationship of Christ, the Holy Spirit and the Church is especially significant in view of the nature of the subject, the general biblical and theological nature of the approach, and the radical effects which must necessarily follow for the whole movement if real conclusions are both reached and applied.

The point is that work of this nature constitutes a summons to the movement to think out its basis and nature at the deepest level. If the summons is accepted, a good deal of what passes for ecumenism will be sifted and some painful readjustments of thinking, speech and action will inevitably be demanded. At the same time, however, the movement will be offered a solid grounding in Jesus Christ; it will be able to acquire the biblical and theological orientation without which there may be much goodwill but there can be no true communion; and there will be the chance of real integration instead of the ecclesiastical rearrangements which seem to be the limit of possibility in existing circ*mstances.

The execution of this work is thus of vital importance for the real future of the movement and for the hope of gaining the confidence of conservative evangelicals which has been sadly dissipated or estranged by so much in its previous record. Three suggestions may thus be made which are constructive in nature, which are not designed in any spirit of impertinent interference, but which may help forward the achievement of the true ecumenism which is both required and desired.

First, to those engaged in the work of the commissions, more particularly in the sphere of theology, it may be suggested that the enquiry should not be treated as an academic exercise but as an urgent piece of service demanding the humility, prayer and urgency of all Christian work. In the desire for full investigation it is fatally easy to protract this type of work, to make it an opportunity for agreeable theological interchange, indeed, to turn it into a theological tournament in which favorite and contradictory ideas are ably but not very relevantly propounded. But if the relationship of Jesus Christ, the Holy Spirit and the Church is truly and effectively to be seen, there must be a vigorous and united work of exegetical and biblical theology which will involve the subjecting of mind and will to the constructive teaching of the Word and Spirit.

Second, to the churches which await the fulfillment of this work, it may be suggested that they should not envisage it either as theological byplay of purely abstract importance, or as mere ballast for actions planned and executed on other principles, but as the real basis for future thought and action. While constructive discussion will be required, the conclusions, when they come, must not be shelved as of only academic interest nor readjusted for purely diplomatic reasons, but brought right into the future progress of the movement. If not, there can be no ecumenism worthy of the name; if so, there is hope of a true ecumenism which will achieve a worthwhile goal commending itself to all who truly confess Jesus Christ as Saviour and God.

Third, it may be suggested that this is a sphere in which the participation of conservative evangelicals on some level is perhaps both possible and essential. With much present-day ecumenical activity they have felt that they cannot make common cause. Towards a soundly exegetical and theological enquiry, however, they have something which they are able and willing to contribute in order that the relationship of Christ and the Church, and its implications for the churches, should be plainly perceived and established. Evangelicals are often accused of exclusivism and non-cooperativeness. But here is a case where there can be little objection to participation, and the genuineness of the desire for cooperation with them can be proved.

For the moment, it is obvious that little has been done, in America at least, to secure the representation of historic evangelicalism even from among those who are in any case members of churches committed to the ecumenical movement. No doubt there has been no deliberate exclusion. But at a point where cooperation seems both possible and desirable towards a particular goal, the incorporation of evangelical witness for specific purposes would meet any complaint that such exclusion in fact corresponds to exclusiveness, and would bring into the whole discussion a new and constructive and necessary element from the exegetical and theological standpoint.

American ecclesiastical leaders are prone to ascribe any lingering disinterest in ecumenism to evangelical obstinacy and obstructionism. They turn a deaf ear to pointed theological criticisms of ecumenism levelled in Europe by neo-orthodox and evangelical spokesmen alike. In behalf of a spiritual view of the Church, Emil Brunner has frequently challenged ecumenical preoccupation with organization and externals. Karl Barth’s criticisms, if anything, drive even deeper. He protests the ecumenical—or world-wide—restriction of a Church whose real nature is catholic or universal, and hence inclusive of Christians in all times and places. Some modern ecumenists are not on speaking terms with Luther and Calvin and Augustine, or even with the New Testament apostles. Hence they are not genuinely catholic at all; despite their zeal for ecumenism, their devotion to essential Christianity remains in doubt. A further criticism of ecumenism is not wholly unrelated. The unity of the Church is best promoted, Barth contends, through the earnest effort of church dogmaticians, whereas the contemporary ecumenical program is advanced largely through the labor of ecclesiastical politicians.

Current addiction to “the inclusive ecumenical Church” has intensified rather than dissolved our modern need for Christian belief (as the Apostles’ Creed has it) in “the holy catholic Church.”

END

A Christian Answer To America’S Youth Problem

Alert churches with efficient programs of Christian education are already preparing for next summer’s Vacation Bible schools. This system of study is immensely successful in reaching increasingly large numbers of children and youth throughout America and deserves an even wider acceptance by the churches.

Vacation Bible schools offer classes for Beginner, Primary, Junior and Intermediate age groups. Included are Bible study, memory work, missionary stories, dramatizations, habit talks, instruction in worship, and handwork. The trend in recent years has been to develop these courses around a single Bible theme for the entire school, but graded according to the ages and development of the pupils. The usual length of the session is two weeks, although an extended program is possible.

Vacation Bible schools are effective evangelizing agencies. In planning for them the churches lift their eyes beyond their immediate constituencies to new fields “white unto harvest” in the community at large. It is the experience of thousands of these schools that lives never before touched by the Gospel are brought into saving relationship to Christ.

Such an evangelistic thrust has been a decisive factor in combating juvenile delinquency. VBS leaders believe such schools act both as a preventive and a cure. They undergird the mind with Bible truth and keep alive the urges to Christian conduct. They supply contacts with parents in new and needy areas which often result in building real Christian home and family relationships.

It is frequently said that a child learns more about the Bible in the vacation school than in a full year of regular sessions in the Sunday school. This is easily demonstrated when it is realized that there are only about 25 Bible teaching hours in the Sunday school year. In the average two-week vacation school the pupil gets considerably more than this. The Roman Catholic Church in America gives some 300 hours of religious instruction to each pupil; Jewish synagogue schools 305 hours. In the light of this comparison it is small wonder that the average child in most Protestant churches can give no adequate reason for his faith. Many educators believe that a few weeks of continuous, intensive training, such as the VBS offers, are tremendously effective. The mind of the child is better able to retain lines of thought from one session to another. Teachers are not faced with the severe time limitations of the Sunday session. Thus churches in a few short weeks can double the effectiveness of their educational program. This factor alone should impel evangelical churches to hold these vacation schools every summer.

There are many other beneficial values to be derived from Vacation Bible schools. Publishers of evangelical church school literature provide a wealth of study courses and methods manuals. Committees, teachers and curriculum should be chosen at an early date if this summer’s work is to be truly rewarding.

END

The Call-Girl Racket And Work As A Calling

Radio listeners were stunned recently by a CBS network program on “The Business of Sex.” The narrator, Edward R. Murrow, introduced evidence that certain large corporations regularly hire prostitutes (now professionally active by thousands in some large American cities) to swing big contract deals.

Testimony of prostitutes (who anonymously claimed a place on the regular payroll of public relations staffs for as much as $25,000 a year) may not be the public’s most trustworthy source of reliable information. But the very picture of corporation-financed prostitution as a business weapon is itself a shocking commentary on the times. Prostitutes’ pimps, who corrupt the world of legitimate work by their lucrative exploitation of female flesh, have apparently shown certain company executives a way to turn business contracts on considerations of vice more than on the virtues of their products.

Of the many perverse ways of earning a living, prostitution is one the Christian community views with compassionate disdain. The great change that Christianity wrought in the sex outlook of the ancient world is perhaps specially apparent here. In the Graeco-Roman world, to which the Gospel was addressed, prostitution—even religious prostitution as a part of temple worship—was not only prevalent and tolerated, but remained unrebuked by the highest philosophical moralists of that day. The remarkable reversal of conviction brought about by the Christian view of sex is evident from the fact that sacred prostitution would today be regarded throughout the West as utterly repugnant to a spiritual conscience.

Yet in the modern world of sex license and corruption, prostitution has become a world-wide vice. In many centers of the Western world racketeers who traffic in sex have sought to make the profession both glamorous and respectable. With this modern glamorization of sex deviations, public curiosity in sex aberrations has mounted; literature of sexual misbehavior soars regularly into best-seller ranks. In stark contrast stands the biblical condemnation of easy sex attitudes. One recalls Hosea’s words: “The land hath committed great whor*dom.” Or Paul’s pointed words to the Ephesians: “For this ye know, that no whor*monger … hath any inheritance in the kingdom of Christ and of God.… And have no fellowship with the unfruitful works of darkness, but rather reprove them.”

Although the modern designation of the call-girl (a prostitute available by telephone) is a reflex of our age of invention, it is also a tragic perversion of calling, a sacred term. The Bible requires every man and woman to justify the work-a-day pursuits of life as a divine vocation. How far the reprobate modern world has lost this sense of calling is dramatized by the gross perversions of our era which—as in the case of company-financed prostitution—corrupt the values of sex and work and business and life in a single night.

END

Elusive Freedom In East And West

Just one hour after Anastas Mikoyan’s question-dodging performance on NBC’s “Meet the Press”—during which Americans must have marveled that a system playing so fast and loose with fact could actually dominate such vast multitudes—Adlai Stevenson spoke in Washington’s Constitution Hall of communism’s vigorous challenge to America. In the first of a projected series of addresses in memory of A. Powell Davies, famed Unitarian clergyman of Washington who died in 1957, Mr. Stevenson had some needed harsh words for his countrymen. Scoring the materialist and hedonist ways of life, he warned that the collapse of the French aristocracy and the corruption of imperial Rome “do not lose their point because the pleasures of today are mass pleasures and no longer the enjoyments of an elite. If we become a nation of Bourbons, numbers won’t save us.… Between a chaotic, selfish, indifferent commercial society and the iron discipline of the Communist world, I would not like to predict the outcome,” he said grimly.

Declaring that tyranny is the “normal pattern of government” and that freedom demands “infinitely more care and devotion than any other political system,” the former Illinois governor called for a rebirth of the vision of Dr. Davies, “who loved the truth and believed in man’s capacity and right to govern himself.”

Mr. Stevenson’s perceptive analysis of his country’s failings was better than his Unitarian solution which ultimately throws man back upon himself and denies him the power derived through mystical union with God Incarnate. The nation needs an Augustine to rediscover its true freedom in bondage to Christ.

END

God And Satellites And Modern Unbelief

The science of atheism—if it is really scientific—is getting new attention at Communist hands.

On television, Soviet Deputy Premier Mikoyan said he had discussed the existence of God with intelligent people, and had concluded that God does not exist.

As ludicrous is the Moscow radio announcement of Y. T. Fadeyev, head of the scientific-atheistic section of the journal Science and Life. Fadeyev said that jets and rockets and earth satellites have disproved God and discredited Christian dogmas (for example: missiles disprove the “religious dogma” that ascent to heaven is possible only through divine intervention!). Fadeyev notes that rockets and satellites have encountered neither angels nor a Supreme Being. This argument bares Fadeyev’s ignorance of the nature of the spiritual.

The case for theism must not be detached from God’s unique revelation in Scripture and in Christ. But nature, too, daily puts God’s glory on parade. And we add this thought: if finite minds and wills are now able to hurl a satellite into space, setting it in distant orbit, is it not perverse for man to ascribe the planets unquestioningly to an aboriginal star dust and to doubt the possibility that God put the stars in their place?

END

NINETEEN HUNDRED YEARS have passed since the early apostles went out into a hostile world with a Gospel that transformed men and influenced nations.

It would be impossible to make many valid comparisons between the world of that time and the one in which we live. The age of the plodding donkey and the ship wind-driven has been engulfed by the atom and the jet plane. And these fantastic achievements of our day will probably be supplanted by yet more fantastic discoveries in later years.

But the hearts of men have not changed. The sins and temptations of Jerusalem, Corinth, and Rome of the past are the sins of London, New York, and Tokyo today. The needs of the human heart are identical in view of man’s separation from God through sin.

Have we, in our sophistication, equated scientific achievement with spiritual advancement? Are we again in danger of substituting another gospel because we fail to appreciate the relevance of the gospel of Jesus Christ for every age?

Study of the book of the Acts is always a rewarding experience. Here we have a stirring record of the beginnings of the early Church. Here are the stories of men who ventured everything for the sake of Christ and his gospel, most of whom eventually paid for their faith even to death itself.

The lives of these men cannot be duplicated any more than can the world and the conditions in which they worked. But do not the underlying truths and principles remain valid for us today? As we Christians look at the Church and search our own hearts, do we not sense that we have lost something infinitely precious, something of their convictions, their message and their power?

Certain definite elements in the ministry of the early apostles are desperately needed today—and they are available.

The apostles went out with spiritual power. But first they were commanded to tarry at Jerusalem until endued with the presence and power of the Holy Spirit. The only power whereby the Gospel may be successfully preached and lived is that of the Holy Spirit. Do we trust primarily in him, or do we look to organizations, programs, collective action, personality, education and other desirable but secondary things? How often we go forth to do the Lord’s work in the arm of the flesh, and then wonder why the work, zeal, and enthusiasm expended bring such meager returns.

The perturbed and resentfully ecclesiastical leaders of that day had to take note of the fact that these men had been with Jesus. Their experience with the living Christ was so vital and transforming that men lacking in social, educational and religious backgrounds had become compelling and effective witnesses to a message which had a stunning effect on those who heard and believed.

How many of us who are engaged in the work of God’s kingdom have had a personal experience of salvation? Can men see and know by our words and lives that we too have been with Christ? Do we always preach Christ, or do we at times preach ourselves or something else?

The early apostles were men of conviction. There was a certainty about their preaching which had its own inevitable effect on those who heard. They were convinced of the source, the authority, and the absolute necessity of the message they were called to preach.

Do we have similar convictions today? Have we been robbed of authority in our preaching through presuppositions and deductions at the human level, all of which change as men and times change?

These early apostles showed an utter disregard for personal comfort or danger. Threatened, they prayed for more courage. Beaten, they thanked God for the privilege of suffering for him. Imprisoned, they sang songs at midnight. Brought before rulers, they confirmed the charges leveled at them by preaching Jesus Christ, crucified and risen from the dead. Ultimately they sealed their faith with their blood.

Are we willing to endure even minor inconveniences for Christ? Are we not in grave danger of making personal comfort, or monetary gain, a major consideration in what we do for the Lord? How can we account for the alarming lack of interest in world missions? Admitting a lost sense of the primacy and urgency of evangelism, are there not also elements of selfishness in our lack of interest?

One of the characteristics of the early Church was mutual love and concern of Christians, one for the other. In fact this Christian love caused unbelievers almost universally to exclaim and wonder.

How different today! One of the tragedies of Christendom now is the unreasoning and unreasoned attacks of Christians upon Christians. They confuse contending for personal interpretations or pet schemes with contending for the faith. There is only too often a contentiousness and lovelessness which cause the enemies of the Lord to blaspheme and Christians to sorrow.

When these early apostles went out to preach the Gospel, they realized that they were a small minority in an alien world. There was no attempt to compromise with the world. The distinctiveness and exclusiveness of the Gospel were magnified, not minimized. Nor did they despise the day of small things. Believing that the saving power of Jesus Christ begins at the personal level, they preached to individuals for personal decisions. Believing that Christians become the salt and light of the society of which they are a part, they confidently expected their faith in Christ to transform them into these witnessing and preserving forces for righteousness.

Cannot we learn from this? Believing in the corporate witness of the Church, should we not always remember that the Gospel must first reach the individual for Christ before he can become a useful member of the Church?

There are many other lessons in the Acts of the Apostles which are relevant for our times. Then, as now, God calls certain individuals to specific tasks, and as they heed that call he prepares and empowers them for that work. In this there are found great diversities of gifts but a similarity in the fruits of the Spirit.

The apostles never deviated from either the nature or content of their message: it was Jesus Christ and him crucified. It was of a risen and living Saviour who fulfilled the prophetic visions of the past and made the salvation God has prepared for his own from the counsels of eternity.

Faced with despotism, they preached Christ before whom despots must fall.

Surrounded by slavery, they preached Christ who makes men free.

Confronted with vice and paganism at their worst, they preached Christ who cleanses men from sin.

The targets of hostile secular and ecclesiastical powers, they preached Christ, rendering to Caesar his just due while giving all honor and glory to God.

As we consider these men of old, we may well ask ourselves: “Who follows in their train?”